She passed a group of ten young officers in identical blue t-shirts standing practically to attention as the gargantuan Sorrel Williams ticked off tasks for the day. The group was flushed and hot from some kind of workout, and would otherwise feel the chill as Lila did from the advancing cold, but Lila tugged her lightweight denim jacket more closely about herself as if with a guilty conscience, in limbo as the newest of the new and not yet with an assignment.
Though soon that would change.
Her eyes crinkled in recognition at a plainly handsome woman bustling in her direction carrying an armload of clipboards with negligent ease, wire-rimmed glasses on the older woman’s face beguiling eyes declining the contact as Lilianna stopped, clear in her intentions, the familiar stranger halting with a slightly uncertain smile begrudging at best.
“Hi, Miss Stacey?” Lila said.
“Hey,” the woman said. “Hi, how are you?”
“I don’t know if you remember me,” Lilianna said. “I’m Lilianna Vanicek?”
“The girl from the train,” the other woman said. “I didn’t remember the name, thanks. I’m Gwen, if you remember?”
“Yes, I do,” Lila answered brightly, then tried to tone down her enthusiasm. “You said it was a famous name like some celebrity or something, but I don’t know who that is . . . or was . . . but I remembered. You said to hit you up if we settled in the City and I was looking for work. . . ?”
“Well, you’re here now,” Miss Stacey said. Her smile was far less certain. Puzzled, perhaps. Her brows narrowed prettily. Lilianna remembered the woman possibly flirting with her dad, and wondered now if she remembered Tom Vanicek too, or if perhaps for more recent reasons. Lila’s father’s shadow hung over her and her own smile dampened as Gwen Stacey asked, “But you’re a Bastion recruit, so. . . ?”
“I’m really new,” Lila answered. “And I . . . no one’s given me official duties yet.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“That’s . . . unusual.”
Lila didn’t like the way the older woman said it, and again the dubious fame of being Tom Vanicek’s daughter thrummed like a bowstring in the teenager’s chest.
“It was a special . . . I mean a kind offer . . . from Councilor Wilhelm.”
“Oh,” Miss Stacey answered, as if that explained everything.
Her downplayed smile returned and Lilianna felt absurdly grateful for it, warmth redoubling for the more senior officer counterpoint to her own annoyance at herself for acting like such a fawning lackey.
“You might be in luck,” the woman said. Her rich Texan tone only accentuated the hint of mystery in the remark. “Sad circumstances, you understand, but . . . why don’t you stop by my office when you’re finished . . . doing whatever it is you’re doing. I’ve got meetings for the next hour – or God I hope it’s just an hour – and then I’ll be back in Communications, OK?”
“That sounds great.”
Gwen Stacey’s grin vanished like it was never really there.
“We’ll see.”
And she nodded to Lilianna and hurried off about her business.
*
THE GYMNASIUM WAS mostly empty, but Lila wasn’t surprised to find Beau there.
Taller than her by six inches and now dripping with sweat in a way that couldn’t help but set Lilianna’s heart a-flutter, Beau looked her way as she picked her path through the exercise machines to the lifting area – and as usual Beau’s near-total expressionlessness challenged the fixed smile Lila kept in place like a ship’s sail driving her towards him.
But she stopped a discreet five yards away, at the edge of the empty deadlift stage. There were no weights racked – Lilianna imagined her father’s jealousy, if he saw the place, which didn’t seem likely, in fact, given his shitty attitude towards the Bastion overall – and Beau grabbed his navy t-shirt to wipe his hands, fresh from his addiction to chin-ups. Then he visibly forced a smile onto his own face and came across to her – and as often happened, paused just outside their radiant intimacy with a hesitant expression, smiling still, not quite meeting her eyes.
“Hey,” he said gently. “You made it.”
