by Kate MacLeod
“That wasn’t my fault—”
But Malcolm wasn’t hearing it. “Find what I need. Until I have it, all of these doors are staying locked.” As if to prove his point, he took a small controller out of his pocket and pushed a button.
So far as Scout could see, nothing happened. But the slump to Tucker’s shoulders spoke differently.
Malcolm turned to march back over to where Bente and Ken were huddled over the toolbox, Bente listening intently to whatever Ken was whispering to her as he dug through the tools. Scout turned to stand in front of Tucker, close enough that he couldn’t avoid looking back at her. He shook his head sadly and she fought the sudden urge to kick him in the shins.
“You two have this in hand?” Malcolm was booming at Ken and Bente. Arvid brushed past Scout to climb up into the passenger seat of the jeep.
“We’ve got it,” Joelle said as she emerged from the equipment room. The red sweater was gone, the tactical vest back in its place. “Do you need one of us to go with you?”
“No, we’ve got help meeting us on the way,” her father said. “I expect to see this car broken down into the smallest possible pieces by the time I get back. If you should find anything, Joelle, send me a signal.”
“Wilco,” Joelle said.
Malcolm was about to step inside the jeep but stopped to look back at them all. Ken and Bente stopped consulting on tools to give him their attention. Reggie even appeared in the doorway behind his sister, Gert and Shadow peering around his ankles.
“I don’t think I need to impress the importance of all this on you. We all know where things are heading.” They all nodded their heads, but he went on anyway, his voice echoing through the canyon. “War.”
Scout was still standing with her nose centimeters from Tucker’s chin, watching his face. He had crossed his arms and closed his eyes as Malcolm started speaking, but he did not flinch at the word “war.”
“The governor’s daughter was coming to meet us, as arranged, but she never arrived. And I’m fairly certain she was not alone in this car. One of those murderous girls was with her. She was not the intended target, but with the governor behind locked doors, the target might change. And that would be very bad for our cause.”
Tucker had turned to look at Malcolm but was keeping his face carefully impassive. Scout looked to see what the others were doing. Ken and Bente had stopped with tools in hand to listen, their faces also carefully blank.
Joelle turned to shoo her brother away from the doorway behind her, but when she turned back she didn’t meet her father’s eyes. She kept her gaze fixed on a point on the ground just in front of him, arms crossed. Scout couldn’t say for sure, but she seemed to be biting her lip.
“But we don’t know if she’s dead,” Malcolm went on, his eyes moving from one of them to the next as he spoke. “Or what happened to what she intended to bring us. That is the most important thing now. War is inevitable. We are too few to change that fate. But hidden as we are, we are safe. We must make the others safe too. What happened before cannot be allowed to happen again. Whatever the cost. No sacrifice is too great to see that work done.”
His voice was booming now, his hands in fists, his eyes on the sky as he spoke.
“And those who have to die to keep our people safe, they will die. Guilty or innocent, for the sake of our people, they will die.”
Scout saw something flicker over Joelle’s face and her eyes went to Scout’s. The harsh sternness was still there, but there was a crinkling at the corners that almost looked like concern. Malcolm had fallen silent, but the words he was leaving yet to be spoken seemed to hover like a massive hammer about to drop and crush them all.
Scout turned away from Joelle’s eyes to see that Malcolm had been staring at her for some time, waiting for her to turn and see.
Was she the one who would have to die? Why?
But Malcolm, sudden storm of fervent emotion apparently gone, just turned his attention back to Ken and Bente. “Get going on that car.”
Ken saluted with the wrench in his hand and Bente nodded. Then Malcolm dropped into the jeep’s driver’s seat and fired up the engine. The wheels spun, filling the air with red dust. Then they were gone and the gate was closing.
“Wait!” Scout shouted, throwing up her arms as if she could stop those massive metal doors from closing.
“They can’t be stopped,” Joelle said. “I’m sorry.”
Scout whistled for her dogs and ran for the rapidly diminishing gap between the doors. To hell with the rover, she had the coordinates in the tablet on her belt and could walk day and night if she had to.
Scout took two steps and then stopped. The coordinates were on the tablet, and the tablet was on the belt, but the belt was in the rover. She would never reach it in time.
The gate shut with that deafening clang followed by the grinding of the lock engaging.
Scout spun to glare at Joelle.
“It’s not up to me,” Joelle said, her tone and her face both cold and steely. “My father has all the controls. There’s nothing I can do.” She was bracing herself as if waiting for Scout to take a swing at her and only then did Scout realize her hands were balled into fists. She took a breath and forced her fingers to splay wide at her hips.
“You’re not going to find anything in that car,” Scout said.
“You know this for a fact?” Joelle asked. “Because if you do, you can save us all a lot of time. You can save us a lot of everything if you’d just tell us what you know.”
“Nothing I know is going to help you,” Scout said. “Seriously, what was that speech?”
“He’s been under stress,” Ken said, but he flinched when both Joelle and Tucker turned to glare at him.
“Is that a secret too?” Scout asked.
“It’s not just stress,” Joelle said, turning her glare onto Tucker.
