Blood Binds the Pack

by Alex Wells

  This was not a factor he could have even begun to guess at in his calculations, and it took the situation entirely out of his control. It would stand in Mr Yellow’s way. He had to fix this before he lost his advantage entirely. But how?

  Perhaps the answer was in Weatherman 001’s associates. After all, Hob Ravani was the first and only person known to have killed a Weatherman. She’d technically almost killed Mr Green twice, even if the second time she’d needed a bit of help. He doubted she liked Weathermen very much in a general sense, beyond their association with TransRift.

  And, he thought slowly, she didn’t seem the sort of person who liked being lied to. If she didn’t know any of this information, perhaps the best interference would be to simply give it to her. And then hope that her anger would fuel action. That seemed to be how she worked as well.

  The situation was salvageable. It had to be.

  Chapter Forty

  11 Days

  Mag woke to the sound of shouting in the street outside her window. She scrambled out of bed, thoughts a tangle of terror and confusion until she realized that the voices sounded happy. Not enraged. Not terrified.

  She made herself take a few deep breaths and scrape her tangled hair back from her face with her fingers before looking out the window. People were hugging each other. There was no longer the tension she’d felt in the air the last few days, like the warning crack of glass before it shattered. What the hell had happened? Why did she feel so unsettled, when it plainly had to be something good?

  Mag went downstairs to look for Clarence and Anabi. She found Clarence first, standing in the narrow strip of shade that fell over the front step, his arms crossed over his chest. And he was smiling. She hadn’t realized just how long it had been since he’d really smiled until the expression looked so unfamiliar now.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Bill had me in about an hour ago. Said the bosses in Newcastle have agreed to renegotiate our pay, with real credits.” His smile got a little bigger, as he talked. “We won.”

  That seemed far too easy, as much as she wanted to believe it. “When?”

  “Someone from HR will be out on a special train tomorrow.”

  She trusted that even less. “They didn’t ask anything from us?”

  “Well, we ain’t started negotiatin’ yet,” Clarence said. “They pulled the greenbellies back from the street, to the office and the depot. Don’t want to risk the hotheads pickin’ a fight before we get a chance to discuss things.”

  That, too, seemed logical. But none of this added up. Was what the government man Rollins had told her true, or was it some lie for his own purposes? Maybe she’d been so set on spending blood for this, so ready, nothing peaceful felt right. “They say anythin’ about wantin’ to move us to a new work site?”

  Clarence’s smile finally faded. “No. Why?”

  Mag gestured him back inside, then told him about the government man visiting, every detail she could remember. By the time she was done, his expression had gone downright thunderous. Mag felt bad, but also sickly relieved that she wasn’t the only one worried now.

  “You think this is a fake,” he said.

  “Maybe he was tryin’ to twist us one way or another,” she shrugged. “But I know I don’t trust any of this.”

  “After what you said, I sure as hell don’t either.” She could feel his unspoken thoughts, because they echoed her own: they’d already had one traitor manipulating them. The company fought dirty, and it never showed its hand until it was too late. “I’ll spread the information to the work gang leaders. We gotta be watchin’ like eagles, ready for anythin’.”

  “What about them?” Mag jerked her chin toward the street, still filled with the boisterous sounds of celebration that she was about to kill.

  “If people got it in ’em once the news is spread, we should keep dancin’,” Clarence said. “Company ain’t the only ones who can play this game.”

  They quietly doubled the guard on their section of the wall, on the streets that stood between them and the company buildings. Those not standing had themselves a picnic out in the street, pretending that everything was fine, that they really did believe there’d be a negotiator coming in the next morning.

  Maybe it would be, Mag told herself. Stranger things had happened. She’d be happy if she was wrong. She should have been trying to get a few more hours of sleep – Clarence had basically ordered her to do it – but she felt every nerve in her body strung wire-tight. So she’d parked herself at one of the tables set up in the street, with a piece of pie she really didn’t feel like eating in front of her, and a glass of lemonade she barely managed to drink.

