Captives (39 page)

"Holy mother of Sasquatch," he said, taking her in. "I wasn't sure I'd see you again. Check that: I thought that, if I were to see you again, it would be nailed to a telephone pole."

"If I'd stayed another day, it might have come to that."

"Well? Whadja bring me?"

"Nothing you'll like hearing."

"Sounds like it ought to be something Raina should have the displeasure of hearing, too. Sneak peek?" He scratched his neck. "Wait, belay that order. I don't want to look unconcerned when the bad news drops."

"Afraid you'll be gutted for a lack of zeal?"

"You talk like that's a joke."

They found her practicing her knife play before the silent audience of the Bones. She wore a sleeveless shirt and the muscles of her arms were as hard as the lacquered red sheath of her katana. Her body language suggested she'd seen them, but she didn't slow down her practice.

Mauser stopped on the asphalt, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "Our embedded reporter has returned from Coruscant."

Raina's expression suggested she hadn't understood him and didn't care. Her head swiveled for a look at Mia. "What did you find?"

"This will be long," Mia said. "Might want to grab some shade."

They relocated to the base of a palm tree jutting from the lawn of a burnt-out home. Mia started at the beginning, deciding to provide all the details she could and let them decide which ones were useful. Though she'd hardly been gone for a week, the telling made it feel much longer. It had been another world, with much to unpack. She found herself enjoying the story. The way each place was now its own little cosmos: that, if anything, was her favorite part about how life had changed.

When she reached the final scene—last night's talk with Dreggers—she slowed even further, doing her best to remember as many of his words as she could. Raina and Mauser began to exchange looks. Hers were level, shielded. His were plastic and alarmed.

"Exactly how drunk was this Dreggers?" he asked once she'd finished. "Blackout, shit-your-pants wasted? Or just drunk enough to become incredibly good at pool?"

"He passed out in his chair mid-conversation," Mia said. "Why?"

"I was hoping there existed the chance that he was feeding you a line. Well, shit.
Aliens?
"

Raina scowled at the grass. "Better to know what they're carrying than to bring a knife and find out they have a gun."

"Or just always bring a gun," Mauser said. "Anyway, nobody's arguing the point that more intelligence is better than less. Rather, my argument is this: that this fucking sucks."

"We persisted through much worse than this." The girl stood, sword on her hip. "We do what we have always done."

"Tell me this was useful," Mia said, finding herself on her feet. "Tell me that I've helped."

Raina frowned, brown eyes shifting between hers. "You brought us knowledge. Secrets. It may not be the time to act upon this lore, but when that moment comes, this might be the difference between victory and the grave."

She turned and jogged away.

Mauser brushed off the seat of his pants. "Listen, while you were out, we had a few incidents. Travelers and merchants getting robbed on the roads. Nothing we can obviously tie to the People of the Stars, but the signs would point that way."

"Kolton kept a log of when he'd seen them," Mia said, suddenly putting it together. "Could be a pattern in it."

"I would definitely like to see that." He folded his arms. "Eyes sharp out there, all right? If you run into somebody who recognizes you from your stint in the city, you might get introduced to that telephone pole after all."

"I'll be careful."

She wasn't certain she'd be honoring this promise. She'd only been away from the front lines for less than a day and already she was getting the itch to hurt someone. She was afraid that might include herself.

Mauser gave her the day off—tomorrow, she would begin short-range patrols, particularly on the major roads into the market—but after she took a long nap, she went on an informal patrol, hiking through the hills and dead homes. It was late in the day, yet the sunlight lingered like cigarette smoke, blazing from the ocean in a yellow haze. Now that she was removed from the Heart, she thought that she probably ought to have tried to kill Anson. It was obvious Dreggers didn't believe in the alliance with the aliens. He held no love for Raina's people, yet he hadn't been waving pom-poms for the war, either. That meant its momentum originated from Anson. They said violence never solved anything, but once in a while, applied in the right place, Mia thought it might make all the difference.

