An Inheritance of Ashes (22 page)

Tyler's hand shook at my cheek; brushed away a tear. “Damn,” he repeated, his brow furrowed into one thin line. “I'm sorry, Hal. I'm so damned sorry.”

“Don't be sorry,” I whispered, and leaned against his hand. “Just tell me what Ada said.”

He flushed beetroot red. “I never made it,” he said simply. “I pushed the leg too hard, and on the way to the Chandlers' there was a patch of ice and I fell. Cal and the dogs found me two hours later, crawling home. In the ditch.”

“Oh, Tyler—” I breathed, and he held up a hand.

“This is what you'll get, you know,” he said numbly. “A man who can't walk down the road on a clear day. Who won't be there when you're hurting. I should be sorry. I'm going to disappoint you.”

My hands dropped to my sides. “Tyler.” He didn't look up. “Did you practice this to your bedroom ceiling too?”

Ty sucked in a breath. “That was cruel,” he said.

“Well,” I answered weakly, “this
hurts.
”

He looked up, and his eyes were rimmed with red.

“Are you leaving me?” I asked, surprisingly small.

His throat bobbed. “I wasn't sure we were doing anything we could leave.”

“Apparently so,” I answered past the lump in my own throat. We stared at each other, trapped; no way to back out now. The kettle whistled, and I took it off the stove and ignored it. “Please say something.”

He looked away, blinking fast. “I just . . . I don't want to hurt you, okay?” he said. “And no matter what I say next, it'll hurt you. I can't win here.”

A dull ache spread beneath my ribs. “So,” I managed, and cracked a grim smile at the irony, “say what's true.”

He hesitated and then looked up, the hazel shreds of his eyes ablaze. “I want to kiss you. I—forget I said that: I just want you around. To talk with, to help each other. To be there. But then there's
this.
” He thumped, bitterly, his bad leg. “And I know I can't take you walking, or dance worth a damn anymore, or even make it a few miles up the road to keep my word to you when it means—oh, God. When it means Thom's life. I can't make it so we're partners. I can't make it equal. And I wonder who I even think I'm fooling, because sooner or later a guy who can
walk
will come along.”

I swallowed hard. The very air felt too close, and not from the presence of Twisted Things. “We don't have to dance, then,” I said thickly.

“But—”

“Nope,” I said, my voice hitching. “My turn. We'll go for shorter walks. We'll do other things. You'll be there. You've already been there. My list of perfect dreamy things in a suitor never had
must walk without a limp.
”

“Don't mock me,” he snapped.

“I'm not,” I said, just as hard. “Y'know, this guy I know told me once that there was no right way or rules to this. I forget his name: Ty? Tyrone?”

“Tiger,” he said with a shard of a smile, and wiped his eyes. “You twist my words.”

“Uh-huh,” I answered, the knot in my chest untangling slowly. I rubbed a hand across my face. “I needed you. You need me too, sometimes, when I'm not there. That doesn't mean we're not equals, or I'm disappointed, or I'm going to run off with Will Sumner because he has a leg, because believe me, he has
nothing else.
”

Tyler snorted.

“It means I want you when I'm sad. Because I—” The words tangled. I flushed hard. “That's all.”

Tyler's gaze had steadied. It was faintly ashamed. “Maybe I'm not really okay either, Hal.”

“S'all right,” I managed, and reached out for his hand. He took mine, his skin breath-shakingly warm. “We've got time.”

Footsteps clattered, nice and loud, down the hallway, and Nat eased into the kitchen. “Well, you're getting better at cover stories,” she told me as she pulled out a chair. “Next time pick something that doesn't make me have to convince Mum I'm interrupting her future grandchildren.”

“Nat!”
Tyler hissed.

I closed my eyes. She meant it well; she did. It wasn't her fault she was all edges, always.

She leaned in with bright intensity. “You two all right?”

I nodded, then let out a breath when Ty did too.

“You don't look all right,” she said critically, and I bit my lip. And told her, in brief pieces, about Thom.

“Heron never showed up,” she said at the end with a shred of leftover disdain.

“He never came back,” I said softly, and stood up. “I'm going to the Chandlers'. If he didn't make it there”—the lump rose in my throat—“they'll know better where to search.”

