Keepers

by Brenda Cooper

  Coryn answered. “I have five connection IDs.”

  Not enough. “Please give Shuska and Matchiko each one now. You can send me the others.” Lou turned to take a cup of coffee from Matchiko while Shuska and Coryn negotiated the ID. The wind blew the smell of the river toward them from the east. The tops of the ecobots already glowed with direct light. Here and there, lanky jackrabbits grazed cautiously some distance from them, periodically looking up as if to check and be sure no hawks circled overhead. When Shuska had clearly established her connection and become lost in data on her tablet, Lou spoke again. “We’ll need more IDs. I’ll need one for everyone I have permission to hire, even though we haven’t got them all yet.”

  “Did you add anyone in Wenatchee?”

  “No. I wanted to get set up in Chelan as fast as possible. Now that I have network I can get the word out, but I thought I should know where we’ll be before I add to the team.”

  Blessing appeared, looking quite put together and ready of the day. Matchiko immediately handed him cup of coffee, probably the one she had intended for herself.

  “We found you a headquarters. I’ll send you the address.”

  Daryl raised an eyebrow. Shuska grimaced. “You didn’t sign anything long-term, did you?” Lou asked. Matchiko laid a hand on her arm, reacting to the tone in her voice and patting her as if she were a child who needed to stay calm.

  What was it about little sisters? Lou loved Coryn, she even trusted her, mostly, but so many of her ideas were so naive. But Coryn had brought connectivity, and funding, and those were no small things at all. “All right. We’ll check it out and let you know if it’s any good. In the meantime, can you look for alternate ways in? Shuska will do the same. What else have you learned about Chelan?”

  “There are at least a thousand people there. There aren’t supposed to be any, but there are a lot more than zero. Adam thinks there could be up to fifteen hundred.”

  Something in Coryn’s tone made Lou ask, “Who’s Adam?”

  Surprisingly, Blessing answered the question. “Her running coach.”

  Her what? She could ask later. “That’s a lot of people.”

  “And there are more up at the top of the lake. There’s a town up there called Stehekin. It’s fifty miles from Chelan, on the lake. The only easy way to get there is on the water, on a big boat called Lady of the Lake. It goes up and down once a week.”

  Lou took a sip of her coffee, and then asked, “Are you telling me there’s a boat that goes up and down the lake once a week even though there’s not supposed to be anyone in Chelan?”

  Daryl had moved over beside Shuska and was pointing at things on the tablet. “I’ve been to Stehekin. It’s pretty. Might be where we’ll find some wolves as well.”

  Coryn apparently agreed. “There is a pack north of there, and the other one is closer to where you’re going. I’ll send you a summary after you get there. It’s not important now.”

  Lou was still a little stuck on the boat with no town. “Why does Stehekin exist?”

  “Stehekin kept the right to exist, way back on the way to the great taking. It’s a single line in the agreement with the feds. Jake has a cabin there, and he argued that since it’s so rustic already and rewilding efforts could go forward from there, it should stay. It’s not a city and it can’t tax, but it never was a city. People who lived there during the taking, and their children, get to live there as long as they want. They don’t get any services except that Seacouver sends them enough engineering support to run the boat and maintain their power arrays.”

  Matchiko finally got her own cup of coffee. “How come no one told us that before? Does Jake still have a cabin there?”

  “Yes, and you can use it. But it’s not big enough to be a headquarters and Jake would prefer you to be near Chelan so you can figure out what’s going on there.”

  “Me too. But we still have to get there.”

  “Okay.” Lou glanced over at Shuska. “Can you take this call? Work on a route with Coryn? One the robots can manage?”

  Shuska nodded as if it were a great favor indeed, her distaste for Coryn evident on her face. Well, that went both ways. Lou was going to have to work on that someday. In the meantime, she pitched in to help Matchiko heat up bread and eggs in the skillet.

