Julianna replied, “You got there, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you haven’t been attacked?”
“Right.”
“I’m no lover of robots.”
True. Coryn blamed Julianna for Paula’s death. “Okay. Coryn told me.”
“So I had a good reason to send you with some or I wouldn’t have done it. You may need to show their power.”
“They aren’t war machines.” Lou moved a few steps, following Mouse to better grass.
“They can be defense.”
“Not reliably. I’ve been working with them for years.” Lou heard the edge in her voice and took a long breath. “Sorry. I’m just not sure it wouldn’t have been easier to sneak in here as a small group.”
“Would Valeria have led you home without the ecobots?” Julianna asked.
Point Julianna. Lou kept trying. “Ecobots aren’t the best defense, you know. They don’t engage in minor crimes like killing humans.”
“They will defend you. Now that you run a rewilding operation, they will obey you in almost all things, as well. I made sure of it.”
Irritation crawled up Lou’s spine. “How do I find out handy things like this?”
Julianna laughed, which only made Lou more irritated. But she knew herself well enough to know she shouldn’t be. Her ego was getting bruised. She picked up a rock and threw it.
Mouse tossed her head, startled by the missile flashing past her.
Lou stepped into her, whispering, “It’s okay.”
“What?”
“I was talking to my horse.”
Julianna laughed. “Tell us more about the people?”
Lou tried to name them all, got through over half and then just described genders and ages. She spent time on Valeria, though, since she was the key to everything.
“I know who she is,” Julianna said. “Not directly. I’d like to meet her. She was a resistance fighter for Promise when she was a kid.”
“That was a long time ago!”
“She hasn’t always been on the same side as I am, but in this case I think she will be.”
“Why?” Lou led Mouse a few more steps forward.
“She believes in the wilding, but she also thinks there should be more people, more settlements, than came out of the agreements. My sources say that she hates factory farming, and I think she understands that the land needs the cities. She won’t like Returners much. She’s famously stubborn.”
“I noticed that.”
Julianna ignored her. “I’ve heard she’s also a raving pacifist.”
“That’s good.”
“Does that fit? You’ve spent time with her.”
Lou liked being asked. A little of her anger drained away, although under that was only a need to get moving, to go resolve the housing issue and start her real work. “I think so. And she got us in here. It wasn’t the ecobots that did that. It was her. She told people to let us though and they did. And she’s a damned fine singer.”
Julianna ignored that last observation. “Is she honest?”
The question was so direct it surprised Lou. But Julianna was like that sometimes. “I don’t know yet. I think so.”
“Very well. I’m sorry we didn’t have better intelligence.”
Lou thought of those rows of raised garden beds. “The Lucken Foundation would have made me kick these people off. Or at least most of them. Can you give me permission to hire more of them? Will that protect them?”
A pause on Julianna’s end. Evidently, she hadn’t expected the question. “We’re not permitted for more than the papers indicate. I doubt we’d get a better number without establishing some success.”
“Is there money? Extra money? Can I be given enough to build another house?”
Julianna actually laughed. “You want to use rewilding money to build a house when you have a perfectly good permit for a perfectly good house?”
Lou threw another rock, watched it smack against a boulder.
“You’ll have to be more creative than that. I do have resources, but the permitting is difficult. You could lose our permit if you do anything illegal.”
“These people have young children.”
“So do the Returners. So far, you made the—” A slight hesitation. “You made good choices. I’m pleased with you. You will have to be more creative than you have ever been. Blessing and Day can help you.”
Julianna’s pets. “But I am running the foundation.” She hesitated at how bold the words sounded. “Or at least our operation out here.”
“Yes, you are.”
Lou swallowed, pushing away the stray thought that Julianna was housetraining her. She needed the old woman, and she did appreciate her. Without her, there might be no wilding, or no land to rewild, anyway. “I have things to do. But we should stay in touch. I’ll call if I have any questions. Can we set up a call once a week?”
A brief moment of silence. Then, “Yes, of course you can. We’ll send you a schedule for when Coryn will be available.”
“Will you be there, too?” she asked Julianna.
“Coryn will be your main support.”
“Okay.” That meant she would largely be on her own. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes. We didn’t put this in writing, but Blessing should have delivered the message. Wolves matter. The rewilding matters. We want you to work on that. But you must find out what the Returners are up to. There are rumors of another attack soon—on the city. We think the leaders are there.”
Lou wanted to see all of the Returners scraped from the land. But just starting up was going to be so much work! “Can Blessing and Day work on that while I start hiring?”
Julianna’s response came swiftly. “Finding out what the Returners are up to is one of your highest priorities.”
Lou took three deep breaths, biting her tongue. She did care about that, but right now she had more immediate troubles. “There’s a storm coming in. I have to make sure the horses get put away.”
“Watch for messages. We’ll be looking at satellite shots as they come in, and we may see threats before you do. Find the Returners’ plans.”