Tyler winced. “I can't.” His face grew sour, and Nat sighed. “Mum isn't too happy with me about the other day.”

“Not just Mum,” Nat muttered, and her mouth crimped tight.

“Fine, everybody,” he retorted. “And I'm not allowed off the property for a while.”

“Oh. Damn,” I said feelingly, and Nat snorted into her hands.

Tyler gave her a dirty look, such a normal, familiar dirty look I almost giggled—or sobbed. Nat banged her head lightly on the table. “Right, Hallie. Let's go. You and me, to the ruins to rescue your scarecrow hired man. Adventure.”

I looked over my shoulder, down the dim hallway. The murmur of Cal Blakely's reading moved on, uninterrupted. “Right,” I said. “What do we tell them?”

Tyler snagged my fingers, twined his between them. “I don't know,” he said. “I'm blood relations with
that
. Trust me to make up a ridiculous story.”

Nat stared at the hinge where Tyler's fingers slipped through mine. “You know,” she said mildly, “if either of you hurt the other, I will kill you.”

“Which one?” Tyler asked.

“I can't decide. Neither. Both.” She shook her head. “I'll call it even and you'll both just die.”

She wasn't joking. There was a tremble underneath the flippant smile.

“I understand that we will both be dead,” I said solemnly, and took her hand with my free one. “And I will not hurt your brother unless he acts like a complete and total jackass.”

“Hey,” Tyler said.

A smile ghosted over Nat's face. “Right,” she said, and squeezed my hand back. “Go pretend we're out behind the barn,” she told Tyler, “gossiping about how goopily you probably kiss.”

Tyler's face could not have gotten redder. “I hate you, and you will pay,” he said, and limped gently through the kitchen door. Nat grabbed her jacket, and we crunched across the lawn to the road that ran up to the ruins.

“I really will,” she said after twenty minutes of the ruined old city growing larger against the sky. “Kill you both. Don't make me hang for murder.”

“I know,” I said peaceably, and we trudged toward the gates of the ancient abandoned towers; down the pathway to the dead city where the Chandlers toiled among the graves.

“Adventure, Hal,” Nat said, and pulled me forward into the maze of concrete ghosts.

IT WAS TOO QUIET AT THE CHANDLERS' HOMESTEAD: A CIRCLE OF
whitewashed houses tucked between the moldering skyscrapers, their gardens and cattle pens under straw for the winter. The Chandlers' cooperative of my memory was a noisy, bright-painted place full of the sound of hammers and chatter, blooming among the dead ruins. But today the bright shutters were locked tight, the flower beds heaped with piles of old-cities junk. Nat turned a circle beside me, scanning the desolation. “Hello the camp?” I called. “Anybody here?”

A body shifted behind a doorway. “Hello?” I said, softer.

A slight, dark young girl edged over the threshold, dressed in a dust-smeared coat and leather work boots. “Stop,” she said in a piping, tough voice. She lifted a metal contraption with both hands and pointed it straight at us. “Stop or I'll shoot.”

Nat raised an eyebrow. I stopped cold, sorting the face from the passels of Chandlers we saw, so fleetingly, on town days.
Ada's cousin,
my memory supplied: an image of short braids and a big, thoughtful smile.
Her name's June
.

“Junie?” I tried, and her eyebrows drew in.

Nat leaned against a fence post. “That's a pretty tough—whatsit you've got there, Junie.”

The girl's rigid arms faltered. “You'd better not be soldiers,” she said nervously.

Nat whuffed out a breath. “We're not soldiers, hon. You know us: Nat Blakely, from down the road at Lakewood Farm, and Hallie Hoffmann from over at Roadstead. Where is everyone?”

The recognition came slowly. She dropped the device loosely to her side. “Hi, Nat,” she said seriously, and her face was a ten-year-old's again. “I just had to make sure you weren't soldiers after all.”

“That's a good idea,” Nat said soothingly—Nat, who understood young kids, whose Sanchez cousins followed her like ducklings around Windstown. “Do you know where your cousin Ada is? We came to visit with her.”

June nodded hesitantly. “She's in her lab. But we're not supposed to bother her there. She'll yell if you do.”