“Of course, silly,” she smiled and immediately regretted the words making her sound like a ten-year-old girl flirting with the object of her affections, even though that’s precisely how things stood between them. Perhaps unnoticed, though unlikely, Lila took a step closer and reached out her left hand, body on a slight angle as she often did too, consciously or otherwise angling her scarred right arm away from easy eyesight despite the denim jacket she wore.
Beau’s callused hand took hers and he smiled like he always did too. In relief.
It occurred to Lila for the first time perhaps her Beau was as uncertain of her affections as she was of his, and so – boldness the antidote to inaction, as her father once said – she pushed herself forward, almost emitting a tiny feminine growl, and wrapped her arms around her sweaty paramour’s lean, muscular, moist, stinky torso, and angled in for the kiss.
Beau gave her a peck, nothing else. Lilianna slipped away, lubricated by his sweat, her nose crinkling whether she wanted it to or not.
“You really need a shower,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I still can’t even believe I can say that,” Lila said with a genuine grin. “I don’t know how long it’d been since we had running water, before we hit the City.”
“One of the perks.”
Lila nodded, hiding her smile. “One of them.”
If Beau ever blushed, maybe he would’ve then. But it didn’t show. He nodded instead, like she’d made some pronouncement about the stock market – and equally as foreign to her.
“I’ll wash up.”
“Hey,” she replied, putting her hand in the middle of his chest and reveling in the sensation on the sly. Beau’s chiseled physique set her heart thumping once again in her chest. “You don’t have to go.”
“Actually, I do.”
His dark blue eyes betrayed him, flicking towards the door. A second later, two bigger men entered the long chamber, deep in conversation, and headed straight towards them, though with eyes only for the power racks and the pins holding Olympic plates of all sizes in place.
Beau started moving anyway. The illusion of privacy was lost, though Lilianna restored it for a few precious seconds as they passed the men with polite nods and moved back towards the entrance.
“Duties,” Beau said.
“What are you up to today?”
“Did you get an assignment yet?”
Lila brushed off him ignoring her question. The fresh memory of her appointment with Miss Stacey pushed back into mind and she nodded.
“Maybe,” she replied. “I think I have a . . . job interview?”
“Where?”
“Communications?”
Beau nodded sagely. He paused before the exit. Their usual awkwardness resumed. Lila desperately wished her boyfriend would fill the conversation gap, but knew he wouldn’t.
“Everything OK?”
She felt herself slipping into his minimalist speech patterns and screwed up her mouth in an ironic expression lost to him since his eyes flitted elsewhere. Beau only nodded.
“OK,” Lila said needlessly.
Beau squeezed her hand again, smiled like he was embarrassed by it, and left.
*
THE IDEA OF working out herself didn’t hold a lot of appeal, but she lingered in the gymnasium long enough to acquaint herself with the machinery she might use. All she really longed for was the promised chance to practice her archery on the Bastion’s rifle range. At least she’d had the chance to refamiliarize herself with a rifle.
No more than a minute out of the gym, a bright peal of laughter pricked Lila’s ears and she scanned down a passing side corridor to spot her friends Aurora and Montana headed her way. Montana waved cheerily, another of the Bastion’s dark blue t-shirts in her hand.
“Hey, we were just coming
for you,” the thin brunette said.
She thrust the navy shirt towards her the moment the pair arrived. Aurora, who shaved the sides of her head and wore a hard fringe as well as a bull-ring through her nose, averted her gaze from the sunny catch-up, giving Lila a view on the not-particularly-good tattoos climbing one side of the girl’s graceful neck and crowding the left side of her skull.
“Here,” Montana said. “These are yours too.”
She had three more identical shirts in her arms, along with some folded track pants and a pair of Nike runners.
“Size six, right?”
“Wow, you remembered.”
Lila took the gear. A flush of belonging tore through her.
“It’s the curse of Logistics,” Montana beamed. “We were just grabbing lunch. Join us?”
“I’d love to,” Lila replied. “But I can’t.”
“Catching up with that hot boyfriend of yours?” Aurora asked.
