Blood Binds the Pack

by Alex Wells

  If any town would be racing to light the fuse, Mag knew, it would be Rouse. That was still her home, even if she hadn’t crossed the gates since her parents had been killed. They knew what was at stake there. They wouldn’t falter.

  “Segundo,” Clarence read. “By… simple majority, the vote is no.”

  That felt like running into a fist face-first. She shouldn’t have been surprised, she knew. Segundo was a big town, an old town. And if they were going to go that way, then…

  “Primero, by majority, votes no,” Clarence finished, setting the last envelope aside.

  Mag made herself breathe out. “Them two is what we thought.” She looked at Clarence. “And how goes Ludlow?”

  A small, unnecessary formality. They’d had their own vote days ago, a count of hands in the different cells the workers were broken up in. Mag had stood for each one. She’d seen those faces, eager, determined, grim, scared, jubilant. All of those things, mixed together as the hands shot up in a human forest blackened with mine dust.

  Clarence said, expression set, “By clear majority, Ludlow votes to strike.”

  From the corner of her eye, Mag saw Omar raise his fist, like a salute to the other miners, unseen. Breathe, she reminded herself, breathe. But they had spoken that word. They had made their choice. And there was no going back – but had there ever been going back, from the minute the greenbellies shot her papa dead in the desert? Not for her. And maybe she was dragging them all to hell at her heels. “I’ll copy up the statement so it can be run back out tonight to the other towns. So they’ll know they ain’t alone.”

  “So they know who ain’t standin’ with us,” Omar said darkly.

  “And we’ll be ready?” Clarence asked, looking at Mag.

  “We are ready,” Mag said, like that was another kind of magic and her conviction would make it true. “We got our ground. It’s time to stand.”

  Mag’s fingers were stained with grease pencil after writing up the results to send back to the other towns. She always ended up taking care of messages because she had the best handwriting, the easiest for the half-literate to puzzle out. With bitter amusement, she thought her mother would be pleased, if she’d lived to see it. Irina had always told her to practice more and try harder, had kept pushing her back to school instead of letting her go to the breakers because she said Mag needed an education more than they needed the extra pay.

  Anabi sat on her bed, her feet tucked up under her skirt. It had really become their bed now; there was still a pallet on the floor in case anyone got nosey, but it hadn’t been used in weeks. She glanced up from the book in her lap as soon as Mag opened the door, her eyebrows arched up in query.

  “Everyone but Primero and Segundo,” Mag said. Anabi had known what this was all about, even if she’d chosen to absent herself from the meeting. As someone who had grown up in a farm town instead of with the miners, she still didn’t feel quite at home. That, and she was still afraid of bringing attention to herself. That kind of caution didn’t die easy.

  Anabi took up her bit of slate and wrote, Do you think it will happen?

  “Ain’t in our hands, that. All in what the company puts in the pay envelopes.”

  And if they do?

  “I don’t know,” Mag said. “We never done anything like this before, not really.” They’d stopped work for one day after her papa died, but this was different. Then, they’d said it was just one day, for a funeral. To remind the company that even if they controlled the blacklist, they didn’t control anyone’s hearts. But now it was stop, and no start until they had their proper pay back, and some other demands besides – better safety inspections, shorter hours, no blacklist without a trial.

  It all depended on them standing strong and holding their ground. Clarence said it over and over again like a prayer: the company was nothing without its miners, and they needed to be reminded of that. But how the company would react? Mag doubted it would be good. She’d already seen how itchy those greenbellies were to fight, and she remembered the result of their one-day work stop: her mother dead in a fire set by company hands. “But we gotta draw a line sometime.”

  Anabi rose to her feet and reached out to take Mag’s hands. Mag smiled and squeezed the woman’s warm, rough fingers. “Whatever does happen, we’ll stick together. Like we did before. I promise.”

