“Is that why you ride off for whole days at a time?”
“Yes.” Another gust of wind rattled the windows, and Lou sat and listened to the storm, wondering if the barn roof had been fixed, and happy that Valeria could be quiet.
Eventually, Valeria said, “I’m grateful for the removal of fences that are no longer used and houses that have fallen into ruins. I’m grateful you helped me rip out the dead grape vines. I need you to be careful.”
Lou’s jaw tightened. “I’m far more interested in wolves than threats, but I cannot ignore either.”
Valeria looked equally determined. “I will stop you if you endanger my family. I’m glad the other two are gone.”
“I’m not. They were good fighters, and we might need fighters.”
“You can hire more of my boys.”
“I can’t. You need some of them to farm.”
Valeria watched her, silent and looking thoughtful in the way a cougar looked thoughtful sitting on a tree branch.
“I can’t pay you to farm, and I cannot take orders from you. But I will try to keep your family safe.”
Valeria’s nodded stiffly. “Thank you.”
It must gall Valeria to need someone as young as Lou, but Lou couldn’t let it worry her. She had to maintain her leadership in spite of the doubts anyone else had, or that she had for that matter. It would be easy to fall into letting Valeria give orders. She stood. “I want to see if the roof got fixed.”
“I haven’t heard them come in.”
“The sound has changed,” Lou said. “It’s not rain anymore.”
Valeria cocked her head. “Sleet. Maybe going to snow.”
“That’s not good.” Lou paused, eyed the other woman. In many ways, Valeria was still a mystery to her. A brilliant, helpful mystery, but her goals remained unclear.
“What if you have to choose?” Lou asked. “What will you do if you have to choose between us and the town? It could happen.”
A door banged, and Felipe yelled up the stairs for Valeria.
Lou had never heard him yell.
She followed Valeria out her room and down the steps at a near run.
The foot of the stairs emptied into the wide hallway that led to the front door, and a chill stung Lou’s cheeks. Someone lay on the ground. A man, based on the boots and the size of the feet. Not Daryl. Matchiko stood beside whoever it was, blood running down her right arm.
Valeria cried out, “Angel!”
Matchiko moved aside, and Lou noticed that his arm bent in the wrong direction, before Valeria knelt beside him and blocked her view.
There were enough people right around Angel that Lou took a place near the wall behind Matchiko, assessing. There was no obvious blood on Angel, so Lou’s eyes darted to Matchiko. A bleeding gash marred her forehead. In spite of the blood running down her cheek and dripping onto her shirt, all of her attention was on Angel.
Lou felt someone behind her. She turned. Alondra, her eyes wide with worry.
“Can you get me a clean kitchen towel?” Lou asked her.
The girl turned away toward the kitchen, but Astrid was already there with a fistful of towels and two long wooden spoons in one hand and duct tape in the other. She handed Alondra a towel and knelt beside Valeria.
Valeria carefully examined Angel’s arm, which appeared to have broken neatly just above the wrist. Astrid handed her a spoon, which she placed in Angel’s mouth. He bit down on it and Valeria tugged and twisted his arm.
Matchiko grunted.
Astrid turned her face away.
Valeria set the arm down, it looked right again.
There were two bones in the forearm. Doing that correctly wasn’t easy.
Astrid calmly took the spoon from Angel’s mouth, and he whispered, “Better.”
Valeria said, “You’ll need a doctor when we can get you one.”
When she had pulled on his arm, he had made no sound, but there were deep teeth-marks in the fat wooden handle of the spoon. In just a few moments, Valeria and Astrid transformed the towels, spoons, and sticky tape into a decent splint. Felipe reached down to help Angel stand, his face white.
By now the whole family had gathered. The hallway was chock-full of people, most of them still in coats.
Lou handed Matchiko a clean towel, which Matchiko held up to her head. Blood quickly stained it near her fingers.
Valeria asked, “What happened?”
Felipe spoke. “It’s gone to ice out there. Freezing rain. Angel slipped, Matchiko tried to catch him and fell herself. Two or three of us fell trying to help them up, and then we had to almost skate back, slow and easy.”
Valeria nodded.
“Are the others still in the barn?” Lou asked.
Felipe smiled, a brief twitch of the lip. “Just your two. I don’t know if we fixed the leak. Maybe. But everything is frozen now, so ice will plug the hole until the storm passes.”
“Are they okay?” She glanced at Angel. “Do they know to stay put?”
“Wrapped in horse blankets.” Felipe smiled reassurance. “They have a bottle of wine between them. I think they were glad to see us go.”
He was probably right. She smiled in return, then turned to Matchiko. “Let’s go to our room and clean up.”
Alondra put her hand on Lou’s arm. “Can I help?”
“Of course. Maybe you can bring Matchiko a cup of tea, and bring me a fresh clean towel? You can bring tea for yourself, too.”
Alondra’s nod looked quite solemn, and she turned quickly to her task.
Lou went to the window and looked out. “Is it snowing?”
Felipe spoke from behind her. “Yes. It will make the ice even harder to see. Hard to feed the animals in the morning.”
“Or the people.” Shuska and Daryl had survived a worse storm the year before, so she trusted they would be okay.