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  They separated from the 97 shortly after the place they had camped and climbed laboriously up a steep ravine that added at least two hours of travel time. It forced Lou to close her eyes twice for fear of falling. After that, they connected with a strip of dirt that had been a road in some far past life. The sun shone so brightly on the ecobots it was hard to look at them, and equally hard to touch them. The bots themselves seemed noisier than usual, clanking and rumbling. While they couldn’t talk, Shuska knew how to read their diagnostics, and once she stopped and cleaned out a leg joint.

  “What would they do if you weren’t there?” Matchiko asked her.

  “Clean each other. You know how you almost never see just one?”

  Matchiko smiled. “Oh.”

  “But humans are better,” Shuska explained. “Our fingers are smaller.”

  Lou burst out laughing, the laugh turning to a dust-clogged cough. “I wish it would rain again.”

  Daryl stood nearby. “Be careful what you wish for. There’s a wicked thunderstorm due in day after tomorrow.”

  They reached the top of the hill and looked down. Lake Chelan lay there, bright blue, thicker than she had expected given its shape in pictures, but then she could only see one end. The other end of the lake wound all the way back into the hills, which rose up and up, and above the hills she could see the tops of the Cascades, brown and gray and sharp at the tips and then folding down into forested ridges that must—somewhere—enclose the other end of the lake. No wonder people wanted to live here. It was truly beautiful.

  She signaled for a stop. After everyone dismounted from horse and robot, she and Matchiko broke out sandwiches they had made before breaking camp. It was the last of their fresh bread from Wenatchee.

  Matchiko handed out the sandwiches.

  As they ate, Lou gave simple directions. “Don’t look threatening. We’ll ride in front of the ecobots so no one thinks the robots are attacking.”

  This made Blessing smile. She smiled back at him. “Shuska will stay in the rear, and Daryl with her. Blessing will be with me. Matchiko stays on a bot. As soon as we see anybody we’ll go slow. We want to make friends.”

  Matchiko shook her head in amusement. “You sound like you’re telling us how to go meet the savages.”

  Lou laughed. “Maybe we should have brought some trade goods.”

  Shuska glared at her so hard that her cheeks reddened. “Sorry,” Lou said. “We’ll be nice to everyone.”

  “Until they’re not nice to us,” Shuska finished. It was a thing they used to say when they approached people who weren’t supposed to be on the RiversEnd Ranch property. Appropriate. This was half of that crew, and the best half as far as she was concerned.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Aspen wriggled in Coryn’s arms as she passed Jake’s personal bot and pushed open the door to the conference room Jake had dubbed the Outside-N Foundation Support Office. She noticed someone had put up a sign that said just that, in formal lettering. It made her smile. Inside, Jake waited for her at the big conference table. He held his hand out, and she released Aspen on the top of the table. The dog bounded over multiple devices and piles of papers and into Jake’s embrace. His tail brushed a vase of red and yellow flowers, and Coryn leaned across the table just in time to catch it. “Good afternoon!” she said, laughing.

  Jake pushed Aspen’s face away from his for a moment and said, “Your sister is on her way into Chelan.”

  She glanced at the wall screen, which showed tiny people on horses dwarfed by the two robots that followed them. She identified Lou and Blessing out in front. In back, the big Indian woman sat on a horse so big the two of them looked normal s
ized together. Shuska, who refused to trust her. For just a moment, she wished she was there with them, and with Blessing. Then Adam came in and greeted her with a slightly sultry smile, and she had to look away from him so he wouldn’t see her blush.

  Both men attracted and confused her. When she tried, she could still feel Blessing’s kiss like a ghost against her lips.

  Adam sat down and stared at the screen. “How old is that picture?”

  “Twenty minutes.” Jake pulled Aspen into his lap and scratched him behind the ears.

  The image refreshed every thirty minutes. She sighed and sat down. “Any news from any other source?”

  “No. Not about Chelan anyway. Or the nukes that woman told us about. I doubt they exist. But we did find a strange link.” Jake looked up again, smiling softly when he saw Adam looked interested. “Money trails going into Chelan. Supply purchases ordered into Wenatchee or even Stehekin.”