  Anabi leaned forward to kiss her. Her lips were soft and tasted a bit like coffee and a bit like cinnamon. Mag squeezed her hands lightly again. “Sleep if you can. We both got early mornings tomorrow. I need to think a bit.”

  After Anabi had gone quiet in sleep, Mag went over to her clothes chest. She dug down through the layers of plain work coveralls and skirts, well-worn and patched. She went past the thin strata of mementos she had, mostly things that Hob had saved of Uncle Nick’s and passed along to her. At the very bottom of the chest, resting on the cheap, thin, synthetic wood, was a small, silver pistol that Uncle Nick had pressed in her hand a lifetime ago.

  It felt heavier than she remembered when she picked it up. Mag hadn’t wanted to use it when Uncle Nick gave it to her, had refused to even touch it until now. It had seemed such an ugly thing, full of the same kind of death that had killed her father. That disgust felt like a luxury she couldn’t afford any more. Mag slid the pistol into her skirt pocket, where it hung heavy and cold against her thigh.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  25 Days

  The Bone Collector sat at the heart of the world and waited, listening to the ceaseless song spun by the vortices of its core. Too complicated to be expressed mathematically, but he knew the melody by instinct, could sing in harmony with it. And maybe, he thought, if he found the right harmony, he would be able to talk to it. There was a presence there, a mind of sorts, more alien than his, speaking its thoughts into a place just beyond his perception. It was infuriating. All he could see was the mirror surface of the Well, the alien stars within – and then he shied away from looking deeper, because in that reflection, his eyes were black in black.

  But where? There was no where in a place where space and time twisted back in on themselves. He had tried to tell Hob that, again and again, and she’d still dragged him around the desert, looking. He’d told her, after leading her to Coyote, that he would continue to consider the problem, even if he thought it had no solution. That had brought him here, to these ceaseless permutations, to a cycle of continually almost losing himself and drawing back at the edge of dissolution. There was part of him that almost wished to let go, escape the flesh that caged him, flow into the blood of the world and cease to be himself. And yet he doubted that Hob Ravani would forgive him a second time, if she called and called and he did not come. If he ceased to be, it would no longer trouble him of course, but he still existed now, and the thought slipped into his mind like a needle through skin. Not so painful at first, but more wrong with each passing moment.

  He felt and heard a change in the harmony around him, a creeping wrongness that shattered all his attempts at spinning in just the right way. He stopped, stilled, listened.

  And recognized. Oh, he knew that wrongness, bile at the back of his throat, blood flowing out between his hands, the inhuman scream that threatened to burst his eyes like ripe fruit. When had it come here? How had it hidden itself from him? Still so fatigued from the injuries he’d taken, had he just not felt its cursed feet burning the ground?

  It was still far away, but it searched. It hunted. It sniffed the air and lapped at the surface with a rough tongue, trying to find the blood beneath.

  He hated it. He hated the black eyes, the scalp laced with silver scars, the wrongness of all of it. The Bone Collector flung himself outward, searching, hunting. If he could destroy this as he – as Hob – had destroyed the last one, then maybe, maybe…

  He found the Weatherman at the surface, where the sand grains sang their distress as the breeze parted around him unnaturally. And the Weatherman saw him, his gaze piercing as knives. He sang a question in a language tha
t the Bone Collector almost understood, and hated himself for understanding because it was unnatural, it was wrong. There was something different about this one. He was stronger than the last.

  He reversed those words, wrapped them in on themselves, reformed them into something new like a thin-bladed whip to lash out.

  The Weatherman recoiled, turned the world ninety degrees, and came in again, trying to engulf him and trap him. Somehow, the Weatherman sang harmonies with himself, layer and layer and layer, louder until the sound of the world seemed a distant thing and the Bone Collector felt weak, trapped, grasping. A different, strange world welcomed him as this world had, warm and tasting like captive lightning, but he did not want this.

  No, he asserted, reaching for stone and the hint of fire he’d tasted in Hob’s blood, I am me. I cannot be encompassed. With a burst of energy, he flung himself to the four corners of the world, too great for the Weatherman to entangle.

