“But we were talking about Lou,” Blessing said. “She’s sane as anything. Lou protects the land she’s responsible for from the Returners. That’s her job. It can take days to ride it all. She’s got wildlife cameras and sometimes ecobots to help her out. At least once a month, she rides the whole place. She’s put more Returners into jail or sent them into cities than anybody else.”
“She sent them into cities? Does that work?”
“The little cities. Like Cle Elum. Sometimes they like having hot showers so much they never come back out. Other times they turn into escapers, like you.”
She stiffened. “Just a minute ago, you said I was a wanderer.”
He laughed. “How would I know what you are? All I know is you’re my friend’s sister.”
“You guys have a label for everyone? I came to find Lou. Not to escape.”
“So you were happy in the city?”
“Ecstatic.”
“Thought so.” He stood up and stretched, a tall thin tree trunk of a man with a wide smile, and at the moment laughing at her. “Go on.” He glanced up the same road that they had walked down. “We’ll see you again. The Outside is not as big as it looks. Nowhere near as big as a city.”
Her throat tightened. “I’d love to hear about your life someday.”
He leaned over and gave her a hug, his cheek warm against her forehead. “I’ll keep an eye out for you. Outside is big, but it’s also small.”
Day shook her hand, and then Paula’s, and started off first, his gait smooth and easy. He reminded her a little of the coyotes she’d seen. Lithe. He looked eager to be wherever they were heading to. Cle Elum? Maybe they’d see Lucien and Liselle. Blessing wasn’t too far away yet. She took a few quick steps after them. “If you see some particular Listeners, Lucien and Liselle, tell them I’m okay so far. And pet their dog for me.”
He stopped in his tracks and stared down at her. “Who would have guessed?” He bent down and planted a completely unexpected kiss on her forehead, and then turned and jogged after Day.
She stared after him for a long time, her forehead burning. Paula came up beside her. “There’s only an hour or so before dark. We should go unless you want to stay here for the night.”
Coryn glanced at the debris pile from the barn and then back up after Blessing and Day, but they had rounded a corner and vanished. She took the pack Paula held out to her. “Just a minute.” She hadn’t sent Liselle any pictures of Blessing or Day, or anything else since the storm had gotten worse late that morning. She sent a short message to say she was okay and took a picture of the broken barn and sent it along with a short description of the tornado. She felt a little guilty for not mentioning Blessing or Day. Before she stopped staring at her wristlet, she added a question. Are you okay?
When there was no immediate answer, she started walking. If it was an autobot, why hadn’t it answered?
CHAPTER TWENTY
The cedar above Coryn swayed ever so slightly in the early morning breeze. Birds that had woken her an hour ago grew louder, as if the puff of wind was a signal for extra volume. Back in the city she had used bird sounds on her alarm clock, but they had always obeyed her wishes explicitly.
These birds refused to be muted.
Paula’s arms curled around Coryn’s torso, the robot’s stomach warming her back. Paula put off a tiny bit more heat than a human, and being close to her helped keep the worst edge of cold away. Coryn was pretty sure she’d slept no more than three or four hours all night in spite of the fact that it had stayed clear and quiet.
She stretched the leg that had been cut the day before. It felt stiff, and moving it brought a twinge of pain. Still, it wasn’t as bad as she had feared.
She pushed Paula’s arms away and they sat up at the same time, Paula looking considerably more refreshed than Coryn felt. Coryn grumbled, “You could do me the favor of sleeping badly some night.” Not that Paula slept at all.
They crawled out from under the tree to find the morning sun painting stars of light on the stream that ran down a short bank in front of their sheltering tree. They sat side by side on a rock, and Coryn drank water from the river she’d purified and rubbed her arms together, trying to get warm.
At least there was no wind or rain.
“Any messages during the night?” Paula asked her.
Coryn peered at her wristlet, then stiffened. Help us! We’re under attack. “Oh! Oh my. Oh. We have to go.” She stood up, still staring at her wrist. There were coordinates.
