This Broken Veil (Ran Book 2)

by Joshua Guess

  I didn’t know the answer, so I had Jem call a small war council.

  We had a cold camp. No fires, not even any lights beyond small, shielded hand flashlights used only at great need. Nicholas worked by moonlight for the most part, only flashing his penlight on when he wanted to make sure he was grabbing the right item.

  Ellis, Julia, Davis, Anthony, and Samantha had joined us. Gregory was there as well, mostly because he had nothing else to do at the moment.

  “What do you think Phillips will do now that Doctor Pickles is dead?” I asked them. I ignored the snort of laughter from Jem at the name.

  They shared one of those group looks that begs for one person to be the spokesman. Julia took the reins. “We don’t really know the man, other than what we’ve heard from the soldiers. You’re the only one here who actually met him. From what you’ve told us, it seems like he wanted to get his people out of here. Join up with a bigger group.”

  I nodded, though of course I’d agree with my own reasoning. Jem, however, played the other side.

  “Maybe if there was no immediate threat. Tactically, I don’t see how he pulls up stakes without being sure we’re gone. That’s assuming his troops don’t want to chase us back home and get some revenge.”

  Nicholas spoke up. “You aren’t gonna want to look over here. I’m about to start stitching.”

  The faces around me showed various states of discomfort except for Jem. Their arrangement left them facing the man as he did his grisly but necessary work. “Noted. Thanks.” My arm was completely numb but for the occasional tugging sensation as he moved it, and I didn’t have so weak a stomach that the idea of being stitched back together was especially upsetting.

  I sighed. What a long day. I was hurt and wanted real sleep. That wasn’t much of an option, sadly. “Our obvious choices are these. We can fight, which would definitely get all of us killed but leave Bastion alone unless my read on the colonel is wildly off. We can run in vehicles, which will end up with us also dead or possibly prisoners again. We can run on foot, slip through their perimeter, and maybe make it home in weeks if we can survive the trip. Not finding us would probably stir up a lot of unease, so I’d say the odds favor some or all of these soldiers coming to Bastion to look for us.”

  “Hmm,” Julia said thoughtfully. “Those sound like three really shitty options. What’s the fourth?”

  I put my uninjured—or less injured—arm over my face, enjoying the sensation of cool skin across my eyes. “In a perfect world I would sit down and talk with the guy and use reason to make him see we’re not worth chasing down. That we’re not interested in a fight and just want to be left alone.”

  Julia waved a hand. “Oh, is that all? I’m sure he’ll be willing to sit with you and talk without any problem. After all, it’s not as if his base was attacked a couple times and his people lured into a trap.”

  “Too bad we can’t force him to talk,” Anthony said.

  I said, “Yeah.”

  Julia said, “Why can’t we?” at the same time.

  I blinked. “What? How the hell would we do that?”

  Julia shrugged. “Capture some of his men, send one back home as a messenger. Tell him we want a parlay. If he’s as dedicated to them as you say, he’ll take chance to get them back alive if we offer it.”

  “That’s…really smart, actually,” Jem said, running the back of his hand along his light beard absently. “But that still raises the question how we catch them in the first place. Still puts up pretty firmly in the ‘probably gonna die’ category.”

  Anthony shook his head. “Seems like all our choices are. At least this one gives us a chance to work this out.”

  I snorted. “By taking captives and threatening to kill them.”

  Anthony shrugged. “I didn’t say it was perfect.”

  Jem leaned forward. “We just have to work out the logistics. With so many small groups of them out there, taking a few hostage shouldn’t actually be that hard. Not if we play it right.”

  Ellis chimed in half a second before Samantha said something, and I began to tune them all out. Not that I wasn’t interested in what they were saying. I was. If there was a way to get us home and left to our own devices, I was a million percent behind it. I just didn’t care about the details of getting to whatever solution they came up with. For once it wasn’t me trying to navigate the problem and get people engaged with trying to solve it.

  Instead I laid there with my arm over my eyes and let the rhythmic tug on my injured arm lull me into a more relaxed state. Yeah, I know: weird. But when you’re hurt as often as I am, much of the stigma and anxiety of injury falls away.

  Nikola shifted against me, his warm presence and deep breaths more comforting than I would ever say out loud.

  I have lived my entire adult life with sometimes crippling anxiety. Yet the longest I’ve felt consistently free of it was after the end of the world. I’ve thought about that nearly every night since Zero, pondering why.

  I think it’s about institutions. It wasn’t that I lost faith in them to protect me as a child, because I was raised and educated in such a way as to not understand they could protect me. I didn’t put that together until my teens.

  It was that the only institution I saw regularly, the cult that called itself a church, systematically tried to break me and my spirit. It left me with an irrational but bone-deep fear of any group of people larger than a dinner party banding together for the same purpose.

  You’d think that would leave me terrified of all the tribalism in the world post-Zero, but no. Maybe the death of the world that was broke those fears on a subconscious level. It would take a skilled psychiatrist to know for sure, and those were in short supply these days.