“I only did what he asked me to,” Tucker said. “He makes the decisions that are best for him.”
“Not for a minute do I believe you think what you’ve been bringing him is ‘the best for him,’” Joelle said.
“He makes the decisions—” Tucker started to say again, but Joelle cut him off with one upward motion of her hand.
“You told me before there was another way out of here?” Scout said after a painfully long moment of no one else saying a word.
“They’re all locked now,” Tucker said.
“Show me,” Scout said.
Tucker looked to Joelle. Joelle first shrugged, then nodded, then turned to head back into the equipment room.
“There’s the gate,” Tucker said, pointing at it as he continued walking away from it, along the outer wall of the compound. Scout followed, her dogs close at her heels. There was a small building tucked into the corner, like a watchman’s station. Tucker stepped inside, but it was too small for Scout to get more than half of her body in after him. “The gate controls are here, but like Joelle told you, Malcolm locked them down.” He pressed a few buttons that protested with red lights and negative beeping noises.
Then he turned to half sit on the control panel and pointed at the back wall. “There’s a crawl space that leads to a hidden doorway in the canyon.” Scout could just make out the outline. Tucker bent to push at it, but it remained locked.
“There are others,” Scout said with certainty.
Tucker nodded grimly, then waited for her to step aside so he could lead the way back through the equipment room, past the closed offices and the one open one where Joelle was standing behind Reggie sitting at the desk and tapping at a computer terminal. Then they continued on through the kitchen to the room where the dogs had gone hunting the night before.
There was a row of refrigerators and freezers near the door, but further in it was more like a warehouse, crates and boxes stacked on pallets to keep them up off the earthen floor. Scout could hear scuttling and both of the dogs raced past her and Tucker to chase something further in the dark depths of the room.
; “Big space,” Scout said.
“Those stairs lead up to the barracks. And this is the last door out,” Tucker said, pointing to the wall to their left. Scout walked over to it. The stairway was steep with handrails on either side, hugging close to the wall. Further along the wall at the very edge of the room was a hatch, a heavy door with a wheel in the center. The wheel wouldn’t turn in either direction, but then the red light centered over the doorway was probably meant to tell her that.
She turned to glare at Tucker again. She had to. If she let that anger go, she was going to start feeling the despair.
“Why did you do this?” she asked, hoping he didn’t hear how her voice was about to crack.
“Come on,” he said, tugging at her sleeve again. “Your dogs will be okay in here. I want to show you something.”
He crossed the warehouse, heading for the far wall. It went further than Scout was expecting, and she guessed they were now inside the canyon wall that formed the back of the nook where the vehicles were parked. The walls were less squared off here, the ceiling coming down in irregular lumps and crags more like a natural cavern. Tucker led her around a larger outcropping of yellow rock and then up a steep slope that looked like it had been carved out by a stream once upon a time.
She saw sunlight up ahead. Then they were up in it, high atop the canyon. The sun was blinding, but even without a hat Tucker seemed less bothered by it than she. He took her hand to guide her further, then caught her in his arms before she took a step too far.
“Look,” he said.
She blinked, the sunlight bouncing off the yellow rock so bright it brought tears to her eyes. It was nearly noon. Already noon, a day half gone and she trapped immobile, nowhere near the meeting point.
Then she blinked again and started to make out features of the world around her. The canyon nook full of vehicles was below her, spread out under her feet. She could follow the contours of the canyon with her eyes, even see the cloud of dust that hid Malcolm and Arvid in their jeep heading back to the compound Scout had tried to bury with Ottilie’s explosives.
Having seen every detail of the compound and dust trail, her eyes at last settled on the canyon walls themselves. They gleamed brightly in the morning sun, so many bands of colors. How could stone come in so many colors? Not even in her dreams had she ever seen such a magical sight.
It brought a tear to her eye, but she had to shut her eyes to it. Block it out; not notice it. It was a distraction when what she needed was an escape.
Scout pushed away Tucker’s hands on her shoulders and walked along the edge of the ridge. It was a sheer drop down to the compound below, then a sheer drop down to the canyon she had entered from.
And the back side was even worse. There was a chasm so deep the bottom was lost to shadows.
Scout walked the entire way around, but there was no path to level ground, no way out of this complex but through the locked doors. She ended up back where she started, where Tucker waited for her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not as sorry as I am.” Scout turned her back on him and went back down the tunnel to find her dogs.
15
Scout’s feet threatened to slip out from under her as she tried to make her way back down the slope into the cavernous part of the warehouse. The floor of the tunnel was a steep groove, sloping up to the walls on both sides but not evenly, and the bottom was filled with dust, sand, and fine gravel too small to see. It was definitely there, though, moving around under the soles of her boots. Scout put a hand on each wall as she carefully made her way down.
After the heat of the noonday sun, the cool of the cavern was quite pleasant, but that heat was going to drive Tucker inside after her soon enough so she kept moving, past the natural rock formations to where the walls were squared off. She took the first turn through rows of shelving, then another and another until she was certain Tucker would not find her should he try to follow her.
