Tristan took a half step nearer. He reached for his baton. She rolled her eyes, half surprised he hadn't gone for his gun instead. "I'm his legal guardian."
"You got a court order?" Hollister laughed. "I'd say I'm his guardian now. And if you don't watch the way you talk to my ward—and to me—I'm going to make your life hell."
He lifted his brows, waiting, then smiled and returned to his men. She didn't want to push him. Things were too delicate already. If she lost all contact with Alden, she might not be able to get him to leave once she was ready.
So she walked away, too, trying to see the farm with fresh eyes. Digging a tunnel was out the question. Even if she could trust all five of her roommates in the longhouse room, extending a tunnel from beneath her bed to beyond the fence would take weeks, if not months. She didn't think she had that long before she lost Alden for good.
Digging a hole right beneath the fence was more plausible. She might be able to do that much within an hour. But even if she were able to pull that off without being seen, she didn't see how she could leave her room without waking her roommates. Their rooms were padlocked at night; they had four windows, two on one wall, two on the opposite, but they weren't made to open. Which was an obvious fire hazard. She would have to raise the issue with Daniel Morgenstern straightaway.
It would be easier to dig a hole under the fence by the river, grab Alden, and float downstream in broad daylight. But Hollister would notice Alden's absence within minutes. He'd send the dogs after them. That meant they needed enough of a head start to reach a vehicle before security realized they were missing. They could only do that by leaving at night.
She woke to the old man's voice every morning and worked all day. While others poured the foundation for a new longhouse, she was given a handsaw and boards marked with thick pencil. She soon learned why the other man had complained. Even a tool as simple as a saw took touch to use right; the teeth often skidded off her line or dug too deep and got stuck. For several days, she had to concentrate just hard enough that she could spare no thought to her schemes, and even after she got the hang of the tool's use, her thinking time was fragmented, constantly broken up by the delivery of more boards or the orders of Jorge, a kindly but driven man who'd found himself managing twenty of the workers after Hollister discovered he'd once been foreman of a work crew of his own.
Her talks with Alden were rare and brief. When they arose, she probed for information on the progress of his apprenticeship, pushing any point where he showed signs of doubt. Even when she bent his confidence, his desire to stay held firm. Even so, she expected he would follow her out if she showed up in the middle of the night, but in the meantime, she couldn't count on him to help.
Despite that, piece by piece, her plan came together.
Tristan complained of blisters, which was true, and was granted the use of a pair of leather gloves, which she had to sign out of a warehouse of goods from an old woman with heavy jowls and a pen tied to her wrist. Two days later, Tristan returned for a roll of duct tape and a plastic tarp.
The old woman glared over her bifocals. "For?"
"My job," Tristan said.
"For what at your job?"
"They've got me cutting lumber. Every morning I go to the pile and there are spiders everywhere. I've seen black widows."
The woman's jowls bunched in a frown. "You've got gloves."
"Think those will stop a rattlesnake?" Tristan laughed at herself. "Look, I'm not asking for a battleship. But if I throw down one more load of boards because a wolf spider's racing up my arm, I'm going to pitch myself in the river."
The woman craned her neck at the rows and rows of racked goods, then leaned forward and rolled from her chair. "Duct tape. Tarp."
"Can you make the tarp a clear one? I'd prefer to see the snakes before I get within striking distance."
"Duct tape. Tarp, transparent."
The woman disappeared into the stacks. Tristan swore silently. She couldn't push the woman with another request. She'd have to steal. She signed for her materials and took them to the site. The site itself had any number of tools—including several hammers, which she made sure to note the locations of—but no wire cutters. Scissors wouldn't be thick enough. She kept her eyes open, scanning benches and workstations as she shuttled cut lumber back and forth. And spotted a pair of fat-headed tin snips.
She kept one eye on them through the rest of the day, tracking them from one workstation to the picnic table used as a makeshift tool bench and back to another station. As the sun drew toward the western hills, she snagged them from the station, wandered to the pile of uncut lumber she had yet to get to, and hid them under the boards.