She sighed. It was bound to take all afternoon just to figure out who was sleeping where. “Okay. Thanks.” She hung up, and then realized she hadn’t said goodbye to Coryn. Dammit. She took a few deep breaths, forcing herself to notice the trees and birds around her, to be here in the moment and not worried about some future she couldn’t control.
She rubbed Mouse behind the ears and mounted, starting back toward the house and barns.
The sky looked like it was about to unload on her, and a wicked wind had started twisting the tops of the trees.
She flirted with the idea of talking with the others before she found Valeria, but this was her moment to lead. Back to the amigas question; they couldn’t talk about everything. There wasn’t time. “Dammit, Mouse,” she addressed the horse’s ears, which swiveled back at the sound of her name. “Why is this so hard? All I really want to do is save wolves.”
The horse didn’t answer.
The family would need to stop selling food in town. That was a legality thing. Anyone who worked for her would have to stop that entirely.
Alondra waited for her at the end of the lane. Lou stopped Mouse and leaned down with a smile. “Do you know where Valeria is?”
“She wants you to go for a walk with her. She said I could take the horse.”
“Really? Well, wasn’t that nice of her?” Lou kept her smile friendly and relaxed. “You can follow me to the barn and help Daryl if you like.”
“Daryl is helping clean out chicken coops. But Shuska is in the barn, and she said I could.”
She didn’t believe that Shuska had allowed any such thing.
Lou slid off of Mouse, clipped the lead on, and handed the girl up onto Mouse. Alondra clutched the reins awkwardly, but Lou kept the lead, and thus control of the horse. There. That was a creative solution.
> Valeria waited by the barn. She wore a small backpack and carried a sturdy walking stick. She smiled. “We’ll be going uphill.”
Lou nodded. “Give me a minute.”
“We have about three hours before the storm hits,” Valeria said.
Lou nodded again and held her hand out toward Alondra. She stayed seated. “I want to ride more,” she insisted.
Lou shook her head firmly. “We’ll take the saddle off with you in it.” The girl leaned over and half fell into Lou’s arms. The move was less graceful than it looked like it was going to be, and Lou moved with her, swinging her in an arc and then landing her with her feet on the ground, giggling. Lou tousled Alondra’s unruly dark hair. “You can help Shuska brush Mouse and put her away.”
She packed paper and a notebook, her wristlet, her stunner, water, and some of the last of their dried fruits from Wenatchee into a pack of her own, and met Valeria out front.
Apparently jeans, boots, and a ruffly off-white shirt were Valeria’s signature outfit. Her boots looked better than Lou’s.
They walked side by side down the long drive, to the end of the road they’d come in on and then up a thin set of long switchbacks. The sun was still largely in the east, warming them while the clouds drifted toward them from the mountains in the west. The air smelled of dust. She was fully winded by the time Valeria stopped at the top of the hill and turned toward the lake and city, which now looked smaller.
Though Lou had ridden through the partly ruined streets and the runaway gardens, and seen that a quarter of the roofs were falling in or even had fallen fully into the houses or blown away, Chelan looked picaresque and whole from their high perch. Hills folded down to the town, a few living trees sticking up here and there amid many dead ones, burned to outsized black toothpicks in past fires but never taken down. She could see the black onion of fire-ravenged earth, each fire bringing new wildflowers and a fresh bloom of grass except for the last two, which must have been superheated and fast since the earth itself was still black in some places.
Valeria broke her silence. “This was a thriving tourist town. Vineyards everywhere. Half the houses—including the main house on the property—were bed and breakfast inns. That’s why the kitchen is so large and so fine. It’s the best room in the house.”
“That also explains the way every bedroom has a bathroom,” Lou commented.
Valeria added, “And the locks on most of the closet doors. The bunkhouse was built for hands and harvesters.” Valeria looked down at the house, a slight wind plucking at the dark hairs that had escaped her braids. She looked proud of it, and quite proprietary. “They used to have wine-tasting events. There’s a downstairs cellar you get to through the mud room.”
“We missed that in the tour yesterday.”
Valeria pointed at the clouds. “Maybe we have a little less time. I asked Diego and Santino to move to the bunkhouse. There’s three other places in there as well. I thought you could move your three men in there.”
So that was her opening. “We prefer to stay close. I had thought we three women would take one suite, and Blessing and Day one of the small suites, and Daryl the other for now. One of us will sleep outside with the bots and horses each night for a while anyway.”
“I want my grandchildren upstairs. Surely you understand.”
Lou took a long sip of water. The thunderclouds were breathtaking folds of grays with brilliant white tops. “Has anyone ever attacked you?”
“Three times.”
She wanted to ask when and over what. “There are four small bedroom suites. If you take three—one for each child—we will use the downstairs bedrooms where Diego and Santino were staying.”
“Sofia must stay in the house. She is only twenty-one. And she is very beautiful. None of her brothers would harm her, but it wouldn’t be seemly for her to stay with them in the bunkhouse.”
“Can she stay with you?”
