Kiwi Strong (New Zealand Ever After Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  I wanted to tell her to stay here. Her face looked strained and tired despite the laugh, and her hair was still wet. Instead, I said, “Ready,” grabbed my jacket and keys, and told Mum, who was making ham sandwiches, for some reason, at three in the morning, “I don’t know when I’ll be back.” I’d explained what had happened, but not much. I’d only had time for a couple sentences, but she’d accepted them with the equanimity she brought to most things.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll be here. Ring if you get into trouble.”

  I gave the dog one last pat—she was standing at the door as if she was ready and waiting to go out there again, as if, tired or not, she expected to do her job, a bit like Daisy—and said, “Stay here, girl. You can guard Mum, eh.”

  When we got to the ute, Daisy held out her hand for the keys and said, “I’ll drive. I know the way.”

  “As you don’t have a license anymore,” I said, “I think I will.”

  “Oh.” She stood stock-still a minute. “Rethinking here. There goes my hired car for the morning. D’you think you could help me with a motel room, though? Just for the one night—or maybe two, because by the time we get into it, it’ll be morning already. I’ll pay you back,” she hastened to add, when I didn’t answer straight away. “I need to get my brother up here, much as I don’t want to, but I don’t have his number. I can ring his work in the morning, though.” Her face cleared. “Yeh. That’ll do. Two nights. Cheap motel. Backpacker’s, maybe.”

  I sighed. “Get in. I’ll drive. You direct. You can’t tell me that’s not your preferred mode.”

  I achieved one thing, anyway. She lost some of the worry. Of course, she was narky instead, but personally, I preferred being angry to being scared, and I was guessing she did, too.

  Something about her appealed to me. Either it was her guts, or I’d turned into a masochist. I preferred to think it was her guts.

  She climbed into the cab, which was an effort, because she had to pull up her trousers at the waist and the legs were dragging a bit, and said, “I’m a nurse. I don’t direct. The doctor directs.”

  “Why aren’t you a doctor, then?” I asked. “Never tell me it’s because you didn’t think you could do it. I’m not believing that.” She didn’t answer, and I shot a look at her. When she still didn’t answer, I said, “I’ll take the turning to Lake Hawea. I know vaguely where it is after that, but I’m not sure how you get in. Am I expecting to fight?”

  “No,” she said. “I appreciate the lift, but you don’t have to do more. If there’s fighting to be done, I’ll do it.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “No.” This time, she actually laughed. I smiled and drove on, leaving the town behind. It was warm in here, and weirdly cozy, too, the headlight beams picking their way through the darkness and nobody else around. The scent of honey and spice hung faintly in the air from her shower, and that was nice as well. Thinking of her in my shower, using my shampoo? Yeh, that was nice.

  We’d had an adventure, and we’d lived to tell the tale. Now, we were off to have another one.

  Off to the rescue, in fact.

  6

  The First Step

  Daisy

  With every kilometer Gray drove up into the foothills, I got sicker. I’d been fine before this—well, as fine as a person could reasonably be. Now, I was forcing myself to breathe in through my nose, one-two-three-four-five, then out through my mouth, one-two-three-four-five, feeling the saliva pooling just the same, and trying to overcome my weakness.

  I wished we’d brought the dog. I could have sat in the back with her, buried my hands in her fur, and not looked up. Like when I’d used to brush and plait my sisters’ hair every morning, once my own was laboriously twisted and rolled into a knot and hidden under its white cap. The three of them who’d been old enough, anyway. Prudence had been two when I’d left, with not enough hair to plait. The youngest, Dove, hadn’t been born.

  I’d had to leave Mount Zion to keep myself whole, or that was how it had felt. Like the tissue had turned gangrenous, and I’d had to cut it away. But it had cut me off from so much of the good, too, because afterwards, there’d been no sisters, no cousins to share my secrets and jokes. Nobody to comfort, and nobody to hold. Nobody but Dorian, who’d lived in a world of his own, and who now had somebody else in that world.