The next day, she resumed official patrols. Sweeping along Western, the coastal road around the peninsula, the highway across the Long Beach piers. Reminded of the size of the borders they were tasked with protecting, she became more certain than ever that she ought to have assassinated the man. In the long, quiet hours, she imagined doing so, envisioning the story she would tell to talk her way back in, the steps she would take to get near him and mortally wound him before he or his friends understood what was happening. Her initial departure from the Heart might raise questions, but she could make up another story about having been kidnapped or wounded, unable to escape and find help. Unless Dreggers had spread word that she wasn't to be trusted—and she doubted he'd have said a single word, given that it would implicate him in the spilling of state secrets—they would have no reason to be especially suspicious.

She had nearly convinced herself to seek Mauser's approval to begin this ninja mission when she heard the gunshots coming from the center of San Pedro.

At that moment, she was on Western, a solid mile and a half away by the major routes. She had learned the back roads, however, the confusing curves looping through subdivisions intended to stay forbidding to through traffic. She cut through one such neighborhood, sprinting as hard as she could.

The shots thickened, fusillades crackling across the morning. Too early for them to have marched down from north L.A. Must have camped nearby overnight, striking the market after the Place's scouts and sentries had departed on their morning duties. Either they had a spy in their midst, or the Stars had been watching them.

The shots lessened. Within another thirty seconds, they were sporadic: the market had either repelled the invaders or been taken. She rushed off the road and cut across a back yard to reconnect with a boulevard. Footsteps thundered ahead. She skidded to a stop behind a sage-smelling shrub.

The street sloped downhill. A hundred feet away, a young man ran toward her, looking back over his shoulder. He had a pistol in his hand, carrying it as if it were covered in mucus. She drew an arrow and fitted it to the string of her bow. The man continued to gaze behind him. She waited until he was twenty feet away before letting fly.

The arrow took him dead in the heart. He fell with a gasp; she wasn't certain if it was from shock, or the air being shoved from his lungs as he struck the ground. She ran to him, producing a knife, and cut his throat.

She stepped back to watch, breathing hard. Down the road, shoes rang between the houses. Mia bolted for the cover of the shrub on the corner. She'd barely thrown herself behind it when the first of the men entered the boulevard.

She might have been able to hide there if not for the body. As it was, she might as well have announced herself with a bullhorn and a confetti-filled cannon. Keeping her eye on the troops, she backed away from the shrub. One of them spotted the body, calling to the others. She turned and jogged as quietly as she could to the yard she'd crossed on her way there. The men argued briefly, then ran on, leaving the body behind.

Mia let them gain distance before moving after them, sticking to the protection of the houses, following the rasp of their feet and the clink of their gear. They reached Western and began the long climb past the cemetery. She cut overland through the gravel digs near the top of the hill, then shadowed them from behind the shopping centers lining the street. If they spoke, she was too far away to hear it.

Four large wagons awaited them at the foot of the hill. They clambered aboard and pulled away, hoofbeats clomping up PCH. She could have followed further, but there was no mistaking where the men had come from.

By the time she got back to the Dunemarket, warriors patrolled both ends of the street and the hills to either side. Moans carried on the still morning air; they'd taken the wounded to be treated at the Seat.

Henna saw her and trotted over to exchange notes, rolling out statistics like one of Raymond's baseball websites. Raina's forces hadn't suffered much—one dead and five wounded—but a merchant family had been massacred on their way into town, and several others had been killed or wounded in the middle of the market. The People of the Stars had taken two deaths, not including the man Mia had downed.

"We caught one of them," Henna said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder at a patch of torn-up leaves halfway up the hill. "Before Raina got one word out of him, he bit off his tongue. Drowned on the blood."

"Sounds like the Sworn." Mia crouched to give her legs a break. "These people are fanatics."

One of Mauser's deputies swung by to organize aggressive patrols. Mia reported what she'd seen and deduced. She was then dispatched with a band of others to keep watch on the stretch of oil refineries and industrial sites bordering the Harbor Freeway, one of the major routes into the market.

