Watching the Scorpions filter out of the room, Aster didn’t feel like she could call this a victory. Even knowing what Eli had told her about the way most dustblood men thought of Good Luck Girls, she had never expected them to be this resistant to the idea of helping.
“That was pretty quick thinking with the theomite,” Eli said. He smiled, but it hung uneasy on his face, a sickle moon lost behind the clouds. His dark eyes still looked uncertain. “I’m glad you got them to come around.”
“It shouldn’t have taken all that,” Aster said, unable to hide her frustration. “They should’ve been willing to help because it was the right thing to do, not because they were getting a mountain of jewels out of it.”
“Well, working with Derrick McClennon is an added risk. I understand why some of them may have had trouble getting used to the idea.”
Aster shot him a glare.
“I’m just saying,” he said defensively. “The McClennons aren’t the kind of folks you trust. But I trust you, Aster. We all do.”
“Well, you sure have a funny way of showing it,” she mumbled.
“Maybe you could try trusting us, too, hear?” Eli suggested.
After today’s display? Not likely. But Aster was too exhausted to argue further. It was no use. The Scorpions thought they were safe here, thought they were free, and they were loathe to risk that. But how was she supposed to make them see that their freedom wasn’t real? Not if they were still skulking underground because of the landmasters’ law. It was that law that was their enemy, not Aster or any other Good Luck Girl. It would do no good for dustbloods to fight among one another for the scraps. None of them was free until all of them were.
There’s no time for all that, Aster thought to herself. It had been hard enough getting everyone to come together to burn down this one gambling hall, let alone the whole of the Scab.
She would take it one battle at a time.
13
Zee finally arrived late that night—and he wasn’t alone.
Aster was on the edge of sleep when she heard a faint knock at the door of the cabin that she and Clem had been given to share. She found her knife under her pillow before going to answer. After the contentious meeting earlier that morning, she wasn’t sure she didn’t have enemies here in camp now.
“Clem … please, it’s me…” a voice faint with exhaustion whispered.
Zee?
Aster dropped the knife and threw the door open. Zee stood before her in the little pool of candlelight pouring out of the cabin, his face drawn and shadowed with stubble, his eyes bloodshot with exhaustion. A small figure stood at his side, wrapped in his coat like it was a blanket. A girl, no older than six or seven, her brown skin dry and cracked, her hair braided into four fraying pigtails. Zee held her close.
His sister, Aster realized, shock rippling through her: not just because they had the same face, but because she would have recognized that protective look in Zee’s eyes anywhere.
“Aster, by the dead, you have no idea how happy I am to see you,” Zee said, relief making him sag. “Is Clem—?”
“Zee!” Clementine cried from behind Aster, leaping up to join them. Zee stumbled forward and drew Clementine into a hug.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry I left. I’m so sorry I took so long to come back to you—”
“Don’t be, I’m just happy you’re here,” Clementine said, stepping back and wiping her eye with the heel of her hand. “Who … who is this?” she asked uncertainly. The little girl still hadn’t said a word, shrinking deeper into Zee’s side.
“Oh, well, this … this is my sister, Emily,” he said haltingly.
Clementine looked back and forth between the two of them, her eyes widening as she saw the truth in their faces.
“Your—your sister?” Clementine stammered. “But where did you … how…?”
Aster opened her mouth to ask the first of a thousand questions herself, but Zee gave them a pleading look with his eyes. Not now, it said. “It’s … a long story. But she’ll be staying with us, if that’s all right. I already talked to Sam.”
Aster and Clem glanced at each other, confusion and concern passing between them.
“Of course,” Aster said after a beat. “It’ll be a joy to have her.” She kneeled down to Emily’s level, hoping to bring a smile to the girl’s face or coax a hello out of her, but Emily was either too tired or too shy to react. She seemed to fold in on herself, like a flower in the rain.
What the hell happened to her, Zee?
