Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory Book 2)

by Lauren Gilley

  Tris Mayweather was an outlying statistic: he’d been a Knight longer than most. In a branch with a high mortality rate, he’d proven tough, and savvy enough to stay alive. Long enough that he had iron streaks in his dark hair and close-cropped beard; long enough that his gaze moved dispassionately over everyone and everything. The instructors at the academy had used old still photos of him and anecdotes to excite the cadets about their futures as Knights, but he’d been younger in those photos, and not dead behind the eyes.

  She’d recognized it in him straight off: the lack of all caring. His gaze had moved over her and Gallo on that first day, and she’d known he was already seeing them with toe tags; had already dismissed them as casualties. She respected that. She felt dead inside, anyway.

  Lance struck her – at least at first – as a painful military cliche. Handsome and strong-jawed, earnest and righteous. The sort who believed in what he was doing; believed he was accomplishing something for the greater good. The first to offer condolences and congratulations, and he tried to make them sound sincere. Someone who stood on ceremony. Someone who thought that holding her back from the portal the night she lost Beck had actually saved her. That he’d performed a good deed. Men like him sickened her: the kind who required those good deeds of themselves in order that they might live with less guilt.

  But. Sometimes. His gaze would slide over, and she’d see the spark of something else lurking behind his Good Soldier Boy façade. Something wilder and thornier, resentful of being contained. She wondered if it could be teased out into the open; if it would even be worth it.

  Regardless, they were a team now – her team. And she had nowhere else to go, no place to call her own, and so she was stuck with them for the time being.

  ~*~

  “You’re dropping your shoulder before you strike. It gives away your plan of attack.”

  Gallo swiped his forehead with the back of one wrapped hand, nodded, firmed up his expression, and slid back into his ready stance. He was quick, and he took instruction well, but he still hadn’t figured out how to keep from telegraphing his movements when they sparred.

  Rose lifted her hands, and circled him; dropped her own shoulder, and offered a weak spot. He didn’t move right away this time, but she saw the flaring of ah-ha in his eyes. Was ready for his next strike when it came and dodged beneath it. Came up with the side of her hand poised as his throat, the threat of a quick chop that, delivered, would have left him choking and gasping, and totally vulnerable to further attack.

  He groaned and stepped back, dropping all pretense of a fighting stance. “Shit,” he muttered, scraping his hair back of his face with one hand. He winced. “I’m hopeless.”

  “No,” she assured, going to retrieve her water bottle over on the bench. “That time was better – you’re getting better.”

  “Then why are you still kicking my ass?”

  Before she could answer, a voice over by the door said, “Because she knows all your tells. You can’t win a fight against someone who can read you that well.”

  Gallo’s startled expression told her who it was before she turned her head, but a look confirmed it. Tris stood leaning against the threshold, arms folded, gaze impassive as it tracked over both of them. Before Beck, what seemed a lifetime ago, she would have read a threat in that look. You couldn’t trust anyone with that much restraint and control over his face. But Tris’s impassivity was a sheer cliff face compared to Beck’s quicksilver disguise. Nothing about him frightened her.

  “She’s better than you, yeah,” he continued. “That’s why it’s good to learn from her.” He pushed off the doorframe and stepped into the room. Shrugged out of his jacket and hung it up, revealing a black t-shirt, and scarred, muscled arms beneath. “Have a go at me.”

  Rose sat down on the bench to catch her breath, and watch.

  Gallo sucked in a huge, unsubtle breath, face twitching as he fought to smooth it. “Yeah. Okay.” Hero worship, fascination, reverence – call it whatever, but it rolled off of him like steam. This wasn’t going to go well.

  But Gallo proved her wrong, as he so often did. The two opponents circled one another, assessing, and after a few more breaths – no time for that in the field, Frankie, she thought – Gallo settled: his jaw set, his hands up, his body tensed and coiled and ready. Tris was bigger, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Look at the cadets she’d laid out in her time here.