  Anabi touched her shoulder, and she jerked. Mag offered her an apologetic smile. “Mind was wanderin’.”

  Anabi turned her slate toward Mag: Going to take some pie to the sentries.

  “I’ll go…”

  Anabi shook her head and wrote: Sit. Or you’ll fall over.

  Mag huffed out a humorless laugh. “Fine. I’ll be waitin’ here for you, then.”

  The answer she got in return was a quick kiss on the corner of her mouth. Then Anabi gathered up two untouched pies and a big carving knife and carried them away.

  A burly, red-faced miner next to Mag gave her a gentle nudge, grinning. “Well, well. Ain’t you lucky.”

  On that account, she managed a smile back. It felt good, normal. This man also hadn’t been in the meeting when she’d told the work gang leaders what she could do. Maybe they’d been keeping their mouths shut. Or maybe some people were just good, and liked to see others be happy, and wanted to trust each other. She missed being able to feel that. “Very lucky,” she agreed.

  “My wife made one of those pies. Those sentries gonna feel damn lucky too,” he said. And with a little prompting, Mag got him to start talking about his wife, who was back in their small house with their six month-old daughter, making more food to share out. She got the story of how they met, both on the same work gang, and him doing double time so she could stay out of the mine for a while, then their plan that they’d trade off so he could stay home with the baby. Mag didn’t have to say much herself, just a little affirmative noise now and then to keep him talking, and she liked the listening. The words washed over her like a cool breeze on a hot day, or the water in one of those rare times she’d gotten to have a real bath, comforting and bolstering. Life went on, ordinary life, with good, ordinary people.

  As they talked and she slowly nibbled her way through the pie she hadn’t thought she’d eat, the sky went blue to violet to black, with the one moon near full and the other a crescent, stars winking out between them. The sodium-yellow lights of the street snapped on, the batteries feeding out the power they’d been drinking in from the sun all day. The town really was self-sufficient in most ways, Mag thought vaguely. Anything that could be done with electricity and a machine simple enough to survive here would tick right over until it got worn to death by sand. If left on its own, the town would keep going, empty but for ghosts, until the desert took it back. The real trouble was the people, because they needed food and water, and that was something they had to depend on others for.

  Didn’t matter, hopefully. Maybe Clarence was right, and the offer of negotiation had been genuine. Maybe for once, they could win without paying for it in blood.

  A sharp crack jerked Mag out of her slow descent into relaxation, and stilled her new friend’s words mid-sentence. “Was that…” he began, head swiveling back toward the walls.

  Another crack and another, then a series of rapid pops – and a massive tear, a crash, like a building collapsing. People around the street bolted to their feet, Mag only slightly slower as she struggled to comprehend what was happening. But they all had their trained instincts, at least, something every miner knew: you heard a sound like that, you waited for the moment of quiet, and then you ran toward it. The lives of every person you worked with depended on it.

  Then she heard th
e screaming, not so distant, and she didn’t know how she’d ever mistaken the joyful sound this afternoon for this kind of anger and fear that moved over her skin like claws. First formless, then coming closer as the message carried: “Greenbellies!” “Attack!” “They’re at the walls!”

  Her first thought was Anabi. Maybe she should have thought about the others first; there were a lot of people on the wall. But the image of Anabi, terrified and still incongruously holding those two pies, jolted her into motion with the hectic energy of pure fear. Surrounded by miners, she sprinted for the wall. Uncle Nick’s little revolver, which she’d kept in her skirt pocket since the day she finally took it out, banged a bruising tattoo against her thigh.

  More people poured into the street ahead of her. Someone tripped, fell. Two other miners dragged them up by the arms and kept going.

  Smoke poured into the street. First it tasted like scorched metal and synthwood and rock dust. Then a chemical stench came through it, something stinging that sent tendrils of dizziness reeling through her. She had to catch herself on the shoulder of the miner next to her.