  You’ve been away too long, the Weatherman sang, and there was that curious harmony to his voice again, familiar and repugnant. You should really come home. We miss you. And by centimeters, using the confusion of that sound, that message, he began to drag the Bone Collector back in. The Bone Collector felt the thread of power from the world, dragged out like blood into the mouth of a parasite, flowing to the Weatherman.

  The press of that power, those alien and hideous thoughts, was too strong. The Bone Collector felt himself losing his grasp again, ready to disintegrate as he tried to escape in a way that could not be followed. In desperation, he reached out, searching for help.

  Distantly, he felt the heat that was Hob Ravani, banked in sleep. He tried to call, but she wasn’t the sort to hear like that. She had a different kind of power.

  But someone else heard.

  He felt confusion, the sharp suck of an indrawn breath. And then it was like hands against his shoulders – no, the side of a mountain at his back, cool in the night and unmoved by ages. He leaned on that strength and used it as a second, stronger foundation, somehow more certain than his own sense of self, of the body he always felt so distant from, and lashed out at the Weatherman. He freed himself from some of those entangling lies, while the Weatherman sang more into existence with his discordant voice-within-voice.

  The mountain listened, waited, understood. He felt it – her – shift, over a millennium, in an instant. She started a new sort of song, something simple and almost childish, but he felt the internal logic of it, rhythm building rhyme by rhyme.

  My love has hair as black as night

  Her breast soft as the moonshine light

  She skips upon the sand and laughs

  While her skirts sweep out my lover’s path

  The words didn’t matter, only the emotion, the steadiness of it with a low pulsing beat that he recognized and didn’t. He wove himself into the cracks of that song, built on it, harmonized, made it into a wall. She fumbled a little, following what he did, but joined eagerly as he pushed back the Weatherman, further and further away from the state of dreaming.

  You don’t belong here, he built into every part of that song. Leave. You do not belong.

  Together, they gave one last mental push, and the Weatherman burst into sand the color of dried blood and blew away. He was still there, of course, a cloud of greasy smoke burning the horizon. The Bone Collector felt him like a boil on the skin of the world. But he’d been thrown out of his own dreaming, disrupted.

  His relief was so great, he didn’t realize for a moment that he still leaned upon that mountain until he felt her recognition and surprise. They touched, exchanging feelings, snippets of memories rather than words.

  The mountain was Mag; he knew her, had known her since she emerged from the labs beneath the scab called Newcastle. He’d drawn her through rock and sand, into safety. And she knew him as well, though her recognition came more slowly, after she cautiously felt around his edges and fixed his shape in her mind.

  He felt her fatigue, stress, and fearful excitement, and with reluctance she offered him a memory by way of explanation: a gun weighing heavy in her pocket, the anticipation that she would soon use it to kill.

  There seemed only one answer to that, a phrase that echoed in his memory in Hob’s voice: Don’t go borrowing trouble when you’ve got enough on your own.

  Laughter rippled like a breeze over the sand. And he felt a warmth from her at the recognition of Hob’s voice, similar but of a different tone than what he himself felt and still did not entirely understand. He shared that back, not intentionally, but as part of the ebb and flow of this odd sort of contact that was for once not combative.

  Where? she asked in feeling rather than words. Where was he?

  He drew her down to the world’s heart. He felt her recoil, then her wonder at the music of it, the rush and hum of endless energy, that to her became like cool water, like all the water flowing down to one point: the Well. She did not threaten to unravel, so certain in the shape that was Mag.

  The dynamic between them shifted, and she sheltered him with that foundation that was her own sense of self, remembered his shape when he felt he might begin to lose it. He showed her the harmonies he had learned, that mirror of stars. And when he shied away from it in fear, Mag stepped into the cool un-water and drew him past the dark image he saw reflected back.