  Ever since she had stopped being poor, everything came down to money. But why did it matter here? “We knew there were people in Chelan. They’d need to buy things, don’t you think? Lou will.”

  Adam leaned in. “How much money?”

  “More than a thousand people could possibly need. We haven’t been able to trace it to its sources yet.” Jake set Aspen down and drew a few papers closer to him. “We can see the smoke, but the fire is still hiding, waiting for us to find it.”

  Adam asked, “Do you know the source?”

  “We’re seeing loose linkages through a particular policy pod.”

  “Can you link it to bank accounts?” Coryn asked.

  “Of course not.” Jake focused on Coryn. “Money doesn’t work that way anymore. The ultrarich seldom directly tie money to bank accounts. The great taking went with the great taxation, and that drove a lot of assets underground.”

  Adam drummed his fingers on the table, looking like a coiled spring.

  Jake referred to the papers in front of him. “Even without direct account ownership or other easy threads to pull, the correlations are strong when you run analytics on the data. The probable fiscal link to the policy pod is only 33 percent. It’s called the Modern Training Institute of all things—a name so benign I have trouble remembering it.” He shook the papers to make the point.

  Coryn had learned to stay interested in Jake’s conversations even when she didn’t quite follow them. So she asked, “What do they do?”

  “Teach Outsiders how to get into cities. Mostly what the culture is like and how the technology works. It’s of interest primarily because that’s also a way to get dissidents in. But no one has been able to prove they’re doing anything dark, and no one they tutored has broken any laws. Not even in the last uprisings.” He frowned. “Yet.” He glanced at Coryn. “Do you know what policy pods are?”

  “They replaced the old think tanks after they were banned. They’re designed to influence laws, so it’s money that goes into politics. They have to be small, and they have to say where they get their money, though, right?”

  “We kept even these illegal for a long time.” Jake’s jaw looked unusually tight, and his eyes seemed to be gazing into his past. “But there are always ways for the greedy few to act, and there’s a lot of money out there.”

  She stared at the screen, willing the image to change. “So what does it mean that there’s more money in Chelan?”

  Adam glanced toward Jake for permission before he answered. “The money trail might lead us to whoever is financing the Returners.” He frowned, hesitated. “I keep thinking that almost-perfect data analytics can trace anything, but that keeps insisting on being an illusion.”

  Jake laughed. “You can’t analyze the real world.”

  Adam merely frowned.

  “If this is about money, does that mean it’s really a war against hackers again?” Coryn stretched, still watching the wall screen.

  “We know there’s enough money to run Seacouver for a year out there,” Jake said. “It’s underground.”

  “Like in caves?”

  Jake and Adam both smiled, and Adam said, “Electronic caves.”

  The screen finally refreshed, drawing all three of them to stare at the wall screen. Lou’s group had made good time for twenty minutes. The flat image made it hard to tell elevations, but it looked like they had almost reached the road that ran around the lake.

  Adam walked near the image and stood in front of it.

  She went over, careful not to block Jake’s view.

  “What do you see?” Adam asked.

  He was close enough that she smelled his shampoo. Mint. “They’re in the same formation. Everyone looks good.”

  “What else?”

  She scanned the picture. “There are people over there. On the right.” She gestured at the wall, zooming in. “Ten. And dogs. Three dogs. They’re walking toward Lou and the others.”

  “Do you see guns?”

  “I do. But Returners always have guns.” She hesitated. “Don’t they?”

  Jake cleared his throat and she and Adam both turned to him. “First, no. Of course not. Always is a sloppy word. But they are often armed. Of note, your sister is rather well armed herself, and everyone in her group is a good shot. But a battle would be devastating.”

  Coryn squinted. “It looks like the same people who met them on the road.”

  Adam added, “Which means operation sneak-into-Chelan isn’t working.”

  She bridled at his tone. He’d never been Outside! “Did you really think they could sneak in with ecobots?”

  Adam stiffened. “I don’t know.”

