by Alex Wells
Her boots caught and she surged up onto the ladder, clinging to it like a lifeline.
“Are you going to make room for me, or should I give you two a moment alone?” Coyote drawled into her ear.
Hob laughed, the sound a little more high pitched than she was used to. “Give me a second.” She scrambled up the ladder to the top, then got herself turned around, locking her legs in so her arms were free. “Come and get it.”
Geri was ballsy enough to get closer to the train than his brother had as Coyote, balancing on the pegs with enough aplomb that he made it look good, and easy to boot, counted down. He stuck the landing better than Hob had, gripping firm with both hands. Still, she bent double and grabbed his wrists as he felt for the rungs with his feet.
“Good to go,” Coyote said, sounding somewhere between unsteady and elated. “Get the top hatch dealt with while I climb up, all right?”
Hob scrambled onto the roof, not bothering to be quiet. If there was anyone inside – unlikely to begin with – they would already know that something was going on. One hand feeling in her pocket for the bolt cutters, wind slapping her coat against her legs, she squatted in front of the hatch.
Only it wasn’t a padlock, like she’d expected. There was just a box and a little glowing light, like the electronic locks on the doors in Newcastle. “Well shit.”
“Well shit what?” Geri asked.
“It’s a fuckin’ electronic lock. Opens with a code or sommat.”
“Melt it,” Freki said. There was enough tone difference between their voices for Hob to tell him apart.
“But…” Well, of course the boys knew she had that witchiness in her. She’d burned her handprint into Freki’s forearm when he’d still just been Francis and had been trying to drag her somewhere by her hair. But they’d never really talked about it again after that.
“If that trained freakshow shit bothered any of us, you think we’d be following Nick Ravani?” Geri asked.
Hob laughed. Put in that light, it seemed damn dumb. Like everyone was pretending just to keep the old man happy. “Ain’t rightly sure how.”
Coyote tugged the bolt cutters from her hand. “You burn your cigarettes all the time,” he said. “Figure it out.”
That seemed a little unfair. She burned paper and tobacco and had even got a good blaze going in the wooden interior of the church, but all of those things desperately wanted to burn already in a place this dry and hot. And she could drink in heat and fire, sure. She’d figured that out early on when she was tired of getting sunburnt. Just gave her headaches sometimes, made her sick if she drank in too much. But metal? Melting metal.
Staring at it wasn’t going to do a damn thing, she knew that for sure. Had to be the same principle as burning anything else, right? She just needed more heat. It was worth a try at least, because otherwise they were on top of the damn train for nothing. Hob pulled off her gloves and tucked them under the toe of her boot, then covered the lock with her hands. The metal was already damn hot from the sun, and more sunlight, more heat beat down on her head and shoulders. She drank it into her blood until her head practically swam, then shoved it all back out, focused down onto the much smaller point of the lock. She pushed so hard she couldn’t breathe for a moment and her vision whited out.
Coyote grabbed her by the arm when she started to list to the side. But she felt metal sag under her fingertips, saw it turning to blackened slag. She panted into the confines of her helmet to try to get her breath back. After giving her arm a little shake to make sure she was steady enough, Coyote tugged the hatch open.
Hob laughed a little giddily and pulled on her gloves. “Bet they’ll think it was just a little too much sun.”
Coyote snorted. “Well, when the other option is believing your train got invaded by a fire-breathing witch, I suppose so.”
They dropped down onto a stack of crates, pulling out small handcranked flashlights; nothing helpful in the tail-end car. There was a door they could use to get between the cars, normally for guards and engineers, and it wasn’t even locked. A little more cautious now, they moved up through the train.
At the fourth car up, they found the medical supply candy store, everything that Davey had told Hob to look for and more. Like they were shopping instead of stealing, they picked through, taking just a box here and a bag there, carefully calculating and weighing to make sure they weren’t taking too much to carry in their saddlebags. They grabbed medicine and bandages, as well as a couple of fancier bits of technology that Hob had never seen and felt dubious about, but Coyote insisted were a good idea. Coyote climbed up to the roof and Hob handed him the boxes to pitch off after they warned Freki and Geri that supplies were coming.
