He grinned. For a second there was pain there, and she glimpsed one of the realities underlying this one; she was on the stage again and he was lying on the ground before it, his skull pulverized.
The grin won out.
"You'd prefer to talk to Crow, I get it, but there's not a lot of him left. That jump from the fire used most of him up."
Lara was getting bored. "My boy," she said, bringing him back on topic. "That's what you said. Deliver your message."
He raised one eyebrow. "All right. It's Amo. He's in the shit."
It wasn't anything she didn't already know. She'd felt his cry of desperation from the Lincoln Bedroom days earlier.
"And you care, because?"
He spun the knife round his thumb; a neat trick. "I like that boy. I like you, sweetheart. Not just the figure. Not just the face. The balls. You've got a real pair on you."
Lara reached out and took the knife off him. For a moment he looked surprised. She'd done it so easily. But then she knew him now. She'd seen him from eighty-seven different perspectives, while she'd run through her trial, and there wasn't a single secret left.
"Did you say that to the Portuguese girl too? To Myra?"
He winced a little.
Lara waved the knife before him. His eyes followed it, entranced. "You raped her, didn't you? Raped her in the woods. Raped her again in the hotel, kidding yourself that it was for her own good, then you kept going until she killed herself. After that you just let loose raping your way across the continent. Men. Women. If it was good for you, it was good for humanity, right? I'm sure you had plans for the children. You had plans for us. You raped Witzgenstein. You broke her mind. I was next on the docket."
He leaned back a little. His eyes danced along with the swaying knife, uneasily. "Steady, girl. I'm here to help."
Lara laughed. She leaned in.
"You call me girl. Sweetheart. But is that what I look like to you? Since when are you so familiar with the one who stamped your goddamn lights out?"
He tried a grin. He was leaning back so far he was almost falling off the stump. "You don't get it. I'm different now, up here. We're all clean."
Lara chuckled softly. "Different? People like you always think they've been punished enough." She threw her arms out. "Behold Matthew Drake, father of 'the Laws'!" she let them drop slack. "You should have died on your cruise ship. You should have died a dozen times since, but you didn't, and it fell to us to punish you, to me and Amo. But dying's not enough for you. You need more. Wash your mouth out, if you think I'm your girl."
Without waiting for any reply she stabbed him in the mouth; a straight and simple thrust. The thin blade slit into his tongue and pinned it to the roof of his mouth. He shrieked and rolled backward, but Lara didn't relent. She rolled after him, bearing him down to the ground. The knife pressed deeper, into the back of his throat and through the other side to spike into the earth.
He tried to throw her off but he was weak. Blood welled out of his mouth and down his throat, and he began to choke.
"It's not enough," Lara said, holding him down easily with one knee across his chest. "Not until I say it's enough."
He tried to speak, his brawny arms wrestled at her grip, but she was stronger and all he produced was slurping, bloody spits.
"Is this what it felt like for Myra?" she asked. "A blade between her legs while you reveled in her pain, you swallowed her humiliation down? Is that what it was like every time you raped them all, from Lydia to Janine? Spit it all up, Drake. Spit it up for me."
He vomited blood; it washed out and over his face, over his throat and down his chest, marking him like a demon.
Lara pulled out the knife, then just as he was closing his wounded mouth she shoved it in again, this time spearing his upper lip and digging into his gum. He shrieked and coughed red.
"Rape," Lara said. "It isn't nice. We don't laugh that shit off. I don't care where you are, or how clean you think you've become. This is how real punishment works."
Bubbles rose up in the red pond of his mouth. She drew the knife out and stabbed it in again, cutting through his cheek and burying into the ham of his jaw. His chin sagged as the tendons tethering it cut loose.
"You don't get to say when it's enough."
* * *
She woke with a start, sweat-soaked and heart racing.
"Hello, Lara," said a voice, and she spun toward it.
Cynthia stood there, holding a tray. On the tray was a glass of water and a steaming meal ready-to-eat in its plastic and foil packaging.