  Tris offered a few feints to start, but he didn’t strike her as the type to toy with his food. She was right: he launched a crippling sequence of blows that would have left any untrained civilian, or a common street tough, halfway unconscious.

  Gallo had been learning and practicing, though. He dodged, blocked, and bent back, catching himself on one hand to avoid Tris’s last swipe – then bending back up in a flash, inside his attacker’s guard, ready with a strike of his own, a chop of his hand like Rose had just used on him.

  Tris deflected it easily – but was forced to take a step back to keep his balance.

  Gallo grinned, his gaze cutting over toward Rose. Did you see that?

  “Dumbass,” Tris muttered, and in a matter of moments had him pinned face-down on the mat, his arm twisted behind his back.

  Gallo’s face went red, and Rose knew it wasn’t from exertion.

  “The second you stop paying attention is the second you’re dead,” Tris said, letting him up. Gallo scrambled to his feet, head ducked, cheeks flaming. “If you wanna celebrate every time you get in a halfway decent hit, you can go serve with the infantry.”

  He shook his head with a mumbled, “No, sir.”

  “Here, let’s go again.”

  Lance settled down on the bench beside her; he walked very quietly, but he wasn’t silent, not like Beck. She’d heard him coming.

  “I told Tris not to kill him,” he said, softly, too low for the sparring partners to hear.

  “He’s tougher than he looks.”

  He snorted. “Like you then, huh?”

  She glanced toward him, and found his eyes on the action, the corner of his mouth curved up in a grim little smile. As she stared, his gaze cut over. He wet his lips, and she thought he meant to say something else, but in the end he didn’t.

  He had no idea what to make of her, she’d realized. She thought a part of him wanted to treat her like any other new, young, inexperienced Knight. To guide her, offer suggestions, share his experiences, and to soothe her with bad jokes and anecdotes. But there was no escaping that night in Castor’s basement. He might not have known what she lost, but he knew who, and she could read the hesitance that flickered in his gaze when he looked at her for too long.

  “That was a good hit,” Lance said, nodding toward the match.

  She glanced that way and saw that Tris’s jaw was clenched, a muscle leaping in his cheek, though no other movement betrayed where he’d been struck.

  Gallo was grinning again.

  “What did I say about celebrating?”

  “Sorry, sir,” Gallo said, not sounding sorry at all, and danced back into the next parry.

  They circled one another a moment, taking stock. There was a stillness about Tris that Rose appreciated; he wasn’t one of those fighters who felt the need to boil in place, a needless expenditure of energy if there ever was one.

  He pulled a double feint, and sent a blow toward Gallo’s ribs – that he blocked with a hiss as their forearms collided. Tris was bigger. But Gallo didn’t slow, and offered a strike of his own, one that was deflected, and the dance continued.

  “Gallo knows he can’t match him strength-for-strength if they keep tangled. Same as me.” The last she added with reluctance, and she could feel Lance perking up beside her. It might have been the first time she initiated a conversation with him, she realized.

  “Yeah, well, no shame in that,” Lance said, eagerness peeking through his casual air. He wanted to talk to her, for some reason. Probably as team bonding or some such rot. “It’s better to know your st
rong and weak points and learn to use them to your best advantage. We can’t all fight the same way – and that’s a good thing. How is he with a knife?”

  “Not as good as he is with a gun,” she said, honestly. “But I don’t get the impression you guys do much knife-fighting.”

  That earned another snort. “Not with conduits, no. Only crazy people attempt that. But you’d be surprised what sorts of situations we get into on some ops. Cities are full of surprises. The bad kind.”

  She nodded. That was very true.

  “Can I ask something?”

  She stiffened. His tone had gone careful, like the night he’d tried – awkwardly, inefficiently, but sincerely – to offer his condolences about Beck. She nodded.

  “When I told you that you could join up, that was a sincere offer. Things are upside down right now, and I think this is, as strange as it sounds, the safest place to be sometimes. But I didn’t think you’d actually do it.” He paused. “Why did you?”

