The Bone Roses

by Kathryn Lee Martin

  The words slip right through my mental defenses. He talks about Henny like he knows the guy personally . . .

  “What endgame move?” I test him. “What’s coming for us? And why give up information like this to a rustler in the first place?”

  “You Rondonians are providing plenty of entertainment for the Kingdom right now on the radio and I like to level the playing field just to see what happens. Never works. But even so, in a few days—” He glances over his shoulder. “Complete and total destruction is coming, so I’d keep that in mind before you shoot.”

  The metal hothouse door crashes open. Angry footsteps storm across the cement floor. Frigid air sweeps through the cornstalks, rattling their leaves. In seconds, several sets of furious eyes are upon the foreigner and me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tracker seizes the foreigner’s jacket and hoists the young man off the ground in one swift motion.

  “Wait, I can explain—” The foreigner’s eyes flash in recognition and immediately turn to terror. He squirms and tries to break free but Frank moves in behind him and seizes both of his thin wrists.

  A fist strikes his jaw. Tracker towers over him, face twisted in a menacing snarl, right fist clenched.

  I’ve never seen him look at anyone like that.

  Another strike from Tracker makes the foreigner stagger. I flinch at the brutality. We’re not supposed to do things like this. If we must kill, we do it quickly and as humanely as possible. Never like this.

  Tracker strikes again. The foreigner staggers again, blood dripping against the cement floor.

  He’s K. C., that little voice says, and I try to turn away. You were going to kill him yourself. He’s a threat and we deal with threats, but not like this. Never like this.

  The foreigner yelps. His body trembles and his legs shake. He turns his green eyes to look up, pleading for forgiveness, mercy, a chance to beg for his life.

  Tracker won’t grant it and hits him again.

  This is wrong.

  Shuffling footsteps, belonging to farmer Addison, advance from the doorway. The old farmer hobbles, shotgun in his frail hands. His wrinkled face is flushed, but his gray eyes offer a gentleness to rival the judgment being carried out as they meet mine.

  You can stop this, they say.

  I turn back to the foreigner. If Tracker doesn’t beat him to death, they’ll shoot him. It won’t be quick. They’ll make him suffer.

  Those grass-green eyes rest on me briefly, full of pain and desperation.

  Help me.

  He’s the enemy. I try to look away but am drawn back the moment I hear him struck again.

  We are not rustlers right now. We have become the K. C. Matthew wouldn’t stand by and let this happen. He’d do something. Anything.

  “Stop it,” the words barely rising above a whisper. “Don’t hit him.”

  “This doesn’t involve you, Rags.” Tracker draws his arm back again in what will likely be a fatal blow.

  “No.” I seize his wrist. “Wait.”

  Tracker’s furious brown eyes turn on me. “Let go.”

  I shake my head. “No. Please.”

  This isn’t the wise, humble man who raised me and taught me what’s right and what’s wrong. The man I consider my father—this man is a monster.

  “Rags.” Frank gives me an equally stern look

  My wrist quivers and I’m too afraid to let go; too stubborn to give in.

  “Please. Don’t hit him.”

  Tracker reaches a hand around and grabs my jacket collar. My buckskin jacket’s collar tightens around my throat. His nostrils flare. Sweat coats his dark brow.

  “I said let go.”

  Those hostile brown eyes don’t blink. His wrist twists, easily picking me up. Sharp pain jolts my spine, paralyzing every muscle and forcing me to let go. He turns back to the stranger, leaving me lying on the cold cement floor.

  Seconds pass. He’s never laid a hand on me before now. Not even in his angriest moments. I draw a hesitant breath, fighting back tears. Just like how the slave master treated us in the pens . . .

  “We are not K. C.” The rifle feels clumsy in my hands. I sit on the floor, legs folded under me, trying to pretend that this man isn’t Tracker.

  I don’t want to believe it’s him. Tracker would never do something like this.

  With his gloved hand, he seizes the rifle. Tracker’s brown eyes have lost their patience and he jerks the weapon away.

