“Tansy, no. We’re not leaving anyone behind,” Aster said firmly. She turned to Zee. “How long until the raveners get here?”
He let out a long breath. “They have no trouble moving in the dark, and we didn’t take time to cover our tracks. I’d give us half an hour, at best.”
Tansy began mixing together ingredients in her mortar. “Then I’ll hurry.”
“What are you making?” Zee asked.
“A stimulant. The sooner she wakes up, the sooner we can assess her injuries. It might not work, but … I have to try.”
Tansy poured the mixture into a tin mug and stirred it with water from her canteen. Then she held it carefully to Mallow’s lips and coaxed her to drink. She coughed but didn’t wake.
“Give it a minute,” Clementine said into the strained silence.
Tansy shook her head, looking sick now herself. “You all are going to have to leave us.”
And then Mallow cracked her eyes open and spoke, her voice brittle but her words clear.
“Next time you want to get me out of my clothes, Tanz, don’t feel like you have to wait for me to be dragged halfway to hell first.”
“Mal?” Tansy looked at her in shock. Then a fragile smile broke out over Tansy’s face. “Mal!” She leaned down to pepper Mallow’s forehead with kisses. Clementine and Aster met each other’s eyes, relief passing between them. Zee flashed a tired smile of his own, and Violet visibly relaxed.
“Easy, I’m still pretty delicate,” Mallow said, laughing. But then it turned into a ragged cough that left her lips flecked with blood.
“Careful! Here, have some water. How do you feel?” Tansy asked, gently pouring water into her mouth from a canteen.
“Feel like … I just got run over by a ripping train…” Mallow said. She tried to prop herself up on her elbows and winced from the effort. Clementine helped her. “Dammit. Something’s … broken.”
“Your ribs. You’re lucky you didn’t puncture a lung. I’m still not convinced you didn’t. You’re not in any kind of shape to ride,” Tansy said.
“As long as she’s safe to be moved, I can strap her legs to the saddle to help keep her upright. But someone will have to help her,” Zee said. He was already on his feet.
“Let me ride with her,” Aster said to Tansy. Guilt still nibbled away at her heart. “You’ve done enough already, Tansy, and you need to rest. I’ll make sure she stays awake.”
Tansy nodded gratefully, though her eyes never left Mallow’s face. She wet a rag and pressed it to Mal’s forehead. Wiped away the sweat.
“Where … are we … going?” Mallow asked.
Aster felt a swell of admiration. She recognized the exhaustion on Mallow’s face, and she recognized, too, her determination to bury it. Both of them clung to their toughness, and for Mallow that had always seemed to mean literal, physical strength. When she’d woken up with nightmares back at the welcome house, she’d done pullups on the rafter beam until tiredness took her once more. When she’d been too overwhelmed with anger to laugh it away, she’d shadowboxed until sweat dripped down her face. Her vulnerability now clearly frightened her, even if she wouldn’t let it show.
But Tansy was right. She needs a hospital.
“I know some people who might be able to help,” Zee said. “It’ll take us out of our way, and they’re not … proper doctors, I’ll warn you, but I’d trust them with my life. And they won’t turn us in.”
“How do you know?” Aster asked.
“Because the law is after them, too.” Zee ran outside to get to work.
Violet curled her lip. “He’s taking us to a bunch of criminals?”
But it was the best thing Zee could’ve said to convince Aster. She offered Violet a shrug. “Don’t worry, Violet. You’ll fit right in.”
* * *
The stars wheeled above them as they rode away from Scarcliff and made their way down into the pocket of darkness that was the valley below. Aster rode with Mallow, holding her carefully around the waist. They had to take it slow, but at least they were on the move. Mallow started to nod off every few moments, and Aster jostled her awake every time. Tansy had said it might be dangerous for her to fall asleep in her condition.
“Aster, for the love of the dead, stop poking at me like a damn frog,” Mallow swore thickly.
“Sorry. Doctor’s orders.”
“Doctor’s too clever for her own good.”
Aster smiled faintly. “You ever catch frogs as a kid, then?” Anything to keep her talking.