Judging from the haunted look in Emily’s eyes, Aster wasn’t sure she’d like the answer.
Aster and Clem helped Emily get settled in one of the empty upper bunks, whispering to Zee as they told him everything he’d missed. It was only once Emily fell asleep that Zee began to tell them where he had been.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help with the Scorpions,” he began. They were all sitting on the opposite bed, the low candlelight making shadows flicker across their faces. Zee took a long swallow from his canteen, hands trembling with exhaustion, before he went on. “I never meant to abandon you. But when I saw that ravener on the train…” He looked at Clementine, his eyes like a wounded animal’s. “When I saw my sister…”
Aster’s heart sank with an aching heaviness. She had hoped Zee had been wrong when he’d said the ravener on the train was his oldest sister.
“The dead protect us,” she murmured.
“S—So you mean Elizabeth … she … just like your father,” Clementine stammered, her expression slowly breaking in devastation.
Zee nodded, looking at them both for strength. “You remember how I told you my sisters disappeared while I was out on a job, back when I first started working as a rangeman? Well, it turns out they went into town at some point, and when they were on their way home, they were captured by a pair of raveners transporting girls bound for a welcome house. No one saw it happen; no one was there to help. They just vanished like the dead come daylight. They never made it to their destination, though. Elizabeth managed to bust the lock and break out with the other two. Elena, my middle sister, was killed by the raveners as they tried to run away, but Lizzy was able to get away with Emily. Went into hiding. Luckily the raveners didn’t spend much time searching for them, since they weren’t a part of their bounty to begin with. But now Lizzy and Emily were halfway across the Scab, and Elena…” Zee’s voice broke. He swallowed and continued. “So Lizzy turned to ravening to support them. Felt she had no other choice. Didn’t ever want to be vulnerable like that again. She eventually got hired on as a steward for Sullivan Rails, which was where we crossed paths. I followed her back to the room she was sharing with Emily at an inn. That’s where she told me all this. I promised her I could get them to safety, both of them, but…” He trailed off. “She doesn’t trust me. Said I was free to take Emily if I wanted, said she’d be glad to be rid of the burden, but that she wasn’t going anywhere with me. And I don’t blame her for that. If I’d been a better brother, they never would’ve gotten kidnapped in the first place. And Elena never … never would’ve been…”
“Zee…” Aster said helplessly. “I—I don’t even know how to tell you how sorry I am.”
“It’s not your fault,” Clementine insisted, holding his hand. “It’s the raveners’—”
“And now Lizzy is one of them!” Zee said. His voice broke with emotion, and he quickly swallowed it back. “She’s not as far gone as my father was in the end, not yet, but the girl I grew up with … I barely recognize her. The way she just handed Emily over to me like she was a dead dog and not our baby sister—”
Emily stirred, and they all quieted until she went still again.
“Is there anything we can do for Elizabeth?” Aster asked. Zee had become like a brother to her, and she would not let him wrestle with this loss alone.
Zee shook his head, his eyes glassy. “I’ve never heard of anyone coming back after becoming a ravener. She knows what this
does to a person. She watched our father—I just can’t believe she’d do this—”
But she’d done it for the same reason parents shipped their daughters off to welcome houses. For the same reason dustblood boys sold themselves to the Arkettan army. For the same reason Clementine had killed Baxter McClennon.
When you were desperate enough, you were capable of anything.
We can’t keep putting people in these positions, Aster thought. It was tearing them apart, all of them.
“Zee, you still saved Emily, and that’s what matters,” Aster said. “And we’re not going to let anything happen to her, hear?”
Zee nodded gratefully, and Aster took his other hand, and they held him until his silent tears were spent.
* * *
Aster met Violet the next evening outside the Rattlebank gambling hall. It was their job to scout the outside of the location while Derrick scouted the inside. Rattlebank seemed to be much like most of the dust-covered towns in the Scab, little more than two neat rows of rundown wooden buildings, their paint peeling from too much sun. Horse droppings and broken beer bottles littered the ground, while the air was thick with grit and biting flies. The gambling hall was by far the most impressive establishment here, three stories high and meticulously maintained, the anchor that kept the rest of the town from blowing away. It cast a long shadow over Main Street.
