The Sisters of Reckoning

by Charlotte Nicole Davis

  But then Derrick flinched, closing his eyes against the coming punishment, and there was something so familiar in his fear that Aster let him go immediately, as if she’d touched something cold and wet. Derrick fell back into the plush booth.

  “I’m sorry,” he breathed, brushing away the hair that had fallen in his eyes. “I didn’t mean it like that. I only wanted to help you understand.”

  The nerve of this boy. Aster was shocked to find her eyes stinging with the threat of tears. “I understand better than you ever could,” she murmured, and sat back down heavily.

  “So, Derrick, you’re saying that the welcome houses are so profitable that nothing would be worth giving them up, is that it?” Clementine asked, looking between the two of them, clearly pleading for peace.

  “Not nothing,” Derrick said, his voice still shaking slightly. “Eventually, yes, you could make it too costly for the landmasters to keep ignoring you. But like I said, it’s the work of an army. For the people in this room to take them on, alone … it’s impossible.”

  “Well, then, it’s a good thing you’ve expressed such an interest in achieving the impossible,” Aster said dryly. “Look, Derrick, from what you’re telling us, the welcome houses aren’t something the landmasters are ever going to give up willingly—so waging this kind of war against them is our only choice. We owe it to these girls at least to try.” Her eyes began to burn again, and she blinked them back angrily. “You know your own family best, so let’s make it easy and start there—what do the McClennons value the most?”

  At last he seemed to consider the question in earnest. He swallowed, his throat bobbing.

  “Your mining operations, obviously,” Tansy suggested after a moment. “That’s how you all got your start. So, what’s your most valuable mine?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Derrick said. “To destroy that mine—to destroy any mine—would be incredibly dangerous. You’d need explosives.”

  Well, that could certainly be arranged, but Aster didn’t much like the idea, either. There were too many variables they couldn’t control. A rockslide, a cave-in, a sinkhole opening up and swallowing them—they’d need the help of an expert if they were going to try to blow up a mountain, and Derrick, for all his insider knowledge, had probably never so much as swung a pickax.

  “It’s a good idea, but we’d need more time to prepare. What can we do now?” Aster asked, trying not to let her impatience get the better of her.

  “What about another welcome house, then?” Derrick offered. “If that’s the business you want to see changed, why not attack it directly, rather than burning down farms or blowing up mines? I can suggest a few locations that—”

  Aster shook her head. “We’ve already decided we don’t want to put the girls in danger. The five of us alone barely managed to get away and survive being on the run. A whole welcome house full of girls … the little ones, the older women dependent on Sweet Thistle … I’m willing to take risks, but not with their lives.”

  Derrick puffed out his cheeks in frustration.

  “You’re making it very difficult for him to help us,” Violet said pointedly.

  “Stop coddling him,” Aster snapped back. “Come on, keep thinking.”

  They all fell into silence as they considered the problem before them. The muffled sounds of the barroom filtered in from beyond the door.

  “What about you?” Raven asked suddenly, leaning forward and fixing her piercing stare on Derrick. It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d started the meeting, and Derrick seemed startled to find her addressing him.

  “What about me?” he echoed.

  “Aster asked what your family valued most,” Raven went on. “And something tells me there’s nothing they care about more than their last living son. If we pretended to take you hostage, I reckon they’d give in to our demands right away.”

  It was as if Raven had lobbed a bomb into the middle of the room.

  “Holy shit, Raven. I mean this in the best way possible, but how the ripping hell does your mind work—” Mallow said, grinning.

  “It’s brilliant,” Clementine agreed.

  “But where’s the best place to pull this off?” Zee asked.

  “Should we do it right now?” Tansy suggested.

  “Wait,” Derrick interrupted, his eyes widening. “I haven’t even agreed to this yet.”

  But Aster’s mind was already racing as she considered the possibilities. She leaned forward. “Derrick, think about it—it’s perfect. We stage a kidnapping, you come into hiding with us, and then you can continue to help us without worrying about raising suspicion from your family, who will only be thinking about getting you back.”