“Bugs, sure; lizards, hell yeah. But frogs—never. My dad’s side of the family, they’re descendants of the Nine. It’s one of our nation’s beliefs that frogs are good luck because they’re a sign of rain in the desert.”
The Nine: that was how folks referred to the confederation of nine nations that had lived on this land before the Empire seized it and renamed it Arketta. Those who had resisted had been imprisoned and sent to the Scab to work—the first dustbloods. Even after the Empire’s fall, they hadn’t been released from their debts.
“My brother, he’d even croak like a frog sometimes when we were little,” Mal went on. “As if he could trick the sky into thinking it was time for a storm.” She laughed a little at some memory.
Like most Good Luck Girls, Mallow had never talked much about her family. But still, Aster was surprised she’d never known Mallow had a brother. Her heart ached to think how much she must miss him.
“A brother,” she echoed. “Older, or younger?”
“Twin.”
By the Veil.
“We used to joke that our souls got switched at birth—I should’ve been the boy and he should’ve been the girl. He was always so damn tenderhearted. He told me once he wanted to be a songbird when he grew up because their only job was to make the world more beautiful. The other kids would try to give him hell and I always had to give it right back.” She let out a wet cough. “His name was Koda. He’s dead by now, probably. The mines aren’t kind to boys like him.”
The words hit Aster like a punch to the gut.
“Mallow—I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
She shrugged. “We’ve all lost folks.” But Aster could hear that she was trying to hide her pain once again. A hole that deep was best avoided.
“I tell myself, though, that if Koda was really gone, I would’ve felt something when he passed, you know?” Mallow went on. “Just like he might feel that I’m hurting right now. Might wonder what the hell trouble I’ve gotten myself into this time.”
Her words began to slur and her head lolled. Aster nudged her gently.
“I suspect he’d be proud of you,” Aster said.
“Yeah, I like to think so.” Mallow sighed. “You’re lucky you have Clem in all this.”
Aster thought about what her sister had told her by the lake. About how they had to look out for each other now. “You’re our family, too, Mal.”
Mallow didn’t respond, and for a moment Aster worried she’d nodded off once again. But then she spoke, sounding more conscious than ever. “Kaya,” she said. “Just so you know—Kaya. That’s my name.”
Aster smiled a little to herself. “Dawn,” she replied.
The woods had begun to thin out, and Zee sent word back that they were almost there.
Thank the dead, Aster thought. It was nearing the small hours of the morning. Mallow wasn’t the only one who needed rest. A moment later Aster spotted the unmistakable outline of a sizeable town ahead—but no lights, strangely. No sounds of life, either.
“Ghost town,” Mallow said, answering Aster’s silent question.
“What good’s a ghost town to us?” Aster asked impatiently. Some towns died as soon as the mines that supported them were used up, leaving nothing but abandoned buildings and the lost remnants still living in them. Certainly there’d be no open doctor’s office out here.
“Maybe Zee’s people are squatting here?” Mallow suggested.
Well, if they were,
they’d be fools. Ghost towns had unhealthy reputations. Folks disappeared, went mad, died mysteriously and became ghosts themselves.
“I don’t like it,” Aster mumbled back.
They rode into the town proper, passing its collapsed deadwall, their hoofbeats echoing down the empty brick streets. Snarls of drygrass grew through the crumbling mortar. A flagpole line clinked softly in the wind. A dozen dust storms had left a layer of grit thick as snow on every surface, and every building they passed had broken windows, or a collapsing roof, or a door knocked in like a punched-out tooth.
No one spoke, as if they were all afraid to break the silence. They left the fairblood part of town behind and came into the outlying mining camp, where the dustbloods had lived in shacks practically stacked on top of one another. Something like ground-fog curdled around them.
Remnants. Aster could just see their blurred human outlines from the corner of her eye. An old woman sweeping her porch. A child running after a ball, over and over. Aster’s skin prickled. A lot of folks had died unfulfilled here. Just as many had probably died angry.
Which meant there might be vengeants, too.