  She remembered Kay giving her one of those calculating looks through the curls of smoke off her cigarette. He got a taste for it. Beck had killed to get answers; to hurt Castor; to avenge his brother. But Beck also killed because he liked it. She could close her eyes and see him now, head pressed back in his chair, firelight dancing in low-lidded, honey eyes; black-smudged fingers tracing the rim of his whiskey glass. After.

  In the time between her world shattering and turning up at the recruitment office, she’d killed three people. One was a sour-breathed man who’d grabbed at her arm and asked where you going in such a hurry, honey? She’d putting a starving, begging, dying man out of his misery, at his request, when he didn’t want the bread she offered, and instead asked for the knife.

  But there had been that pimp. The one who’d come out of that underground bar; the one who’d slapped a woman. The one who’d sneered in her face and told her to run back home to her mommy. His blood had slid hot and velvety between her fingers. That one had been just for her.

  Because I got a taste for it, she didn’t say.

  But there was another reason. A stronger one. Beck was in hell, and it was down to her to get him out. On the streets, she’d had no resources of any kind. She’d entertained fleeting, wild thoughts of joining the criminal underground; fighting and clawing and stabbing her way to the top. Becoming the next Castor. The, with money and goons at her disposal, she would have the means to figure out how to reopen the portal to hell. Maybe she’d find a conduit of her own. She already had the dagger…

  But, no. Too much risk; too little chance for success.

  The military would be the easiest, cheapest way to gain access to the powers of heaven of hell. Her best chance for answers.

  She’d hesitated too long; could feel the tension vibrating in the air between them, now. Said, “It seemed like the best fit.”

  His gaze weighed heavy against the side of her face, but she didn’t turn her head.

  ~*~

  Because the Knights were an elite force, prized, rare, and used only for certain kinds of missions, there was more down time than she’d ever expected to have in the military.

  For the most part, Rose occupied herself with training. There were treadmills and ellipticals that she used every morning before tackling a heavy bag. She jumped rope, and worked through a calisthenics routine. Lifted weights, rep after rep until she could barely lift her arms, her whole body quivering with exhaustion. Her mirror was small, and only offered a view from her chest up, but she could see that her body offered evidence to her regimen. The stark lines of muscle in her shoulders and arms; the slender line of her neck; the hollows below her cheekbones. The transformation that had begun the night Beck pulled her from the pie safe had reached its final peak: she was a weapon now. Fully.

  “Do you ever sleep?” Gavin asked, grinning, one evening in the gym.

  She executed another bicep curl and said, “As much as I need to.”

  His brows gave a little jump in the mirror and he didn’t press.

  She liked him for that – him and Tris. They seemed content to let her throw herself at physical activity and never tried to dissuade her from it; never looked at her with mingled concern and pity.

  Unlike Lance.

  He was better not thought of.

  She missed the library at home, some nights, when sleep was slow to come, and she tossed back and forth on her bunk in the dark. She’d brought only two books with her: the romance about the boy with the wings and his homeless girl, and Jane Eyre, because even smelling the pages reminded her of sitting across from Beck, his eyes glinting, his gaze impossible as she told him she didn’t think Jane was the lamb and Rochester the lion. Two books that she paged through and reread when she needed to feel close to the life she’d lost. But she missed the shelves; the multicolored spines and the paper-dust-ink scent of air saturated with knowledge. The crack of the fire.

  The only thing that cracked here was the poly fill in her pillow when she rolled over.

  It was almost a month before she went on her next op: a clean extraction in the once-dry deserts of New Mexico, now frigid and snow-dusted, fat flakes mingling with ash in a slow, constant drift from the low clouds. The target turned out not to be a conduit: only a human with a grudge and a machine gun. They neutralized him, accepted the thanks from the locals being harassed, and radioed back to Captain Bedlam.