“Why?”
Coryn was already heading for the packs. “Liselle sent me a text. They’re being attacked.”
“Where?”
Coryn stopped, reread the note, whispered a few short commands. “About ten miles I think. They’re ahead of us, same road. We have to hurry.”
“Really, why?” Paula threw her pack on and kept Coryn’s in her hand. “You’ll be faster this way. Go.”
Coryn made a grab for her pack. “I want you to go now. Get there as fast as you can.”
Paula got her no-nonsense look on. “That’s a bad idea.”
She wanted to argue, could argue, but the look on Paula’s face suggested it would take a while. In truth, she was probably right.
Coryn took a deep breath. “Then let’s go.”
She started a little slower than she usually would, controlling her breath to keep her panic down, lengthening her stride. After the first mile, she found a comfortable, quick pace. She avoided her fastest run, though, staying slow enough to react to holes in the road and to last that distance. Almost half a marathon. Paula jogged easily beside her, carrying all of their gear. “I swear,” Coryn said, panting a little, “some days I’d rather be a robot.”
“No,” Paula replied, “you wouldn’t. Every day I want to be human.”
“That’s a cliché.”
“Doesn’t make it a lie.”
“Stupid robot. You should go ahead. We’re not going to get there in time to help them.” She thought about making it an order, forcing Paula, but she didn’t want to lose sight of the robot, not out here.
“Look how much you care. Humans. You break on each other.”
“You care.”
“How do you know?”
Coryn refused to take that particular bait. Yes, Paula was programmed to care. But what was genetics if not programming? Still, she’d lost the argument before, and right now she needed her breath.
They kept running. Coryn’s breath soon became too hard for conversation anyway.
She kept glancing at her wristlet, losing a little speed every time. No new messages came in.
She started slowing down, finally dropping all the way to a desperate, fast walk. Paula made her eat a handful of nuts and a gel energy pill. “It might be okay,” Paula said. “Didn’t they tell us they had defenses?”
“They never said what they were.”
“They’re better defenses if no one knows about them. Get your breath. Drink water.”
Coryn gulped a few mouthfuls, then they were running again, the road fairly straight and long. It hadn’t gotten warm, but Coryn ran with her coat tied around her waist.
At almost eleven o’clock they came up on the caravan. If they hadn’t been looking they would have missed it. But they were looking, and the garish colors gave the vans away.
All three vans had been shoved nose-in to a copse of trees in full leaf. A small stream ran under the front wheels of the yellow van. Lucien lay on the ground by the stream, under a dogwood full of cascades of fine white flowers going brown at the edges. One hand trailed in the water.
She had seen death in games and videos, and once a suicide had jumped close to her, although Paula had hustled her away before she could get close to the broken body. Lou had seen their parents dead, and she hadn’t. Still, she knew immediately that Lucien was gone.
Paula grabbed Coryn’s arm and pulled her to the side, behind the edge of the trees. “Wait. It might not be safe.”
The robot flared her nostrils to draw in a deep sample of air. “Stay here,” she said. She loped around the periphery and then cut through between the vans, moving like running water. She made no sound, as if her feet weren’t even hitting the ground.
Birds twittered and sang, high up in the trees, clearly more in touch with the sky than the ground. Would they be singing if the attackers were still here?
She hated not being able to help. Her frustration turned to slow anger and then worse. She couldn’t stand still forever. She edged forward, taking small steps.
Most of the van windows gaped open and smashed. Tiny bits of glass littered the ground, dull and wicked looking as the first few raindrops pinged against them.
Even from the periphery, Coryn spotted three other bodies. Kimberly, who had made them soup, face up, staring at the rain. Two others she recognized, but whose names she’d never learned. They had fallen right next to each other, the dead man’s arm over the dead woman’s face.
Paula stood staring into one of the vans. She didn’t react as fast as Coryn expected, and when she did turn around there was a warning all over her face and in the way she held herself. “Back up.”