As if they needed another round with those.
Enough, she thought. She spurred the horse ahead and pulled up next to Zee. He’d stopped to look at something carved into the side of a tree: a symbol of some kind, what looked like a scorpion.
He smiled but didn’t say anything.
“Zee,” Aster snapped, “what the hell are we doing here?”
“And is it much farther?” Tansy jumped in. “Mal really needs to rest.”
“Well, we better be riding at least a little bit farther, because if you think I’m spending the night here, I’ve got news for you,” Violet said.
“Not here,” Zee said, turning his smile towards them. Then he pointed up ahead, down a crooked dirt path, to the pitch-black mouth of an abandoned mine.
“There.”
14
“Have you lost your damn mind?” Violet hissed at Zee.
“What? Didn’t you spend your first night on the run in an old mine?”
“Barely. We didn’t go any deeper than the entrance,” Aster said. The only thing worse than spending the night in the ghost town would be spending it underground.
“Just trust me,” Zee said. He led his horse down the path towards the mine, leaving them little choice but to follow him.
“I’m going to kill him,” Aster muttered to Mallow.
“Hey, I’ll hold him, you hit,” she offered, sounding weary.
Zee paused at the mouth of the mine. There was that symbol again, carved into the timber. He climbed down from his saddle.
“All right, friends, on foot from here,” he said. “Leave the horses. Our hosts will send someone up for them.” He lit a lantern and held it up. The rest of them hurried to dismount, Tansy and Clementine propping Mallow up as best they could.
Zee started down the tunnel, the steep descent making his gait awkward and uneven. Rocks as big as a bear’s skull were strewn across the ground. A makeshift pathway of planks laid end to end cut through the debris, but years of neglect had left the wood warped and rotting. Somewhere up ahead Aster heard the trickle of water and the shifting of falling soil. The sounds made her scalp crawl. The air down here was cold and close, like the soft, damp breath of an undead thing.
“How are you feeling?” Tansy whispered to Mallow.
Mallow wet her lips. “About ready to collapse.”
“Well, fair warning, this shaft runs about half a mile—” Zee began.
“Half a what now?”
“Dammit, Zee.”
“Ripping hell.”
“Jackass.”
He elected not to finish his thought. The girls stopped talking, too, each seeming to retreat into her own place of silent concentration. Aster focused on her breathing, keeping it slow and steady, wrinkling her nose at the smell of the grave. She was all too aware of the crushing weight of earth above them. By now the entrance to the mine was just a pinprick of moonlight growing fainter with every step. Her only consolation was that there didn’t seem to be any dead down here—unheard of, for a mine this old.
At last they reached the end of the shaft, the ground leveling out into what seemed to be a central chamber that split off into multiple tunnels. Zee held his lantern high—
“TURN AROUND, STRANGERS,” a man’s voice boomed out from the dark. A constellation of headlamps hovered in the darkness ahead, but Aster couldn’t make out the faces below them. “YOU’RE STANDING ON SIX KEGS OF BLASTING POWDER. ONE MORE STEP AND WE’LL BLOW YOU ALL TO HELL.”
Aster looked down at her feet in alarm. Sure enough, the ground beneath them was freshly turned, as if something had been buried there. A detonation cord sprouted up from the soil and spiraled away into the dark. She started to take a step back instinctively, then stopped herself, panic fluttering in her belly. She glared daggers at Zee.
What the hell have you gotten us into?
Zee raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Easy,” he said, his voice clear and calm. “Name’s Ezekiel Greene—Zee. I’m a friend of Sam Daniels. I was helping this group escape to Northrock when we got ambushed by some vengeants. One of us is hurt bad, needs urgent medical attention.”
“WHAT’S THE WATCHWORD.”
Zee frowned. “Since when do you all have a watchword?”
“SINCE EVERY BASTARD AND HIS DOG STARTED COMING AFTER US LOOKING FOR A BOUNTY. YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO CLEAR OUT—”
“Hold on now!” Zee cried. “Is this or isn’t this a base camp of the Scorpions? And are you or aren’t you a refuge for folks on the run from the Reckoning? I know your code. I was there the day Sam swore to uphold it. You’ll not find anyone more deserving of your hospitality than these women here.”