When she met Lila’s eyes, the older girl’s expression hardened as if making some kind of challenge that went entirely over Lilianna’s head. The fringe said it all: she was one of the President’s loyal minions, and whether by natural appetite or the requirements of the role, professed a preference for women rather than men. Lilianna hoped that didn’t include her, but only because she found the hard-featured woman intimidating despite the meager gap in age between them.
“No, he’s . . . working.”
“Still getting the cold shoulder, huh?” Montana said.
At least she had sympathy. Aurora gave a sarcastic snort.
“Just fuck him already,” she said. “That’s all they want.”
“Lilianna’s on the blowjob diet for now,” Aurora smirked.
A flush of embarrassment and indignation swept in to replace Lila’s earlier happiness, hurt at the crass judgement from her friend, and made worse for it not being true. She’d already shared much – perhaps too much – with Aurora about her longing for the handsome and aptly-named Beau, as well as her frustrations at the perpetual distance between her and the young man she desired. There was a gap between them it would take two of them to breach, and her father’s words about how well she really knew her would-be lover surged up despite her efforts to suppress it. The effort showed in her face, and Aurora seized on it like she did any show of weakness to give a teasing, tittering laugh that said everything while committing to nothing.
“Guilty conscience, Lilly?”
“Lilianna,” Lila replied and forced some steel into her voice. “And no.”
“Where you headed, hun?” Montana asked.
Nice deflection, Lila thought. She had a jealous pang that Montana hadn’t jettisoned her acid-tongued best friend in favor of her, even though Lila was still a newcomer to the place, but she set it aside and drew a deepening breath, managing a complex smile on the exhalation.
“Communications,” she answered at last.
“Why’s that?”
“Gwen Stacey said there . . . I think there’s a job opening.”
“And you know why that’d be,” Aurora said.
Her dark tone was finally reserved for someone other than Lilianna. Yet Lila’s eyes quested between the pair for some hint of understanding, and as usual it was Montana who took pity on her.
“Chin was a Comms officer,” she said.
“Chin?”
Lila repeated the dead woman’s name, not because she didn’t remember her, but because of the image that flashed through her eyes of seeing the other young woman fatally shot during the St Mary’s siege – and Lilianna’s own lack of feeling or surprise was a soft, chill note within her.
“Oh,” she said because she had to say something. “I didn’t realize. She had the welding gear, so I assumed. . . .”
“They still keep the women off Construction, mostly,” Aurora said.
The terse woman sniffed, but said nothing more. As one of Dana Lowenstein’s adepts, the subtext was obvious, though the men in charge of the hard labor had their own justifications, even if rumors the department was shot through with Brotherhood loyalists was also true.
“Good luck with the job, Lila,” Montana said sunnily. “Gotta go though, babe, OK? I’m starved.”
“It’s barely eleven,” Lilianna answered and tried to conjure a smirk.
“We’ve been on shift since sunrise,” Aurora scowled. “You’ll know what real work is soon.”
“But you’re staying over tonight, right?” Montana said. She interjected in a way to show she was keeping the conversation civil. “It’s movie night, tonight.”
“Movies?”
“If daddy’ll let you,” Aurora smirked a shark’s grin.
“I’ll be here, yes,” Lila said – and ignored her rival.
“Cool,” Montana said. “Grub’s up at five, movies after dark, cool?”
“Cool.”
“Cool,” Aurora added.
Lila gave the other woman a slow eye-flick and contemplated her next move, but Montana grabbed her friend by the arm with a wayward laugh, ejecting them from Lilianna’s contemplation and leaving her standing alone once again in the hall.
Lilianna turned at once and hustled towards where she thought Communications might be.
*
THE SIDE OFFICES were gloomy in the daytime. Despite the solar power, the Bastion remained on rations, and a teenage girl with a limp and a couple of years on Lilianna kept busy moving through the different rooms trimming candle wicks and refilling the numerous small oil lamps from a container the woman wore unevenly across her back.