  “You’re going to kill him.”

  Tracker’s look confirms it.

  “But he’s—” Someone who knows Henny. Someone we can interrogate for information.

  “He’s Kingdom Corps,” Frank says.

  “You know the rules.” Tracker rests the rifle butt against the floor. “Now go home. You don’t need to see this.”

  “Don’t do it.” The foreigner squirms in Frank’s grasp. “I can help—”

  I make a grab for the rifle. Tracker is faster.

  “If I have to, I will take you home by force.” He grinds his fingers against the rifle’s barrel. “Now leave. And you,” he snarls at the foreigner. “Not one more word.”

  My legs wobble as I stand. The bone roses in my pocket offer little comfort as I will myself to look him in the eyes. “Does Jericho know about this?”

  “This doesn’t involve him.” This definitely isn’t Tracker. Every matter in Rondo involves Jericho.

  “Like it doesn’t involve me? I’m the one who caught him.” I point at the foreigner, praying this will buy me some time to interrogate him. “Don’t I have a right to finish what I started?”

  Fleeting hope lights up the foreigner’s bruised and bloodied face.

  “Go home.”

  “Not until I get my prisoner back. I’m a rustler too, damn it.”

  “She’s right,” Addison says with an approving nod.

  Every head turns to the old man. He makes an arthritic gesture to the foreigner as if the two men are acting childish. “What would you like to do, Rags?”

  Tracker’s eyes cut to me, not at all pleased.

  Standing up for our rustling laws will only delay the inevitable, but it won’t just be a cold-blooded murder without Jericho’s official “okay,” even though I have every right to carry it out so long as I follow the rustler’s code.

  A code that includes the right to get any and all information I can out of my prisoner before he’s executed, and this one’s full of it.

  Looking to Addison I tip my chin. “I want this sorted out the right way.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do.” Addison shuffles to the door; boney fingers hook around the handle as he moves his shotgun in silent command for us to go on ahead.

  Tracker doesn’t return our Damascus rifle. Instead he uses it to force the foreigner out in front of him. His eyes warn that if he even so much as stumbles, he’ll drop him faster than he does to an animal when we go hunting.

  The foreigner seems to know it too because he doesn’t waste any time and hooks his fingers behind his back the moment Frank releases him.

  The big, burly man pulls out a pocketknife and roots through the cornstalks until he finds one tethered against a support pole. The twine snaps and it’s handed to me.

  It slithers through my fingers. I catch it with my thumb and quickly loop it around the foreigner’s thin wrists. Threading it a few more times than I want to, a knot tugs into place.

  I place my palm between his shoulder blades and give him a light shove. His shoulders tense; he tests the twine with his wrists, but he makes no move to break it.

  We walk past Addison and Frank, into the cold.

  Sleet drums the metal hothouse and clicks in time with our footsteps. The icy crystals cling to my eyelashes. I don’t wipe them away for fear that the motion will get me sent to the group’s rear. They fall harder as Addison’s farmstead vanishes behind us.

  The foreigner bows his head.

  Behind us Tracker’s feet move slowly and deliberat
ely as though well versed in marching prisoners to their deaths. The chain-link fence towers over us on both sides. Icicles hang from the rusted razor-wire. A corroded sign lies half buried in the snow, its letters impossible to make out. It’s remaining, tiny golden loops jingle in the frigid breeze.

  I place a hand on the foreigner’s shoulder and move closer. Two millows stand sentinel, one on each side at the trail fork. Their branches intertwine, forming a skeletal arbor. The foreigner balks but I steer him toward it.

  Whispers begin among the few battered and wounded villagers wandering the streets. They look at us, sunken eyes condemning and harboring bitterness so thick they look like wraiths among the haze and smoke. Their clothes hang in tatters; soot stains their faces. Hair unkempt, women pull their thin and trembling children to their sides and bare their teeth like angry wolves.

  The whispers cease under Tracker’s glare. The looks don’t, those follow us the whole way through the ruined street.

