Califia's Daughters (37 page)

“Funny.”

“Yeah, it is. Anyway, sure, this is a fine time to get you off the streets. We may need to call on you once the Queen arrives, but there's nothing urgent until then. You want a job in the meantime, or some time off? You have the credits.”

“You know me, I've got to have something to do. A desk job, or teaching?” she suggested, knowing she'd never finish any class she started.

“Can I put you down for tutoring duty? Nothing too physical, maybe wand and guns?”

“Sure. Archery if you want it,” Dian offered. “Or staff, if I wear a padded vest.”

“I don't know about the staff, but we were just saying the other day that we should do a refresher in archery. I'll see if I can put together a class. You get more credits for a group,” she added, and made a note in her ledger. “Might even join myself—I did a bit as a kid, but it would be fun to pick it up again.”

“Fun, yes, well. Schedule it whenever you like, two or three days a week. See you,” she said, reflecting that she probably would not, ever again.

“Sure. Say, where's the dog?” the Angel asked innocently. Dian paused, her hand on the door frame, searching the woman's face for mischief and not seeing it. She was that rare creature, an Angel who missed out on the gossip.

“With Breaker,” Dian said finally.

“With—oh, yeah, come to think of it I did hear something. You know, I don't think I've ever seen you without him. Must feel funny.”

“It feels like I've had an arm amputated,” she said flatly, and went out the door.

It was the truth. She felt the loss of Tomas even more acutely than she had Culum. Then she had the distraction of fever, and the death had been noble and clean; this, however, was neither. It was betrayal, it was selling the dog into slavery, and the thought of Tomas working with Breaker was almost as repugnant as the idea of giving birth to a citizen of Ashtown. That Tomas was young enough to recover from her absence, that he would be pampered and valued the rest of his life, almost made it worse. Death in battle would have suited him better.

She was also quite simply not herself without Tomas. Since she had taken her first steps, Dian had never been away from her dogs for more than an hour or two at a time. The dangling fingers of her left hand were continually startled at encountering nothing but air. She kept thinking she was hearing things, only to realize it was an absence, not a presence, of the click of canine nails on pavement. The nights rang with emptiness, and she often jerked awake in alarm at the lack of grunts and snores from the floor beside the bed, imagining the silence to mean Tomas sitting up, pricking his ears at an intruder. Every time her hand went out in a command as automatic as breathing, she was brought up hard by the realization that the human partner at her side was not about to respond. Her reaction time was shot to hell; she really had no business patrolling the streets.

It was true that she was not needed, that the turmoil which had been building throughout the spring had abruptly tapered off. Breaker would leave with a confident mind, and Dian, too, was reassured, though for markedly different reasons: the quiet streets demonstrated more than Robin's words that the Men's Quarter had a greater degree of control, over events and over itself, than she had feared. Perhaps utter disaster was not to be the inevitable outcome of this.

Eight, seven. Dian went to the Quarter that afternoon while Margaret was on duty in the infirmary, spent two hours with the syrupy music blaring, and when she left, the route to the small locked room was in Robin's head. She did not know how the menfolk would get in, either to the Center or the room, but she assumed that there must be some way to overcome the numbered code behind the black glass plate—after all, what if Breaker died without telling anyone the code? Actually, she did not much care; if the men couldn't figure it out, that was their problem. She and Robin would be gone.

Six days, five. Four. Less than forty-eight hours before Breaker left, and coming up from the bowels of the Center where she'd been coaching the new Angels in the use of the bow and arrow, Dian turned a corner and there was Breaker with Tomas at her knee. Both Dian and her dog reacted instantaneously, he leaping at her like a puppy and biting affectionately and stropping his hundred fifty pounds of enthusiastic muscle against her legs and flailing his tail around so hard that the next day she had bruises along her shins, and she thumping him and tugging his ruff and slapping at his grinning mouth and shaking his lower jaw with her hand and feeling his tongue slobber and work against her palm and his teeth chew gently. It was perhaps thirty seconds before Dian remembered.