As soon as she closed the door to their room behind them, Matchiko turned to her and said, “We have tea.”
“I know. I wanted time for a kiss.” She leaned in and gave Matchiko a kiss on the forehead, then one on the lips. “And Alondra likes to have jobs to do.”
“I bet she does.”
Lou ran hot water to wet the towel Matchiko had already been using and started scrubbing at her face. “I hope the house batteries out here will hold through this storm.”
“Probably. I looked at the system. It’s a decent one. Old. But everything seems to work. Ouch!”
“Sorry.”
A soft knock announced Alondra’s presence, and Matchiko called, “Come in.”
“She probably has her hands full.” Lou opened the door. Alondra had three cups of tea on a tray, and two bowls with warm water. “Thank you. We appreciate the help.”
Alondra smiled. “Thanks for letting me come. I wanted to be with someone, but Mom is working in the kitchen and Dad’s gone.”
“Your dad is gone a lot, isn’t he?” She had seen him recently, but not since the storm started.
Alondra nodded.
“Can you can help wash off Matchiko’s arm?”
Alondra took one of the towels off of her own arm and started in. She was efficient, and willing to scrub hard where the blood had dried. “Dad is in town,” she said. “He’s in town a lot. Sometimes he travels.”
“But I’ve seen him here, too.”
“He was home for two days last week.”
She didn’t sound bitter, just resigned. Lou had only seen Alondra and Mathew together a few times. Mostly, Alondra shadowed her mother. This family was like that. Strong women. And Felipe. He had the strength of a favored first-born. Everyone else? Less. But what did Mathew do in town? Was that part of why Valeria wouldn’t allow fights? Or was it really all about economics?
Mostly clean now, Matchiko took her cup of tea. “I’m going to sit on the couch. Want to join me?”
Alondra regarded the couch. “It’s pretty close to the window. Can we sit at the table?”
That was as close as the girl
was likely to come to saying she was afraid. “That will be better for drinking tea anyway,” Lou agreed. She sat and curled her fingers around the cup. It smelled of cinnamon and cloves, and when she touched her tongue to the liquid, it tasted spicy. “This is great. Where did you get it?”
“It’s my favorite. Dad brings me some from time to time He brought this on my birthday.”
“When was your birthday?” Matchiko asked.
“Two months ago. I’m eleven.”
Lou smiled. “I would have guessed at least twelve.”
The three of them listened to the storm, which was quieter now, turned to snow and the occasional soft rattle of wind. “I want to help you,” Alondra said.
Lou reached a hand across the table to her. “You just did.”
“I want to work for you. I want you to hire me.”
Lou laughed. “I can’t hire a child.”
“I want to ride your horses.”
“I can let you do that,” Lou said, tipping her cup to finish the last of the tea. “You don’t even have to help for it.”
“Yes.” Alondra paused, twisting her held-empty cup so the liquid swirled near the edges. “Yes, I do. Mom said we can’t be beholden to you, that we have to work for anything you give us.”
“Good advice,” Matchiko said, pushing up from the table. “I’ll let you two talk trades. I think I’d like to go wrap up in some blankets.”
“I can help you find the wolves,” Alondra said, all in a rush. “I know where they are.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Namina drove Coryn through morning wind sprints, sending her back and forth endlessly across a small park with some other runners and their robotic coaches. Coryn merely wanted to be finished so she could get to work. The storm had hit Chelan overnight, and she wanted to see the satellite pictures on the big screen even if they showed nothing but the tops of clouds. She felt closer to her sister when she had the feeds up, even though they were also sent to her wristlet. A five-foot tall image was so much better than a one-inch picture.
She also, finally, had questions for Jake.
As soon as Namina let her stop, she rushed to the office, where she asked Namina to wait outside. Inside, Jake looked up from a note he was making on paper.
“I suppose it’s too late to tell you a slate works a little better.” She smiled, teasing him.
“For you.” But he returned the smile.
She glanced at the sat shot. Just as she expected, a beautiful picture of clouds, with the glory of the sun turning the tops of them a blinding white and only the barest glimpses of dark gray. The clouds moved quickly, which might or might not mean serious wind at ground level, but it did make the storm look bigger and more threatening. No lightning. “Where do you keep all that paper anyway?”
“I shred it. Some days I burn it. Paper is much more secure than any computer system. Besides, I only write things down to remember them. After I write them down, I don’t forget.” He pushed the paper away from him. “Even now.”
She reached across the table and took his hand. It felt almost like ice in hers, the fingers stiff and knobby. The words he’d been putting on the paper were so spidery she couldn’t read them, but she didn’t mention that. Maybe his trick worked whether or not anyone else could read his writing. “Are you well?”
“No. My head hurts now. All the time. I wanted to make it to the spring, to see us keep the city safe again.” He pulled his hand back and rubbed at the back of his head.
Her eyes felt hot. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
“Sure.” He reached for the paper again and pushed it toward her. “Sometimes it helps to write down the answers.”
She dug through the pile on the table to find a purple pen. “I’m curious about relations between the cities. I really liked being in that meeting the other day. I mean, it scared me. What was said. But I liked the oath and the way people were working together.”