  And, still, the thing that was making my pulse race faster now? The thing that was making the adrenaline flood, and making me sick? It wasn’t the fear of what would happen next. It was the memory of what had happened before.

  PTSD, somebody had suggested, but I didn’t have a disorder. I just had too many memories.

  Gray asked, “All right?”

  “Yes,” I said, and swallowed. “Of course.”

  “Brings back memories, does it,” he said. “Taking this road.”

  How had he known that? I’d been so careful to sit still, to seem calm. I said, “Not really. Not exactly. Until the past couple years, I only drove it a dozen times that I remember, to the dentist and that. Or I rode, rather. Women don’t drive.”

  “How old were you when you left?” he asked.

  It helped to talk. A bit. It was using the time up, anyway. “Sixteen. We were both sixteen.”

  “Both?”

  “My brother and I. We left together.”

  “Older or younger?”

  Why was he asking? To make the time go by, I guessed. We were nearly there now, I could tell, even though it was dark. The land was leveling out as we came into the valley, though behind it, the mountains would rise like bulwarks. A good defensive position, you’d think, holding the high ground. Not that anybody needed to defend it, but paranoia was part of the package.

  “I’m older,” I said. “By twenty minutes. We’re twins.”

  “But he’s not here tonight,” Gray said.

  “No. He doesn’t know I’m doing it tonight. Turn left up here at the gate.”

  He didn’t comment, just did it. My heart was bumping against my chest wall now, beating much too fast, my very own stress-induced version of atrial fibrillation. A few meters on, the asphalt ended, the tires crunching over the metal road. Too loudly, every rotation on the loose cinder sounding like a scatter of birdshot. I sensed rather than saw the white mesh of fencing to my right, and beyond it, the glow that was the yard lighting around the residential compound.

  Gray glanced at me. I felt it. He said, “Could be good to tell me the plan, if I’m meant to help.”

  “You don’t have to help,” I said. “Seriously. You just have to drive. Slow down to a crawl, though, would you?” We were making too much noise. Somebody was going to hear.

  “Oh,” he said, perfectly calmly, “I think I have to help.” He eased up on the gas, though.

  “Stop here,” I told him. “We’ll go on foot from here.” We were too close to the compound. I should’ve had him turn off the headlights. I hadn’t thought of that. My accident meant that it was too far past the witching hour, when the circadian rhythms were at their lowest and everyone’s defenses would be down, and I felt exposed. Naked. Vulnerable. “I know you have a torch,” I made myself go on, “because I saw it. I was going to ask to borrow it.”

  “It’s got a red mode,” he said. “For hunting. Preserves our night vision, and doesn’t shine as far. Better, if we’re being stealthy. I assume we’re being stealthy.”

  I barely heard him, because I’d just realized it. “I’ve forgotten,” I said, my heart giving a dismayed lurch. “I don’t have the stakes. They’re in the boot of my car.”

  “The stakes?” He still sounded calm, somehow. “Are these weapons, or …”

  “No. Plastic stakes, like you use for a tent. I could use sticks, maybe. We can find sticks somewhere. I’ll make it work. I’m not stopping now.”

  “Tell me what the stakes were for,” he said, “and I’ll find something that’ll do.”

  “Where?”

  “In the toolbox,” he said patiently.

&nbs
p; “You don’t have stakes in your toolbox.”

  “Well, yeh. I probably do. It’s a big toolbox. Come on. We’ll have a look.” He grabbed the torch and swung out of the ute, and I followed, tripping over the rolled legs of the track pants.

  Oh. It was a big toolbox. One of those that go crosswise across the entire bed of a truck. He handed me the flashlight, grabbed the edge of the truck bed, and in a move like a gymnast, heaved himself up, then swung both legs over and landed on his feet with a dull, metallic thud before taking the flashlight from me and opening the box.

  I said, “It’s to stake down the electric fence so we can get across. That’s the only way I know to cross it, and we don’t just have to get across ourselves, we have to get the others across, too.” I was talking too much again. I couldn’t help it. Now that we were almost there, I was nearly dancing with the need to move, to get it done and get out of here.

