Blood Binds the Pack

by Alex Wells

  And slowly, the crowd began to peel away, people from both shifts filtering back to their homes.

  Next to her, Hob shoved a handkerchief into her hand. Mag used it to plug her nose. Only then did the enormity of what she’d done hit her. She’d used this power she still didn’t really understand to stop a riot. To stop the Mariposa men from hurting her people. Part of her was horrified, but it had been necessary. It had saved a lot of blood, at least for tonight.

  “I think you should come back to base with me,” Hob said, bending to speak in her ear.

  Mag shook her head. She thought about Anabi. She needed to find a way to soothe the fear out of her face. She needed to talk to Clarence. She had a million other need tos crowding around her, and the sudden exhaustion that flowed out of her bones and threatened to drag her flat didn’t matter. “No,” she said thickly. “Got too much work to do.”

  Mag found Anabi where she’d been hiding by the company store, though she had to practically swim through the crowd of miners heading back to their homes to do it. She still had Hob’s handkerchief pinching her nose, but with her other hand, she found Anabi’s and gripped it tight. “It’s OK,” she mumbled around the handkerchief. “Clarence got ’em all calmed down for now.”

  Anabi’s grip near crushed Mag’s fingers, her palm fear-damp. She stuck close to Mag as they headed back to Clarence’s house. Mag got her seated at the kitchen table and made a cup of tea for her one-handed. She wasn’t sure if it was to make Anabi or herself feel better that she stood next to her and kept her hand on the woman’s broad shoulder.

  “Hope you weren’t waitin’ on me too long,” she said, after she felt some of the tension go out of Anabi. The woman shook her head, and reached up to pat her hand, then carefully leaned back against her. That was just fine with Mag, feeling Anabi breathe against her.

  They still stood like that when Clarence came in. He looked exhausted; he was supposed to have long since been asleep. “Was wonderin’ when you’d get back,” he said.

  Anabi finally slid away from Mag, so she could go about getting Clarence something to drink. He offered her a grateful nod.

  “Might’ve got some information,” Mag offered. She took Anabi’s seat. “That new ore the company’s lookin’ for, they ain’t gonna find it here or in any of the towns. And it’s deep. Real deep.”

  Clarence blew out a breath. “Somewhere else and real deep. That don’t sound good.”

  “What happened?” Mag asked. “Shaft collapse?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “They ain’t takin’ the proper time, and they ain’t been lettin’ us give the timbers time to settle. Was bound to happen.”

  “How many?”

  “Six, this time.”

  It could have been worse, she knew. But six down was six too many, and it didn’t need to be that way. “So we walked out?”

  “We walked out,” Clarence agreed. “And they ain’t takin’ kindly to it. But Bill listened.”

  “Halfway.” She hadn’t missed the part about the safety “volunteers.” And it could have been a riot, with a lot more than six dead. She could feel it coming, on the horizon.

  “Can’t count on him,” Clarence agreed. “He’s a company man, for all he likes to play merciful god.”

  Mag laughed softly, without humor. Most other towns weren’t as lucky as Ludlow, and luck never held. “You find that merciful god, you tell the rest of us, hear?”

  Clarence raised his glass to her.

  Chapter Eight

  69 Days

  “Good morning, Mr Rolland.”

  “Good morning, Dr Ekwensi.” Shige smiled politely at her. They’d established a routine of sorts over the successive days of visits, which had the desired effect of attenuating the doctor’s undercurrent of suspicion. Today, Dr Ekwensi offered him a slightly distracted smile in return as she looked off into the middle distance. It was a look he recognized as meaning she was going over some sort of data on the local network. “Is Mr Yellow feeling more himself today?”

  “He seems to recover more quickly from the calibrations after your visits,” she said, after a long pause. “Some of that might be that gross adjustments have given way to fine tuning, but the size of the calibration has never had a linear relationship to how the Weathermen react to it.” She blinked, seeming to finally recall to whom she spoke. “Feel free to proceed at your leisure.”