Hob shimmied back up the stack of crates, glancing behind to make sure there were no obvious bootprints. Coyote shut the hatch behind her as she climbed back onto the roof, laughing when she cussed, fumbling for the polarizer switch. “How about you go down there first this time,” she told Coyote. “You can show me how it’s done, since you made it look so damn pretty.”
“I’ll get nervous if you watch me too intently.” There was a shit-eating grin in his voice. Coyote climbed down the ladder, wind whipping the tail of his coat. “Get as close as you can, Geri.” The motorcycle moved in. “Closer. Closer. A little closer…”
“Any closer, and I’m gonna crash,” Geri said.
“You’ll be fine. Hold it steady.” Coyote let go with one hand and foot, the wind blowing him around like a kite. He made an odd yelping noise, then pulled himself back around, reached out his foot and got it onto the back of Geri’s bike. Then he just stepped across, grabbing Geri’s shoulders and dropping down so fast that the motorcycle bounced. But Geri got it away, moving out from the train. “Think you can do that?”
Hob gritted her teeth. “Bet it’ll be easier for me, since I ain’t got little stubby legs like you.” She waited for Freki to get up as close as he could, maybe even a little closer than Geri had, like he was trying to make up for his twin showing him up before. She was ready for the wind trying to yank at her, didn’t almost get blown off the ladder like Coyote. She stepped across and stood on the seat, hands grabbing Freki’s jacket so hard that her fingers ached, then settled down more slowly, not wanting to knock him off balance.
“Now who’s trying to look pretty?” Coyote said.
And then they were off, curving back and away from the train, aiming toward the butte where the other two bikes waited. Only then did she let herself laugh, and whoop, but that was all right. The men were yelling their damn fool heads off too, a mix of shouts and “Did you see that? Did you fuckin’ see that?”
Felt like they’d done more than just a little robbery.
* * *
“The hell were you thinkin’, girl?” Old Nick’s voice was painful to hear, all raw crackles and gravel.
Hob hid a flinch in her shrug, dropping the stack of flimsies she held on the rickety bedside table. “What’d I do this time, you old bastard?”
Nick struggled up a little higher against the pillows. “I’m sick. I ain’t gone stupid. And watch your goddamn mouth.”
Hob stared right in to his evil, yellowed eye, crossing her arms over her chest. “Thought we were bein’ casual, seeing as you’re callin’ me girl again.”
The old man’s thin, pale lips curled up in a snarl, his eye narrowing. But he blinked first. “Fine. The hell were you thinkin’, Hob?”
It should have felt like victory. Instead, it just made her feel small and mean, watching his shoulders heave every time he sucked in a breath. “I was thinkin’ money’s thin and bills are big, and there were things we were needin’.” Considering the bottle of medicine that sat next to those flimsies, still in its pretty TransRift wrappings, she wasn’t going to waste any more of his time by pretending not to know what he was asking about.
“So it was you.” Nick covered his face with one pale, spidery hand.
“Who else would it be?”
&nb
sp; “They fuckin’ listened to you? I was hopin’ Coyote, maybe. Man’s a fountain of stupid ideas.”
Hob snorted, not bothering to feel insulted. “This idea weren’t stupid, and was all mine. Mayhap I finally done redeemed myself.” Enough smart, competent ideas to outweigh the big stupid only her and Nick knew. It still wasn’t enough, but if she saved each Wolf’s life a thousand times by thinking clear, maybe it would be. She pointed at the flimsies, hoping to get him off the track. “Brought all the stuff you need to look at and sign. It’s mostly bills. People ain’t so eager to hire us right now. Imagine that.”
“And turning thief ain’t gonna help that neither.”
“We still got to eat. Need medicine for people. Not just you.”