Everyone was older than Lilianna, it was quickly becoming obvious. Although determined not to let it undermine her confidence, keeping up her serious demeanor, and trying to radiate competence, frayed her nerves almost on a par with the hard-set jaw she’d learnt to keep during the years in the wild – five, nearly six years of fighting for survival on the road, intercut with months, sometimes a year at a time nestling under the delusion of safety only to have it all torn away, every single time.
Lilianna kept her head down as she picked her way through the different rooms, a telephone ringing somewhere, officious-looking older men and women moving in and out of the different open doorways, the messengers carrying their slips of note paper between the rooms amid whispered conversations, the ambiance of a public library resting over everything even though Lilianna had no memory of such things. No one challenged her as she passed, thanks perhaps to the new t-shirt she now wore beneath her denim, and Lila continued to follow the half-lit corridor around the turn to find herself surprised when it ended at a broader open doorway yielding onto a cavernous and more brightly lit chamber beyond.
Councilor Abraham Ben-Gurion looked up from a bank of blinking data towers he wheeled back into place among its brethren, smiling slightly as if to himself at Lilianna hovering in the doorframe.
“Looking for me?” he asked.
Lila took a moment to check around the room with the look of a woman making sure it wasn’t an ambush, not truly aware that’s what she was doing or that it was so obvious. Her scrutiny only made the skinny, slightly nervous-looking man chuckle as he finished rearranging his furniture with the appearance of a professor in his lab. A number of computer terminals were alive and blinking, several with working monitors, the light explained by high rows of windows banked across the far wall of the slightly submerged room.
“I’m looking for Communications,” she said. “Gwen Stacey?”
Ben-Gurion nodded. He moved forward with a slight tremor, and out from behind his machines, Lilianna finally recognized him, a split-second before he revealed the same.
“You’re Tom’s daughter, right?”
“Yes.”
“Lilly?”
“No,” she practically growled. “Lilianna.”
“My mistake,” he said quick and breezily, though in haste all the same. “I’m Abe. Your father saved my life.”
“You were captured by Ortega.”
�
�That’s right.”
The light was enough to show the faded bruises on the one-time software engineer’s face, though the scars around his eyes where Ortega’s men had beat him remained almost as fresh as the day they were made. Lilianna felt the weird urge to leave at once, but Ben-Gurion’s eyes stayed on hers as if fixing her in place as he made his way across the room with a sense of effort.
“Come in, if you like,” he said. “Take a look around at my magical kingdom.”
“You have computers in here.”
“Correct.”
“Miss Stacey said I should give up any hope about old technology like this.”
“You had hope?”
Ben-Gurion’s smile was bright, even pleasant. Lila wasn’t sure why she registered him as a threat, declining the temptation to ignore her instincts. The weight of the concealed fold-out knife in her sock, beneath her skinny pale jeans, was as much reassurance as she could wish.
“Me, not really,” Lilianna replied and forced a girlish laugh. “If my brother were here, he’d be excited though, ask if you had the Internet.”
“Hmmm,” the Councilor replied with a fey smile. “‘Were’. Tom raised you guys with good grammar, huh?”
“He gave us a lot more than just grammar.”
Ben-Gurion took in the icy tone of warning, but that only made him nod as well.
“You were at the siege, I recall.”
“I don’t remember seeing you there,” Lila replied.
“No,” and again he laughed. “I didn’t acquit myself with any great honor, as the military types might say. Ran off, in fact.”
“You were . . . brutalized.”
“That’s kind of you to make excuses for me, Lilianna.”
Ben-Gurion smiled and motioned expansively around the laboratory.
“You should bring your brother in here some time,” he said. “I might be able to show him a thing or two.”
Lila felt like a dunce for asking – showing it in her furrowed brows as she asked mock-seriously, “You have the Internet?”
“Well, the satellites are still working,” the man replied. “Most of them, anyway. And now we know what to look for. . . .”
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 7