  Shige had long known how to ingratiate himself within the TransRift Corporate system; it was gratifying to know that the culture changed little in the labs. Show up, be consistently quiet and efficient, be pleased with work but not too loudly cheerful, and silently resist all attempts to be sent away. It wasn’t a recipe for getting noticed, but rather for becoming part of the office equipment, accepted and ignored. It was a work role that suited his purposes.

  He faced the door into the Weatherman’s room, which had formed in the wall during his short conversation with Dr Ekwensi. He no longer had to steel himself to enter it; familiarity bred ease in him too, which he needed to be more cautious about.

  The dry, bloody smell of the room still made his skin go tight with the anticipation of flight, though he was prepared for that now. As he entered the room, Mr Yellow moved immediately. This was new. Before, he’d only ever reacted after being directly addressed. Shige halted, keeping the motion soft.

  Slowly, Mr Yellow pushed himself up onto his hands, leaning one bare hip on the floor. His head, freshly shaved so that it was pale as an egg, hung down as if too heavy for his neck.

  “Hello, Mr Yellow,” Shige said, after waiting to see if the Weatherman would move more. “Or rather, good morning. It is morning, you know. Would you like to hear what the mornings on Tanegawa’s World shall be like?”

  “The wind blows,” Mr Yellow whispered. This was the first Shige had heard him speak, and he’d half-expected his voice to be the same ragged croak he’d always heard from Mr Green. But Mr Yellow’s voice was very pleasant and surprisingly deep, the kind of voice he would have expected to hear in theater or music. There was no block of scar tissue to interfere with his throat. “And it is always dry. Are you thirsty, brother?”

  Hearing the word brother washed coldly through Shige’s stomach, but he kept his expression smooth, slightly curious. James Rolland was an only child. Shigehiko Rollins and all the complicated tangles that came from the word brother – you know they had you made in a lab like one of mom’s custom roses – did not exist in this place. “I’m afraid I don’t have any brothers. Do you?”

  “Many,” Mr Yellow agreed. “None. All the same. We sing together at night. We will eat each other.”

  He used every trick he knew to commit the words to memory as Mr Yellow spoke them. He’d learned to not ignore what Mr Green said, even if it had made little sense at the time. The problem was that he did not know how the Weathermen thought, and no one in TransRift seemed to care. They were living black boxes that performed miracles. “Are you hungry?” Shige asked. An innocuous answer seemed best, since he had little doubt Dr Ekwensi was watching keenly by now. “Thirsty?”

  “Always hungry. Always thirsty. Always drowning,” Mr Yellow said, though by his tone he wasn’t particularly bothered. “Does the wind blow?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been outside in days.” The atmosphere wasn’t particularly pleasant on Earth anymore; nearly as hot as Tanegawa’s World, but heavy with humidity and filled with pollutants and particulates. “Would you like me to check?”

  “We will grasp it,” Mr Yellow said. And he began to hum to himself again, that same eerie music as before.

  Shige listened for a few minutes, then tried, “Would you like me to tell you about the winds on your new home?” Mr Yellow didn’t seem to hear him this time, still humming. After Shige judged he’d been at it long enough, he exited the room.

  “I didn’t realize he’d started talking,” he said to Dr Ekwensi.

  “He hadn’t. That was the first he’s spoken since we upgraded his neural net
.” She wasn’t even bothering to look at Shige. “It’s remarkable. He’s… yes. He’s trying to interfere with Earth’s atmosphere. That pattern is for the magnetic field–”

  “Can he?”

  “Don’t be stupid. We have them governed when they’re on regulated worlds.”

  “Of course, my mistake.” Shige filed that little fact and all its attendant implications away for later. Since she seemed so distracted, he offered: “I never noticed Mr Green speaking of himself as we.”

  “They often do that when first decanted. We take care to train that out of them, since they need to understand themselves as individual actors. Mr Yellow seems to have… reverted.” She didn’t sound like she was talking to him any more, but rather to herself. She began patting down the pockets of her lab coat.

  “Is something the matter, doctor?”

  “I want to run him through the basic repatterning game again, but I left the module in my office. I didn’t think he’d progress this far already…” She trailed off as Mr Yellow pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.