“I’m still in charge here!” Nick drew himself up as much as he could, shoulders shaking as he muffled a cough with his hands. He continued on, a smear of bright red on his lips that he didn’t even seem to notice. “Whether I’m ridin’ around with you meat sacks or sittin’ pretty in this room. You get any other bright fuckin’ ideas, you run ’em by me.”
She wanted to snarl at him, and shout, but that bead of blood on his lips had her transfixed. “I’ll be sure to do that.” He wasn’t angry, not really; she knew what angry looked like on the man. No, the emotion written in the lines of his face was something else entirely: fear.
“Now get the hell out of here afore you piss me off again. You tryin’ to kill me? Man in my delicate condition…” He grinned.
Only it didn’t seem like such a joke. “Fine. When you’re done with that stack of flimsies, you just have someone tell me.” Hob turned to go.
“Take my guns with you. They need cleanin’.”
Hob glanced at him, but his face was unreadable as always. He probably meant it as a punishment, some little shit job to get back at her for doing something he disliked in the most petty way possible. But it felt more like a treat than anything. Those pistols were heavy with history, art that could kill a man easy as breathing. “Yessir. I’ll get right on it.” She injected enough sarcasm into her tone to keep him happy if punishment was his aim.
Gun belt rolled and tucked in one arm, she let herself out of the room. Coyote leaned next to the door. At her glance, he pushed off the wall and followed her, instead of going in to see Nick like she’d expected.
“Ain’t even bein’ subtle about your eavesdroppin’ these days,” she commented.
“You make it sound so ugly when you put it like that.” He grinned. “I expected there to be a lot more yelling, though. I had to press my ear against the door to hear anything at all.”
“Think if he’d tried to yell more, it’d kill him.” Hob thumped down the stairs, Coyote on her heels, and he stuck there like her shadow as she crossed the exercise yard, headed up to Old Nick’s office. “What ya want, Coyote? Ain’t got time for games.”
Coyote stopped in the doorway of the office, leaning there with studied casualness. “We’ve got nothing but time. Which seems a shame. We find a whole new set of useful skills, and he wants us to keep them under wraps.”
Hob watched the man carefully, trying to get a read on his game. Coyote had always been a good poker player, though, just smiling idly away like he didn’t have a care in the world and he’d just mentioned wasn’t the weather so lovely today? His narrow brown eyes gave away nothing. “World went tits up in a single night. Old man’s scared. Lot of people are.”
“But you’re not.”
“And neither are you, but that’s ’cause you’re bugshit crazy.” Hob set Nick’s gun belt on his desk. The yellowed bone of the butts stood out against the dark leather and blackened wood. She gave the metal chair she’d finally dragged behind the desk a nasty look, then gave up and sat on it.
He laughed, touching the brim of his hat with one finger. “Once upon a time – a week ago – so was Nick Ravani. Scared isn’t a good way to get fed.”
“But it’s sure a good way of stayin’ alive.”
“Until you starve.”
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “You heard what he said. You askin’ me to disobey him? You gone fucking mental for real?”
Coyote shrugged one shoulder. “I can have the bright ideas if you’d rather not.”
“Never knew you to be a goddamn lawyer. What are you trying to pull?”
“Making certain you understand your possibilities. I’ve still no idea what you did, three years ago, to put the Ravani in such a rage. But think carefully on the fact that as much as he’s worked to grind you into paste, he worked just as hard to not throw you away.” He touched the brim of his hat, his voice taking on a mimicked twang. “Thank you kindly, sir.”
Hob stared at him and said the only thing that came to mind: “Get the fuck outta my office.” Except she should have said Nick’s office. Coyote laughed and sauntered away.
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nick was not a man on the mend, but neither was he a man at death’s door. He hung for weeks in a strange sort of limbo, too sick to be anything but terminal, but too damn mean to give up. Every day, he swallowed down a handful of pills at the insistence of Davey Painter, the vet who would be a doctor. And he smoked constantly, on his own insistence.
He wasn’t able to walk much any more, let alone ride, but he still worked. He had all the files brought to the infirmary. There were bills to pay and mouths to feed, though the sorts of jobs that could provide money for those were getting more and more scarce.