“Is anyone okay?” She noticed her own wording. Anyone instead of everyone.
“No.”
“Liselle?”
“Dead.” Paula was using her most metallic voice. “Don’t touch. This will be a crime scene.”
Coryn’s thoughts raced. She and Paula had to be the first people here except for whoever had done this. “I don’t see that they defended themselves.”
“I don’t see any dead strangers either, although there are a lot of footprints.”
“Can you tell why this happened? Were things stolen?”
“I’ll look.” Surely a robot shouldn’t be affected as strongly as Paula looked, but maybe that shocked, blank face was really for Coryn. “I won’t leave any DNA behind, but you should back up so you don’t. We should call this in.”
On her way out, Coryn knelt down to look at Lucien’s broken body. He didn’t look peaceful in death, or pretty. He just looked gone, all the animation and structure lost with his life. She had to walk around to see his face. It had been smashed, his cheekbone exposed in one spot. Coryn raced for the bushes and heaved and heaved, tasting bile and fear and anger all at once. When she stood, she felt dizzy.
A whimper came from the bushes.
“Aspen?” Coryn called softly. “Aspen, is that you?”
He didn’t come.
She listened but she didn’t hear anything else.
Paula came up behind her. “That’s an impressive pile of DNA.”
“I couldn’t help it.” She knelt in front of the bushes. “Did you see Aspen? Was he . . . over there?”
“I didn’t notice. He’s small. He could have been under something.”
A thicket of blackberry vines in front of her were wicked with last year’s thorns and just beginning to throw out bright green leaves, so she picked at them gingerly. “Here, boy,” she called.
“I do hear an animal,” Paula whispered.
“Aspen?” Coryn plucked at another cane, drawing blood all down the inner part of her forearm and snagging the cuff of her jacket. “Aspen?”
A nose poked out.
It was him. She had to catch him.
He ran past her, stopping on the road and looking back at her.
“He’s scared,” Coryn whispered. “Poor thing.” She glanced up at Paula. “Did you see any dog food? Any treats? I need something to attract him.”
“I wasn’t looking.”
“Please?”
Paula frowned at her, but after a heartbeat she snapped, “Be careful,” and left.
Coryn sat on the ground. Aspen sat as well, although he left a solid ten meters between them. His pink tongue hung out of his mouth. He panted, looking around as if for danger, his eyes darting this way and that, his little body shaking.
Coryn shushed at him and clicked softly and talked to him, her words jumbled. “It’s okay. It’s not okay. I’m sorry. My voice is shaking. I’m sorry. It’s not okay, not okay. I know. I’ll take care of you.” Hot tears ran down her cheek, and she held her hand out to him. Her fingers trembled.
Damn.
Liselle.
Aspen didn’t move.
Liselle would be glad he was alive.
She had liked Liselle, thought maybe they had been—in some small way—already friends. “Please let me take care of you. I like dogs. I liked how you sat on my lap. I could use a friend, and you need one now. I know you do.”
What had she done? She’d almost lost Paula, she’d almost been blown away by wind, and now she was desperate to save a dead family’s dog.
Everyone around her died.
Her stomach rumbled again, turning so sickeningly twisty she had to work to stay seated.
Aspen took a step closer to her.
She looked at him and whispered, “Please.”
As if he finally understood, he bounded to her and fit himself into her arms.
She clutched him tightly, chest heaving, tears falling on his white coat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Aspen trembled and yipped as Paula came up behind them. Paula held a bag of kibble, a water dish, and a few unopened bags of dog treats. She also had a cloth bag stuffed full of things. “I found the dog food.” She dropped a bag of treats on the ground. “And I brought a few other things we can use. One is a raincoat. For you. I called this in. I had to.”
“Thanks.”
“I had to. The mass murder of multiple people is near the top of the list of things authorities expect travelers to mention.”
Coryn wasn’t sure if that was an attempt at humor on Paula’s part or not. At any rate, she didn’t laugh. Her hands shook as she reached for the treat bag with her right hand, keeping the fingers of her left hand wrapped through Aspen’s collar. “I want to know who did this.”
