Black Moon

by L. A. Weatherly

  “Holy hell, you’ve got that right,” he murmured, gazing at the ceiling, and knew he didn’t have to worry about sounding sincere. Something in him was broken – gone – he’d realized it years ago.

  “You might as well know it all,” he said after a pause, because he knew she’d have guessed. “I was with the Resistance too. Well, supposedly.”

  Kay turned and looked at him, the ancient Washington ruins framed in the window behind her. She waited.

  “I was compiling info for Johnny,” he said, since Johnny was lying in a morgue and couldn’t deny it. “But as long as I’m being honest, I’ll tell you that I liked Mac. Kind of hard not to.”

  Kay sat on the side of the bed – poised, studying him intently. His palms felt clammy. Why hadn’t the painkiller kicked in yet?

  Then, remembering what had happened on almost his last day in Can-Amer, Collis suddenly knew what Kay was waiting for.

  “Oh, and I got Vancour’s brother out,” he added, his voice casual. “Mac saw his name in one of your files and was worried that the kid was in danger. I was trying to keep his trust.”

  Kay smirked slightly and studied her nails. “Yes, I had spies in the Western Seaboard Records Office,” she said. “I knew Halcyon’s paperwork was stolen – then a boy fitting his description turned up in Topeka. What was he doing there?”

  Collis shook his head. “Mac got him out of the WS. Maybe he thought Vancour’s brother could be a rallying point for people – I dunno. He didn’t tell me everything.”

  Kay looked privately pleased with herself. “I planted the name that Mac saw,” she said. “And he fell for it. That’s how I knew for sure about him and Sephy.”

  Collis shrugged, thinking, Shit, shit. “Yeah, thought it might have been a plant.”

  “Where’s Halcyon now?”

  He struggled to keep his icy muscles relaxed. “Same address.”

  Collis had been the one to rescue Amity’s brother and mother from the Western Seaboard. They were like family to him – a hell of a lot closer than his own had ever been. He had to get to that address in time to warn Amity and Hal.

  “Amity Vancour doesn’t seem to trust you very much any more,” said Kay after a pause. “Given that she shot you.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “What about Mac?”

  “Sure, Mac still trusts me.” Collis hid the faint tendril of hope that had just broken through. He managed a wry smile. “I was a good Resistance worker, you know. And I told Mac everything. He thought I was on the up and up.”

  “If the Resistance continues –” Kay mused – “and we both know that it will, in some way, shape or form…”

  Collis yearned to supply the rest of the thought. He somehow kept silent. Kay studied him.

  “If I leave Vancour alone, the Resistance will think they can trust you,” she said finally. “She’ll team up with Mac, most likely – all of them together in a nice, convenient little group. The question is…would she work with you, as an inside person? Or would she refuse to go anywhere near you?”

  The hope felt desperate, hard to contain. “I think she might work with me, if Mac put in a word,” he said, recalling the expression on Amity’s face as he’d pulled the trigger on himself. He cleared his throat. “When she shot me…it was out of character. She was still overwrought from killing Johnny.”

  It struck him that neither he nor Kay had bothered to pretend any distress over Johnny’s death. This small detail alone seemed to show how deep he was already in.

  Kay nodded slowly. Her mouth twisted. “Another question, of course, is whether I trust you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Should I?”

  “No,” he said, and she smiled.

  “Honesty again. Good. Well, I might be persuaded to trust you, Collis Reed, because I understand what makes you tick. I’ve been keeping an eye on you, you know. We’re very much alike.”

  It was true and he knew it. Self-disgust mocked him. If he hadn’t been so guilt-ridden over Amity ending up in Harmony Five, would he have ever joined the Resistance? No – he’d have kept working for Johnny and tried to get as much out of it as he could.

  That was then, he thought. This is now.

  Sunlight glinted on Kay’s light-brown hair, bringing out faint reddish tints. Her voice turned businesslike. “So here’s the deal: I’m going to need someone who can infiltrate the Resistance and keep me updated on what they’re doing. And I think if I give you what you want, you’ll do it.”

