Peace in an Age of Metal and Men (23 page)

It was time to survey the damage, take account of who we’d lost and how to move on. I couldn’t do it. My knees hit the hard earth and I buried my face in my hands. First Jo and now this. I wasn’t sure if I could take it. Haley. She was just a kid. I’d always moved through my life taking one step forward after another. Now I didn’t know which way was forward anymore.

A whistle from behind broke me out of it.

Zane stood in his convertible black car, rifle in one hand and a coiled rope in the other. He grinned down at me like none of this was affecting him, like he didn’t feel the weight of war crushing him like a boulder on his chest. Maybe he’d never been in war. Maybe my memories were wrecking me more than they should. Or maybe he didn’t care as much about these people.

Maybe he did.

As the car lowered I saw who was in it: Ben, bloodied, but alive.

And Haley. She hopped out of the car and ran up to hug Gertie and Dustin. They hugged right back and the three stayed there for a long time.

“You got them,” I said. Relief washed through me.

“Just in time.” Ben grinned a quirky grin at me. “And it looks like you rescued the plan.” He nodded at Muffin.

It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about. “But we—”

“Absolutely have to do it now,” said Zane.

I nodded. He was right, of course. “I’ll ride in alone,” I said. “You all come when the field drops.” My heart pumped hard again. Too many had died, but until there was no one left, someone needed to fight. I needed to fight.

“Mina,” I said. “Wait a spell, then get back onto the yard and see if there’s anyone left. Tend to any wounded. Find shelter for the night.”

“We will.” She whistled and gathered up the remaining people, giving them orders and sending them out to scout the edges of the yard.

“And, Mina?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“There’ll be coyotes. Mean ones. Keep an eye out and shoot them as soon as they show up.”

She nodded, grim determination on her face.

With that, I mounted Muffin and rode off. There was one more stop I needed to make before heading to Swallow Hill.

Josephine’s junkyard was as quiet as the end of the world. The door at the gate had been propped up to be some semblance of a barrier, but the place didn’t feel safe anymore. Heaps of metal no longer brimmed with potential. They were nothing but piles of junk. Jo’s humble sanctuary—her defended castle—was nothing without her. Blood still darkened the earth around the door to her shack.

“C’mon in,” Abi said.

“It’s your place now?”

“As good as.”

Keith waved from atop a pile of junk, rifle in hand. He had a crazed look in his eyes. Tucker sat next to him, his arm a bloody stump. He held a beer in his one good hand.

Abi waved back and smiled. “Keith didn’t feel safe after the last time he tried to leave. I don’t think he’s entirely right in the head, you know?”

“That might be partially my fault.”

“Is there anyone you haven’t driven crazy, J.D.?”

“Where is she?” I asked.

Abi pointed to the shack.

“Find water for the horse, if you could,” I said. “I need to pay some respects before we go.”

She led Muffin away without a word.

Hat in hand, I made my way to the shack. Each step was harder than the last. The pain of knowing—of seeing—waited for me inside. She had been so full of life. Nobody ever got away with anything around Josephine. She kept her place so well that nobody ever even tried to argue her right to it. She was a force to hold back the storm, but she was more than that too. She had been so caring. So peaceful. Now she was at peace.

Josephine’s body lay on the table in the center of the shack. Her hands were folded neatly across her belly, and the damage done by coyotes had been closed up and covered. The wrinkles on her face, which had once shown her ferocity, now only showed her age. They’d softened into an expression of serenity that seemed at once beautiful and unfitting. She was never serene. Her eyes had blazed with fire and now they were cold forever.

A tear came to my eye, but I didn’t brush it back. If anyone deserved to have tears shed for her it was Josephine.

“I’m sorry, Jo,” I said. “If I hadn’t come here they wouldn’t have been after you.”

Something didn’t figure about that. If Francis had sent the coyotes as a way to torment me, then how did he know that she was the one to go after? Why wouldn’t he have gone after my tribe instead? They were much closer to me than family. A flutter of worry hit me before I remembered that Mina was capable of taking care of herself. The coyotes might come after her, but she’d be ready for them. No, something else didn’t make sense. There must have been another reason that Francis went after Josephine.

The safe seemed like a good place to look. In the corner, where the blood had been hastily cleaned up, the safe was still wide open. Peering into it, I was able to see the blood-soaked contents at the bottom. Once they were out, I spread them across one of the shelves. There were bonds, some from a modern Republic of Texas and some issued by the United States of America. She’d never be able to cash those ancient bonds, but a collector might pay good stars for them had they not been soaked with blood. The Texas bonds looked to be a small fortune.

There was tech too. None of it made much sense to me, and my heart fell when I didn’t see any kind of data cube.

“You won’t find much there.” Abi was leaning against the doorframe.

“When I first told Jo I was going to Swallow Hill, she tried to stop me.”

Abi rested a hand on Josephine’s elbow. The young woman’s face was hard to read, but her lip quivered and she bit it. Her eyes were dry, but maybe all of her tears had already been cried.