Paula’s clothes were covered in droplets of rainwater. “It looks like it was a surprise to them. No one seemed to be in a defensive posture, and they didn’t have weapons.” Paula’s voice sounded robotic and calm, like it had the day Coryn’s parents killed themselves. “There are so many footprints I couldn’t tell the story from the aftermath. Someone ripped all of the drawers out of every van and spilled everything out of every drawer.”
“So they were looking for something?” She held her hand out, with two treats in her palm, and Aspen gulped them, the edges of his teeth raking her hand lightly. “He must be scared. At least he’s eating.”
“They must have been. I wish I knew what was in the drawers.”
Aspen struggled in her grip, and she dropped a few treats on the ground and let him take them one by one. “What about the one I found, with the notebooks in it?”
“All gone.”
“Maybe that’s a clue. Maybe someone killed them for information.” She glanced at her wristlet, which had at least one notebook of data stored on it. She wished she had been bold enough to take more pictures. “Did you see a leash?”
“I’ll go look. Put on your coat.”
“Bossy robot.” She fed Aspen two more treats and then closed the bag. He seemed a little calmer, so maybe having something familiar like the treats helped. She turned to look at what Paula had stuffed into the bag. A coat, a fresh pair of pants, and an inner plastic bag that held snacks, water, and a little more dog food. She shrugged into the coat, which was bright red. Just like the Listener’s vans. At least it was too big, so it probably hadn’t been Liselle’s.
Paula wouldn’t have taken anything in the city. The logic that drove Paula’s choices seemed to be shifting.
Fair enough. Coryn wasn’t exactly the same person who had walked up out of the city three days ago either. She stroked Aspen’s chest and the soft fur by his nose. “Do you understand death?”
For answer he licked her fingers, then curled into a small comma-shaped ball, with his nose resting on the ba
se of his tail. “How could you not?” she asked him, and then she fell silent. Lucien and Liselle and the others had been alive right here—maybe they had sat in this same place, talking and looking at the dark clouds last night, wondering if it would rain. They had made camp in this place and slept here and gotten up, and then they’d been surprised. It couldn’t have taken long—she’d only gotten the one text. “Where were you, boy?” she asked the dog. “What happened?”
Paula walked with heavy steps now, moving more like a human than a graceful robot. Coryn took a leather leash from her and clipped it to Aspen’s collar. Paula stuffed the food and extra clothes into their packs until they bulged and carried the packs back up to the road while Coryn carried Aspen after her.
“They’ll be here soon,” Paula said. “You’ll have to tell them you rode in the vans.” She set the packs down. “You probably left hairs or skin cells behind on our trip to Cle Elum. But don’t say too much, or get involved. We don’t want to get stuck here.”
“Or blamed,” Coryn said. “I want to get to Lou.”
“Contact her.”
Maybe she should. Her original plan looked childish and stupid about now. So far she hadn’t been able to get through a whole day without some kind of trouble.
Paula put a hand on her shoulder, as if to encourage her. “It will be immediately clear we couldn’t have done this.”
“Even you?” Coryn whispered.
“Even me. Not alone. It took a lot of people. Or robots. But I think it was people.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t always efficient.”
Coryn shivered at those words, and the cold, and her losses. They sat on damp rocks under some trees and waited for the police. Hawks or some other kind of big bird circled high overhead. A deer wandered through, upwind, and then saw something that startled it and bounded away.
A half hour passed before two ecobots and a truck full of policemen rumbled up the road and pulled to a stop. Two policemen—both men—surrounded them and started asking questions, while four or five more walked slowly in toward the scene, careful, guns up and pointing at air.
One of the policeman took Paula away, while the other questioned Coryn. She stumbled over her words at first but eventually calmed as she described finding the vans and Paula going in to see if she could help while Coryn stayed outside. She kept a tight hand on Aspen’s collar the whole time, unable to stop fidgeting.
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