They saw nothing else that day. Back in town, there were scattered reports of sightings, but no further skirmishes. The next few days were tense and exhausting, long patrols broken up by returns to the Dunemarket and drinks at the inn. Mia didn't know what was worse: the marches, which were endless and nerve-racking, or the hours in the inn, which were tedious rehashes of the same non-news they'd heard the last time they'd come back to town.

The vibe in the air was that something had changed, that they were on the precipice. It was strange how fast this had manifested; two months ago, they'd hardly known the People of the Stars existed. The threat of the northmen had appeared as suddenly as the June Gloom fogs raced in from the sea, wiping out a sunny day in a matter of minutes.

To Mia, there were times it felt very overblown. They were talking about a handful of encounters in the wild and a single substantial raid. Hardly a guaranteed precursor to a full-scale war. Still, Dreggers' slurred words echoed in the halls of her mind.

Four days of quiet elapsed before the next encounter. Mia got the recap secondhand: a band of scouts had surprised a group of the enemy in the woods high in the hills. A few threats and bullets had been exchanged, but the situation had essentially been a standoff, with the Stars attempting to slip away while Raina's people tried to keep sight of them without getting close enough to spark an incident. Hours of cat and mouse had led to nothing.

She had missed that event, but she was present for the next: Mauser chasing a determined Raina across the Seat, his voice ringing through the warm day: "I know you think this is leadership, but I've got another word for it: irresponsible."

Raina didn't look back. "It's irresponsible to negotiate?"

"For you to, yes. Send me. Send notes. Send smoke signals! But do not send yourself."

Mauser's tendency to blabber was already taking them out of hearing range. Mia stood and jogged after them, doing her best to stay discreet.

"You do not think as he thinks," Raina said. "You think like someone from the old world. That the best way is to hide behind your walls and your warriors. Have you never watched the dogs? When a challenge is made to the leader, he doesn't send his followers to meet the threat. He readies his fangs and leads the way."

"That is so absurd I don't know where to begin. If you really think—"

"He is coming in person," Raina said, cutting him off. "If I send you, or a piece of
paper
, the only message I send is that I am afraid."

They were hiking up a portion of open hill. Mia stepped on a leaf, crackling it. Mauser turned and scowled at her, dropping his voice as he replied to Raina. Mia stopped and watched them ascend the slope.

Two days later, Mauser called a briefing. Anson had requested a meeting to discuss peace and draw up official borders between the two tribes. The meeting was to be held on neutral ground in a park in Inglewood. Each side could bring a limited number of assistants and security, but it was not to be a confrontation of armies.

This drew a number of questions, particularly from Henna. Mauser answered them with brittle impatience.

"Enough," he declared after hardly a minute of Q&A. "Trust me, whatever your concerns, I've voiced the same ones to Raina. At this time, unless your question is going to improve our specific execution of the mission, raising your hand is nothing but a waste of calories."

He gazed across his people. When none of them spoke up, he transitioned to the details. They would begin scouting the route and their destination that same day. In two days, they would set off on their journey, camp near the rendezvous, and finish the trip to the meet the next morning. In the meantime, if any contact was made with the People of the Stars, armed conflict was to be avoided at all costs.

The day came. Mia assembled with the thirteen others who would be accompanying Raina and Mauser to the conclave. Together, they looked very few. But it was the same as the Stars had agreed to send. It would be the scouts' job to ensure the enemy hadn't violated the terms.

The trip was unhurried, almost leisurely. The scouts saw no sign of the People of the Stars. The group established camp inside a motel in Lawndale, splitting the night into three watches. Mia's shift was dead quiet.

In the morning, the first scouts came back reporting clear streets ahead. They had entered a stretch of weather where it never truly cooled off at night and Mia was sweating the moment they got back on the road.

Her turn came up in the rotation and she jogged ahead, sweeping westward through the buildings. Most were intact, no worse for wear than the ever-present dust, some broken windows, and roofs piled with leaves and fronds. A handful of buildings had been scorched, but so far, most of the city was untouched by major fires or quakes. Only a matter of time.