Sadie clears her throat and makes a slight gesture to the trampled path. She says nothing, only offers a pleading look for us to sort this out before they ruin a life before it can begin. I tip my chin in agreement and watch her waddle into the shadows, casting not even the slightest glance at the soldiers standing sentinel on each side.
Tracker’s brown eyes narrow.
No, they say to a question I didn’t even ask yet.
My fingers work against my palms to drive away the cold and my shoulders bristle.
Tracker shakes his head as if I didn’t understand the first time. Snowflakes cling to his short gray hair and the graying stubble dusting his dark chin.
This is not open to debate. He points to Witherwood Lane’s end, the little white church, and the snowfield just beyond them both.
I suppress a glare.
“No,” he speaks the word aloud. The way he says it is different than his usual commanding tone. I’ve only heard him use this warning tone twice, and never in a gentle way.
I look down at the ground and dig my boot toe into the snow.
Tracker stands there, eyes on me and frowns.
I burrow both cold hands into my jacket pockets.
Behind us, snow crunches under hurried footsteps. My fingers brush against the switchblade in case Henny changes his mind.
The footsteps slow into an uneven, striding gait I’m more than familiar with. I draw a shaky breath, throat thick and raw. Anyone but him right now.
“Tracker, Rags,” Jericho’s light, Midland Territory drawl warms the frigid air like it did earlier today. Only this time, he’s got something worse than a fight at the fountain on his hands.
He runs a hand through his unkempt, wavy, copper hair. His forgiving and strange brown eyes trail to the bloodstains on my jacket and its fringes, widening with a questioning look to Tracker. When he sees Matthew isn’t with us, the gaze softens. A shaky breath passes through his thin lips and he strides by with a quick wave for us to walk with him.
His dark overcoat smells earthen and swishes in time to limping strides. He’s still wearing his cross; probably listening to the Kingdom’s weekly broadcast for updates regarding Rondo on the church’s old radio and waiting for Frank to get back from the mines when the K. C. stormed the place.
I fall in step beside him.
“What a miserable Sunday.” He glances at me before looking to the little white church rising from the snowdrifts with a signal to pay close attention. “The weather’s even awful today. Especially that harsh southern wind.”
I stand a little straighter. Father Jericho rarely leaves the church unless Rondo needs him. When he’s not spiritually trying to keep our souls out of Hell, he’s either establishing order in the settlement like he did this morning or constantly fueling the rumor mill by preventing Hunter and the villagers from sacrificing me.
Some say I look like him. That my pale face is thin and oval like his. My nose is small and set like his. I’m wiry like him. Even my hair has an almost similar but lesser pronounced wave when it’s brushed all nice and proper.
Jericho doesn’t have any children of his own, so he claims. Only Matthew, and even then, I’m told he took Matthew in like Tracker took me in. But when he says he has no children of his own, there’s this sadness in his strange brown eyes that doesn’t sit right and only fuels the rumors.
His eyes aren’t blue though from what I can tell, but a strange lighter brown and I don’t share his copper-colored hair. Mine’s mahogany with only the faintest copper highlights if that. I’m taller than Jericho too by about an inch.
That doesn’t keep them from talking and throwing their support to Hunter’s unfounded witch-hunt though. Thanks to my skills as a rustler and uncanny ability to stay ahead of the Kingdom Corps like a phantom, to the people of Rondo, I’m some kind of mysterious black-magic-peddling demon spawn, likely sent to steal their souls. And like all good witch-hunts, it starts with getting on the good side of the last known preacher in the world since they think I enchanted my way into being protected by him.
Jericho draws a long breath and hunches his shoulders. “The wind comes in from the ridges and batters that poor little church.”
I sense the K. C.’s eyes on our group. Jericho pretends he doesn’t know they’re listening. He’s smart though, smarter than us all, and knows quite a few things about stepping on their toes.
Gone is the shaking of his voice; simmering anger takes hold. He’s not a preacher right now, but a grieving father. There’s only one thing he’s referring to and it has nothing to do with the weather.
I tilt my chin upward to signal I’m listening.
Tracker frowns in stern warning.
A soldier’s rifle clicks; his attention turning to us.
Jericho pretends not to notice. “So much noise and destruction. Why this morning, it tore off the back window’s shutters and damaged the steeple.”
Jericho wrinkles his nose, one eye on a nearby soldier turning to another beside him. A few K. C. peel from their group. I worry the switchblade under my fingertips.
“That unfortunate steeple.” He shakes his head and eyes the church. “In the middle of the night, it woke me up because a gust battered it. I’m a little worried it’s going to fall on someone, so if we can, I’d like to get some climbers up there and at least tie it down so it doesn’t collapse.”
The soldiers’ boots sink in the snow.
Tracker nods, understanding the hidden orders. “Anything we can do to help?”
“That depends.” He eyes me. “How do you feel about helping me secure it better? Lord knows you can climb.”
He’s not giving me a choice. Henny’s attention hasn’t gone unnoticed and right now I’m a safe bet at driving him from Rondo. I owe it to Matthew to attend this urgent meeting tonight, even if Tracker disapproves.