Whistle blew for cleanup. Workers picked up stray tools and delivered them to the portable shed for the night. Jorge padlocked the shed and the crew filed away for dinner. Tristan ate quickly, exchanging a few words with her coworkers, then rose for a walk through the dusk. She wandered toward the fields, which the farmhands had all but completely plowed, then moved past the lumberyard. She knelt for the snips, glanced back toward camp, and headed straight for the river. Within sight of its banks, deep in the smell of the mud and the leafy decay of spring, she took her leather gloves from her pocket and clipped the lowest wire of the fence.
The sun was all the way down when she replaced the snips beneath the pile of boards. She didn't dare check whether the fence had been mended the following morning. She didn't have to; she was counting on security to let her know that.
They obliged the afternoon of the second day after she'd made her cut, calling for a safety check of all the workers' bedrooms. She watched as they entered her room. Their feet thumped across the floor. Drawers rustled as the men in black turned them out. She wasn't worried. There was nothing to find. Security finished up and returned to the barracks. They had given no explanation for the search, but Tristan didn't need that, either. They'd been looking for whoever had made such a clean cut in the fence.
Two days to find it. The fence wouldn't be any problem, then. They'd notice she and Alden were gone long before they noticed the wires had been cut. Even so, on the chance her test run had stirred them into greater vigilance, she intended to wait several days before making her run. Give them time to get complacent again.
Then Alden came to tell her he was going to war with Spokane.
"It's not a war," he laughed.
She rolled her lips together. "You just told me Hollister's taking ten of you to help put down a rebellion. You know another word for rebellion? Civil war."
"We're just like advising the people in Spokane and stuff. Training their troops."
"You've had two whole weeks of training and you're qualified to teach people yourself? Pretty accelerated program Hollister's got you on."
"What's your problem?" Alden glared at her with teenage defiance, his face contorted, frighteningly reptilian. "It's going to be like training for me, too. Like field work."
"When?"
"I don't know. In a few days."
She ran her fingers down the scars on the left side of her face. "I don't want you to go."
His glare deepened. "Well, you don't really get a vote. Those are reserved for people who earn it. Like I'm going to."
"Where do you sleep in the barracks?"
"Why?"
"Where do you sleep?"
"1F," Alden said. "It's not a big deal. That's where all the recruits stay."
Tristan rolled her eyes. "1F? The back corner without any heating, I bet. Nice view of the fence."
"There's heating. Who cares if you can see the fence?"
She managed not to smile. "I thought you were signed up with Hollister to protect the community. How is getting shot to death in Spokane going to do one damn thing to help Hanford?"
Alden shook his head, smiling at her obvious stupidity. "I'm not going to get shot."
"You can see the future?" she said, abruptly furious with this little know-it-all. "Then why aren't you running from me
?"
"What are you talking about?"
"How I'm about to pick you up by the ankles and dash you against that tree."
"Did you just threaten one of my officers of the law?" Hollister said, appearing once again at the worst possible moment, as if he'd been lying in wait. He squinted at her through the sharp post-dawn light, mouth half open.
"I threatened my brother," Tristan said. "No uniform is going to stop a person from threatening their own family. Anyway, what kind of hypocrite are you? Sending a fourteen-year-old to war?"
"The state of Hanford is not engaged in any wars."
"Really? This Blackwater bullshit you're trying to pull in Spokane? Just what are they giving you in exchange for your 'police'?"
Hollister turned his bloodshot eyes on Alden. "That was classified information, Cadet Carter."
Alden scowled at Tristan. "I'm sorry, sir."
"Barracks. Now."
The boy spun on his heel and hustled for the security housing. Hollister tapped his nails on his baton, nodding at Tristan. "I feel like we've been here before."
"Child soldiers?" she said. "That's a new one to me."
"Oh please. He won't see the first hint of trouble until he's finished his training." Hollister worked his jaw. "Training you're compromising with insidious doubt. You know what doubt does to a soldier?"