Shivers of the dream washed off her, vivid like dirt rinsed away in the shower. A moment ago she'd been right there, in that forest and doing that to Drake, and now…
Cynthia eyed her strangely.
"Drake?" she asked.
Lara sat up, then jerked as the soles of her feet touched the floor and fresh pain flooded in. Shit! That was an easy one to forget. She'd been walking in the dream.
"You saw it?" she asked, trying to cover the pain as best she could.
Cynthia grinned, showing a few cracked yellow teeth embedded like dirty gravestones in ridges of empty gum. "I ain't a witch, child, but I feel you fuming with night terrors. Now that was some kind of man."
Lara frowned, and carefully extended her legs, settling them into the ice bath set on the chair. There was fresh ice in it, and the relief was instantaneous. She couldn't help but let slip a sigh.
"Good, huh? You bitches are all the same."
Lara snorted and gave her some side-eye. "You bitches?"
Cynthia sucked at her gums. "Bitches! Got two in RV three, Drake's whores, complaining of fire rash, when I ain't see them anywhere near that blaze. Two bitches in RV five, men, mind, but bitches what the hey, moaning and pissing about crotch rot from you keeping 'em sat still so long."
Lara had to think hard to decipher all that. It was ridiculous, and she laughed.
"Cynthia, you are a sight."
"I ain't all that changed, woman. Now eat up. There's a council in the making."
Lara laughed again, but took the tray. Another council, of course, after another trial. How these things went.
The food looked unappetizing, but it was hot and tasted fine. Cynthia muttered something in particular about mad black bitches while she chewed.
"All right," said Lara. "Settle down."
"What's to settle?" Cynthia countered. "You've been inside my head, haven't you, rooting around where you weren't welcome? What's a little 'casual racism' amongst friends? You gonna bury my face in the mud until I choke?"
Her eyes shone dangerously. Lara only wanted to laugh more.
"Maybe in this dish," she said. "It looks like slop."
Cynthia looked scandalized. "Be grateful, child. We came on you in the desert, you were all starving, the baby in your belly half-emaciated. We stuffed you full of food, if nothing else."
Lara almost pointed out that Witzgenstein had tried to stuff in more, but thought better of it. Witzgenstein was gone now.
"Yeah," she said lamely. "You're real kind souls, Cynthia."
Cynthia cursed under her breath. Lara of course knew what she said, but chose to ignore it. It wasn't really racist, just more dumb hick bullshit, and despite the surface anger it hid a kind of possessive affection. Cynthia had hated Drake as much as the rest at the end, even as she'd loved him outright. To see him brought low was as much a blast as it was a disappointment. It was about the same with Witzgenstein too, burnt on the pyre.
Lara looked out of the side window, where bright blue skies glared beneath a snowy cover of gray cirrus clouds.
"Where are the kids?" she asked.
There wasn't any concern there. Vie and Talia weren't by her side anymore, but she felt them nearby. It was more just something to say.
"Playing," said Cynthia, surly now at being mocked. "Drake's little boys and girls got a fierce appetite for play. Some rough, but your kids don't hardly get touched. Couple of bruises, maybe. They throw a f
ew rocks, sand in the eye, but folks mostly watching."
Lara stretched tentatively. The pain in her belly and across her shoulders was right there, hot and bright like the sense of demons in the distance, but tolerable compared to the pain in her feet.
"How long have I been asleep?"
"I make it thirty-four hours, straight through. Folks been in and out, some paying homage, some tempting theyselves on further action. All waiting."
Tempting theyselves. That was a nice euphemism. But she could feel the sense of waiting, humming on the line like a kind of miasma. After all these people had been through, they were hungry for it to be over, or at least moving on. The weight of anticipation was palpable.
The next step forward was clear.
The line was an open book to her now, and she could feel the ripples on it swelling from very far away. Amo and his black eye were stark screams popping off halfway around the world. Anna was a series of focused explosions halfway around the other way. Those weren't things she could ignore.