  The painkiller was finally working. His emotions felt distant enough to control.

  “What do I want?” Collis said.

  “Power. Money. Prestige. And maybe…a warm body once in a while, no strings attached.” Kay smiled and studied his chest again. She didn’t touch him but it felt as if she had. “Neither of us like strings, do we?”

  His bullet wound still throbbed, but distantly. He forced himself to take Kay’s hand. He could think through the implications of the deal later; all that mattered now was surviving and keeping Amity and the others safe.

  “You’ve got me pegged pretty well.” Collis stroked his thumb across her palm.

  Her blue eyes glinted. “Then we have a deal?”

  “I’m your man,” he said.

  In the four months since, Collis had embraced his role. Sometimes you’ve got to play a long game, Mac had told him once. Collis did this now with a vengeance.

  He was all Kay’s.

  He gave her no reason to suspect him. He advised her matter-of-factly on things he found stomach-turning but to his disgust he had a talent for – how to control the populace, for instance. In doing so, he could never fail to recall Harmony Three…or suppress a faint feeling of better them than me.

  “What about kids?” he’d said back in June.

  He and Kay had been in her office. She’d propped her chin on her hands with a smirk. “Why, Collis, are you suggesting we have them?”

  He’d managed a natural-sounding laugh. “No, the kids in Can-Amer. Young teenagers. We could use them more, couldn’t we? Call them Harmony Helpers or something. Let them have rallies, meetings – talk about how great Kay Pierce is – keep an eye out for Discordants.” They both still used the word to mean “divisive elements”, even if neither believed people to be Discordant by their stars.

  A slow smile had spread across Kay’s face. She’d come and sat on his lap, twining her arms around his neck. “Have I told you lately you’re a genius?”

  “No. Overdue,” he’d said, stroking her spine.

  And even though he’d hated the idea of “Harmony Helpers”, fucking hated it, some inane part of him had been pleased that he was playing his role so well…maybe even pleased at the praise from Kay.

  Kay had implemented the idea immediately. The Helpers were thugs who spied on family and neighbours. Well done, Collis, he told himself whenever he saw their red-and-black uniforms.

  Yeah. Well done.

  Mac trusts me. Collis kept repeating this to himself. It was his touchstone. Mac Jones, the best judge of character he’d ever met, had listened to almost everything Collis had done and decided that something in him was okay after all.

  Collis would never understand it, but would be grateful to Mac for ever.

  He didn’t tell Kay about his meetings with Mac though knew she was aware – that his very freedom to slip away from the palace meant he was probably being followed. Smuggling President Weir out of house arrest had taken weeks of secret preparation, and was one of the few times he was confident he hadn’t been tailed.

  As the Resistance’s activities became more overt – the newspaper, V for Victory, Amity’s broadcasts – Kay grew restless. “Maybe we should just get rid of them after all,” she muttered, listening with tight anger to Amity’s voice on the wireless.

  Collis had shaken his head, pretending casualness. “Another Resistance would just form eventually. One that I wouldn’t have any connection to.”

  “And? At le
ast it wouldn’t have Amity Vancour in it! If we string up Wildcat, people will think twice.”

  His guts lurched. “Listen – trust me,” he said. He stroked her upper arms. “Something’s in the works with the Resistance. You and I are going to use it to get what we need.”

  Kay went very still. “Getting rid of Cain,” she breathed.

  He nodded.

  “I want details.”

  “I can’t give them to you. You have to be able to act naturally when the time comes.”

  She frowned, studying him. He met her gaze steadily. Finally Kay looked down at his cufflinks – his newest pair; the gold ones that each had a small diamond at one corner. She touched one and gave a tiny, private smile.

  She slipped her arms around his neck. “All right,” she said. “But it better not take long.”

  The ruse made keeping Kay’s trust even more vital. Collis was still feeding her information about the Resistance, though it sickened him to do it: the identity of minor players, the odd hint about their less important plans. He always protected the core group. And, of course, Kay knew that to keep Mac’s trust, Collis gave information in return, though not the scale of it.

