Blood Binds the Pack

by Alex Wells

  He turned another page, to a grainy instant picture. The mug jerked in his hand before he could bite down on his own reaction, slopping mercifully lukewarm coffee onto his fingers. He’d know that face anywhere, though he had thought it impossible. When last he’d seen it, the cheeks had been flushed and puffy with wound fever rather than slack with sedation: his older brother, Kazuhiro.

  Not impossible, he reminded himself. He never had seen the body. But he’d configured his life into that reality, where he no longer had an older brother because he was dead and not just disowned, and he couldn’t classify his own reaction now. Anger? Hurt? Hope? The mix of it made a strange, sick little knot in his stomach, and he didn’t have time for any of that. He recalled the number of times his father had whispered news of Kazu’s continued survival on some backwater, and in some utterly compromising circumstance. He’d always turned back up, until this last time, and now… well, leave it to Kazu to not even die properly, he thought with a mix of grim amusement and annoyance.

  He had a performance to maintain, he reminded himself. There was no room for any of this. “This was the subject?” he asked, to buy himself some time.

  “And a fucking witch, too,” the security chief spat.

  “Maybe the witch summoned the dune lion,” Shige said dryly. He was rewarded by a strangled guffaw from one of the guards, and a muttered “Fuck,” from the doctor.

  Kazu, what have you gotten yourself into this time? he wondered. The vivid crescent of teeth marks on the neck of the med-tech stood out in his mind. If he had his brother’s dental records, would they match? Did he want to know? This was a level of animalistic brutality he did not want to think anyone capable of. And to think, Kazu had always said, in his least kind, illicit-drug-fueled moments, that Shige was the monster and Ayana the Frankenstein of the family.

  By sheer force of will, he swallowed another, much less healthy laugh and made himself turn the page to another set of medical notes. Automatically, he skimmed over the words. He needed to maintain his calm. He needed to deal with the personal fallout – ridiculous that finally he could have something personal in this – later. “This says there were samples taken.”

  “Almost everything was smashed, like you saw. But we did find some unlabeled blood vials,” the security chief said. “We’ve got them in a cooler, to go back to Newcastle with you. Figured your lab would want them.”

  And those were no doubt already documented, Shige thought. The entire room, with its grim-faced security contingent, knew about them, and that they were being given into his care. He could destroy them and doctor the records later if necessary… No, he couldn’t do that. Out of the question. The thought of destroying something so precious as blood filled him with an alien horror. He rationalized the strange feeling as best he could: even knowing the source, that blood was far too precious to waste, filled as it was with whatever oddity fueled this world. “Good thinking, chief,” he heard himself say. “I’ll take all of this and the bodies back to Newcastle with me immediately. Destroy the train car.”

  That would take care of the optics problem, if Ms Meetchim did decide she wanted another witch hunt. He could defend the decision by saying they didn’t want to rile the workers if she took exception to it. “What happened to the agent who delivered this terrorist to security?” he asked. Another person to track down himself, later, if he had the opportunity and deniability to do so.

  “They’re Ludlow security’s problem,” the chief said, then shrugged at the sharp look Shige gave him. “Up to them to keep the cover story going.”

  “I’ll be certain to inquire. But it is of great import that their cover is maintained, since we cannot assume one of the witches will have simply died from running off into the desert.” He couldn’t even make that assumption about his own brother, it seemed. “And I will convey to Vice President Meetchim that this mess is not their fault and we’re certainly not looking to blame anyone.”

  “I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort, sir,” the security chief said bitterly.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  28 Days

  “If I’d known getting abducted by Corporate security would put you in this much of a snit,” Coyote, now properly wearing his own clothes, drawled, “I wouldn’t have done it.”

  Hob glared at him from across her desk, and he offered her only a bland smile in return. Really, it hadn’t changed all that much other than to make her pissed at Mag. She’d given Ludlow back the two-thirds of its money so she didn’t have to send her people back there. Didn’t trust it, and didn’t think anyone would blame her for it.

  Hob curled her lips back to snarl at him. “You ain’t near as funny as you think.”

  “I’m not trying to be. Do we already have to re-litigate the fight you had with Nick before he died?”

  It had been about Nick being paralyzed with caution after he’d overstepped badly and gotten a fair number of his people killed, all out of rage for a personal matter – the death of Mag’s father, Phil. “It ain’t like that,” Hob said.

  “You’ve got your foot on that path.”

  Hob held up one finger. “Not wantin’ my people in a position to get picked up by the greenbellies ain’t even half the same. We still got plenty of stupid shit to do that don’t involve stayin’ overnight in a town.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Or are you just mad you can’t roll in and take everyone’s paycheck?” Hob said.

  He held up his hands. “This isn’t about me.”

  Hob sat back in her seat and took a long drag of her ever-present cigarette. “Yeah, it is. And you don’t want it to be.”

  “Hob…”

  “You think they knew what you was, when they snatched you?”

  “A Wolf? Yes–”

  “No. A witch. Fuckin’ say it.”

  He closed his mouth in a grim line, then wiped that away with a hand over his face. “No.”

  “Think they do now?”