“It's very important,” Nat cajoled. “We won't bother her long.”

June's face squinched up. “Cross your heart?”

“Hope to die,” I said.

“Okay. C'mon,” she said reluctantly, and led us into the ruins.

I had never spent much time at the Chandlers': as unpopular as Marthe and I were, they were outright ostracized, tolerated for their relics and nothing else. They were a clan built on drifters and runaways, and they and Windstown had existed uneasily together as long as I'd been alive—ever since Rami Haddad left home, moved down the highway, and changed his name to Chandler, and his new brothers outright refused to make him go back.

I could go there,
I'd thought time and again, on days when Papa was worse, or late at night, when Marthe and I argued especially hard. No need for a lonely road south, into the unknown, when I could run away and live free as Hallie Chandler. It hadn't taken long for me to realize that the Chandlers, every one of them, were
smart
. There was no place for a maker of malt and a keeper of goats among their sharper minds.

I enviously drank in their houses as June led us through the compound: houses sealed tight against feral dogs and ruin rats, built by people who had, even when they'd lost families, found a family waiting down the black road. June ducked between rusted siding and old concrete thoughtlessly, humming a skipping song, and rapped on a burn-scarred brown oak door. “Ada?” she said, and pushed inside. “It's not soldiers.”

Ada Chandler turned, in a thin sliver of winter light, and I let out a breath. The door was ancient and battered, but the room inside was an old-cities dream. Shelves of precious board-bound books spilled over each other, the gilt lettering of their titles flaked off and rubbed dry. Her butcher-block counters bristled with relics I didn't even understand: metal and glass, and trays of sun-bleached shards with wires twining out. Ada put down an ancient book, took off her leather gloves, and said, “Oh, great. There's more.”

Perched beside her on a tall stool, looking utterly exhausted, was Heron.

“There you are,” I burst out, and Junie's hands went to her metal contraption, suddenly unsure.

“I've told you fifteen times not to play with that thing,” Ada said, infinitely tolerant, and plucked it out of June's small hands. “I'm not playing,” June protested.

“What is it?” Nat asked.

“Gun,” Ada said, and tucked it on a high shelf. “Old-city weapon. Don't worry; it's never loaded. Jerome was teaching her piston engineering and was stupid enough to tell her what the thing's really for when she started having nightmares about the soldiers in town. She's been playing Guardian of the Compound nonstop.”

“Ada, you don't
understand,
” June started up.

I barely even heard her. My eyes had snagged on that high shelf, and the five beneath it. They were packed with rows of floating bodies caught, loose-limbed, under glass. Stick-legged mice; lizards, hatchlings and adults; a bird or two, with soggy feathers. A whole farm's worth of Twisted Things, displayed in neatly labeled jars.

“Good God, Ada,” Nat said softly. “Are you
trying
to get hanged?”

June's dark eyes went as round as saucers.

Ada cast Nat a dirty look and patted June's braids. “No one's getting hanged, love. Go find your dad, hmm? I'm sure he's got some math for you to do.”

June brightened, and skipped out into the snow. Ada turned and fixed Nat with a hard eye. “Where do you get off, saying that around a kid?”

Nat shrugged. “I'd say she's figured out the risks all by herself.”

I edged around them to Heron's side. “Miss,” he said quietly. “I thought we agreed you'd stay home.” He looked cleaner, at least. Someone had got him a bath and a warm jacket.

“Don't even,” I said. “You didn't come home. What were we supposed to do?”

“Travel out of the compound's restricted as of last night,” Ada cut in impatiently. “There are still army scouts in the neighborhood. You shouldn't even be here.”

“We know there are,” Nat retorted. “Who do you think's been leading their wild-goose chase?”

I rolled my eyes. It had been long enough since someone put Nat and Ada in the same room that I'd forgotten why you just
didn't
.

“Look, they're not here now,” I said, before they could get back to it. “They borrowed our rowboat. They're at Beast Island, all day. And—” I couldn't keep my eyes from filling. I swore, inward, at their constant treachery. “Thom's in danger. He wants us to open the hole.”

“That's a stupid idea,” Ada said promptly.