  “Would you like me to fetch it for you?” Shige offered gently.

  Eyes still fixed on Mr Yellow, she pulled a lanyard with a code tag on it over her neck. “Office 171. There’s a green carry box on the cabinet next to the door. Bring the entire thing.”

  “Of course,” Shige said, taking the lanyard. This was the opportunity he’d been waiting for, the entire purpose of the daily visits and his quest to make himself at least temporarily indispensable. “I’ll be back in just a moment.”

  Shige shut the door of Dr Ekwensi’s office. With the proper code tag confirmed by entry, he slipped it into a thin memory film sleeve that served as a tag copier, one of the bits of helpful technology that had been in Ayana’s promised resupply. As soon as he removed the tag, the sleeve would bond up into a code-perfect copy, suitable for later use. He now had access to everything that Dr Ekwensi did, so long as he was cautious about it and didn’t do anything that would alert the security algorithms to suspicion. And considering Dr Ekwensi was the head of the program, there should be little barred to him now.

  That was the only delay he allowed in his task, that and a quick glance around the office so he could confirm where the doctor kept her dumb terminal – tasks that required multiple displays were still best completed on larger canvases than one’s optic nerves – and where the security monitors discreetly hovered. That was another bit of training he’d have to do; no doubt his presence would be remarked upon today, and Dr Ekwensi could confirm he had her permission to be in her office. After that, he’d be able to do nearly anything he liked without security being alerted. Scientists were like management, in that they didn’t like being bothered with the details of their underlings’ coming and going.

  He stopped his circuit of the room at the cabinet Dr Ekwensi had mentioned, for all the world like he’d merely been looking for that. Then he picked up the green toolbox and hurried back down the hall.

  With luck, the doctor would make his life easier by sending him back to her office at least twice more before he and Mr Yellow departed for Tanegawa’s World: once to use the code tag to plant a data acquisition leech into the terminal and thus the private network of the labs, and a second time to retrieve it, with all of the files for his queries invisibly copied over. Otherwise, he’d manufacture his own reasons to be there.

  He stopped next to Dr Ekwensi. Inside his room, Mr Yellow walked slowly past the walls, one hand sliding along them, his head still hanging. “Doctor? Is this the right toolbox?”

  “Oh!” She started and looked at him. “What? Yes. Thank you, Mr Rolland. You’ve been very helpful.”

  Shige smiled as he handed the toolbox to her. “I am always glad to be of service.”

  Chapter Nine

  69 Days

  “Shoulda tied her ass to the back of my bike,” Hob muttered to herself as her motorcycle rolled to a stop in the entrance of the base’s garage. It was dark, close, hot, and stank of grease. Motorcycles, each lovingly modified to suit the preferred weapons of its rider but alike in sandblasted paint jobs and lack of identifying marks, lined each wall.

  “What was that?” Hati, the garage master, asked. His deep red-brown skin sported smudges of grime, one of them right over the crooked bridge of a big nose that had its already low profile repeatedly flattened in fights. His long black hair was tied back in two tight braids.

  “Nothin’ for you to worry about.” Hob tossed him her helmet.

  “You’re in later than you said you’d be.”

  Hob toed her kickstand down and stepped off. One advantage of being in charge was that she didn’t have to do the maintenance on her own bike any more. Hati had always done better than she could anyway. “Some excitement in Ludlow.”

  “Shootin’ kind?”

  Hob sucked at her teeth. “Near thing.”

  Hati let out a low whistle. “Gonna be a fat contract rollin’ in from there afore long.”

  “Hope you’re wrong on that, but I don’t think ya are.” Another damn reason she should have just knocked Mag over the head and dragged her off. Hob pulled her saddlebag off her motorcycle and looped it over her shoulder.

  “Oh,” Hati said. “That pale friend of yours blew in about six hours ago. Last I seen, he’s been talkin’ with the sand out in Lobo’s garden.”

  Hob froze for just a second. Well, she’d told him to meet her here. She should probably count herself lucky that he hadn’t gotten bored waiting and fucked off. If bored was even a thing someone who spent part of his life being a rock did. “Anythin’ else interesting happen while I was away?”