Aster and Violet sat on the porch outside the saloon across the road, dressed in oversized miners’ grubs, dustkerchiefs pulled up to cover their favors. Meanwhile Raven subtly patrolled the perimeter, drawing the layout of the building in her sketchbook, while Tansy went to the drugstore to get more supplies for her ghostweed salve and Mallow went to the gunsmith’s to buy ammunition. Aster’s eyes darted up and down the street constantly for any sign that the lawmen on patrol were on to them. Thanks to the ghostweed salve, their favors wouldn’t give them away, but the law was on high alert these days—Aster couldn’t give them any reason to look twice at her.
It didn’t help that Aster was on edge with Violet, too. Perhaps her mind had magnified the whole thing, as it so often did, but Aster felt like there’d been friction between them last time: Derrick had gotten in the middle of them like a stringy piece of meat caught between two teeth. And as grateful as Aster was to have the chance to talk to Violet alone now, her chest clenched at the thought of driving Violet further away.
Still, despite everything, it felt good to be near to her again, their legs just touching as they huddled together against the chill of the night.
“… and now his youngest sister is staying with us at Camp Red Claw for the dead knows how long,” Aster muttered under her breath as she finished catching Violet up on everything.
“By the Veil,” Violet swore. She was idly passing a bent bottlecap between her slender fingers, worrying at it like a lucky copper. “I remember that ravener was on patrol in our car, too. Couldn’t help noticing her—I’d never seen a lady ravener before. I thought something about her looked familiar, but I never in a hundred years would’ve guessed…” She trailed off, shaking her head and tossing the bottlecap away. “Damn.”
“I hope it went better for you and Derrick?” Aster asked carefully. Violet’s hair, usually brushed until it shone like a raven’s wing, frayed out from beneath her canvas cap now, and dark circles lay under her bloodshot eyes like bruises. Even her shadow looked tired, stretched out before them in the light spilling from saloon. Violet never let herself look vulnerable to the outside world, no matter how she felt. So why was she slipping now?
“We did all right for ourselves,” Violet said with a sigh. “Got us a room in the inn down the way last night. Neither of us got much sleep, though.”
“I don’t doubt that. All due respect, you look like hell, Vi.”
“It’s this place.” She sighed heavily. “This ripping place. It drains the life out of me.”
“What, the Scab?” Aster asked, and Violet nodded.
“You don’t realize how bad it is until you get out. Eighteen years I spent, listening to the dead keen every night, and after just a few months on the outside suddenly it’s unbearable to me. Everything, all of it—just, unbearable. I don’t understand. I lived here my whole life, and I slept just fine before. So what changed?”
Aster didn’t have an answer for that, as much as she wished she did. It reminded her so much of her own conflicted feelings. Her hatred for “this place” was more complicated than Violet’s seemed to be—although she almost wished it weren’t.
“Anyway, Derrick has always been a poor sleeper, he tells me, so I reckon he was just happy to have the company.”
Aster found her mind straying to a dark place then, and it was not the first time it had gone there. “Derrick…” she whispered. “He hasn’t … you know … tried anything with you, has he? Because if he has—”
“No, no,” Violet said tiredly, leaning back with her palms braced against the porch floor. “He’s a perfect gentleman. He slept on the floor.”
“Where he belongs.”
Aster couldn’t help the barb, but to her relief, she sensed Violet smiling behind her dustkerchief for the first time that night. “You might take your boot off his neck for ten minutes.”
Aster returned the smile, the fabric of her own dustkerchief scratching her cheeks. “Why should I? I’ve only just eased up on you, and I’ve known you for years.”
“Mm, I almost miss it,” Violet mused.