  And we’ll be keeping you close, so you don’t have the chance to betray us, Aster thought, though she didn’t say so.

  “It would definitely light a fire under their asses faster than anything else,” Violet admitted, a slow half smile spreading over her face. “Aren’t you always saying you want to get away from them anyway, Derrick? I know I certainly do.”

  “Yeah, Violet, we could get you back, too!” Clementine said excitedly.

  Aster and Violet locked eyes, and, despite the friction between them earlier, Aster felt a kick of genuine excitement at the thought of having her back for good.

  “But I can’t just—I can’t just leave my whole life behind for the dead know how long,” Derrick sputtered. “Where could we even go that my family’s raveners wouldn’t find us?”

  Zee cleared his throat, looking at Aster meaningfully. “We have friends who’d be willing to take us in, for a price. Might even be able to outfit us with some military-grade voltric weapons from Ferron, too, to help us get the job done.” Aster stared at him blankly. “Sam Daniels and them,” he clarified.

  The Scorpions. Zee was probably being vague for Derrick’s sake, not wanting to give away too much information about the rebels and their underground sanctuary for hotfoots. But they’d remained hidden from raveners for years in their network of abandoned mines. There was nowhere Aster would feel safer within the Scab.

  “Zee, that’s fantastic,” she said, pulling out a notebook from her satchel so she could begin writing down the details. “What’s the nearest town to their base camp?”

  “Well, there’s Scarcliff, of course—but I’m guessing we don’t want to show our faces around there again after the bank robbery. So our next best option is Rattlebank.”

  “All right, and Derrick, does your family have any operations in Rattlebank?” Aster barreled on. “They must, they’re every-damn-where. Could you say you have some business in town, find an excuse to be there?”

  “There’s a … a gambling hall. Our largest, actually. It’s where we keep some of our finest cuts of theomite, as winnings. The place has been in our family for generations, and a lot of unofficial business gets conducted there. But—”

  “So we stage the kidnapping there, and we steal the theomite and burn down the gambling hall while we’re at it. I still think it’s important to hit them in the wallet, too. And then we just need to find a way to get our demands out, explaining that we’ll return Derrick once they’re met—”

  “Stop,” Derrick whispered. He had braced his dovelike hands against the table, eyes closed and breathing slowed, as if he were trying to steady his stomach while on the deck of a heaving ship. “This whole plan … assumes … that my family would go to any lengths to get me back, when, in point of fact, they will be glad to be rid of me. My father has made it clear he believes the wrong son died, and my uncle, for all his half-hearted efforts to mold me in his image, is far more interested in advancing his own career. I am nothing more to them than a burden and a disappointment. It’s not that I’m unwilling to do this—I will do whatever you ask of me, Aster—but you came here for my advice, and so I am advising you: do not pin your hopes on this.”

  Aster looked at Violet, bewildered. What the hell is this? Perhaps Derrick expected her to feel sorry for him—
he certainly seemed to feel sorry for himself—but she could only think again how removed he was from reality. The world kept turning when dustblood children went missing, sure. But a fairblood child? The son of a landmaster? The heir to the McClennon empire?

  “Derrick, for the love of the dead—” Aster began, exasperated, but Violet cut her off with a cool blue look, shaking her head subtly.

  “Don’t sell yourself so short, Derrick,” she told him. “You are the last living son of the McClennon bloodline, your family’s sole hope for the future. You may have your differences, but none of them doubts your value or importance. That’s why they’re so hard on you.”

  “But—” he protested.

  “Take it from an outsider who’s been living with your family for months now,” Violet insisted. “They would tear down the Veil to get you back.”

  Derrick still looked doubtful, but he swallowed and nodded. “All right,” he said, seeming to steel himself. “All right, I’ll agree to this. But it has to be on my terms—no unnecessary violence, and no killing under any circumstances—”

  Mallow let out an impatient sigh. “Here we go.”