  I realized as I lay there listening to the others talk and plan and scheme that I usually tried to lead because it reinforced the sense of control over my own life I’d lost when the world ended. Yet here I was, perfectly content to let others do the work.

  What had changed?

  Why had it changed?

  People are a running total of their experiences. The you which exists now is the sum of the accumulated changes from the you six months earlier. It’s common to say people don’t change, and maybe on a fundamental level that’s often true.

  But we do grow and diverge from who we were in a thousand little ways. Sometimes that adds up.

  All the proof of concept I needed was to consider a man who served his adopted country, spent the years of sweat and study needed to become a physician, and know what he became in the end.

  20

  I wasn’t part of the team charged with snatching a handful of trained soldiers and bringing them back. I was just torn up over it, lemme tell ya.

  We moved out well before the sun came up, vehicles running dark as always. Jem did his homework after arriving in the area, scouting everywhere he could for potential assets. We settled on an abandoned metalworking shop set up in an older prefab steel building. It would offer precisely dick in terms of protection from bullets, but it was secluded enough to keep us safe from casual observation.

  Also, since it was a large shop with lots of tools and other resources, it presented opportunities for a girl with a questionable moral compass and a working knowledge of most of the gear in it. Though I thought it might be my decent chemistry skills which would truly come in handy.

  I set up shop in a room partitioned off from the main area by an enormous rolling door. I didn’t want any potential captives seeing what I was doing. Jem, as expected, had not traveled all this way without over-packing. I had armor and weapons again, as did the other prisoners, but those were incidentals as far as I was concerned. Much more interesting were the backpacks full of what I called my special blend, a concoction I’d been slowly perfecting over the last few months.

  “What is all that?” Anthony asked as he helped me organize the contents of the packs as well as several large plastic totes.

  “Explosives,” I said, dropping
one of the bags on the table with a loud thunk.

  He jumped back, putting his hands up as if that would do anything but blow his fingers off and lodge them in his face. “Jesus, seriously?”

  I nodded and grinned. “Relax, it takes a lot more force than that to set this stuff off. Jem thought he might need it to take out a bridge behind us on the way out. It’s what he used to set off the rockfall part of the trap he sprung.”

  Anthony eyed the bags as if they were full of snakes. “So what are we going to use them for?”

  My smile grew sharp edges. “Leverage.”

  “You do know that cryptic drama bullshit is really annoying, right?”

  I turned, whipping my jacket about in a flaring flourish and raised the spread fingers of my hands up in front of my face like a stage magician. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He laughed, a sound more like the giggle of an adolescent than a grown, if young, man.

  I gave him a little bow. “Anyway, we’re going to whip up some bombs. I’ll be doing the work of cutting metal for casings and shrapnel. If you want to help, I’ll probably have you grab stuff for me, that kind of thing. Gopher work.”

  Anthony nodded. “Sure, no problem. Just tell me what to do.”

  Many people would have thought the work beneath them, and it made me curious. “What did you do before Zero? College student?”

  “Construction manager, actually,” he said. “Youngest to ever get the job at my company. I was good.”

  “Well, you and Tony will get along well. He runs all that stuff for us. Work your way up?”

  Anthony nodded with a wry grin. “Graduated high school two years early and got a job basically doing what you’re asking me to do here. Learned everything I could. Loved seeing an empty lot grow into something, you know?”

  “I do, which is weird. Before we started building Bastion, the idea never really occurred to me. Knowing I helped shape it, even a little, was pretty neat.”

  I slipped a heavy apron on, tucked gloves in the side of it, and plopped a welder’s mask on top of my head. “So, you ready to make these bombs or what?”

  Four hours and a lot of breaking the rust off my metalworking skills later, someone pounded on the door. Anthony, who was carefully mixing explosive powder with a thickening agent, looked over at me.

  “Throw the blanket over that stuff,” I said. I gave him time to do it before taking off the heavy gloves and going to the door.

  When I entered the main room, I intruded on Jem and the remainder of our crew duck-walking four bound soldiers into it. None of our people looked thrilled about it, and I assumed the actual work of taking hostages had been pretty difficult. The introspective part of me once more took a glance at the change of pace—me not being the one doing everything—and decided that yes, it was pretty damn nice.

  I looked for familiar faces among them, but no one stood out. I wasn’t surprised even if I was a little disappointed. There were a great many troops at the fort, so chances were always low I’d see someone I knew, much less knew well.

  This next part would require me to take the lead, or at least give the impression I was in charge.

  “Hey, fellas,” I said as I walked toward them. “You all know who I am?”

  Their only reply was a matched set of stony gazes.

  “In case you don’t, I’m Ran. Until last night I was a prisoner in the little house of horrors at your fort. One of you is going to feel either super lucky or cursed, depending on your perspective. Because I’m going to say a few words, then that person will be taken out to the road and set free to carry a message. Do you understand?”

  More silence. “Look, guys, this isn’t one of those situations where I’m gonna break your knees to get you to talk. I’m trying to communicate, here. So can we do that, please? Not looking for state secrets.”