"Restores his sanity?"
"Ruins him. Gets him killed. Threatens his brothers in the field."
"What's apt to get him killed is the fact he's fourteen!"
"You're done." The man cut his palms through the air. "You are no longer to have any contact with Alden Carter. Any efforts to defy this decision—if I so much as see you look at him—and you will be whipped."
She had to turn away to stop herself from striking him. "You can't do that."
"Says who? I run security on this side of the river. This isn't a joke. This isn't an idle threat I'll forget tomorrow. Talk to him again, and I will tie you to a post and whip you."
To stop herself from whipping the blade of her hand into his windpipe, she resolved to leave in two days. Not that she had much choice; Alden would be bound for Spokane within a week. But she had her gear together already. Her plan. The last piece of the puzzle had been discovering where Alden slept. The barracks was structured like a roadside motel—the front door led to a "lobby" and, she presumed, the upstairs where the security team gathered to strategize and drink Miller, but the bunk rooms themselves were accessed through outside doors, with no interior passages connecting them to each other. The front door was locked, but for whatever reason of philosophy (never leave your weapons behind), hubris (no one who's not a security officer would dare step into their rooms), or just poor planning (oops), the bunkroom doors didn't even have locks.
"Understood," Tristan said.
Hollister's focus swam through the red-rimmed murk of his eyes. "You're taking this awful gentle."
"What else am I supposed to do?"
"The Tristan I know? Throw a fit. Or a fist."
"How can you move forward when you're always stopping to fight?"
"Smart girl." He watched her go.
She got her gloves and went to the yard with the others. Amid the rasp of saws, the low jokes of the men, and the caws of gulls picking at the scraps around the picnic tables, she worked with patient diligence, cutting her marks and loading them up on the wagon for the men to haul off to the dig for the new longhouse. Her feeling of peace ran so deep Hollister could have walked up, slapped her in the face, and forced Alden to eat dirt at gunpoint, and she still would have borne it with a smile.
Because it would all be over soon. In less than two days, they would be gone from here, somewhere on the roads through Oregon or Northern California. That was her provisional plan: head south, stock up for a couple of weeks, and find somewhere permanent before the end of the spring. Somewhere they could grow a garden. Have fresh water and a means of fuel to boil it clean. Find a streamside cabin in the woods beyond Redding. Somewhere past a ridge so the Empty Skulls wouldn't see the smoke of their fires. If they could find a cabin—and between wealthy skiers, grizzled survivalists, and cartel pot operations, there were more than a few even in the remotest mountains of the Shasta Cascades—all they'd have to do was store enough wood to keep them warm through the winter. There was still more than enough food in the homes of the dead to see them through while they grew their garden and learned where to fish and how to hunt.
It felt good to have a plan again. A future, however fragile. It meant she had hope, too, for the first time in a long time. No matter how hard the work ahead, no matter how much chopping and planting and cleaning it took to set up their home, after everything that had happened in the last year, it would feel like the sleep at the end of a long journey.
By dinner, her numinous optimism had been sucked away like rainfall on the dust. By bed, her doubts had sprung back to life like poison spores. Yet again, she'd let her anger get the best of her. Banned, under threat of actual whipping, from speaking to Alden. What if circumstances changed her plan and she needed his help after all? What if he didn't even want to come? Was she so sure he'd leap out the door as soon as she showed up? He seemed happy here. Accepted. He was even looking forward to this idiocy in Spokane.
That idea drew the darkest blood. What if Alden were genuinely happy here? She wasn't his mother. Taking him away from here to be with her would be, in its way, just another form of imprisonment. For his own good, yeah. His safety. But she had been safest in the kingdom of Lord Dashing: locked in a room, knights warned to keep their hands to themselves, fed and housed and protected from all the wrongs lurking beyond the high stone fence. Safest, yes. Happiest? Not close.