  For one perfect moment, they stood hand-in-hand, on the black sand beach of an alien world, with stars no human had ever seen hanging over them. Cool water lapped at their feet. Something shifted within his blood, within hers, a thing recognizing home, drawing strength and sustenance from it. Above them, the water of their world poured through the bottomless Well and onto these alien shores, and in exchange dream and blue blood made of change and will flowed back and manifested as the impossible.

  Mag looked at him, and in this world she was a titan of living stone, each of her eyes its own well of stars. “Is this where it all comes from?”

  He felt the answer, just as she did. And he wondered how she saw him, in this new place, one step removed from their world, where different forces governed the universe, where fire and stone and water lived and light sang itself into being, where will governed the planets rather than something so weak as gravity. “Yes.”

  This was a place, now, he knew. Hob had been right. A single point in their world where the umbilicus of this… magic attached and altered everything. And if he found that place, if he kept from unraveling with this certainty of self Mag had showed him, he would have a foot in each universe. He would be this heart, become this power, and he would move worlds.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  25 Days

  “It was, indeed, another witch,” Shige informed Ms Meetchim as he handed her cup of coffee over. He’d had to come straight up to her office after returning from Segundo; stimulants and determination kept him from looking in the least bit tired. “The damage was quite… disturbing.”

  “Mmm.” Meetchim sipped her coffee. With her unoccupied hand, she turned the page of a report. From his vantage, Shige saw another survey map, the lines of the seismographs drawn in thin and red. “That sounds very messy.”

  Shige’s expression of disgust wasn’t entirely feigned. All he had to do was recall that apparently his brother had been involved in order to make it quite heartfelt. “It was.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement. Thank you for traveling to look at it, by the way,” she said, as if she hadn’t all but ordered him to do so. “I don’t think the distraction of a witch hunt is advisable right now, however.”

  A relief that he hadn’t needed to lead her to that conclusion. “Of course. How is the exploration faring?” Poorly, he would guess, which was good. She knew she had to have results for the home office, and there’d been a demand for reports along with a monthly schedule of courier stops to pick those reports up.

  “The seismic surveys are far too hit or miss. The geologists haven’t been able to come up with any sort of provenance theory that makes sense of the
data. What we have found isn’t following the established tectonics and seems completely unrelated to the known stress mechanics.”

  “That does sound difficult.”

  “I’m going to have to request more personnel, to be certain. We need full-time exploration crews, and we’ll need to still operate the current mines. We can’t afford to lose all of the production indefinitely, no matter what potential there is in the new resource. We still have a business to run.”

  Shige gestured toward one of the maps, and after a moment of hesitation, Ms Meetchim handed it over to him. He looked at the drawing with little comprehension; no pattern that he could sense, and he was very good at finding patterns. He shrugged and offered it back. “This is obviously not my area of expertise.”

  “You are an excellent secretary, but no.”

  Shige smiled, not at all stung. “Have you considered putting Mr Yellow on the problem?” The thought had been constant in his mind for days, strangely: Mr Yellow was thirsty, and this could provide him some relief. Let him find the place to drink. It was odd compared to his other trains of thought, but he couldn’t shake it or ignore it, so it must be important.

  Meetchim opened her mouth as if to immediately dismiss the idea, then sat back. She tapped her fingers idly on the surface of a map, her pale nails obscuring the wildcat symbols in sequence. “A Weatherman has never been applied to mineral exploration before. His purview is atmospheric and local space conditions.”

  “Yes. But Mr Yellow is the first Weatherman to have been partially built with amritite-derived products.”

  “Is there reason to believe this will give him some sort of affinity?”

  Shige opened his hands, palm up. “I don’t know. But the Weathermen have always had an… affinity for the contaminated locals.”

  “Of a sort,” Meetchim murmured.

  “Of a sort.” The sort that involved them consuming portions of said locals in a process that Shige devoutly hoped he would never witness in more detail. “Dr Ekwensi’s theory on the amritite is that it’s directly related to the contamination. So it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that the Weatherman might have an affinity for that as well.”