  They both knew the answer to that one, but Hob stared at him until he said it out loud: “Yes.”

  “Ain’t a safe place out there for those like us,” Hob said, satisfied. “An’ it’s gettin’ less safe.”

  “None of us are here–”

  “–to be safe. Yeah. I know. But that don’t mean it’s fun bein’ hunted, either.” Hob rolled her cigarette meditatively in her fingers. They all knew who their enemy was at this point, and it was much too big of an enemy for the Wolves to go at head on.

  And that circled back to her wasting three days tooling around in the desert with the Bone Collector clinging to the back of her motorcycle, and nothing to show for it. Might not have been a terrible vacation, if she looked at it sideways and skated over the other implications, but she was not someone who wanted, needed, or could afford a goddamn vacation just now.

  Coyote still watched her. Hob took the butt of her cigarette between her fingers and focused on it. The paper vanished in a white-hot burst. “TransRift’s bigger and got more money than us. An’ this shit is what they do. So maybe it ain’t a surprise that we can’t just come around at it from the side and get ahead. Maybe we got to follow in from behind and just be ready to jump in.” Which was, in a way, what they’d done before with the Weatherman. Strike when the TransRift machine had its momentum going in one direction, and they’d know where to land their punch.

  “We need more intelligence,” Coyote said.

  “Got as much as we could, lookin’ at the busted wildcats,” Hob said. “Ain’t nothin’ there. That’s why they’re bust. So we gotta find us one that ain’t bust.”

  “Have there been any?”

  “Don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “Since the ones I hear about are the ones that fold up in a few days and the crews go home till the next site gets spiked. Damn.” And trying to find a location she didn’t know about was damn near impossible. The desert was a big place.

  Coyote made a thoughtful noise.

  “What?”

  �
��I know it’s not really your style, to go after solutions that don’t require bullets or punches…”

  Hob snorted. “Spit it out.”

  “You think of handing this one over to Freki and Geri?”

  “No. Why?” She frowned. They wouldn’t have any more information than her.

  “When companies do an exploration pattern like this, they don’t do it at random. They try to place their bets on where things are most likely to be in their favor.”

  “They got a lot of information we don’t.”

  “Yes. But we can look at what they’ve done, and do our own analysis.” When she still looked at him uncomprehendingly, Coyote said, “Numbers, Hob. Those things. Use the resources you have.”

  Suddenly, it all made sense. Of anyone, Freki and Geri were the best with numbers on the base. “And Geri was even bitchin’ this morning that he was bored.”

  “Silly man,” Coyote said. “He ought to know by now that’s the incantation that summons work.”

  25 Days

  “You sure it’s somewhere around here?” Hob asked as her tires left salmon-pink saltpan and hissed once more onto undulating, orange dunes. The cloudless blue sky stretched long to the sharp horizon where it met land.

  “No, we ain’t.” Geri’s voice came back, fuzzed with static over the shortwave. “We fuckin’ told ya, likely ain’t near the same thing as sure.”

  “Keep goin’,” Freki said. “Eagles.”

  And there were, ahead, two eagles circling. Hob’s stomach sank slightly at the sight. Sure, it could mean what they were looking for – a mining camp would mean a lot of water – but it could just as easily be another body in the desert. She got tired of playing undertaker, sometimes.

  After Hob had handed over all the maps and notes she had, with Coyote grinning evilly behind her shoulder all the while, the twins had come up with three different “likely” possibilities. Hob had split her available crew into small parties to check them all out. Coyote had begged off leading one of the other scouting parties; he hadn’t said why, but seeing the look in his eye, Hob hadn’t needed to ask. He was still running scared.

  She’d taken the furthest, least certain of the possibilities for herself, and brought Freki and Geri along since they were the ones who had figured it all out. They were just about done with the “window” the twins had come up with, though, and nothing to show for it but a powerful hunger and a drained-off water ration.

  Geri turned his motorcycle up the slope of a dune and paused. “Shadow on the horizon.”

  “Give us the bearing,” Hob said. She turned that way, with Freki not far behind her. Geri would catch up. “This still in the area?”

  “Barely,” Geri admitted. “But we done told you it was fuzzy.”

  If it worked, it could be any texture it goddamn wanted to be and Hob wouldn’t complain. She kept the motorcycle on a steady course, weaving along the gentle swells of windward dune slopes, the electric motor a soft hum felt in the bones rather than heard.

  The shadow turned out to be a small, humpy outcropping of black rock, so small it hadn’t even been marked on Hob’s map. She made sure to note it down as precise as she could, so everyone else would get the landmark. As short as it was, it might end up getting buried in drifting sands anyway. The base of the rock swarmed with activity: a mining camp.

  From a safe distance, camouflaged in the shadow of a dune, the three of them stood in a huddle, helmets off and looking through scopes at the distant activity. People and vehicles, the blocky mounds of mining equipment surrounded the rock and stretched its silhouette.

  “Likely is lookin’ pretty fuckin’ likely,” Geri crowed. He thumped Freki’s shoulder. “We fuckin’ win this one.”

  “Sure is,” Hob agreed. “Guess you get all the numbers from here on out.”