  Flames crackle in the smoky haze. The square still burns; the gray Victorian little more than a smoldering husk as men struggle to heave buckets of ice and snow on the spreading flames. If the winds shift, all of Rondo will be ablaze.

  I guide the foreigner around charred boards and shattered bricks. His grass-green eyes investigate the destruction. We don’t take the storehouse street. Instead, we head to the last spoke in our broken wagon-wheel square—Rondo’s slums.

  Above us, frayed ropes stretch between the brick buildings. Ragged clothes flap in the afternoon breeze. Many of the windows are boarded up while crates and old, rusted military trucks clutter the road.

  We walk deeper into the shadows and stop at a black door at the street’s end. Beside it, someone mounted a plaque on the bricks. Even if I could read it, I don’t need letters to know who lives here.

  Frank takes the lead. The door’s rusted hinges shriek as cold, stuffy air wraps around us. An old mahogany desk sits at the room’s center, its occupant missing. Several sheets of aged paper, ink still fresh, lay on it while a group of pens sit wedged in a coffee cup beside a card deck with scantily clad “Solstice” women.

  I’d just love to sweep everything onto the floor—childish, but worth it.

  “Damn Lawrence—never around when we need him.” Frank shakes his head and tugs at a drawer. It’s locked. “Bastard probably has the keys on him.”

  Tracker grumbles something under his breath and plucks a small bronze key from the wall. He hands it to Frank.

  Key in hand, the burly man waves us over to the door behind the desk.

  I nudge the foreigner down the rickety stairwell and into the closest thing Rondo has to a jail. A single, rusted lantern casts its light across the iron bars when Frank lights it. A wooden cot hangs from the gray blocks with corroded chains, settling against a mildew-frosted wall.

  Exposed pipes run across the ceiling. A boiler stands sentry in the corner.

  Frank unlocks the cell closest to the stairs.

  The foreigner balks but I force him into the cell with a stern shove just as the barred door shrieks shut.

  Tracker’s fingers stiffen against the rifle, as though weighing a heavy choice. After several seconds, he holds the rifle out to me.

  I don’t accept it.

  “Take it,” he commands. “You’ll be using it shortly.”

  Those words are both a privilege and a punishment.

  My hands tremble under the rifle’s weight. It doesn’t feel like the same weapon that’s saved my life countless times. This isn’t a tool for protection anymore. This time it will carry out an execution.

  So? You went after Henny no problem, the rustler in me none-too-gently reminds. And you knocked this foreigner down to fight him as well.

  That’s different. I want to say. He attacked us and killed Matthew.

  This foreigner is no saint either. Deep down inside, I know this is a justified act I’ll be carrying out today. It was justified the moment this green-eyed foreigner set foot in Rondo and mentioned Henny’s name.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Definitely not my finest moment.” The foreigner stands near the bars, those odd grass-green eyes watching me. Bruises mar his pale flesh where his right eye is swollen, and drying blood tints the skin under his nose. He offers up a sheepish smile despite a wince. “Sorry you had to see that.”

  When I don’t reply he pokes his chin through the bars. “Thanks back there. I owe you one.”

  “Who are you?” Tracker will return soon with Jericho and God forbid, Hunter. And when they get here he’ll be handed a guilty verdict and a death sentence. Jericho is fair and practices what he preaches, but he also upholds our principles and Rondo’s rules. Especially when Rondo is vulnerable.

  “Colton Caelan Fieldson.”

  Fieldson? I adjust the rifle and lean against the wooden stair railing.

  “Fieldson’s got his paws in just about everything that goes on in the Kingdom.” The soldier from the snowfield’s words haunt me. He was also in cahoots with Henny . . .

  “Not . . . what I asked.”

  “Sure it was.” His smile intensifies.

  “Look.” I try to banish the soldiers’ words and the sick feeling creeping in. “I’m really not in the mood for games right now, Mister Fieldson.”

  “Polite and cute. No need for the Mister, or the Fieldson. Colton works fine enough.”

  “Either answer the question or be quiet.”