She swigged down the water, then put the half-finished food to one side. "You've got me a chair, right?"
Cynthia grinned. "Your carriage awaits, my dark Cinderella."
Lara laughed again. How long had she been planning on saying that? She rolled off the seat and crawled on her hands and knees out of the Airstream. The wheelchair was waiting. The people were waiting beyond that. The air felt charged as if a storm was on its way.
10. ESCORT
The council was bullshit but necessary, and done within half a day.
"We go west," Lara told them, all eighty-seven assembled, "because that's where the action is."
Some argued, some were silent, some agreed. There was debate about going back to Sacramento or making a fresh start somewhere in the Mid-West away from the cairn trail. Most just sat and listened, waiting for their fate to be determined.
There were a lot of glassy eyes. Even the arguments raised against her were weary. These people were shattered. They had nothing left in the tank, and the stark, forthright way she stated her case was all it took to get most of them moving in her direction. So they tilted. Alyssa held out, as she'd expected. Oddly, Alan was one of the first to support Lara.
Was he afraid of her? She didn't feel that on the line, other than a kind of caution. Maybe the other night's 'forgiveness party' had struck home, and he'd finally accepted that she meant him no harm. Probably though it was down to Lin, who now hated to be apart from Vie and Talia. He was their best friend, clinging on like a crawdad, and Alan was as much a follower as ever; now he followed his son. After so long alone in Witzgenstein's camp, it made sense that Lin wanted to have friends near his own age.
So, this.
The vote came and went, near unanimous in Lara's favor. "Amo's out there," she said, by way of acceptance speech and closing argument. "Anna's out there with our people, fighting for us. It's where we need to be too."
She offered no further explanations. She didn't have any.
They held a mass for Crow before lighting out. Lara added Witzgenstein and Frances to the requiem list. She didn't speak in the brief service, didn't even sit in the front row, but let Georgiana, who'd taken lay orders once in Methodism, speak words from the heart.
Then they were away. Lara sat in the Airstream and watched while Lin and her kids went stir-crazy with being cooped up. Sometimes she looked over at Alan reading his book, and he looked back at her, and there was a kind of connection between them for all they'd been through.
She requested reports from all the RVs and went through their logistics. Records showed them well stocked in supplies. She registered the few of their number with engineering skills, and had them start reading up on super-yachts. She knew enough herself about sailing to narrow down the selection; she'd been Anna's spotter and catamaran tech-support for years, while she raced out on the New LA waves. The scale of this voyage was just a little bigger.
They didn't go near the crater of Los Angeles; instead they passed through Sacramento two days later and ended up in San Francisco, where they hit the Marina Yacht Harbor and went shopping.
A 59-meter mega yacht named the 'Perhaps' looked best. It barely listed in the water, though it hadn't moved for thirteen years. The kids ran around its many decks in a rush of excitement, darting in and out of the dry Jacuzzi, dashing through the cinema, the master suite, the lounge and gym. Down in engineering George and Abed, one of Drake's husbands, worked on the engines with a team of amateur helpers.
"Engines are flooded, obviously."
"Rust here, here, here. The rest were oiled."
"These wires are shot. Circuitry's solid. Drive chain needs a tune-up."
They combed over the machinery in detail while Lara floated nearby, feeling strangely distant from these events she'd set in motion. Her mind was already many miles away, off to the west where Amo was an incoherent streak of rage, and Anna was trapped, and some new force was rousing from a long slumber.
Everything was changing.
Cynthia assigned the six master cabins and the eight crew cabins, with adults parsed to the children and extra bedding brought aboard. They stocked up on movies and games, along with water, food and fuel. Lara played with Vie and Talia when they came to her, but they were changing now too, lost in the importance of their own unspoken task; rehabilitating Drake's children. They took lead roles in games together, along with Lin and a few other New LA kids, teaching them how to play Monopoly or ten-pin bowling, running impromptu yoga sessions that devolved into wrestling on the gym's floor mats.