  “Joke’s on you. We love that shit.”

  The wildcat mine was little more than a pit at the base of the rocks, which a person went in or out of every few minutes. A portable drive chain rigged to one of the solar vehicles brought up large buckets of waste rock that got dumped to the side in a continual stream.

  “Now what?” Geri said after they’d watched for a while.

  “Guess we’ll see if it calms down some at night. I don’t think they run ’em twenty-four hours. Least that’s what the miners I talked to told me.” Too much surface lighting when there wasn’t any sun, they’d said. Too expensive to haul out that many battery banks. “Mayhap send one of you back, get the others. We can run a distraction and then snatch and grab when there’s more of us.”

  “What’s around the perimeter?” Freki asked.

  Hob had been wondering that herself. It wasn’t a fence, precisely, but a set of wire lines and tripods with some kind of… unit at the top. From the distance, Hob couldn’t tell if they were speakers, lights, or something else entirely. Opened crates sat haphazardly nearby, marked with a symbol Hob didn’t recognize from any standard cargo load. “Maybe I was wrong about it not being a twenty-four hour op,” she offered. “Don’t look much like lights, though.”

  “Anti-wildlife fence?” Geri guessed. “Ain’t seen any of these sites before.”

  “Might be something to keep the eagles away,” Hob said. The two circling overhead had been joined by a third. Watching the three circle at different rates, weaving around each other, felt strangely hypnotic. An odd sort of dizziness washed over her, a feeling like she was far away from her body, falling up into that sky.

  “Somethin’s goin’ on,” Geri said, nudging her.

  She brought her attention back to the ground, the black maw gaping in the orange sand by the rocks. But the far-off feeling persisted, got worse even, the sound coming to her ears starting to sound hollow. In a corner of her mind she wondered if she was about to faint, for the first time in her goddamn life, and just how many years it would take for Geri to let her live it down.

  Two miners came up in one of the buckets. Excitement rippled through the little camp. The drive chain paused as they climbed out. People in green and blue suits moved in, and it got damn hard to see what was going on, and why did her mouth fucking taste like lightning just now? Why was her skin prickling, a low hum – like music, like something she should know – sounding in her ears?

  Something blue, so blue, winked in the bright sunlight. It was a blue she’d seen before, touched, and turned into a burst of flame. She knew it, like she knew a perfect shot lined up or the moment when gravity took hold at the top of a jump. She knew.

  “Oh,” she breathed out. “Shit.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  26 Days

  The air in Clarence’s kitchen was thick and hot, even with the night gone cool outside. Mag and Clarence sat watching each other, silent, ignoring their long-cold cups of coffee. Mag jumped as the door opened to reveal the scruffy face of Omar.

  “Runner from Rouse just come in,” Omar said. The bruises on his face, now five days old, had gone purple to green and yellow. He hadn’t been a pretty man before getting beaten, and this wasn’t an improvement. He offered Mag a piece of stiff canvas that had been folded into an envelope.

  Mag took it, looking at Omar from under her lashes as she tried to hide her suspicion. But the crew leaders at Rouse had followed their directions and sealed the envelope with wax. Mag knew it wasn’t a foolproof way to keep out spies and tampering, but it was better than nothing.

  Instead of leaving, Omar only retreated a step to stand by the door. His posture was eager, shoulders leaned forward. Like a dog waiting to jump. Mag was tempted to tell him to leave, but what would be the point? The result of the vote would be known, for good or ill, by all the miners within hours – and by the company on payday in two days’ time. Maybe earlier if there truly was a spy.

  “That’s all of them,” Clarence said.

  Mag set the envelope down in front of him, to join the others already waiting. “Looks like.” They’d agreed – Mag, Clarence, and Odalia before she’d had to depart to tak
e over her shift – to open all of the vote tallies at once after the first two had come in three hours apart.

  Clarence took the first envelope and split apart the wax, which was a mottle of colors – probably several candle stubs in the making – and then pulled out a crumpled flimsy. “Shimera,” he read. “By majority, the vote is strike.”

  A shiver passed through Mag. She realized, then, that no one had used that word before, not out loud. They’d talked about work stoppage, about real work for real pay, about all coming down sick at once. But no one had ever said strike, a word from the depths of history passed down by the miners and completely absent from the curriculum in the company-run school. The word seemed so archaic, so impossible, and at the same time heavy with power. Clarence had written the word in his proposal to the crew leaders in the other towns, but even then, no one had said it out loud, like it was some kind of black magic that couldn’t be taken back once spoken.

  Mag made a note on her own flimsy, which was the margin of an old receipt. She had to fight to keep her fingers steady. “Next.”

  “Walsen,” Clarence read after opening the next envelope. “By majority, the vote is strike.”

  She wasn’t going to be scared, because this was their black magic. If the witches were on anyone’s side, it was the miners. They were the witches. They were the lifeblood of the entire goddamn world.

  “Tercio,” Clarence read. “By clear majority, the vote is strike.”

  Omar clenched his fist and thumped it against his leg, but remained silent. He was smiling, though. Was he really happy?

  “Rouse,” Clarence read. “By overwhelming majority, the vote is strike.”