  Hati shrugged. “Only know about him ’cause he came through to collect his fuckin’ dust catcher.” The Bone Collector’s staff had been living in a corner of the garage since they killed the Weatherman, the wildcat skull on top glaring at everyone who passed it on their way to mount up. “Nobody tells me nothin’.”

  Hati wasn’t so isolated as that. He just preferred to sit in the corner of the garage and scribble long stories out in the margins of recycled flimsies. Everyone on base had been subjected to reading at least one of his efforts; it was another hazing ritual for the newcomers. The real hell of it was, not that anyone would ever admit it to Hati, he wasn’t half bad. Hob waved in acknowledgment of his well-worn complaint and headed into the yard.

  The entire base, a square with the yard a hole in its center, was brown and orange, hung with tarps and camouflage nets to keep it safe from the extremely rare security flight or drone that dared the unpredictable weather and magnetic fields. The Bone Collector was a pale shape against the camouflage netting that hid the dark green shoots of Lobo’s garden, which the cook had recently re-planted after confirming they had enough extra water for it. His staff, the wildcat skull turned unerringly toward her, stood straight up from the ground next to him.

  He turned as soon as she emerged from the garage and walked toward her. There was something different about the motion, Hob could tell immediately. He had never been the kind to bound around or make a show of being athletic, but there’d always been a kind of lightness to his step before, like he floated bare millimeters above the ground instead of touching. Now, he seemed heavy, or at least in the same class as the rest of them mere mortals. As he came closer, she noted the lines of his face, harsh in the morning sun. She hadn’t noticed them before – the man looked tired.

  “Sorry to keep ya waitin’,” Hob said.

  “I suppose it’s only fair.” He offered her a small, tilted smile, one she realized she’d missed, somehow. Like hell she wanted to miss someone who only showed up when it was convenient to his mysterious act. But he reached out to touch her hand with just the tips of his fingers, and she didn’t know what to make of that either.

  Before she had a chance to say or do something stupid in either direction, the door that led up into the offices and supply rooms popped open. It was a hell of a relief to see Freki, the close-cropped black hair on his
head showing no sign of the white lock that marked out his brother. He must have been watching for her from her office window; it had the best view of the yard.

  “Ravani.” He spared a quick look at the Bone Collector, a quirk of one brow that let her know she’d better spill the story to him later. “He woke up. Ain’t pretty.”

  There was no doubt from his tone just which he Freki meant. Hob looked at the Bone Collector. “All yours.”

  They’d been ready for Coyote to wake up and go wrong, Hob saw. Someone had thought to rig a ring in one of the hallway walls so they could secure his door shut with rope. Benefits of them all being paranoid desert rats keen on not being murdered in their beds.

  “Bala’s asleep. Went off before… before he woke up, and I thought it best he keep sleepin’,” Geri said, in answer to Hob’s questioning look. He’d stationed himself outside the door in a chair, a tattered sheaf of recycled flimsies on his knee – and yes, there was the title of one of Hati’s efforts, The Ghost Rider Along Red Ridge.

  She ignored the question he silently asked her in return, the mirror of his twin brother’s – same eyebrow twitch and everything – as the Bone Collector slid past her and laid his hands on the door. “You think you can handle this?” she asked.

  The Bone Collector tilted his head slightly, eyes half-closed, like he was listening. Under his hands, the door shook, like Coyote slammed his body against it from the other side. There was no sound but a thump and muffled, ragged breathing. “Yes. Open the door.”

  Well, what the hell else could they do? This was what she’d brought the Bone Collector here for.

  She heard a soft splatter of pages on her blind side, and turned to see that Geri had dropped his novel on the floor and drawn his pistol. Hob slid one of the knives from her sleeve and held it poised over the rope as the doorknob rattled again. “In three… two…” The Bone Collector smiled like he thought it was funny, the bastard. But she kept going, because he might be able to turn into stone, but she and Geri were both very vulnerable to having their soft parts eaten. “One.”