  Collis longed to tell Mac about the deal. But it would be selfish; his own craven need for absolution. Mac was better off not knowing – not having to sacrifice his own people.

  In the past, Mac had been in Collis’s position. Once, back on the Western Seaboard base, he’d sentenced three dozen of Collis’s former Peacefighting teammates to correction camps.

  Collis had been there, thinking of Harmony Three and trying not to throw up. Mac had also saved over seventy of them, risking his life to do it. Logically, Collis knew his situation was similar.

  But his recurring nightmare came all too often – he’d wake up sweating, hoping he hadn’t shouted out. He couldn’t shake the fear that the dream symbolized who he truly was. Maybe the only reason he wasn’t telling Mac about the deal was that he doubted his own motives for working with Kay.

  Because if he was honest, he liked the money. He liked the power. He liked it that nobody, ever, thought of him as a garbage Reed any more. Standing on the palace balcony waving with Kay, one hand on her back as thousands cheered, gave him a rush. He couldn’t deny it.

  Everyone in Can-Amer might hate him, but they sure as hell respected him now.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  July, 1942

  Though the door leading to the deli’s shop section was closed, the only light I dared in the kitchen was a candle. Its flame gleamed against the countertops.

  It was nearly midnight, but I hadn’t been able to sleep – I couldn’t stop seeing a scene from hours earlier. I studied the meats in the icebox that Jakov had set aside for tomorrow and took them out. I loaded the ham in the slicer and started turning the handle.

  Doing the next day’s prep work for Jakov usually soothed me. Tonight the magic didn’t come. I sliced all the ham and the turkey, and then, still restless, looked for something else to do.

  Mayonnaise, I realized with relief. Jakov made his fresh, and he was almost out. Though in my old life I’d never cooked at all, I’d started studying cookbooks sometimes, late at night here. Something about the neat lists of ingredients and instructions felt calming.

  Just now I needed that badly.

  I’d been at Ernest and Mabel’s in the Leo sector that afternoon, working on the paper. They were a retired couple who used to live in Paris. Mabel had been a dancer back at the turn of the century and wore outrageous flowing scarves; Ernest was scholarly, with a kind laugh. A framed print of the ruins of Sacré Cœur hung on their wall. They drank espresso from small, dainty cups.

  When we’d heard the shouts and sirens, for a heart-stopping moment I thought we’d been discovered. Then it became clear that whatever it was, was happening further down the street.

  The three of us had glanced fearfully at each other. I slowly put down my pencil.

  “Come on,” said Ernest finally.

  Pressing close together at the small window, we’d opened the blinds a razor-width more and peeped out. We’d seen it all: the woman dragged stumbling from a house down the street by Guns while a crowd shouted at her. Her head had been shaved. The Guns tied a rope to a street lamp. The woman was forced to stand on top of a Shadowcar. They put a noose around her neck.

  I felt dizzy – realized that Mabel and I were gripping hands tightly.

  The Gun had proclaimed through a megaphone, “For collaborating with and abetting Discordants, and therefore showing herself to be one of them, this woman is sentenced to death.”

  They hadn’t given her any last words. She’d said some anyway.

  I repressed the memory with an effort – I couldn’t bear it. With the candle’s flame flickering gently, I got out the eggs and the vinegar from the icebox. I broke the eggs into a large bowl and attacked them with a hand-beater. I liked the mechanical way it whirred, and how the yolks swirled away into the thickness of the whites.

  Watching the eggs churn, I tried to forget what had happened before the Shadowcar the woman had been standing on had driven off at speed.

  Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

  “It must be like having pixies in your kitchen,” observed a voice.

  I started and turned. The door leading down to the cellars had opened without my hearing it. A tall man with dark, curly hair came in. He shrugged out of a small backpack and rested a lantern on the worktop.

  The breath sagged out of me. I leaned against the counter, the beater forgotten in my hand.