“But still, I wonder—”
There was a crack of a bottle breaking behind them, followed by a roar of male laughter, and it made them both jump. Violet gasped and clutched Aster’s knee, fingers digging into the denim. The contact sent another jolt of voltricity down Aster’s spine.
“Sorry,” Violet breathed, withdrawing her hand quickly. “What were you going to say?”
Aster swallowed, trying to regain her focus. “I was just going to say that even if Derrick is being a gentleman about it, I … I can’t help thinking he’s sweet on you.” And that bothered Aster somehow, though she couldn’t quite understand why.
Violet raised a single brow. “Really? Because if I didn’t know better, I would’ve said he was sweet on you.”
“What?” Aster choked, forgetting, for a moment, to lower her voice. She quickly brought it back down to a whisper as a lawman passed them on his way into the saloon. “What?”
“It’s true!” Violet insisted, laughing at Aster’s expression. “He hasn’t been able to stop talking about you since our last meeting, and getting all nervous when he does. I think you’ve made quite the impression on him. And who could blame him?”
“Look, it’s fine if Derrick … respects me, but if he actually fancies me—”
“Would that be so terrible? He’s not bad looking.”
“He’s just so … skinny…”
“The better to appreciate his bone structure.”
Enough.
“Derrick and I have nothing at all in common,” Aster said shortly.
“Ah, I wouldn’t be so sure. You’re both some of the most passionate people I’ve ever met, you’re both hungry to see justice done. You both take on way too much responsibility for your own good. And you’re both smart as hell, always thinking half a dozen moves ahead. You may disagree about strategy, but you’re playing the same game.”
Aster scoffed. That was all surface-level bullshit. It didn’t change the fact that he was the son of the richest family in the country and she had been sold like livestock to avoid a lifetime of poverty.
“As for me and Derrick,” Violet went on, laughing through her nose, “I sure as hell respect him—to be honest, he may be the only man I ever have, except for Zee—but I don’t want him. Not like that.” She met Aster’s gaze then, and her voice grew softer. “Is that why it’s felt different between us since I came back, Dawn? You’re afraid I chose that boy over you? You’re afraid I, what, forgot who I am?”
Aster felt a lump roll in her throat at the sound of
her true name, and she swallowed around it painfully. “I’m just afraid of losing you. I can’t go through that. Not again.”
Violet’s hand slid over Aster’s knee, and this time it lingered there. “Well, don’t worry about that. I’m not going anywhere.”
Aster let out a shaky breath. “Thanks, Vi. I just … can’t wait to have you back with the rest of us.”
“And how much longer will that be?”
Aster ran through the next steps in her head. “We still have to get the voltric weapons from that other Scorpion camp. Sam said it’s a two-day journey underground. So accounting for the trip back, and a full day afterwards to recover and prepare … and then add another forty-eight hours to give us some room for error … we should stage the attack in seven days’ time,” she concluded. If her voice had been low before, now it was little more than breath. It would be bad enough to be overheard talking about suitors, but to be heard talking about treason would see them both in gibbets.
“That detour for the weapons—is it really necessary?” Violet asked. “Derrick wants this done as soon as possible. The longer we wait, the more lies he has to concoct to justify his being here.”
Aster nodded. “We barely made it out of Scarcliff after we hit that bank, and there have to be twice as many badges on patrol here tonight. We need every advantage we can get—not just for this fight, but for the fights ahead, too.”
“All right then.” Violet sighed. “I’ll let him know. Seven more days, and then we strike.”
More lawmen were coming up to the saloon from the lawmaster’s office. It was time to leave before they were exposed entirely. Aster and Violet said their goodbyes reluctantly. Aster looked at the gambling hall one final time before she left, its silhouette sharp against the deepening blue of the sky. Then she turned back to Violet, allowing herself to speak above a whisper at last, forcing courage into her voice.
“I’ll see you on the other side.”
14
The Sisters of Reckoning Page 14