She looked up slowly into a pair of yellow eyes utterly devoid of any human expression, and a cold shiver of fear rose through her. Not for herself, but for Tomas. She extracted her hand and stood away from him.

“Tomas, heel,” said Breaker in a gentle voice that held a razor's edge, but Tomas was having none of it and would not be stood away from. He ignored Breaker completely.

“Tomas!” she said again, and this time his ear twitched, but he did not budge. Dian reached down with both hands and seized the fur along his jaws, and bent her forehead down to touch his, holding it there for a moment. When she stepped away this time, it was final.

“Tomas, go,” she said firmly, and without looking at Breaker she began to move away. He made to follow her, and she brought out the voice saved for the direst of sins, the voice that combined shock and disappointment and hurt and a hint of anger, the voice of a condemning god. “Tomas! Bad dog. Go.”

He froze, and she turned and stumbled off.

Dian was not a weeping woman, but when she had reached the refuge of her rooms she gave herself over to it, and allowed Margaret to hold her and comfort her, and wept for that too.

         

The Men's Quarter was slightly more than a sixth of the city in acreage, slightly less than a sixth in population. It was in the northeast quadrant of the roughly heptagonal city, a rounded-off triangle surrounded by three wide, flat boulevards that were lit harshly at night, with access to the Quarter only through barbed wire and broken glass and alarms. The closest the Quarter came to Ashtown's perimeter walls was a fourth of a mile from its northernmost point. The southeastern tip of the triangle was half a mile from the wall, and the western tip was buried in the city, a few hundred yards from the Center. The men would make their break halfway along the Quarter's southern wall. They would head west to the Center; she and Robin would make due east for the outside wall.

Breaker left at night lest the populace take her departure as an invitation to mischief. Dian did not see them off. She was in the shooting range buried far beneath the Center, plugging copious quantities of bullets into paper figures that looked like Breaker.

One more day and its night, and then another day, the last day, never again to see a dawn in Ashtown. The thought was powerful, life-giving, and she kissed Margaret with more affection than she'd demonstrated in some time. She felt—dear God, she was happy, for the first time in forever. When had she last felt like this? Childhood? Then she remembered: the intoxicating hours of freedom after leaving the Valley the previous October, before finding Willa. The exhilaration of action, movement, anything to stir the stagnation that had tugged at her, clung to her, turned her into a fat old pregnant woman. God—the first few nights I'm probably going to bitch at how hard the ground is, she thought, and grinned to herself.

“You're in a cheerful mood this morning,” said Margaret from behind her, sounding mildly suspicious. Dian finished pulling her tunic over her head and reached for her brush, and then turned and directed her grin at Margaret.

“I know. It's crazy, but I just decided, what the hell. I
do
want this baby. And I'm
not
going to allow the Captain to screw me into a corner. Let's do something tonight. What time are you off?”

“Early shift, I'll be home by four.”

“Great. Let's get out of the Center. Dinner somewhere where they won't act like we've got the plague. And there might be a decent movie playing. Yes?”

“You are in a funny mood,” Margaret insisted, but now a smile of her own was tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“C'mon. What I really want to do is stuff myself silly and dance until dawn, but I can't do either right now, so we'll have to practice decorum and be in bed at ten o'clock like the old folks. You game?”

“I'd love to, Dian.”

Somehow Dian got through the day. Somehow she kept enough of her mind on the movie to know when to laugh. Later she managed to eat the food that cost her as much as a night in the Quarter would have, aware of Margaret oohing and ahing over the delectable dishes and the glamour of the restaurant, though Dian could only grimly think that it was as well to tuck away as much as her crowded stomach could bear, because it might be some time before she had another hot meal. It could have been stewed wood chips, for all she tasted it. She gave Margaret champagne, and wine, and brandy, and scandalized eyes were averted from the sight of two Angels in their black uniforms, one markedly pregnant and the other decidedly drunk, helping each other out the door.