When you knocked over a town like you had more balls than sense, the things people wanted you to do were a similar level of dangerous and ballsy. Being in the bad graces of the company, being known murderers and thieves, made it hard to get legitimate work. They weren’t just flying under company radar now, offering to do things Mariposa wouldn’t. They stained everything they touched with that criminal element, and there was a price on Nick’s head at least, big enough that people not wearing TransRift blue might be personally interested in his death. The reward offer on information about the Wolves wasn’t a comforting number either, though them who knew much would keep their mouths shut.
If he’d been a braver man, Nick might have said fuck it, thrown himself right into that spiral down to hell and seen how high they could get that price to go. Fuck the company, fuck this world, fuck it proper. The Wolves would follow him, with varying amounts of glee. Most of them had no use for the damn world and the small-minded towns that spat them out into the desert.
But looking death in the eye had a way of changing a man. Knowing that his brother and sister-in-law had been murdered by the company he’d already angered made him cautious, reminded him that no one was safe. Maybe that should have made him angrier, but he was too tired for that now, too tired and too damn old, outliving his parents and a brother twelve years his junior, coming within a hair’s breadth of outliving his niece in the process, his own damn adopted daughter too.
Those thoughts bounced in his head as his cigarette burned down to the filter and he stared uncomprehendingly at a letter from Clarence Vigil. The message was half progress report on Mag’s wellbeing, half veiled labor talk, all implication and secretive phrases about maybe needing a hand from the Wolves, like they could even put a scratch in an endless army of empty blue suits.
“Nick?” Dambala said.
He looked up, ash falling from his cigarette and onto the letter, obscuring Clarence’s terrible chicken-scratch handwriting. Dambala stood as his second now that Makaya was gone, and that was his fault as well. Dambala was a good man, but he didn’t have the fire, didn’t have the spine to stand up to Nick when he needed it. That was something Makaya had been so very good at. She’d always challenged him and told him where to stick his orders when she thought they were stupid.
Well, she had almost every time. Every time but the last, most important one.
“What?” he asked, fatigue dulling his voice.
“Message for you. Another one.” Dambala offered him a f
limsy folded to be an envelope. “Was at one of the drop points, so I can leave your answer back there if you like.”
Nick grunted, unfolding the flap of the envelope. A sliver of bone rolled out onto his lap. He froze, staring at the ivory stark against the dark brown blanket over his legs. “Never you mind. I’ll handle this.”
“Nick…?”
“You didn’t see nothin’. Just get out.” He waited until Dambala had shut the door, then got out of bed and dressed himself. He had to keep pausing to lean against the chair or sit and listen to his breath rattle in his chest. His clothes were looser than he remembered them being, his coat hanging off his shoulders, and his belt tightened down to the last hole and still not quite enough. Still, he was sufficiently quick on his feet as he dodged out of the infirmary and let himself through a trapdoor, down into one of the escape tunnels. No one saw him, though that wasn’t so much speed as cunning. Cunning was always worth a damn sight more anyway.
The Bone Collector waited for him in the gulch where the escape tunnel let out. Nick barely had to step from behind the camouflage tarp and the man was right there, standing straight and silent, his staff planted firm against the stony ground. Angry red welts stood out on his face, like a vivid slap across his cheek. His normally calm expression was gone; the bones on his staff rattled as he trembled.
“The hell happened to you?” Nick asked.
“A new witch hunt has begun. They’ve brought out one of their… Weathermen.” The Bone Collector’s lip curled as if just the word alone tasted foul.
Nick fumbled for his cigarette case. He’d left it behind. “We’ve already gone to ground. Best we stay that way and not get noticed. Suggest you do the same, just slide beneath the radar and don’t come back up till they done fucked back off ’cause they’re bored.”
“And what about those still in the towns?”
“Can’t do anythin’ for them. If there’s a hunt started, it’s already too late. You know this. You know how the last one went.”