Valeria stood up, the rising wind drawing her hair all of the way back now. “You will understand the value of having your own suite. I could not operate without it. I will allow Sofia to take the downstairs room. Felipe and his family will take the room she is leaving. Ignacio and Ana can join Sofia downstairs. That leaves you one bedroom and one of the two master suites upstairs. If you choose to have your women with you and put your men in that room, that’s on your head. But if I were you, I would put them with my boys in the bunkhouse. People will need to get to know each other anyway, and we will be working for you.”
She let that go for the moment, thinking through the housing. “I need to keep Blessing and Day near me. Daryl can bunk outside. Matchiko and Shuska will stay with me.”
Valeria shrugged, as if to say that there was little she could do about it if Lou refused to accept her advice. But she also made sure Lou saw the shrug.
“I cannot hire all of you,” Lou reiterated. “I don’t have enough permits or enough money. There are some specific skills I will need to bring in from outside.” She paused. “That will mean housing more people.”
Valeria faced the rising wind, looking for all the world as if she were calling it rather than merely reveling in it. “In spring. We can build then.”
Lou hoped to add people before that, but she could argue that point later. “I cannot pay you to farm. Anyone who is on my payroll will work for me. The foundation and our mission will be the top priority.”
“Which is?”
“It means finding the two wolf packs that are up here and supporting them. It means surveying the deer population and tagging as many animals as possible and tracking their movements. Knowing what kills them. It means inventorying plants. It means using the ecobots to destroy man-made things when that is necessary to save animals.”
“I know you came for the Returners as well.”
Lou ignored her. “I can hire three.”
“Felipe, Diego, and Angel.”
Lou stiffened. “I will interview anyone who is interested.”
“That’s fine.” Valeria glanced at the sky. “We should start down.”
The air had begun to smell of rain and to draw the fine hairs on the backs of her arms up. “Okay.” She was pretty sure that those three were the only people who would show up for any interview, and that any one of her team might have done a better job negotiating.
Going down was harder than it looked. Valeria took it almost at a jog, and Lou was soon focused on managing not to fall, and getting down before the rain came. Wind plucked at her, and then, on the flats, it threatened to knock her down.
As if by magic, Valeria timed it so that they closed the door of the house just as the first driving blast of rain slammed into the windows.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The morning after the disturbing call with Lou, worry plucked Coryn awake even before the water of her alarm started lapping the shore. Had she picked the wrong house for Lou? But it was the biggest, and it was available. It had looked neat and in good repair. That had been something Coryn wanted so Lou could work on the things that mattered.
Getting up early put her in the breakfast room on time, and to her surprise Julianna waited for her instead of Adam. For just a second she had mixed feelings—but Julianna was actually better. Adam sometimes knew things Julianna didn’t, but Julianna was really good at seeing how the city and the Outside worked together.
The older woman has chosen blue and green running shorts that hugged her legs tightly to just below the knee and a long bright-orange shirt. Coryn had chosen her black shirt because the lower cut emphasized her breasts, which felt foolish around Julianna.
Her boss appeared to be all-business this morning anyway. “Fifteen minutes,” she said as soon as Coryn entered. “I’ve added five kilometers to the run so we can go a little slower. Endurance.”
Pancakes with blueberries and a light syrup graced the training table. Well, at least she’d have plenty of fuel to burn.
They left via one of the many bridges that connected the most expens
ive buildings, eventually hooking up the Bridge of Stars and doing the long run up at a slow pace. Even so, they passed far more people than passed them, even the slowest bicycles. Clouds streamed around the weather dome this morning, their rain withheld by a sophisticated combination of temperature, wind, and the electrical charge of the air. The difference between the Inside and Outside was clearer than usual this morning, a sharp demarcation of color.
In response to the weather outside of the dome, the in-city temperature had dropped a few degrees from normal, and the cooler air helped Coryn keep her pace consistent up the long slope of the bridge.
Coryn left her AR rig around her neck and dug into the climb, practicing form. The steady hill eventually taxed her breath anyway. Last weekend she’d come in fifth in a race, a disappointing fall of three places.
The little things mattered. How she flexed her feet, the rhythm of her breath. She focused hard, hoping Julianna noticed.
At the top of the bridge they passed a dark woman wearing a golden veil over her head, sitting in a yoga pose and staring at the storm streaming around the weather dome. She occupied the same observation spot that Lou and Coryn had used the day Lou left. They went on to another one, leaning on the rail and panting. The clouds and mist outside made it hard to see the line of the horizon and completely hid the Olympic Mountains.
As she got enough breath back to talk in a normal voice, Coryn said, “It’s a pleasure to see you.”
A small smile touched Julianna’s face. She looked off toward the horizon, as if it were visible, and said, “You need to up your game with the Foundation.”
Coryn swallowed. Just like Julianna to pull no punches. “You mean I chose the wrong house?”
“No. I think that turned out even better than we thought. But we need algorithms built to analyze the sat shots. I sense danger.”
“Adam is doing those.” Coryn took a long, slow drink of water. “He’s better at the math anyway.”
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