Lara watched them, and felt her skin tighten over her burns, and wondered if she'd ever walk again without skin grafts. They didn't have a real doctor with them, only trainee nurses who couldn't hope to perform such an operation. Instead she just hoped, and waited. A lot of the skin was gone, they told her, but perhaps there would be a treatment across the ocean…
In three days they launched. They broke a bottle of '69 Moet & Chandon champagne off the hull and took to the water. Abed was their navigator, George their captain. Lara felt like a payload, watching from outside as people healed and moved around her.
Her kids puked from seasickness, and it was Drake's kids' turn to laugh and offer them tips, like staring out at the horizon line, and chewing on a piece of gum, since they were old hands at sailing, having spent a month already on their Atlantic journey. At night Lara lay with Vie and Talia either side of her, and it felt good, but the absence of Amo became a physical pit in her belly. He'd always been the one to hold their community together. They were going west to find him, whatever kind of man he was now.
She didn't dream of Drake again. Once she thought she spoke with Crow in the night, but couldn't be sure. Most of the time she tried to help out with various tasks, but more often her wheelchair got in the way, so she spent much of her time seated at the prow, looking out to the horizon and floating on the line.
The line rippled above them like an invisible aurora, turning through a rainbow of indigos, greens, yellows and reds. Amo would have names for all the colors and their meanings. She reflected on the past and on the future to come. She let the buzz of her people rock her on the line's tides, as the voyage knit them steadily together.
"We're all right," came a voice at her side. She turned to look, and saw Alyssa standing there. "You and me."
Lara gave her a smile. There was a lot, in those words, as the sun set a russet orange ahead.
"Yeah," she replied.
Time passed. She was a mother and at times a leader, but mostly she was only a literal figurehead, seated at the prow. She felt them pointing to her in back, perhaps making jokes about how far the mighty had fallen, but that was good. Fear was not her friend. It was good they were treating her like just another human.
Thirteen days in, nearly two thousand miles into their voyage, she was first to see the craft in the sky. There was nothing to feel on the line, as they came in remotely piloted, just high enough to be hard to see but not
so high that they were invisible.
Lara welcomed them like old friends. She felt no need to raise the alarm. Only when Cynthia stood at her side, gazing up and amping herself toward fight or flight, did she speak.
"It's OK."
Cynthia scoffed. "OK? Jumping Jehoshaphat, Lara, what do you see up there? Those're drones. I count three. We have to do something."
In back they were rifling through their weaponry. Shouts bounced back and forth.
"Do we have anything ground-to-air?"
"Like what?"
"Homing missiles. Heat seekers. Something military."
"This is a pleasure yacht! It has flares."
"Then we need to run! Turn around and get out of their range. Send out some flak. Deploy the rafts at a minimum. One clean hit on the 'Perhaps' and it'll all be sunk."
"It's OK," Lara said again, and turned around to see them. Fearful faces, not knowing what to do. They'd seen a nuclear bomb explode a city. For months they'd been running, afraid of something just like this.
But this was different.
"They're flying low enough for us to see," Lara said. "They want us to know they're here."
"So what the hell?" Cynthia asked. "What is this, Lara?"
Lara remained calm. This was what the line was telling her. It was all there, if you were still for long enough, if you let it wash over you and learned to read the flow.
"It's our welcome party," she said. "They've come to guide us home."
SIEGE
INTERLUDE 4
Rachel Heron watched on a remote feed as Olan Harrison went out to meet Amo. It was a long walk, and he walked it like a man, not the god that he was. He could have been there in an instant, if he'd so pleased. There were plenty of vehicles, helicopters, heavy duty drones too, if he'd preferred any of that.
Instead he walked.
"What do you think they're going to talk about?"
Arter stood at her elbow, watching the same screens. He was loyal, though more to Olan than to her. She could feel his eagerness on the line, to ask the question they were all thinking: 'Why the hell is he going out to meet a madman?'
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