  “I bet there’s no other ecobots in Chelan.” She glanced back at her sister’s image, now a minute old, at her likely pursuers, coming toward her unseen on the road. “What do you think will happen?”

  Jake answered her. “Anything.”

  She pursed her lips. “Sometimes you’re as exasperating as Blessing.”

  That made him laugh out loud. It always pleased her when she could draw a laugh from him. She really liked the dour old man, and he looked a little younger when he smiled or laughed.

  Jake kept smiling. “Blessing spent a lot of time with me. Maybe I chose to be more like him.”

  More likely the other way around. What would Lou do? “I want to call and warn her.”

  Jake stared at the screen for a long time. Every breath drove Coryn a little crazy. They should be calling. Finally, he nodded. “They’ll know. They should, anyway. A call could be a distraction, and it could be traced. You don’t create leaders by babysitting them.”

  Coryn whispered, “But what if we don’t warn her, and she gets shot?”

  “That’s a risk,” Jake said. “But I think she’ll do okay.”

  Coryn leaned back in her chair, staring at the screen. She wanted to smell the hills, to feel the unfiltered sun on her face. She wanted the danger.

  Blessing often said he expected to die every day. That, he had told her, was why he was still alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Lou sat easily on Mouse, Blessing riding on one side of her and Daryl on the other. They led the group, the robots behind them in a line, with Matchiko on the first one and Day on the second, the two spare horses tied to that bot with a long line and tended by Shuska.

  The road was marred by potholes so deep that the horses had to weave to avoid them, and the sides of the road cracked and crumbled away so that it was no more than a lane wide in a few places. It felt more dangerous than the rocky trail they’d just come down. Above them, the sky was blue and clear, the edges of the mountains and hills sharp against the sky and almost as sharp in their reflections on the lake.

  It was the kind of morning when even though Lou was surrounded by the damage that made the world break, it felt as if they might be able to fix it.

  She could barely wait to set up house, to have a base to work from and daily rosters of work to do. She hadn’t let herself look forward to that until now, but the logistics of creating a new headquarte
rs were starting to run in the background of her brain. She had never created a home before, and when she was a child, she’d never had one. RiversEnd Ranch had felt like home, like they were all working together. That was where she had first met Matchiko and Shuska and Daryl, and where they had all been happy. Once. She yearned to create something close to that.

  They rode past what had been estates with vineyards and wine-tasting rooms. These had surely once been well-tended parts of sophisticated gardens. Years before the great taking, even the rich had stopped trying for grass lawns.

  They passed a car rusted into the earth, partly obscured by tall ornamental grasses and butterfly weed in full yellow bloom. Her stomach twisted in a brief flash of anger. So much toxic junk just left behind. Greed had made the world into a place that needed Wilders instead of a wild place. Blessing must feel the same, since he said, “Such wasted opulence,” just loud enough for Lou to hear.

  “That’s an unusually big word.”

  His only response was to look serious.

  “There’s someone close by,” Daryl said, for no reason that she could see.

  Blessing stood a little in his stirrups, alert.

  Lou shook her right wrist to loosen it up in case she needed her weapon. She glanced up at Matchiko, who rode above and behind them, seated in a lotus position on top and near the front of the ecobot. She had dressed in blue this morning, just slightly brighter than the sky, and she reminded Lou of a picture she’d seen of a woman riding an elephant.

  Lou gave a fist shake to indicate possible danger, and waited for Matchiko’s nod before she turned around again just in time to see Daryl raise his rifle.

  A woman strode out into the road in front of them, stopping with her legs a little apart and her hands at her side. Confident. She wore old jeans and a flowing top that had once been white, and which was still white enough to contrast with her dark hair and flint-colored eyes. Latina. A beautiful Latina, tall. Her hair had been braided away from her face, but fell down her back freely, blowing behind her in a soft, warm wind.

  Daryl watched the place she had come from. Blessing glanced toward the other side of the road, a strip of long bank leading to the lake, the water level ten feet below the footings of a dock that had almost crumbled to dust. He pulled his gray back a little.