“Abi, did she have dealings with Quintech? Did she know about the town?”

She refused to look at me, instead studying the contours of Josephine’s face, as if Jo would give her some advice on what to say. Finally, in a voice so quiet I could barely hear, she said, “It wasn’t Jo who was tied up in Quintech.”

The implication of her words slowly sank into my skull. “You?” I asked.

“Jo said never to tell anyone. Ever.”

We were both silent for a time.

Abi spoke first. “She said I was little more than a baby when she found me. She was visiting her sister in a town—she never told me what town it was—and she figured out that I was going to be taken for a program. My mama wasn’t happy to send me, but it was going to be for a good cause. Folks made some mighty sacrifices during the Civil War and the years after. This was going to make everything better. It was going to give them an advantage.”

“It didn’t, did it?”

“Does it matter?” Her eyes met mine and there was anger in them. “Auntie Jo figured out that they weren’t just experimenting on kids. They were performing experiments that had no chance of leaving the kid human. Mama didn’t know what to do. Auntie did. She took me away and hid. She stayed off grid until she could get some fake creds. She ran from her sister and her husband. Her husband wanted to sell me back to Quintech.”

“There was a bounty?” I scratched my head and looked out the door. “Why?”

She licked her lips. “They’d already done something to me. I was already part of their system, their collective mind.”

“You’re a wiki?” Wiki’s were a kind of human hive mind that depended on ultimate information sharing.

“No, something else.” She pulled her hair up and showed me a tiny metal port at the base of her skull. “It was new tech back then. Now, it’s rare, but only the wealthiest can afford it. That’s how I’m able to drive your skidder. I just plug in and it’s under control.”

“They’d rather have killed a little girl than risk a leak.”

“Something like that. Or maybe they were afraid I’d return and mess up their system.”

Her words were spoken with flat determination. She wasn’t telling me what she could do; she was telling me what she was going to do.

“I didn’t just come here to pay my last respects. I came looking for a key.” I placed a hand on Abi’s shoulder. “Jo wasn’t with Quintech, so she doesn’t have a key,” I said slowly. “But you were with Quintech…”

“And I
am
the key.”

The twin hills behind Swallow Hill rose up in the glow of the setting sun, and the streets were empty. My metal arm hung limp at my side and my headgear was switched off. The spare battery sat heavy in my pocket, ready for whenever I needed the strength my artificial arm could give me, but I didn’t want it yet. The horse had allowed me to move quickly to town, and staying low-tech allowed me to do it undetected. That was the hope, anyway.

I hopped off Muffin and tied her up in front of the tavern. She needed water and probably food, but she wasn’t going to get it for a while. Stroking her cheek, I apologized for the inconvenience and genuinely felt sorry for dragging her into this mess.

There was a backup for the tech that we had destroyed in the bank. That and a tower. With an army just outside the barrier, all I needed to do was drop that field and they could fly in and disable the Quintech tower. Granted, the army was smaller and scattered. Who knew if they would be able to organize in time to do any good. I couldn’t bother with that. All I needed was to know where the backup was so I could take it down. The long ride to town had given me some time to think of strategies for gathering that information.

I was done with strategy.

Kicking the door open, I strode into the tavern like the reaper with a job to do. Four men sat playing poker. Three were in grungy, old clothes. One was dressed all fancy.

They all looked at me with jaws wide open.

Before they could react, I grabbed a handful of Fancy’s hair, slammed his head into the table, and dragged him away.

“Any of you follow,” I said, “you’ll get a bullet in your foot.”

I pulled the man outside and tossed him to the ground. He rolled and tried to stand up. I kicked him hard in the face, bloodying his nose. He scrambled backward, so I drew my revolver and stomped on his ankle. Bones crunched under my boot and the man screamed.

The door to the tavern opened.

I shot a man in the shin, and he stumbled back inside.

“Where is it?” I asked.

He just stared at me, the whites of his eyes showing.

I pressed my revolver up against his knee. “There was something in the bank. Where’s the second one? The backup?”

“I-I don’t know.”

My gunshot echoed off the hills and the man’s knee splattered all over the dirt road. His screams died fast when I put a boot on his chest and pressed the hot gun to his neck.

“Where is it? I know you work for them. Just tell me where it is and we’ll be done for the night.”

“The hill.” His voice was a quiet rasp, like it hurt to say it. “The one on the left. Right at the top there’s a bunker.”

Without thanking him properly, I cracked him across the head and sent him to an early slumber. Untying Muffin, I mounted up and made for the hills. Time was running short, so I spurred her into a hard gallop, despite the approaching dark.

The hill was deceptively far, but Muffin closed the distance quickly. How much longer could she take this? She smelled distinctly like horse and sweat. A path that wove its way up the slope led directly to a grassy patch at the top. The light was nearly gone by the time we got there.