  “You’re back,” I murmured. Unaccountably, tears sprang to my eyes.

  Ingo came over and touched my arm. “Amity?”

  He looked weary, his clothes and skin grimy. In the candlelight, the burned half of his face appeared melted, tugging his eye downwards more cruelly than usual. The unmarred side was frowning with concern.

  “I…” I swallowed hard and wiped my eyes. “I’m fine,” I said roughly. Then I realized I was still holding the beater, dripping mayo onto the floor. I swore and put it back in the bowl.

  “You’re back earlier than I thought,” I said, struggling for composure.

  Ingo let his hand fall from my arm, though he still stood close. “Yes. What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said finally. “Just…something that happened earlier. I’m fine, I promise.” I wiped my hands on a dishcloth, taking him in. The relief was like diving into a cool lake.

  “Seriously, how did you get back so early?” I asked softly. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

  Ingo regarded me for a moment. Then he went and washed his hands and opened the icebox door. “I had a bit of luck.” He swiped a tired hand across his jaw. “Is any of this for us?”

  “The pasta,” I said, and he took out a bowl covered with tinfoil. I handed him a fork and he ate standing up – quick, hurried gulps that I recognized from my own eating, as if someone might take it away any second. Harmony Five did that to you.

  “There’d been a cave-in,” Ingo went on. “It must have happened last week sometime. I had to try a new tunnel coming back – the one near the Chambers Street sewer, remember?”

  I started beating the mayo again. “I thought that one was caved in too.”

  “No, we were wrong, but you have to crawl for a while. It opens out and connects with the main Midtown line.”

  “A shortcut?”

  Ingo nodded, still eating. “A good one. It cuts at least half a day off the route, though some of the groups won’t be able to make it through that tight passage.”

  Any shortcut was good – the round-trip journey would still take him nearly a week. “So you got everyone out all right?” I asked.

  “Yes, I hope so. Three of them – parents and their little boy. He was only four. We saw a group of Guns on the way down to the oldest section,” he added.

  I stopped mid-motion, my gaze flying to his. “They didn’t see you?”
<
br />   “No, though we had to hide for a few hours and try to keep the boy from crying.”

  My chest tightened. I slowly put the finished mayo away in the icebox, imagining it. After that afternoon – what had happened to the woman – I could see it all too vividly. If Ingo was ever caught…

  I let out a shaky breath and leaned against the counter, rubbing my forehead. Ingo hesitated, then put the bowl aside and came and propped himself beside me.

  His voice was quiet. “Are you going to tell me what happened today?”

  I was very aware of his closeness. My neck felt damp in the warm kitchen, my hair too heavy. It would be even worse upstairs, with its stifling rooms and the thick air of July weighing everything down.

  I glanced at Ingo and tried to smile. “Do you…want to go up on the roof for a while?”

  He looked down at me, his dark gaze level. An odd lightness stirred in me as we studied each other.

  “Yes, I’d like that,” he said gruffly. “I’ll take a shower first and be up.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  September, 1942

  Mac and I neared a bend in the abandoned sewer and hooded our lanterns. We peered around the corner.

  Guns, clear in their own lantern-light, had just emerged from a tunnel a few hundred feet away. We jerked back. No – not when we’re so close to it finally happening, I thought wildly.

  “Lead the way,” Mac murmured.

  I was already scanning my mental map. “Come on,” I whispered. We hurried back the way we’d come and quickly climbed up a service ladder.

  Twenty minutes later, we were in another tunnel, narrower. We half-jogged through the silent gloom until we came to an opening in the wall. I hefted myself into it; Mac followed. We paused, listening.

  Nothing.

  We exhaled and glanced at each other.

  “You and Manfred are two of a kind when it comes to this place, aren’t you, kiddo?” said Mac with a rueful grin. We started down the passage.

  The thought of Ingo brought a dull ache and emotions I didn’t want to examine. In a rush, that night on the roof almost two months ago came back. I pushed away what had happened and cleared my throat.