A rifle jostles in a clumsy soldier’s hands behind us.
Jericho spins on his heel, maintaining his gentle façade.
“God bless you, dear friends. Is there something I can help you with?” He says it as though the soldiers are welcome in Rondo. Inside, he’s seething like the rest of us.
The soldiers halt, unaccustomed to being addressed by a genuine preacher. The only religion in the Kingdom involves worshipping Hyperion and his policies and these two are devoted disciples.
“What are you doing?”
I grant them a quick glance, recognizing the tears in their uniforms and the bloodstains drawn by my switchblade. Fantastic.
“Just admiring God’s beautiful canvas on my way home.” Jericho points to the little white church. “And thinking about my sheep.”
The soldier looks up, probably rolling his eyes at Jericho’s words.
“And her?” Their fingers drum against their rifle stocks.
Mine curl around the switchblade. This time I’ll finish the job.
“She was on her way home for the day, good sir.”
I flinch. Just what we need tonight, a reason for the K. C. to go sniffing around our farmhouse.
The first hesitates and looks to his buddy for their next move. He scans us over, pausing between Tracker and me.
“Not worth our time.” After several long seconds he turns back to his post. The second soldier stands there, uncertain. The thought of taking on two rustlers and a preacher loses appeal fast and he retreats to catch up with his comrade.
Jericho and Tracker fall in step beside me.
“Well that was eventful.” Jericho steps onto the church’s tiny, warped porch. “But yes, as I was saying, do think on the steeple thing. The faster we secure it, the less likely it is to fall.”
“I will.” Also known as rustler for, I’ll be there, you can count on it, even if Tracker doesn’t agree with that choice. But I can’t just sit back and do nothing. Not now. Not with everything that has happened.
“Good.” He places a hand on the church door’s corroded handle. For a moment he stands in the dull candlelight spilling throug
h the doorway, a sad smile on his face. “You will get through this, Rags. God and his angels be with you.”
I sure hope so, Jericho. I really hope so. Tracker doesn’t wait for the door to shut before he starts walking.
Behind us, the two K. C. soldiers whisper between themselves, casting looks our way every few seconds. They’ll run to Henny the moment we’re out of sight.
Let them run. I grit my teeth. We’ll be ready.
Chapter Eight
Fifty yards from the church, “civilization” ends. The road vanishes under a drifting white ocean that rises and falls with the crosswinds. Remnants of warehouses and laboratories from Rondo’s Kingdom days rise from its depths, broken down and stripped of everything useful, and appearing larger than they do from the ridge overlooking them.
A rusted chain-link fence snakes a crude path across the half-mile-long snowfield. If it wasn’t for farmer Addison’s hothouses on the other side, no one but us would ever venture this far westward.
And the anthracite mines. Somewhere in that Western Ridge is a labyrinth of tunnels that supply the village with off-and-on-again electricity. I’ve been told stories of a fire that burns deep within those mines, started in what was once a pre-Yellowstone town not far from here called Centralia. It was also one of the reasons Rondo was built here. I don’t know how they did it, but farmer Addison worked with Frank Williams and his coal miners to implement a system using the heat to keep those hothouses running. It’s a noble effort on everyone’s behalf, but even so, that doesn’t keep us all from going hungry during the endless famine seasons.
Our old farmhouse stands on the hill closest to Witherwood Lane’s end. It’s a battered wooden building that existed even before Rondo. The siding peeled away, leaving splintered boards and a few cockeyed shutters that clack and groan in the wind. Only half the roof is still intact and the front porch sags.
A dead willow’s skeletal branches twist and bend. The trunk leans away from the house, tethered to a corroded metal fence with a rusty chain. Words, clumsy like those of a child’s scrawl, are carved deep into its trunk.
I try not to shiver.
Matthew and Jericho’s faded-blue cottage looms nearby. Little wooden window boxes hold the wilted remnants of paper flowers. A small welcome sign hangs on the door. The handmade swing where Matthew and I spent more than a few late afternoons joking and exchanging stories while watching the snow fall rocks back and forth, clacking against the cottage’s siding.
I can’t look at any of it right now.
The farmhouse door sticks. I shake the snow from my boots and lean my shoulder against it. It gives and bumps inward, striking an oak cupboard.
“Rags.” Tracker eases the door shut behind us once we step inside the small kitchen. “We need to talk.”
I swipe a hand up across the chicken-patterned wallpaper and flip a light switch. Nothing, as usual. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Look at me when I am talking to you.”
I flinch but don’t turn around.
“You’re upset, I understand that. But that’s no excuse to be foolish.”
Foolish? I curl my fingers over a chair’s narrow back. One that just this morning, my best friend was sitting in, alive and well.
“They could have killed you.” He steps closer. “You know better than to—”
“I don’t care,” I snarl, nearly tipping the chair as tears scald my eyes.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Rags,” his voice turns gentle, “it is okay to be upset.”
The chair clacks against the table, bitterness rising in the sorrowful growl. “I’m not upset.”
He says nothing, only watches me. His lip twitches in a frown, the lines on his dark face those of a man too old for this. Pity replaces the anger.
I hate that look.