Two turrets sprang from the ground. I drew and fired on them both before they could swivel around to gun me down. Edgy nerves saved my life. The first exploded in a shower of sparks and the second took two shots and went dark.

I took a moment to reload the revolver.

There, right between the turrets, was the entrance to the bunker. It wasn’t much to look at. Nestled in the grass and made to look like rocky soil, it would have been hard to spot if not for those turrets.

Beyond this hill, were others: knobby things, cramped and bulbous. The land got rockier back this way, and a network of canyons seemed to stretch for kilometers.

The door to the bunker opened with a howl. A ladder disappeared into the black pit and was more than a little intimidating. I holstered my revolver and lowered myself in with one arm. My augmented eye would have been able to see perfectly, but the dim light was insufficient for my natural senses. I felt my way forward, touching the walls as I went.

It would be so much easier to roll a grenade down here and be done with it. Tucker would have been the perfect ally for this job. He’d always had my back. Why had he ditched me at the bank? What would have made a loyal man like Tucker Hale betray the only man who’d shown him any kind of companionship? It must have been money.

I shook my head. Focus.

The dry ozone of electricity filled the room with its static charge, but underneath it was something foul. There was the dry scent of sweat and piss.

Something moved in the darkness. A hiss of movement, like paper moving across stone. I held my breath.

It came again, this time quieter. The sound was like a rasping breath in the darkness.

Brushing my hand against the wall to my right, I stepped forward. The surface was cool and smooth, like steel. Two steps farther and I felt something running from ceiling to floor. It felt like a cord or a tube.

Should I cut it? I rolled it in my hands and was surprised to find that it pulsed slightly, like it had fluid pumping through it. There was another one right next to it.

The sound came again, louder this time.

My eyes still hadn’t adjusted. Outside was twilight, but a dim light suffused the room from above. Behind me, faint shapes came into focus, but forward was still a mystery.

Another step. Here, thin wires protruded from the wall in bundles. Curious, I followed one of them away from the wall. As soon as I let my fingers slip from the solid safety of the steel wall, my heart raced. I was disconnected from the whole world. There I was in darkness, trusting senses that weren’t sight.

The bundle of wires ran along the floor, and I followed it for several steps. The smell was stronger there, and the steady rasp of dry breathing was right in front of me. Someone was there. No natural sense told me for sure, but I knew it in my heart. Something alive was right in front of me. It knew I was there.

It was scared.

The sense of fear filled the room, its infectious nature swelling right into my belly and causing cold sweat to bead on my forehead. It smelled sour and wet. I ran my hand up the bundle, finding where it touched the thing in the middle of the room.

The tubes sunk into flesh. The soft smoothness of human skin ran under my fingers in the darkness. My heart raced. What was down here? Who was it? It must have been another Kiva, like in the bank. The image of that grisly scene flashed before my eyes.

“Who are you?” I asked.

There was no response but a long, dry breath in the darkness.

That’s when I cracked. Blindness was suffocating me, making the bunker feel like it was constantly crashing down around me. There was only so much a man could take.

I switched my headgear on.

The child before me drew in a sharp gasp.

Wires plunged into red, raw skin at the base of his skull. Leads had been attached to irritated skin all along his spine and across his limbs. Tubes ran into his belly, pumping fluids in and out like he was nothing more than part of the plumbing. He stank.

Somehow I knew that he wasn’t quite awake and he wasn’t quite alive, but that he was aware of himself through me. My vision was part of his system.

Then he was gone.

My natural eye still saw darkness, but the augmented eye erased the boy. Maybe he preferred not to exist at all. His soft skin still felt slick underneath my fingertips, but he was completely invisible.

Then, Francis appeared from nowhere.

He was upset, showing emotion in a way I’d never seen on the boy. He pulled at his hair. “What are you doing here, J.D.? How did you get here?”

“This,” I said, indicating the place where I knew the boy was. “What is this, Francis? What the hell is happening to this boy?” I could barely form the words I was so spitting mad.

“It’s the price we pay for a world where justice isn’t needed. It’s the one thing.” He cocked his head to one side and the emotion drained from his face. “The human brain has wonderful computing power. It has the ability to construct whole worlds from nothing.”

“This is a child.”

“Of course it is.” His eyes regarded me coolly. “Children are small and require little maintenance. Their capacity for imagination is not quite so bounded. Tests were far more successful.”

I roared in frustration and drew my revolver. I pointed it at Francis.

“You can’t shoot me,” Francis said. “I’m not here.”

“I’m coming for you, Francis. I’m coming for you and I’m going to kill you.”

I took a deep breath and felt my way to where the invisible boy was. Finding his head, I pressed the gun tightly against his temple.

“I’m sorry, kid.”

I pulled the trigger. The vision in my right eye flashed white and changed. Francis disappeared. That would disable his tech for a while, anyway. How long we had, I could only guess. We needed to hurry.

When I climbed out of the bunker, my ears were still ringing and a little bit of me was dead.

Also, I was surrounded.