  “Right,” he said, then fossicked about in there, the clank of metal loud in the quiet night, while I held my breath. In the distance, a dog barked, a nearly rumbling sound from a very deep chest, and I tensed some more and tried to force my breathing to slow. Finally, though, Gray pulled out a packet, stuffed it into the back pocket of his jeans, set the lid of the toolbox down without extra noise, vaulted down the same way he’d come up, like it was no trouble at all, and said, “Good to go.”

  “You happened to have tent stakes in your toolbox,” I said.

  “No. I happened to have something that’ll work. For landscaping.”

  “Are you a landscaper, then?” It would explain the scars on his knuckles, and the absurd level of fitness.

  “No,” he said. “Do you want to have a chat about occupations, or do you want to get across that fence? Here. You hold the torch.” He’d switched it to the red setting already, but was grabbing something else out of the truck bed. Something long and heavy. “Lead the way.”

  I stopped where I was. “What do you have?”

  “Shovel.”

  “Why?”

  “You never know when you may need a shovel.”

  “Right,” I said, abandoning the thought. “We need to be quiet from here, though.” I headed down the track, careful to keep my distance from the fence, stumbling over my rolled trouser legs and nearly falling.

  Gray grabbed my elbow and said, keeping his voice low, “I’ll hold onto you. Just in case.”

  I nodded. All my distractions were gone now, and there was so much that could go wrong.

  As long as I’m on this side of the fence, I reminded myself, they can’t touch me. The trouble was, I wasn’t going to stay on this side of the fence.

  A cautious hundred meters, and then another one, my feet squelching in the wet canvas trainers, the legs of the track pants dragging along, the sleeves of the jacket falling over my hands despite my attempts to push them up. The sound of wind rustling the leaves in a stand of poplars, a faint, far-off hum of generators. A nearly full moon low on the horizon that was much too bright, but we’d had no choice. And, finally, a darker rectangle that was the outbuilding I was looking for. The most far-flung of the storage sheds on this side of the property.

  Please, let them still be there. I was nearly two hours late. Let them still be there.

  No talking now. I touched Gray’s arm, solid under his flannel jacket, and nodded at the fence. Then I handed the torch to him, and when he had the red light trained on the mesh, I moved closer, breathless once more.

  The electric fence was made of white mesh, the sort where the electrified strands are woven through horizontally. I was very familiar with this fence.

  I faced the mesh, waited until the red light steadied, took a breath, held it, and plucked two non-electrified vertical strands of white fiber delicately between finger and thumb. Using both hands at once, the way I’d learned to do as a kid, the way that would keep your fingers away from the electrified wires and wouldn’t get you shocked. The way that had earned me my harshest belting, two weeks before I’d run.

  That one, I didn’t want to think about.

  The blood was pumping hard into my brain, and my hands were trying to shake. The body’s arousal system in full activation mode. Blood. Hormones. Brain. Everything.

  I was a low-arousal person. I’d worked at it. Tonight, I couldn’t be.

  I didn’t have time for panic, so I pulled the fence down toward the ground as carefully as if I were handling nitroglycerin. I had small fingers, a flexible body, and steady nerves, and I lowered myself and took the fence along with me, slowly, steadily, until I was crouched as low as I could go and the strands were on the ground, then whispered, “Stake them down.”

  Gray didn’t say anything. He just did it. The stake in his right hand, the light in the left, he crouched down on the damp grass beside me and pushed the two prongs down gently and carefully, avoiding the thin blue-and-white lines of electric cables. The U-shaped stakes were metal, and they were long. Capable of carrying a charge, which was exactly wrong, and why I always used plastic ones instead. I kept my eyes glued to that stake, and every muscle in my body tensed to breaking point.

  The fence wouldn’t kill you if you touched it. It would just hurt. Heaps. I couldn’t get the girls out without crossing it, but Gray wouldn’t keep helping me if he got shocked, and the girls couldn’t. Your muscles didn’t want to do it a second time.