He uncrosses his arms and places a hand on my shoulder. Throbbing discomfort creeps through the bruised muscles.
I shy away. “Don’t touch me.”
“You’re hurt.” The words stay calm.
Yeah, so what, I want to say, but don’t. Tracker’s shoulders slump in defeat. He walks over to the snow-packed freezer. Opening it, he retrieves a small bag of ice and wraps it in an old, frayed dishtowel, offering it to me. “Here, this will help.”
“Nothing will help.” I grudgingly accept it, watching as he sits at the table and tents his fingers together.
“What has gotten into you lately, Rags?”
Tracker is old, but for a man who knows everything, I would think it’s pretty obvious. Matthew is dead. Gone forever. Nothing’s going to bring him back.
My last memories of him will be him collapsing in that street, bleeding to death and dying in my arms. The young man who killed him is gloating while Hyperion’s forces occupy Rondo, and that same young man will skin and put our corpses on display tomorrow morning if he doesn’t sell me back to the Kingdom.
Tracker sighs. “It’s Hunter, isn’t it.”
My dirty fingernails scratch the chair’s back. Of all the things wrong right now, he goes straight to that. How dare he bring him into—
“Ignore him,” he says like it’s really that easy.
“You can’t be serious.” Discomfort radiates where a civilian’s boot almost broke my right hand as I clutch the icepack. “Matthew is dead and you’re bringing up Hunter?”
“Rags . . .”
“In case you haven’t noticed, my life’s about to suck even worse now thanks to the K. C. showing up. Matthew was an ally, my friend. Someone I trusted. And now he’s gone and Hunter has even more stuff to throw at me than he already did.”
“It only ‘sucks’ as much as you make it.”
“They tried to kill me.” Forget the fact that I routinely risk my life to help provide for them. That what rustlers do decides if a simple treatable illness becomes a deadly outbreak. Or that we’re always being shot at, run out of settlements, forced to kill or be killed on these raids. Only to come home to a settlement that doesn’t realize that if they kill me, life gets harder than it already is because Tracker can’t do this all on his own anymore.
“But they didn’t.” He watches me. “And you’re stronger because of it.”
“The hell I am,” a feral growl works its way to my lips. “First chance they get, they’re going to come after me again. I never thought I’d have to watch my back here like I had to in Hyperion’s slave pens.”
He sits straighter, eyebrows raised. I don’t talk about my life before Rondo often.
“You know I’d never let that happen to you.”
“Yeah, well it sure feels like it sometimes.” I press the icepack to my shoulder. The cold seeps through the buckskin offering small comfort. “Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t better off a slave.”
He’s quiet.
I’m the one who averts my eyes this time. Guilt sends a single teardrop down my cheek. If it weren’t for Tracker, I’d have died three years ago. Frozen to death by Rondo’s ration station where my accidental leap from a Kingdom-bound slave train traveling across the three territories landed me. I owe my life to this man.
“Rags, you know the answer to that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“As long as you live under my roof, they won’t touch you. I won’t let them,” he assures me. “You’ll always have a home here, even if you don’t think so.”
“But what if—” What if you die tomorrow? What if Henny gets his way? What if the K. C. wins this time? What if they take you away like they did Matthew?
“There’s no sense worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet,” he says with absolute certainty, quietly daring me to tell him otherwise. “Nor should you. It leads to being reckless and foolish, which are the quickest ways to die.”
He watches with that same stern look he used around Henny. “You owe it to Matthew not to die.”
I bristle at the words.
“And you are not goi
ng after him.” He stands up. “So don’t even think about it.”
Smoldering anger mingles with the guilt. Doesn’t he realize what’s going to happen tomorrow morning? That if we don’t do something about Henny, he’ll do something about us? There won’t even be anyone to worry and be reckless about.
“He’s a dangerous young man, Rags.”
“He killed Matthew.”
“Which is why I’m going to deal with him and not you.” His brown eyes narrow. “I don’t want you anywhere near that young man, understood.”
“Why? I deserve as much of a chance as anyone else for what he’s done.”
“Because I said so, that’s why. And no, you do not. Not with all that has happened.”
I tense at the edge to his words.
“I want your word that you will not go after him.”
“Fine, I won’t go after him.”
“If you go after him, Hyperion’s pens will be the least of your problems.”
A soldier’s glare. I don’t know what branch of the K. C. Tracker served in, but his comrades must have cowered under that look. My foot inches away from the table a half step.
“Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes sir.”
“Good.” He gestures to the living room. “You should rest before our meeting with Jericho tonight. I’ll find us something for dinner.”
Chapter Nine
I return the makeshift icepack to the freezer and escape through the living room, hanging an immediate right as soon as I make it through the door before Tracker can reprimand me more.
All eleven rickety wooden steps creak underfoot, the twelfth changing to spongy red carpet. Sunflower-yellow walls form a narrow T-shaped hallway with five doors. The first two sit across from each other closest to the top of the stairs. The second two are arranged about a foot away, similar to the first pair of doors, but seated three feet inward on both sides to form the crosspiece of the hallway’s T-shape design. The final door rests at the hallway’s center, facing the stairs.
The Bone Roses Page 6