  “Gas!” a man yelled from the side. “They’re gassing us.”

  The crowd drew up short. Then a few miners went into the nearby houses and came out with their breather masks, the ones they used during mine collapses. They threw extras, belonging to siblings or housemates or spouses, probably, into the crowd. Mag caught one and pulled it on. It wasn’t the right size; she still tasted the smoke around the edges, but it would have to do. The band around the back of her head yanked at her hair. She shoved to the front of the crowd, with the other people who had masks, and they kept going into the smoke as it got denser. Yellow lights glowed dully in the dark billows, people becoming nothing more than shadows.

  Then out of the smoke, more lights blazed, along the ground. Truck headlights, Mag realized, and she made out the high shape of the town’s wall, but with a gap through it. They’d blown or ripped or torn a hole in the wall of their own town. Dark shapes moved in and out of the light and smoke, and Mag couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

  A hand grabbed her shoulder, someone pushing past her. They – she – raised her hands, like she was going to just push the smoke away. The breeze blowing into town through that hole in the wall slowed, stopped, then shifted to come from a new direction, directly at their backs. It was weak, attenuated by too many houses and the other side of the town wall in the way, but enough to start rolling the billowing smoke and gas back.

  The woman sagged back, and a miner who had to be twice her size caught her. Mag recognized the woman now, as one of the witches that Hob had brought into town back during the witch hunt, who’d taken a job in the mine and tried to just blend in.

  She saw people in green uniforms, men made monsters in some kind of military tech armor moving in and out of the walls. Some of them carried bodies, not bulked-up ones – unconscious miners from the walls. At least, she hoped unconscious. It wouldn’t make sense for them to be taking the dead, would it?

  Anabi. She had to find Anabi. Miners charged in around her, brandishing what weapons they had, mostly picks and hammers. The greenbellies raised shotguns to fire at them, and another round of loud cracks and pops made Mag drop to the ground. A voice roared over some kind of speaker system, the words so overdriven it sounded like a howl, but she picked it out: “STAY DOWN. STAY DOWN.”

  Mag scrambled back up to her feet, desperate. Somehow, in all the light and noise and confusion, people shoving her this way and that, she closed her eyes and tried to focus. She knew Anabi. She knew what the woman felt and smelled and tasted like, the sound of her mind. She could find her. She had to find her.

  There.

  Mag turned, focused on one thing as the shotguns roared again, as people screamed, as the greenbellies howled like demons. Shapes twisted and blurred, and she saw Anabi, struggling to free herself as a man in dull black armor dragged her toward the hole in the wall. Metal flashed and she dropped to the ground, let go abruptly. The greenbelly reeled back, the carving knife sticking from the meat of his forearm. Mag ran toward them as another guard lunged in, his fist connecting with Anabi’s face, the sound of it lost in the chaos. A fresh wave of chemical smoke washed over them, the breeze shifting again, and Anabi became a limp shadow on the ground, one the guards picked up and dragged.

  “No!” Mag screamed behind her mask. She forgot about the gun in her pocket, about everything else. She reached out with her hands like she would crush the heads of those two guards between her fingers, even from fifty meters away. And she felt them, minds like tiny sparks in the melee, she smelled them out by their proximity to Anabi, by them touching her. Her throat raw with a scream she wasn’t aware of, she threw the weight of the witchiness in her blood on them and watched them drop to their knees.

  She could do this. She would do this. She was doing this.

  So focused, she didn’t see another guard raise something too big to be a shotgun and fire at her. She didn’t see the gas canister fly through the air toward her. She felt an instant of impact against the side of her head–

  –then nothing more.

  Chapter Forty-One

  11 Days

  Long before the shadow of its walls were visible against the horizon, Ludlow was a column of smoke boiling up over the dunes, lit from within by evil yellow light and the strobe of brighter, blue-white pops.

  The shortwave radio chatter, which had been its normal mix of shit talking, shit talking, and more shit talking, stuttered to silence. Static popped, not quite in time with the flashes of light erupting through the smoke. Finally, Geri said, voice low and tense: “What the fuck.”