  Well, mine would. Theirs probably wouldn’t.

  The first stake was in. Gray took the second one from his back pocket and fastened it down with the same care.

  A half-meter section of fence was pinned down near the ground now, twenty centimeters of it fastened flat, so you could step straight over. More of a jump, it would have to be, as the fabric stretched nearly a meter wide along the ground, but everybody could jump.

  Gray had his hand cupped over the red light, blocking most of it. Now, he whispered into the silence, “Ready?”

  I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me and muttered, through a throat that had gone dry, “Ready.”

  He picked up his shovel, pointed to himself, and held up a hand. Wait. I’ll go first. He jumped lithely across, and he was on Mount Zion land.

  I lifted a foot, and stumbled. My trouser leg was caught under the other foot, and I was falling.

  Gray

  If I hadn’t been holding the shovel and the torch, I could’ve caught her. As it was, I was a split second too late.

  Her entire body jerked as her hands and knees made contact with the wires, and I was grabbing her under the arms and yanking her across. My own hand brushed the mesh as I did it, and the shock jolted me hard.

  Electric fences don’t kill. The amperage is too low. They just make you very sorry you’ve touched them.

  I didn’t call out. That didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was that she didn’t, either.

  I whispered, “All right?”

  She nodded, and I set her on her feet, whereupon she dropped down and rolled up her trouser legs and jacket sleeves with hands I guessed were trembling, and I picked up my shovel and torch again.

  The night was lit by the risen moon, and I’d never felt as exposed as I did walking across that stretch of lumpy paddock toward the dark shed. I could see the tension in Daisy’s shoulders, and I could see the determination, too.

  I could understand why she was so tense. Why was I, though? What did I think they’d do to me?

  My safety wasn’t what was worrying me, though, not really. It was not getting those girls out. And it was whatever was eating Daisy up from inside, forcing her to keep going through her fear by pure effort of will. She was past thought now, operating at that extreme edge where all you had left was mana, the courage and commitment that pushed you on when all you wanted was to turn back.

  We were nearly there now. A dog barked nearby, and she froze a second, then started to run. When she stumbled over the trousers again, I grabbed her under the arms and half-carried, half-dragged her to the shed, then set her down, pressed on the latch, a
nd tumbled inside with her. I shoved the door closed behind me, remembering at the last moment not to slam it.

  It was black dark in here, but I could sense a human presence. The hair rose on the back of my neck, and I gripped the shovel tighter.

  “Fruitful?” Daisy asked softly. “Obedience? It’s me.”

  “Chastity?” The voice was young. Tremulous.

  “Yes,” Daisy said. “It’s me. Who’s that?”

  “Obedience,” the voice said. Whispered, actually.

  “Shine the light,” Daisy told me. “On us.” She kept talking while I did it, keeping her voice low. “This is Gray. He’s helping us.”

  I shone the light toward the source of the whisper, then, and picked up the white of an apron, a cap, a figure about as slight as Daisy’s. A white face, too, turning away from me.

  “But he’s a man,” the girl said.

  “It’s all right,” Daisy said. She didn’t wait any longer, but ran to the other girl and took her in her arms. “He’s helping. It’s all right.” The girl’s shoulders began to shake, but her sobs were silent, the same way Daisy had been when she’d fallen onto that fence. “Shh,” Daisy told her. “We need to be very quiet. We need to go fast. Where’s Fruitful?”

  “She’s …” There was a hitch in the voice, and then the whisper. “In the Punishment Hut. She’s locked in. I couldn’t get her out. I couldn’t … And I didn’t know whether to come here or not, and then you didn’t come, and I thought they’d find me, and I wanted to go back, but you said not to go back, and …” She couldn’t go on. She was shaking too hard.

  Daisy said, “Quiet.” Still in that low voice. “Is the Punishment Hut still in the same place? Next to the milking shed?”

  “Yes,” the girl managed to say. “It’s the same.”

  Daisy said, “Come on.” She took the girl’s hand, then came to me and said, “Follow me. Don’t use the light.”

  She opened the door.