  “We can’t work a transport for you until tomorrow morning. Hunker down for the night. See the sights or some shit, I dunno.” The last she said with what might have been a hint of laughter, or maybe it was just radio static.

  But Gavin slapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly. “You heard the captain, boys. Free night.”

  Lance groaned.

  “What – what does that mean?” Gallo asked, more than a little nervous.

  “It means.” Gavin slung an arm across his shoulders and gave him a friendly shake. “Drinks and dames.”

  “Because it’s the nineteen-thirties out there,” Tris deadpanned, rolling his eyes. “Clean up, nubes, or don’t. We’ll leave in ten.”

  Rose turned to Lance. “We’re going out?”

  It was hard to tell in the dim, flickering light of their night’s temporary base – a rundown infantry facility with water-stained floors and faulty wiring – but she thought his color was heightened, two dark spots on his normally composed cheeks. “This city’s one of the safer ones. No known conduits, and the crime’s not so bad. It’s become something of a carnival spot. Lots of food stalls and nighttime hotspots.”

  “Clubs,” Gavin said. “He means clubs.”

  Lance gave her a considering look. “You can stay back, though, if you want. I’m sure there’s a treadmill around here somewhere you can run the belt off of.”

  Gavin sniggered.

  Gallo chuckled, and then ducked his head, looking guilty.

  It took her a moment to name the precise emotion that churned in her gut. The way she wanted, suddenly, aggressively, to wipe the smirk off his face, and shut Gavin up. The way she wanted to prove them wrong.

  She composed her features and shrugged. Made her voice airy, indifferent. “No, I’ll come.”

  “Ooh,” Gavin said, delighted. “Greer, I can’t wait to get you drunk.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” she said, and turned to head for the showers.

  ~*~

  Despite the cold, and the constant, gentle sifting of snow, the city did have a bustling nightlife. The larger buildings that had once held offices were now the headquarters of the hydroponic gardens; some floors had been converted for the holding, raising, and slaughtering of livestock. A once-charming shopping district of glass-fronted, first-floor shops had expanded out into alleys and smaller side-streets, set up with semi-permanent stalls, tents, and lean-tos, where you could buy everything from clothing, to cheap jewelry, to produce, to a hot, portable meal. There was still a supermarket, she saw, its façade sad and soot-streaked, but if you didn’t mind walking in the sn
ow, there was much and more to be found in the stalls.

  Rose pulled the collar of her parka up tighter around her throat and followed along behind the rest of her team.

  They were off duty, technically, and while they still wore their boots, they’d pulled plain black parkas on over black tac pants, and, without any patches or insignias, no one could say, definitively, that they were military. They had to look it, though, the way they all walked with that particular, ground-eating, prowling stride. The way they turned their heads back and forth, a constant watchfulness.

  For her own part, she wasn’t going to try to blend in. Better to be observant and alive than inconspicuous and dead.

  Ahead of her, Gavin still had an arm around Gallo’s shoulders, other hand stuck out and gesturing, like a ringmaster presenting a spectacle to his young sightseer. Their breath misted in the chill air, and Gavin pointed to the subtle, purple sign above a closed-off purple cloth tent, the lettering just visible in the glow of the string lights that criss-crossed like netting overhead. Gallo ducked down into his jacket a little, and Gavin’s laughter floated back to her, delighted, but not outright cruel.

  Tris said something to Lance, received a nod, and then strode off on his own, hands tucked in his parka pockets. He ducked his head a little, like he was trying to keep from drawing attention to himself.

  Rose watched him go, curious about his destination; surprised by her own curiosity. She didn’t normally care about that sort of thing, but she tracked him all the way across the street, until he ducked behind a vegetable stand and slipped out of sight.

  “Anything catch your eye?” Lance asked, suddenly right beside her.

  She was too well-practiced to jump, but felt a stir of alarm in her belly. She’d been distracted – and after she’d just been thinking that she couldn’t allow that – and she hadn’t heard him drop back and fall into step beside her. Getting sloppy. She blamed it on fatigue.