Margaret sang rude songs and giggled in the open horse-cab, and once home fell headlong into Dian's bed and lay senseless, snorting occasionally. Dian removed Margaret's boots and tucked the blankets over her, and then, before turning off the lights, she eased back the heavy hair that tangled onto Margaret's face and placed her lips lightly on the skin behind Margaret's right ear. Margaret grunted and muttered. Dian smiled, sadly, and closed the door quietly, and went to make herself some coffee. She sat with the lights out and the curtains open, looking down at the Angels' private inner garden, its blossoming trees ghostly in the dim light of lamp and half-moon. She sat, and breathed, and felt the beating of her heart, and waited, and when at twenty-three minutes after midnight the first sirens sounded, she relaxed.

The waiting was over.

She picked up her cup and carried it to the kitchen, washed it, dried it, hung it on its hook over the sink. When the alarm bells began to clamor in the hallway, she went in to Margaret, shook her shoulder gently.

“Margaret, there's some kind of problem. I'm going to see if I'm needed. Don't bother getting up, they'll send for you if they need you; I just wanted to tell you where I was going. And to say thank you.”

Margaret backhanded the hair from her eyes and squinted groggily up at Dian.

“F' what?”

“For tonight, of course. And for everything since January, I suppose. Go back to sleep now, sweet girl. I'll see you later.”

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

She leaned down and kissed the woman lightly, drew the quilt up over her shoulders, and left her. With any luck, Margaret would never know for certain. Bones would no doubt be unearthed in the cooled debris, and what was to say that some of them were not those of one pregnant Angel?

Dian took her wand from its recharging unit beside the door, strapped it on, reached into the closet for her thick, short-sleeved flak jacket, tight across the belly now but with inner pockets that would not show the items she had secreted there earlier—extra socks, a flint and matches, a few fruit-and-nut bars, a twist of plastic film holding a few tablets, mostly antibiotics, in case she and Robin did not come through unscathed. And a long, thin, strong rope. She did up the jacket's buttons and reached into the closet for the rest of her riot gear, issued to every Angel but worn only in the rare event that the Angelic mystique of invulnerability was actively, massively challenged. The rifle, her personal choice over the more commonly used shotgun, she slung onto her back; the belt, bristling with ammunition and gas grenades, went around her hips; the claustrophobic helmet she tucked under her arm, and let herself out into the corridors.

Downstairs it was incredibly noisy, but not chaotic: give Breaker her due, she may be an absolute tyrant, but her women were trained to function without her. There were three people at the communications desk instead of the usual one, all speaking stridently into radio telephones with hands flattened over their free ears. Dian gave her number to the Lieutenant in charge and was told to get to the northern end of the Men's Quarter, where there was apparently a mass breakout attempt, reports of twenty, forty men already over the wall. Dian obediently left the Quarter, stopped outside to buckle on her helmet and unsling her rifle, and then took off—east, not north. North was the decoy.

In five minutes she trotted up to one of the minor entrances of the Quarter. The single guard there greeted her with furious questions.

“Fucking hell!” she exploded. “What's going on? I can't get anyone to stop and tell me.”

“Don't you have a radio?” Dian asked her.

“They said to shut up and get off the air.”

“They probably won't have told you, then. You're wanted in the north end. I'm your relief.”

“What is it?”

“Breakout attempt and, from the look of it, fires. Better hurry up if you want to get in on the fun.”

“I should go back for my gear.”

“The Lieut said no, just get your ass up there. Oh, and you're to go around the east end, round up any stray Angels you see, and send them up too.”

The woman hesitated no longer, but grabbed her equipment and set off at a run down the lit boulevard. Dian let out a sigh of relief. She'd been prepared to wand the woman, or shoot her, but deceit was far better. She tapped twice on the thick wooden door. She felt eyes on her but nothing happened, and then she remembered that she was completely anonymous, and hastened to raise the obscuring faceplate on the helmet. The door opened instantly, and she slid inside.

“You'll have to put someone on the door,” she started to say, but a black-clad almost-woman was already pushing past her to the guardhouse. She nodded and turned back to the dark passageway, which her senses told her was full of people. The door behind her shut, the lights went back on, and, prepared though she was, she took an involuntary step back at what confronted her.