“Good to have you there. What was the most interesting?”
“The meeting was almost like a dance. The mayor—Mayor Broadbridge—he knew what he wanted to tell us, and it was a lot, and he figured out how to make it happen. And everybody agreed. I really liked that.”
He leaned back and smiled. “I think you’d be a good diplomat.”
“I don’t know if I’d have wanted to do the talking.”
“Not now. You hardly know a thing. But you work hard and people like you. Do you have any questions about what you heard?”
“I probably have a hundred.” She stood up and leaned against the wall. “But one thing is really puzzling me. How are the people attacking us paying for it?”
Jake’s smile widened. “Very astute. A lot of money went missing during the troubled years. We never knew if it lost itself forever in the failed markets or if it was simply hidden. We always suspected some of both.”
“And you can’t track it? Not even Adam?”
Jake shook his head, slowly. He looked a little faraway, like he was lost in memory. He tapped his fingers on the table for a while, and she sat back down and started doodling, letting him work out what he wanted to say.
“Money from then went into a million holes. Some people had been saving it up since the very beginning, when climate change was big enough to see but not yet big enough to get attention. People ignored it. Inconvenient, hard . . . a lot of reasons. But some people started saving up and stashing away then. This might be that coming back to haunt us, or it could be from the underground economy.”
“I thought that was a story they made up to torture econ students with.”
He laughed. She hadn’t heard him laugh for a while. Then it turned to hacking and she brought him water and tissues and waited him out, worried, rubbing his shoulder.
After he got his breath back under control he heaved once and finally spoke. “Sit down. I’ll live another hour. We don’t know. If anybody knew where the money came from, they would have said so in the meeting. I suspect everyone is looking.”
She nodded.
“Do you know how a meeting like that gets pulled off?”
“I’d like to.” She started doodling on the corner of the paper, sketching his face badly. “A lot of planning.”
“Days, maybe weeks, of work. Meetings about the meeting, and I’d bet everyone practiced the presentations together. Did you see how they didn’t repeat a thing, and how the presentations just built on each other?”
She had. That kind of puzzle would be worth the work. “It was like being in a class, only it was so real it made every class I’ve ever been in seem fake. That meeting was worth a few days of work.”
“Probably a few days of work each for about twenty people.”
That shocked her. “So much?”
“Yes. Diplomacy requires a competent staff.”
“Like Imke.”
“And Adam.”
She nodded. Whatever else Adam was, he was certainly competent.
“Julianna shared the note you sent her with me.”
She had almost—but not quite—forgotten about that. “Did she like the answers?”
He smiled, and for a moment he looked far away, like a memory scooped him away from the conference room. “She did. I did, too.”
Coryn blinked, relief spreading through her and unknotting muscles in her shoulders. “Were they the right answers?”
“Can you pull them up?”
“Sure.” She glanced at the screen again, the white clouds, the certain fury of the storm right over Lou. She probably wouldn’t be able to see anything useful until morning anyway. Maybe there’d be a small break in the clouds she could use to check on the new barn. She’d spent so much time finding materials she wanted it whole. She pulled up her note.
The three things that threaten Seacouver:
1. Whoever fought us a few months ago. Hackers and Returners?
2. The complexity of our systems. Maybe even the systems themselves?
3. Our own sense of sa
fety.
The three things that threaten Lou:
1. Whoever wants to attack Seacouver. (She’s helping us look for them. If she gets caught, they might kill her.)
2. Weather (storms and fire).
3. Disease.
I want to work on diplomacy. After Lou is safe, after this summer.
Jake stared at the screen for a moment, squinting a little, so she made the font bigger. He nodded at the list. “Do you see what you did there?”
“Saw a lot of bad things?”
“Even though Adam says you’ll never be a data analyst—”
“Hey!” she interrupted.
“You can’t be everything. There are precision thinkers like Adam and intuitive ones like you.”
She leaned back in her chair, a smile threatening to sneak up on her. “Julianna is the precision thinker. And I’m like you.”
“Yes, although don’t be fooled into thinking you or anyone else is just one way.”
She nodded, the flash of insight dulling a little.
“Your intuition is good. You listed three of the four things that we presented in that meeting. And you did that before the meeting.”
She stared at it. Had she?
“See?”
“I suppose.” She’d screwed her face up, perplexed, and consciously relaxed it. “I learned a lot in that meeting.”
“Of course you did. Anyone would have. One of the most important senses for a politician is instinct. Knowledge that just comes, and is right. Your answers show instinct.” He sat back, pain tightening his face.
“Are you okay?”
“Please stop asking that question. It’s a silly one. I’m as okay as anyone who’s about to die.”
She winced and hurried on. “I didn’t get it that the cities have to work together at all, even though we read about that in school. I didn’t understand. But they’re all islands of information, aren’t they? And we need rivers of good will in between. We need to share, and we’re far more likely to win together.”
He smiled. “Maybe.”
She narrowed her eyes. She was right.
He held a hand up. “Maybe. Maybe we’ll win. As humans. That’s what you’ll need to remember to be a diplomat. That to win as humans is to win for everyone. Not just for the people in the city who have it good.”
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