Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
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Among These Bones - Book 3
Amanda Luzzader
Copyright © 2020 by Amanda Luzzader
www.amandaluzzader.com
Published by Knowledge Forest Press
P.O. Box 6331
Logan, UT 84341
ISBN-13: 978-1-949078-08-4
Cover design by Damonza.com.
All rights reserved.
To Lilly (spelled like Billy),
an intelligent, charming, and beautiful
young woman.
I write for readers like you.
CHAPTER 1
It wasn’t a cane, Ruby insisted. It was a walking stick.
“Canes’re for old ladies,” she said, “an’ I might be old, but I ain’t no lady.”
The walking stick helped Ruby negotiate the uneven terrain and sometimes rocky mountain trails between camps, but it was mostly for her “bum knee,” she said. It hadn’t improved, of course, and the stick took just enough weight off the leg to make the pain tolerable. It still hurt, though. You could tell. It showed when she slowly lowered herself to sit and when she winced and strained to stand. She’d rub the muscles around the knee absently while she sat talking, debating.
It was a nice piece of maple, the stick was. Ruby had inscribed intricate patterns along its length. The knob at the top was carved into the head of a grizzly bear. A crude countenance but nevertheless fierce-looking, not unlike the stick’s owner, I thought.
And the stick certainly did not make her seem like a weak old lady. Instead, she brandished it like a field marshal, pointing at a distant ridge line where she wanted a new observation post, or thumping it into the ground to drive home a point. She was even known to use it to administer the occasional rap upon the head of some underling who’d screwed up or failed to follow orders.
Ruby stood by the executive fire pit, where a few officers were still seated in a ragged circle after their breakfast and the first of the day’s coordination meetings. Ruby had one hand on the walking stick. The other was balled into a fist and planted on her hip. She stared at the dying fire. Her long coat was hiked back behind her fist to reveal the old pistol she wore on her hip. One might mistake her for a stout, immovable military commander standing for a battlefield portrait.
Someone offered to fetch her a chair. Ruby didn’t answer. The offer was repeated a minute later.
“Don’t want one,” she said without taking her eyes from the fire. “If I sit down, I’ll just hafta stand back up again. But thanks, Dan. For the offer.”
In a strangely direct contrast, Arie was tall and rangy and remained in a sort of constant, youthful motion. He stood across the fire pit from Ruby, staring at her and shifting his weight fluidly from foot to foot. He’d crossed his arms high across his chest, fingers tucked tightly into his armpits, thumbs sticking up. It was a statement of body language I understood to mean he was annoyed, anxious.
“Well?” Arie said after remaining there, fidgety but silent, for several minutes.
Ruby shot me a look as if to say, “Would you please do something about him?”
I only shrugged.
When she didn’t answer Arie said, “Rube?”
“Jeeze, kid,” said Ruby, “y’ever consider givin’ it a rest?”
“You said you’d have a decision this morning,” said Arie, yanking his hands out of his armpits and holding them out imploringly. “Then you said wait ’till you had your coffee, then you said wait ’till after breakfast. Well, it’s morning, it’s after breakfast and” —here he stepped up to the fire pit and lifted the lid of the blackened coffee pot that sat on the fender— “and the coffee is gone.”
“Fine,” said Ruby, looking up at him and jabbing her stick into the dirt. “The answer’s no. Not this month.”
“What? Again? When then?”
“Sorry, kid. We’re just too busy providing for and protecting ourselves. I got a thousand people strewn across these mountains.” She flourished the stick vaguely at the surrounding hillsides.
“We aren’t the only people who matter,” Arie replied. “What are we gonna do about the people still in the system? You think just because they can’t remember anything that they’re not suffering?”
Ruby’s jaw muscles flexed.
“We’re free,” Arie continued. “We have a responsibility to them. We should at least be making plans, gathering intel. That’s all I wanna do. I’m not proposing some full-on frontal assault, but we can’t just forget about them.”
“We got plenty of people here who need looking after, kid. I can’t forget about them, neither.”
“They won’t need looking after if we bring down the Agency once and for all. The best defense is a good offense.”
“We been over this, kid.”
Ruby was right about that. It was an old debate. How to move forward? Were we to risk our own safety for those still held captive and ignorant by the Agency, and possibly become captive again ourselves, or should we stand off a bit and build our resources and capabilities? I couldn’t begin to count how many times we’d been over it. I could recite Ruby’s retort almost word for word before she made it.