She was done talking with him.
She found a crate left sitting on the floor in one dark corner and sat down on it, drawing her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them while she tried to think things through. The air was cool but had a musty smell, a bit like a small rodent had died and was slowly decomposing somewhere just out of sight, but also like something organic inside one of the containers had gone mildewy. She didn’t investigate; if it smelled this bad while locked away, she had no interest in getting a lungful when she took off the lid of whatever box it was hiding in.
She heard footsteps. Tucker, coming back down and into the warehouse. He didn’t pause, just kept walking past the food storage to the kitchen. There was a soft murmur of voices. She couldn’t make out any words, but she reckoned the other speaker was Ken. It sounded like his tone and that voice went on quite a bit longer than Tucker’s softer replies.
Then that sound too faded away. Scout wrapped her arms around her legs and leaned against the heavy support of the shelving unit beside her, letting her head rest against it. She had gotten maybe an hour’s worth of sleep. She needed far more.
She had only dozed off for a moment when a fury of skittering woke her. Something small was running her way, pursued by two dogs. Shadow was intent on his prey, keeping his nose low to the ground even as he ran, but Gert galloped along behind, punctuating her trot with excited barks. Not her frightening hellhound woof, but a delighted yap that was probably more terrifying for the poor rodent about to be played with to death.
“Scout!”
Scout lifted her head, then toyed with the idea of not answering Joelle’s call. But what good would that do? Even if they didn’t have cameras in here watching her already, it wouldn’t take long to search the place. Scout got to her feet and stretched out her back, then walked back to the kitchen.
Joelle was in the doorway. Relief washed over her face when she saw Scout emerge from the shadows.
“What is it?” Scout asked.
“Tucker and Ken have gone out on a mission,” Joelle said. “I wanted to see if you would like to help Bente and me with a thing. I know you’re going to want to tell me to stuff it,” she said as Scout opened her mouth, “but please consider it. It would help my father’s judgment of you a lot if he knew you were pitching in.”
Scout wanted to snap back that she scarcely cared how her probably insane father judged her, but she remembered he was the one holding all the keys.
“What sort of thing?” Scout asked. “Robbing trains?”
“No, not robbing trains,” Joelle said. “No need. As you saw in our warehouse, we’re well stocked on everything.”
“Stripping the town car?”
“No, that’s been done. Bente came up with a . . . faster method.”
“Did they find anything?” Scout asked, trying to sound like she didn’t already know the answer.
“No. Not yet.”
“So this thing . . . ?”
“What we need to do is more an act of rebellion than thievery or vandalism,” Joelle said. “And we’ll be doing it in the kitchen.”
“How do you rebel from a kitchen?” Scout asked.
“Come on and I’ll show you,” Joelle said, stepping back from the doorway. Scout was curious enough to follow her.
Somewhere behind her, something squeaked and then died. That had to be Shadow’s work. His headshake took them out nearly instantly. Gert, on the other hand—with her toss-up-in-the-air-and-fail-to-catch-it technique—tended to give her playthings a long, slow death.
“You really do have a rodent problem,” Scout said as she followed Joelle back into the kitchen.
“It’s recent,” Joelle said. “And they’re not getting into the food. That’s all well sealed.”
“Yes, Tucker said something like that,” Scout said. “They didn’t come here with the food you stole, he said. Something was driving them here?”
“Tucker says a lot,” Joelle said with an air of dropping the subject. Apparently her new friendliness had defined
limits.
Joelle walked over to the long table where they had eaten the night before. Bente was setting out blocks of paper, using the knife from her belt to cut away the bindings that held the stacks perfectly square.
“Where’s Reggie?” Scout asked.
“He’s in his office. He attends a school in the city remotely,” Joelle said. “The rest of us qualified for early graduation, but he’s young yet and still has a ways to go.”
“School,” Scout said. Her own school days had ended the day the Space Farers dropped an asteroid on her city. There had never been a chance to finish her education. She felt the others watching her and was afraid her cheeks were flushed. She had no reason to be embarrassed over what she couldn’t control, and yet she was. “What’s all this?” she asked to draw their attention back to the table and not her face.
Bente handed her one sheet of paper. It was a bright neon pink. The Space Farer logo was emblazoned across the top, and the entire thing was done in the weird font they preferred, all curves and long horizontal lines so that lines of texts looked like high-speed trains racing across the page.
“Propaganda,” Joelle said as Scout’s eyes swept down the page. “The Planet Dweller government blocks all their transmissions, so the Space Farers have taken to printing things up. They like to drop these on the towns from the sky. They even get them to blow through the streets in the domed cities.”
“They’re threatening to knock the satellites out of orbit if we don’t double the food shipments,” Scout said. “Is this legit?”
“What do you think?” Joelle asked, her face carefully blank. Bente beside her imitated the expression, even blinking her blue eyes with feigned innocence.
“First of all, why would you steal their propaganda?” Scout said, examining the page. The paper had a heavy quality to it. That, the logo, the font—it all felt like the real thing. She had touched missives from space before, and if this was counterfeit, it was quite good.