The Scorpions? Aster had never heard the name, had never heard of anyone standing up against the landmasters’ law and living to tell that tale. Who were these people? Where had they been the day she and Clem had been stolen away? She shifted her weight, straining to see these strangers’ faces.
A brief silence. Then: “I’M SORRY, BUT WE SIMPLY CAN’T ACCEPT ANYONE WHO ISN’T BROUGHT TO US BY OUR OWN PEOPLE.”
“You turn us away, you’re leaving an innocent to die.”
“INNOCENTS DIE EVERY DAY.”
“Not today, they don’t!” Aster shouted. Mallow was losing consciousness, sagging against Clementine, and her stitches had just broken. She was losing blood again, fast. “Stop hiding in the dark! Show your face! Come look my friend in the eye when you turn her away.”
More silence. One of the headlamps started forward and the others followed. Footsteps echoed with military precision. Aster swallowed, glancing at Clementine, who looked right back at her with eyes widened by fear. Zee’s mouth was a line.
The strangers stepped into the circle of the lantern light.
Half a dozen rough-cut young men, all of them Aster’s age or a little older. Like the girls at the welcome house, they were dustbloods whose families had been brought to Arketta from all over the world, though they all shared a certain weariness that ran deeper than their worn-out clothes. They wielded pickaxes and pistols, shotguns and knives. The boys in the back had greased their faces, the better to blend into the dark, but the leader’s face was bare—half russet-brown skin, half leathered red scarring from a burn.
In his hands was a long-barreled rifle.
“Don’t want to have to use this,” the leader warned.
Then suddenly one of his partners elbowed him in the side.
“It’s the Good Luck Girls from the posters, Cutter,” he whispered. “Them that killed McClennon. See their favors?”
Recognition flickered across Cutter’s face. Aster stiffened, ready for trouble. A long, tense moment passed. But then Cutter smiled slowly and lowered his weapon, gesturing for the others to do the same.
“Ladies—gentleman—my deepest apologies,” he said, dipping his chin in a bow.
“On behalf of the Scorpions, welcome to Camp Red Claw. We’re honored to have you.”
* * *
Running the length of the main tunnel was a mine cart that’d been modified to carry passengers. It couldn’t fit them all at once, so Tansy and Mallow were taken first, to be swiftly escorted to the medical ward. Then Cutter returned for the rest of the group. He took hold of the lever that powered the cart, pumping it up and down, up and down, slowly rowing them along the rails. The rush of air slipped up Aster’s sleeves as they gathered speed. Her stomach lifted with every bump and dip. And as much trouble as it had been to get here, she couldn’t help but admit how much of a relief it was to let someone else take responsibility for their well-being for a night.
“My apologies again for the misunderstanding,” Cutter yelled over the click-clack of the wheels. Shaggy black hair fell to his shoulders, and now that he’d let his guard down, his brown eyes shone as if he were always on the edge of good-natured laughter. “We never use that mine shaft ourselves anymore, so whenever we hear someone coming down it, we know it’s a trespasser of some kind. Used to be just curious folk, the kind who go poking around old ghost towns instead of steering clear like their mothers told them to. But lately we’ve had raveners, too, and up north they’ve had spies trying to pass themselves off as hotfoots. Just two weeks ago Camp Blueback was attacked from the inside.”
“Hotfoots?” Violet asked. She seemed more than a little uneasy with the night’s turn of events.
Cutter tilted his head. It wasn’t the kind of question any dustblood would have to ask. But Violet wasn’t a dustblood, of course.
“Yeah, you know, runaways. Folks trying to escape the Reckoning and live in hiding. They stick together in camps like this one, hidden all over the Scab. They don’t always stay hidden, of course—just last month a camp west of Briarford got busted up and every single soul in there was killed. But it’s the best we can do until…” Cutter’s eyes flashed.
The Good Luck Girls Page 18