“Every time we go down there, even just t’look around or do some reconning, we put ourselves at risk ’a bein’ found, and every time we go up against Agency troops, we just make them stronger—our people get killed or captured, and to be honest I’m not sure which one ’a them two options is worst, cuz it’s terrible when someone dies, but at least when they’re dead, those Agency thugs can’t wipe their minds and put ’em back to work against us.”
“Yeah but so if we—”
Ruby held up her hand and pre
ssed her mouth into a straight line. “Kid, you’re smart. You got a good head and a good heart. You wanna help them people. I do, too.”
“Yeah but that’s not what it sounds—”
She snatched up her stick and pointed it at Arie, as though it might shoot out some dreadful magic spell. Arie shut his mouth.
“We’re just not in a position to take them kinda risks right now. You wanna talk about helpin’ people? Let’s talk about last time we got found and how many people got taken and killed when we got attacked. You wanna help people? There’s mushrooms to be foraged ever’ time it rains and we need a bigger pottery kiln and hell you know you can go bring up water from the crick any damn time y’like. Felix’s peas are comin’ on an’ he’s got bushels of ’em that need shelled. You wanna help? Then help. You asked me for an answer. Answer’s no. Least for now.”
Arie looked at me as if to say, “Would you please jump in here and help me out?”
I only shrugged.
Ruby leaned on her stick again and looked at Arie. “Now. You’re gonna stop hounding me about this, or I’m gonna put you on latrine duty for the next year.”
Arie pursed his lips and tried to make his face impassive. “Fine,” he said, his voice flat. He stormed off.
“Dan!” Ruby barked. “Were you gettin’ me a chair here ’er what?”
Dan sprang up and placed his own chair behind Ruby, then stood without appearing to know what to do with himself as Ruby eased herself down into it. She sighed and ran a hand through her hair before turning to me.
“Quite the revolutionary ya got there,” she said testily.
“I don’t know where he gets it,” I answered.
She scoffed loudly and rubbed at her bum knee. “Like he ain’t the spittin’ image ’a you.”
The fire had dwindled to white-flaked coals. Ruby leaned forward in the chair and stabbed at them with her stick, sending a plume of ash into the air. A few flames were rekindled.
“Not many kids his age care s’much about other people that way,” she added.
I smiled and nodded.
“Thing is, I wish we could do more. I really do.” She sighed. “This world—” She closed her mouth, then opened it again, then shook her head, as though she really couldn’t find words to complete the thought.
“I know what you mean,” I offered.
“Will you talk to him, Al? Make him understand I ain’t tryna be the bad guy here?”
“Sure,” I said, rising from my chair. “But right now I’m on dish detail.”
Ruby kneaded her knee and thigh. “I’m gettin’ too old for this.”
“For which part?” I asked.
“All of it. Everything. Don’t ever get old, Al. It’s the pits.”
CHAPTER 2
I appreciated the communal nature of Ruby’s camps if only because I was a lousy cook. Everyone pitched in to help on nearly every kind of task at one time or another, but we were more often given duties that matched our capabilities, which allowed me to enjoy the delicious meals the others produced—venison and squirrel and wild greens and even garden produce like carrots and squash and garlic—before going to work on guard duty or hauling water or, like today, dish detail. The camp fostered a lifestyle that I would have considered entirely wholesome and healthy and even enjoyable, if it weren’t for the constant threat of being found by Agency troops or roving raiders.
A pile of tin cook pots and cast-iron pans was waiting for me at the wash station by the kitchen fires. The cooking crew was finishing up, and we exchanged waves and smiles as I approached with the other members of the dish detail.
I began by placing the cast-iron pans face-down over the coals of a cook fire to scorch away the oil and food residue, then I put on a large pan of water to boil while the others took the bushel baskets of scraps and leavings to the composting area.
After my first couple times working on the cooking crew, I wasn’t invited back. I could hardly peel a potato properly. But apparently, I had a knack for doing dishes, and I rotated onto that crew more often than almost any other. I didn’t mind. Not at all. It was simple work that allowed me to think and let my mind wander. And lately, my thoughts turned to what I’d began to think of as “the Arie Problem.”
When the water reached its boiling point, I filled a washbasin with hot and cool water until it was hot enough to wash but not too hot to tolerate, and then I set to work. The others chatted quietly around me as we worked. Telicia, busy with her own wash basin, had been trying to get the attention of a young man she’d met on a foraging trip, and now she was being pressed pointedly for any romantic updates.
“What’d you guys do?”
“Just went down to the big tree by the stream. Put our feet in the water.”
“Anything happen?”
“We talked.”
“About what?”