She shut these thoughts out. She would take him from this place. And once she taught him how to think well, that's when he could start to make his decisions for himself.
At breakfast, she didn't glance Alden's way. At work, she stuck to her cuts. At dinner, she took the duct tape and tarp back to her room, dawdling along the way to give her roommates time to clear out, and hid the items under her mattress. Alden was still in camp the following breakfast. When work finished at sunset, she took a hammer and the tin snips behind the shed, tucked them into her waistband, and went back to her room, where she scrubbed her hands and face until the last of her roommates left for dinner.
The room was silent. She pressed her ear to the walls of both adjoining rooms and heard nothing besides the empty tone of her own ears. This was, perhaps, the biggest gamble in her plan. She had a cover story in case one of the woman who bunked in her room returned early—she had slipped while trying to hammer a loose nail into the sill—but even if they bought the lie, her plan could be spoiled.
She pulled back the thick brown curtains on the eastern window. Fleeting sunlight showed a field of sparse weeds between her and the fence. The window was framed into eighteen-inch quarters. She tore at the duct tape, laying it in strips across the lower left quadrant of the window, first forming a square, then filling in the glass with a many-pointed aster. Last, she plastered the top of the square of tape to the upper edge of the sill.
Tristan wrapped a sock around the hammer's head, grinned foolishly, and bashed the taped-over center of the window.
It fell apart neither as cleanly as she'd hoped nor as disastrously as she feared. The noise was a muffled crack; a few shards fell outward, hitting the yellow grass beneath the window. The bulk of the glass hung from the tape holding the window to the upper frame. She donned her gloves, pulled over a chair, climbed up, and removed the broken window from its frame. She brought it to her bed, splinters tinkling on the floor, and hid the mess underneath the bed frame. She hurriedly covered it in her dirty laundry and backtracked to sweep up the fallen pieces with her gloved hands. Heart racing, she cut out a square of the clear tarp and taped it into place in the empty window. She pulled back the drapes.
The sun's edge had already fallen below the hills. In a few minutes, it would b
e night. So long as the wind didn't pick up and ripple the tarp—and even then, it would have to blow out of the east instead of its usual southwestern source—the window should go unnoticed until morning.
She went outside, hastily buried the pieces that had fallen into the grass, brought her gloves inside and washed up, and went to the tables for a late dinner. Workers murmured, chuckled. She was glad she hadn't made any friends. No one had bothered to note her absence.
Tristan knew she should eat, but her nerves drowned out her hunger. She swallowed what she could and retired to her room for what would be the longest night of her life.
She brushed her teeth and washed up, gaze flicking across the room whenever one of the women went too near the east window. Settled into bed, she feared falling asleep, but she couldn't exactly do jumping jacks while waiting for her roommates to drift off. She lay on her side with her knuckles digging into her ribs and remembered all she could of Alden. The first day he'd come home from kung fu, flushed and sweaty and smelly, throwing punches at their mother's stomach. His first day of middle school a week before Tristan left for Berkeley where he refused to tie his shoes because he said no kids tied their shoes anymore. The day their dad had driven them to get the puppy—a baby black lab with the fattest cannonball belly you'd ever seen—and it had licked Alden's baby face and he'd cried and tried to squirm away.
After remembering for an hour, she discovered she recalled his birth, too. His beginning. Pink. Squalling. She'd hated the hospital; it smelled like her dead grandparents. There was nothing to do. And the baby, Alden, was such an awful whiner.
In the cold of the longhouse on the farm, stretched in deliberate discomfort beneath a worn-out down blanket, smelling her roommates' skin and the cut lumber of walls that were younger than the virus that had destroyed it all, Tristan laughed and covered her mouth. She'd wanted to run away so badly after her brother was born. She had gone so far as to make herself a baggie of baby carrots and another of ranch dressing (spilling as much on the floor as in the Ziploc) and two boxes of an electric orange drink masquerading as juice and headed for the woods above the subdivision. A survivalist from the start.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 68