  It couldn’t be the town burning, Hob realized after an instant of panic. She knew smoke from fire, and she didn’t see anything in it that flickered like a living thing. She didn’t feel it in her blood. “Don’t know, but we ain’t slowin’ down. Guns at the ready.” Mag was in there, somewhere. Mag was under that cloud.

  They came up over a dune and the town wall was visible – what was left of it. Its shape went ragged in the uncertain light and blowing smoke. But Hob saw, too, the trucks parked outside the wall, headlights cutting broad white cones. The guard towers had their floodlights pointed at the ground, and the dark shapes of people moved in and out in a mass of confusion.

  She still didn’t know what the hell was going on, but a few things were plain: it wasn’t bandits, and she’d bet down to her last breath it was Mariposa, attacking their own town. “Kill your lights,” she said. With all the action around the wall, there was a good chance they hadn’t been spotted yet. “Freki, what’s your estimate on how many of ’em there are?” There were enough trucks arrayed outside the walls that she wasn’t going to try to do that math in her head, not with her brain already buzzing up with adrenalin.

  “Hundred and eighty,” Freki answered quickly. “Maybe two-forty. Depends.”

  “Fuck me,” someone said over the radio. Either number was bad, it was just a choice between really bad and really fucking bad. Without Coyote and Maheegan, there were only twenty-six of them. Not good odds – if they were going in head-on. If Ludlow was going quietly, which it sure as hell didn’t look to be.

  More confusion was going to be to their advantage, Hob saw quickly. And they weren’t going to be able to make this a toe-to-toe fight. But if they could get Mariposa twisted around enough, maybe they’d retreat. And if the fuckers retreated, she could at least get into the town and look for Mag.

  “Geri, take four. Go around the walls, and get the guard tower lights down. Make ’em think there’s a shitload more of you, goin’ for the rail depot.” That’d force at least the town garrison to split off some of their people to protect that. “I want Lykaios and Diablo. We’re goin’ in one of the tunnels. Freki and Dambala, split everyone else atween you. Come at the trucks from either side. Make a lot of noise. Use them flash-bangs if we still got any left. Just leave a fuckin’ clear path for ’em to retreat so we can make
’em think it’s a good idea. Give us about a thirty-minute lead, then start makin’ some noise if you ain’t heard otherwise.”

  She listened with half an ear as Freki and Dambala quickly parceled out the other sixteen Wolves between the two of them. “Get all your hand lights out,” Dambala said over the radio. “We’re gonna string ’em together right quick.”

  “Flares, too,” rumbled Akela. “Oldest trick in the book.”

  Anything to make it look like there were more of them than there were would help, Hob knew. The only advantages they had were surprise, and that it was already so chaotic, no one would be able to tell what the hell was actually coming at them.

  She’d picked her people right. They’d do the best they could with what they had, and better without her breathing down their necks. She had her own job to focus on.

  With Diablo and Lykaios close behind, Hob headed for the tunnel entrance Mag had shown her. Turned away from the town, she hazarded having her headlight on again. Maybe fifty meters from where she remembered the tunnel entrance to be, she caught the ghostly shape of a person running across her view and slammed on her brakes. Thankfully, Diablo and Lykaios were quick to react. Skidding across sand, they all came to a halt.

  “Who’s there?” Hob demanded, one hand going to her holster, though she didn’t draw yet. She hadn’t gotten a good look, but she was sure it was no security man she’d seen. “We ain’t greenbellies. We’re Ghost Wolves. Who the fuck’s there?”

  Slowly, the rustle and scrape of their steps over sand muffled through her helmet, one kid, then another kid, then a gangly teenager holding a baby edged into the bubble of light cast by their motorcycles. Then another, and another. There had to be thirty of them, kids of various ages, from babies being carried to ones almost old enough to be toting a gun and riding a motorcycle.