“Just whatever. Nothing. Everything.”
The others groaned with disappointment.
I had developed a dish-washing sequence. First tin mugs and flatware—they dirtied the wash water the least, so they came first, followed by the plates, which everyone was asked to scrape clean before placing them in the dirty-dish bin. Next was the crockery, which was liable to break if washed with lots of other pots and plates. Last in line were the big pots and pans, which were blackened and crusted with cooked-on food. If I cleaned the dishes out of order, I had to refill the basin more often. Oddly, the dirty pans and pots were my favorite. We used sand from the riverbed and a little crude, camp-made, lye soap to scrub them clean. There was a meditative aspect to polishing away the soot and food.
Arie acknowledged that I was his mother, and so did everyone else in camp. Ruby and others had uninterrupted memories which confirmed our relationship, but things nevertheless could be odd between Arie and me. After all, I didn’t know him. Not truly. And he didn’t know me. And we got along well enough. I felt an unmistakable kinship toward him, but I felt continually that I should be doing something “motherly” for him without knowing what exactly that might be or how to go about it. He was too old to take orders or discipline from me, and he was too smart for me even to provide much useful guidance. He was practically an adult, but still he seemed lost.
And while I was happy with the quiet, rustic tranquility of Ruby’s camp, it was clear Arie was deeply dissatisfied. Even without my memories of our previous lives together, it was obvious to me that Arie was smoldering inside. He wanted challenges, and he wanted change. Most of all, the injustice of our world goaded and galled Arie. I sensed that the heat inside him was likely to consume him completely if he wasn’t able to put it to some good purpose. It had occurred to me more than once that if Ruby and the other officers kept turning down his proposals to undermine the Agency, Arie might go off and do something on his own, something that could easily go wrong and make things worse, maybe much worse. This is where I felt I should step in as a parent, to provide comfort or advice or just an understanding ear. But what could I say? What could I do?
I placed the last of the cook pans on the drying rack. Their burnished metal sides shone dully in the morning light.
Surely it was my responsibility to encourage and nurture Arie’s ambitions and opinions. No one knew exactly what the future held for us, but everyone agreed that Arie would make an excellent leader in the years to come—if we could keep him from turning resentful or reckless.
The Arie Problem.
The dish detail was finishing up and going their separate ways.
“See ya after lunch.”
“Kay. See ya.”
“We want more details, Telicia.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I had no idea what I should say or do for Arie, but as I untied my washing apron and hung it on a tree branch, I knew it was time to talk to him.
I went to find him. It took a while, but I finally spotted him sitting beneath a stand of aspens at the far edge of the grassy, hillside meadow up above the camp. It was almost like he was hiding
there. One of his long legs was stretched out before him, and the other was bent and gathered in almost to his chest. He sat there shelling peas. He worked mechanically, his hands dropping into the bucket for a handful of pods, splitting them open with a practiced motion, and spilling the peas into a small basket. He repeated the process without ever seeming to pay attention to the peas themselves. Instead, he stared across the meadow at something happening at the lower edge. I followed his line of sight. Just down the hill was an open, sunny area where lines had been strung between the trees for clotheslines. A group of people was there hanging laundry. That’s when I understood why he’d come all the way out here to process the pea pods, and I felt a twinge of sadness. Sandy, the woman who had cared for Arie when they’d been part of the Lotus project, was there hanging laundry with the others. I continued crossing the meadow.
When I came near, Arie smiled faintly and waved.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s just frustrating.” He grabbed a handful of pea pods and let them drop a few at a time into the bucket. “Shucking peas and doing laundry are bigger priorities than helping people who are where we used to be just a year ago.”
“You gotta remember that Ruby has a lot on her plate,” I said.
He shrugged.
“She knows it’s important to go after the Agency. She agrees with you. But she’s also looking out for all of us, too. She’s trying for a balance between making progress and managing risks. You know the argument better than anyone.”
Arie shrugged again and took up another handful of pea pods. He was no longer looking down at where Sandy was, but I knew she was on his mind. I looked down the hill. The blankets and sleeping bags they’d hung to dry waved sluggishly in the breeze like wet, heavy flags.
I picked up some pods and worked on them. Arie and I sat there awhile that way, silent except for the muted plinks of the peas dropping into the bowl. He stole a quick look at Sandy as they gathered up their empty baskets and left the meadow in the direction of the camp.
“Have you talked to her?” I asked.
Arie looked up at me, maybe a little embarrassed that I’d read his thoughts. But then he shook his head. “A little. Not really.”
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 1