  One of the soldiers, older than the others, nodded slightly. It might have been a reasonable nature overtaking years of training, but hey. Progress.

  I pointed at him. “Winner! You’re going to carry the message, which is this: I need to speak with Phillips in person. He can bring four guards with him, no more. The rest of you will stay here as collateral, but won’t be mistreated. If he comes and talks to me, if we reach an agreement, we’ll let them go.”

  The older man sitting slightly apart from his fellow soldiers looked up at me. “That’s it?”

  “No,” I said. “Tell him I want to discuss everyone walking away from this. No reprisals, no revenge, just everybody getting to go on living their lives in peace. We just want to be left alone.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I can remember that.”

  I left a lot of things unsaid, because the essence of good communication was boiling every complicated idea down to its essential parts. I could have written a long message and had him deliver it, including the many reasons why Bastion would be a bad place to go after a second time. The people there, having been held at the end of a gun, probably wouldn’t be as relaxed about doing it twice. Considering the hundreds of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition we’d taken from the distribution center, such an event would cost many lives on both sides.

  And that was an argument I would have to make, much as I didn’t want to give away logistical details. Just not one I felt was best presented in dry detail. The most convincing way to make a person see your point of view is to talk to them.

  It bothered me that the only way I could get Phillips to do that was to threaten lives, but you play the cards you’re dealt.

  “Good. Jem, please have him taken to the road and dropped off. No idea how long it would take him to walk back to the fort, but if he sticks to the road I’m sure a patrol will pick him up.”

  Figured it would buy us a little time.

  I left the bound soldiers at their spot on the floor and went back to the workshop with Anthony. Jem joined us a minute later, and he was all business.

  “We need to start getting people in place to cover the meeting. I’d rather not do it indoors. Outside will give our shooters more cover and better angles.”

  “We could do that,” I agreed. “But we won’t.”

  He stared at me in confusion. “Why not?”

  I gave him the little half-smile I knew he loved, just a slight curve of my lips. “Because you’re going to give that man a good ten minutes to get far enough away not to see what you’re doing, then get everyone but me loaded up and as far away from here as you can get before abandoning the vehicles and setting out on foot.”

  Jem laughed, low and deep. “Yeah, okay.”

  “I’m serious. Phillips seems like he’s on the level, but I’m not willing to risk every other life here on my gut. I’ll stay and talk to him. If he’s the man I think he is, I’ll head north from here when we’re done and grab a vehicle. We agree on a general direction I can drive toward to find you, and I’ll honk or something until that happens.”

  He stared hard at me in abject horror. His hands shook a little, a sure sign of incredulous rage about to boil up. In that I was not disappointed.

  “Are you fucking insane?” Jem hissed. “We just got you back, and you want me to leave you here by yourself?”

  “Yes,” I said calmly. “I do. What if he comes with every soldier he can call in? A hundred guns in the hands of people who know how to use them, with every reason to? This way gives the largest number of people the best chance of getting free. It’s not even debatable. No ‘I am Spartacus’ shit, either. Everyone but me goes.”

  “That’s—you can’t just—how—” Jem sputtered, his face red with how flustered he was with me. “This is ridiculous. You can’t make us leave you here.”

  “No, I can’t,” I agreed. “All I can do is explain my logic to you and trust that the good man I know you to be wins out over the emotions going through your head right now. This is the right call to make, Jem. You know it.”

  “I’m going,” Anthony chimed in. “I like you and all, but I don’t want to d
ie. I for damn sure don’t want to go back.” He shuddered as he said it. “Kinda feel like shit for saying it out loud, but it’s the truth.”

  Jem glared at him, and I reached out and turned his face toward me. “Don’t you dare hold that against him. Nothing wrong with a healthy sense of rational self-interest. That’s why I’m telling you this now, so the others don’t have to wrestle with themselves and make the hard call. You’re taking other options away from them, you understand?”

  I saw the warring emotions as his eyes drilled into mine. “This is so fucking unfair, you know that? You know exactly what you’re doing. It’s shitty and manipulative.”

  “Sure it is,” I said. “That’s how good people are supposed to feel when someone uses their goodness against them. Now go, get everyone packed up and ready to roll.”

  I didn’t try to kiss him or comfort him in any way. I knew I was asking him to make a terrible choice, the sort of thing that damages you on the inside. Even if I came through it fine—not great odds—the act itself would change things between us. Maybe in a subtle way, maybe more obvious, but unavoidable all the same. As much as I wanted to hold him to lessen the sting, it would come across as another act of manipulation.

  “Fine,” he said. “But I want it on the record that this is the worst thing you’ve ever done to me.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at the slightly childish tone, with a bare dusting of humor in it. “You thought I was dead for a few weeks after Robert shot me. I put this second on the list.”

  Jem shook his head. “Nah. You didn’t choose for that to happen.”

  And he left. Stomped on his way out, but he did his duty.

  I clapped Anthony on the shoulder. “Come on, fella. We have more work to do and not much time to do it. I’m gonna need your help.”