  He leans his shoulder against the bars. “So, what’s your name?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “No, seriously. Your name. What is it?”

  “Whatever they’re calling me nowadays.” I stop short of pandering to Hunter’s “blue-eyed witch” theory. Right now I just want to get this straightened out so I can work on fixing my Henny problem and maybe, just maybe, grieving the death of my best friend.

  “You’re an odd one—different from the wanted criminal that just about knocked me over fleeing from Hydra’s market the other day.” He studies the rip in my jacket sleeve. “Got anything to do with that nice little shiner he landed on you by any chance? Because I know you didn’t get that in Hydra.”

  Great. I capture the one Kingdom Corps person with a good memory. “Just tell me what you know about Henny.”

  “Henny?” He gets this funny look on his face and snorts.

  “You know, blond guy, looks like a woman when his hair’s down.”

  Colton looks away, shoulders quivering.

  “It’s not funny.”

  “No.” He closes his eyes and tries to compose himself. It doesn’t work. “I’m not laughing at that. It’s just that, well, never mind.”

  “What?”

  “No one’s ever had the balls to call him a woman.”

  “Yeah?” I jostle the rifle for a more comfortable position wishing Jericho was here. “Well, I’m not afraid to, so I suggest you don’t waste my time.”

  He eyes the weapon. “Well, I can’t really complain. I’d rather be executed by a beautiful wild girl than the locals.”

  I place a foot on the first wooden stair.

  “Wait, don’t go.” His voice shifts from lighthearted to serious. “You want to know what’s coming for you, right?”

  I stop.

  “Get the hell out of Rondo. Don’t look back. Take whatever and whoever you can and go. Go tonight.”

  I fix my eyes on him.

  “Our dearest Henny is a bit quirky with how he does things and if it was just him dicking around in some nobody hick town to find something, you’d be fine. But you’re not playing solely against him.” He stares at me. “You’re up against Hyperion and the whole Kingdom will be listening when he makes a permanent example of Rondo and everyone in it.”

  “And you know this how, exactly?” He might as well just outright admit he’s a soldier. Likely high ranking if what I heard the other night from those soldiers held any truth. If he is high ranking, that makes him valuable as a hostage at least.


  “Meh, Henny leaves his diary open sometimes and it’s not like I don’t have access to the Kingdom’s radio network back home to hear the weekly broadcasts or anything. But, seriously, leave. Henny’s going to publically crush you guys.”

  “Why now?” It’s not like rustlers aren’t in every settlement. It’s just as illegal there as it’s supposed to be here. And why wait until now to crush us? For as long as I remember from my time calling Rondo sanctuary we’ve always been exiled from Hyperion’s “good” graces.

  “Don’t know. Don’t honestly care.” The light twitch near his eye gives him away.

  “Oh, I think you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Look buddy,” the rifle shifts in my hands, “lying to me isn’t going to save you. Once that door opens, it’s pretty much over for you. So if you know something, now’s a really good time to offer it up.”

  “Aye, a trial eh?” He glances at me with a mischievous, knowing look. “Seemed like I was already condemned when the Kingdom’s former second-in-command tried to beat the hell outta me. Like I told you before, Frost Flea, I wouldn’t be a very good prisoner if I just told you everything.”

  Former second-in-command? I freeze. That explains the Damascus . . . I think I’m going to be sick . . .

  “I’d be more than happy to show you though,” he continues. “Assuming you’ll do a favor for me of course.” His words curl slyly around the damp basement.

  “Will you shut up for a second?” The info tumbles around in my brain. Kingdom. K. C. Former second-in-command. Tracker . . . That would explain why he didn’t want me near Henny. He knows more about the Kingdom than he lets on. A lot more . . . And he’s been lying a long time from the sounds of it.

  I lean against the stair’s railing. I’m going to be sick.

  I should turn away now, admit to the “grown-ups” that I know precious little about being a rustler and leave him for Tracker to deal with. This isn’t the place for me. Not now, not ever. I don’t belong here. I can’t though.