  “Why do you assume any violence we would resort to would be unnecessary?” Tansy asked pointedly. “As opposed to, what, the necessary violence of the welcome houses?”

  “No, I don’t mean—” Derrick said. “I just—I just don’t want anyone hurt on my account.”

  “It wouldn’t be on your account,” Violet said quietly. “It wouldn’t even be on ours. It would be for the girls we’re trying to free.”

  She looked at Aster meaningfully as she spoke, and for the first time since the meeting had started, Aster felt like they were on the same side. Aster’s chest filled with sudden warmth.

  “All right, then, it’s decided. Our next stop is Rattlebank,” she said. She tapped Derrick’s journal, indicating for him to start writing. “Now let’s hash out the details.”

  10

  The last time Aster had caught a train, she’d been practically dragged underneath its wheels while her friends pulled her up into the boxcar they’d chosen to stowaway in.

  This time, thanks to Derrick, she actually had a ticket.

  “Dustbloods to the last car, single file, keep it moving,” the conductor was saying as Aster and Raven shuffled down the narrow aisle between seats. They’d separated their group to avoid suspicion while they traveled—Aster with Raven, Tansy and Mallow with Clementine, and Zee on his own. The train would take them as far as the edge of the Scab, where they’d pick up a coach and ride the rest of the way to Rattlebank. It was to be a different route than they’d traveled before: back then, they’d been on the Arkettan National Line, but now, they were taking Sullivan Rails.

  “I’ve never ridden a train before,” Raven whispered to Aster. “Are they all this high class? This shit looks like a welcome house on wheels.”

  It was true—Derrick had told them Sullivan Rails had the finest luxury cars of any rail company, and so it seemed to be. An aisle of polished cherrywood flooring ran between two carpeted rows of velvet-padded booths that stood on gaudy gold claw feet. Heavy valances swept along the top of the wide windows like frosting on a cake. The passengers, all well-dressed fairbloods, shot Aster and Raven dirty looks as they passed, and raveners guarded the entrance to every car. It was not a place where any dustbloods were welcome, let alone Good Luck Girls. They had all applied the ghostweed salve to their favors so they could cover them with makeup for the next several hours, but that didn’t help the fact that they still didn’t have shadows.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Aster muttered back to Raven. “But something tells me the dustblood car isn’t going to look anything like this.”

  Finally they reached the car in question. Aster and Raven pushed their way into the crowded space—unlike the fairblood cars, there were no velvet-cushioned seats or carpeted floors here, just rough wooden benches and windowless walls. There weren’t enough seats for everybody, and some folks were standing or sitting on the floor. The air was suddenly stifling, hot and sticky as the inside of a mouth. Airholes had been punched into the sides, sending spears of sunlight into the dark, but it was hardly enough. A pair of frustrated children cried ceaselessly, and Aster couldn’t say that she blamed them.

  “Well, this shit looks like … shit,” Raven observed.

  Aster scowled. The fairblood passengers would probably say they were lucky to have been allowed on the train at all. Some of them were no doubt complaining, at that very moment, that they had to share a ride with a bunch of degenerates. But for the love of the dead, could they not at least have given them enough room to breathe?

  I was more comfortable as a ripping stowaway, Aster thought irritably as she and Raven slid down to the floor to sit between a sleeping, stooped-backed older man and a woman with a fidgety infant in her arms. The rest of their friends settled in opposite corners of the car, the girls several rows behind Aster, Zee directly across from her. The train let out a long whistle and started to roll. The floor jolted below them as the wheels gathered speed, bruising Aster’s tailbone. She supposed she had Sullivan to thank for that, along with so much else she had suffered.

  Eight hours to go.

  There wasn’t much Raven and Aster could talk about without giving themselves away, so they settled into silence. The scattered conversations around them washed over Aster meaninglessly until one of them caught her attention.

  “… first those Green Creek girls kill McClennon’s boy, and now another Good Luck Girl burned down his welcome house…” one young woman was saying to another. Raven perked up, looking up at Aster, who didn’t meet her eye but nodded to show that she’d heard, too. Aster leaned forward subtly so she could listen more closely.

  “My brother-in-law wrote us saying there’ve been riots in the south—some of the miners got together and destroyed all their tools. And I saw in the papers that another tenant camp ganged up on one of the raveners on guard and trussed him up like a turkey.”

  “Yeah,” her travel partner said, “and there have been lots of people clearing off in ones and twos as well, hotfoots making a run for Ferron. Most of them probably got caught, but the law’s overwhelmed right now—they can’t catch them all.”

  Hotfoots, like the ones the Scorpions sheltered in their underground hideouts. Would the Scorpions have recruited any of them to their cause? Aster wondered. Young men who might help even more dustblood families escape the Reckoning? The corner of her mouth twitched in a smile at the thought.

  “All this trouble, and you really think there won’t be consequences?” the first woman continued. “We need to slow this down, not speed it up.”

  “I’m starting to think it’s like this train, though—no stopping it until it gets where it’s going. But it can’t be any worse than where we are. As far as I’m concerned, we can’t get there fast enough.”

  And then, despite the stifling air, the sweat sticking to her skin, and the ache in her knees from sitting crossed-legged for so long, Aster felt a sudden lift in her spirits. When they’d robbed the brags last year, they’d been acting out of survival instinct, in their own interests. What they were doing now was something bigger, greater. Not just for other Good Luck Girls, but for anyone who had been mistreated by the landmasters. It was giving folks the courage to fight back, and that was worth any risk. Derrick didn’t see this side of Arketta; he couldn’t understand.

  The conversation died down as a ravener entered the car and scanned the crowd, his orange eyes flashing in the half-light. Every half hour or so one of them would do this, forcing a kind of syrupy sluggishness over them all to keep anyone from acting out despite the frustration everyone surely felt after half a day on this train. In combination with the heat and the stench, the ravenings that made Aster’s head spin were enough to set her stomach churning. But once the guards left, Aster saw the defiance in folks’ eyes return.

  “Damned raveners,” the woman who’d spoken first
muttered. “I swear they have a sixth sense about this shit…”

  “Aster,” Raven whispered. She didn’t seem nearly as bothered by the ravenings as Aster might have expected, and, if anything, looked a little bored. “How much farther do you reckon we have to go?”

  “We’re almost there, I think,” Aster said. She peeked through one of the airholes in the side of the car, the heat making her eye sting.

  Red desert. Gone were the fertile forests of the north or the rippling plains of the Goldsea, replaced by cracked earth under a harsh blue sky with little more than scrub brush to break up the horizon. Rock formations were scattered across the landscape like dice tossed from a giant’s hand. They looked small from this distance, but they were massive, Aster knew, up close.

  It wouldn’t be much longer until the desert rose into the mountain range that made up the Scab, with its mean, twisted trees and the animals that struggled to live among them—panting coyotes, low-bellied rattletails, creeping tarantulas … and people, too, just as wind-stripped and dust-choked as the rest of it.

  An unexpected surge of homesickness swelled in Aster’s chest. Her breath hitched, and she swallowed the feeling back resentfully. She had wanted nothing her whole life but to escape this forsaken place. It had offered her nothing but suffering. It did not deserve her, did not deserve the longing she felt now to feel its sun on her skin or taste its dust on her tongue.

  It doesn’t matter how far you run. This place will always own you, a dark voice whispered in the back of her mind.

  Aster set her jaw. If she could not run away from the Scab, she would tear it down to its foundations and rebuild it to be the home it always should have been for her.

  Aster’s tangled thoughts were interrupted by another ravener entering the car.

  Something about this ravener’s aura immediately felt different, more powerful. Aster gasped as a rash of chills rushed up her skin and a crushing wave of hopelessness washed over her mind.

  Why? Aster thought, anger cutting through the sudden sorrow the ravener had forced on them. No one was misbehaving. They didn’t deserve this. This ravener was just toying with them for the cruel fun of it.