Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (18 page)

James sat by her, seething but immobile. “Why do you all do it? He couldn’t burn you all out, he needs you. Without the town, he’s nothing.”

She fixed him with a fierce stare. “You have no idea,” she muttered, “no idea what he really is.” She ripped her hair into its natural bramble-bush mayhem. She reached out and took his hands. He hadn’t realised they had been trembling. “Leave it be. Anything you do will make it worse. That’s the way of men like him. Anyway, you and Alexander care too much about your treaty with the Moon to tear it up over a field-hand’s daughter.”

James wanted to deny it, but found he couldn’t. Instinct told him that the right thing to do would be to take his pistol and blast Malverston away in the attitude of Old World chivalry. But all his long years by Alexander’s side kept him lame and mum.

She was right. They needed Malverston.

He grunted, fumed, and then found calm again as he looked upon her marble cheeks. “It’s not right.”

She punched his shoulder. “What ever is? You’ve been with the
Messiah
too long if you think the world is any kind of fair.”

James smiled, resisting the urge to rub where she had hit him. She had quite the right hook. “Things will get better now that we’re involved. We have things he wants, but we and our partners don’t deal with tyrants. He’ll have to play ball and change, even if only on the surface. And once the region is civilised again—really civilised, with enforced justice—there’ll be no room for his type.”

She was quiet, staring off along the row of peach trees, towards the distant bulge of the faraway hills, and the endless silvered wheat stalks in between, dancing in the breeze.

James swallowed. His words hadn’t come out right. They had sounded pre-prepared, mechanical and didactic. He had sounded almost like Alexander.

That wouldn’t do. He needed her to know he cared. He needed to see her smile. “I promise it’ll be better. Once he’s gone, we’ll even have schools, art, books. The Old World will be at your fingertips.”

“I don’t care about the Old World,” she grated. “I don’t care about books, all those grimy cities, or your precious mission. Things like that can never matter to people like me. All I can worry about is getting my weekly protection quota to Malverston’s men, and trying to keep out of his bed as often as possible.”

James felt his lips working, but he had no words left to offer. He searched deep, clawing at the bare innards of his mind. In the end what he managed to dredge up sounded pitiful and empty. “I will come back, soon.”

She looked as though on the verge of saying something, but a rustling to their right sent them both scrambling to their feet. James fingered his pistol grip, and called out. “Who’s there?”

A moment more rustling, then a tiny figure emerged from the peach trees. “What are you doing with her?” a harsh girlish voice hissed. “You get back, dirty pig!”

Beth growled like a cornered dog. “Go home, Mel. What are you doing out here?”

“Keeping dirty raping mongrels like him from taking you in the bushes. You know what Mum says, ‘
It’s all any of them want from us.
’”

Little Melanie Tarbuck fixed James with a vicious glare. Despite the darkness, James could just make out the slingshot in her hands, and the tiny ball loaded into the string—it would cut right through his skull at this range. She couldn’t have been more than eleven, but the weapon she carried was no toy, and she knew it. He had seen her cut crows clean out of the sky with it.

“Mel, go home.” Beth’s voice was infected with the same exasperated fury that siblings had reserved for one another since time immemorial, but she took the precaution of putting herself between James and the slingshot, nonetheless. That wasn’t a good sign.

James cleared his throat as he noticed the string slacken some. She had really been fixed to brain him. He tried to keep his fingers away from the butt of his pistol, but instinct kept drawing them back.

“He’s a friend, Mel. He’s one of Cain’s lot.”

“I know who he is.” Her face was set, far too old for her years. “You’re the one who’s been sniffing around our house every time they show up. Well you stay away from my sister. She’s not interested in boys. She and I are just fine with Mum, just the three of us.”

“Shut
up
, Mel. Get out of here. Go home!”

She shrugged. “Come on, then.”

“Without me, you little nit.”

Melanie’s gaze remained even, cool. It was eerie, seeing a child handle herself with such detachment. She set him on edge far more than any of the great ugly gorillas Malverston used as his private militia. “You can’t trust him. Men are all the same. We can’t trust any of them besides Dad—and he’s gone.”

“He’s not like the mayor’s men. Cain’s lot are … different.”

“That’s how they get you. Mum says they try all sorts of things to get you to trust them, then they get you alone, then …” She seemed to see the tattered remains of Beth’s dress hanging about her under-things for the first time. She bared her teeth. “You get away. Go on, go, before I put this rock through your eye!”

“It wasn’t him, Mel, it was me.”

“Why would you rip Mum’s dress?” Mel snapped disbelievingly.

“Because—because the mayor made me dance again. I—I … I felt his stink on me.” In the moonlight her face had flushed a dark grey.

Mel paused, and for the first time her emotionless veil dropped. “Again?” she said. “After what Mum did … he promised he’d leave us alone.”

“I know. He lied.”

“How could you?”

“I did it to keep you safe.”

“I don’t need protecting. I’d split his head wide open if he came anywhere near our house.”

Beth stepped forward and snatched the slingshot from Mel’s hand. “You stupid little girl, you think this thing would stop him? You have no idea what kinds of things he’d do, what
I’ve
had to do to keep him away from our door …” Her voice cracked, and she pushed her sister hard enough to send her careening into the vines behind her.

She eyed Beth, wounded and downcast, then after a few moments took her slingshot back and stowed it in her belt. “What were you doing with him, then?”

“We were just talking.”

James risked leaning around Beth, holding his hands out to the side. “I was making sure she was all right. You have my word.”

She glared at him and said nothing.

He tried again. “I’m James. James Chadwick.”

“I said I knew who you were. You think we’re just a bunch of stupid farmers, but we all know who you are.” Her brow flickered. “You’re the one who sends the birds. Everyone’s heard of your bunch. The one with the big mouth they call the Messiah. You … They call you the Pigeon Keeper.”

James blinked. “That’s right,” he said. He took a step forward, around Beth. “We’re here to help you, your sister, everyone in town.”

“We don’t need your help! We’re just fine on our own.”

James and Beth shared a look. “It’s okay,” he said. “I have to go, anyway.”

Beth stiffened. “Now?”

He glanced between the two sisters. Mel was plastered to her side now; there would be no separating them. His time with Beth was over. “We have a situation back home we need to take care of.” He hovered for a moment, wanting nothing more than to take her by the hand and ride with her away from this place. Instead, he nodded to the little girl, and turned to leave.

“What do you want with us?” Mel Tarbuck said.

He paused, and shook his head. “Just to help.”

“Well, you should stay away. If you hadn’t come tonight, we’d both be home.” She took Beth’s arm, and for a moment, James saw the little girl underneath. “My dad gave my mum that dress. It was one of the only things the mayor hadn’t taken away from us … Now that’s gone too.” She glowered. “Just stay away.”

James made to protest, but Beth flickered her eyelids shut and shook her head minutely, squeezing Mel’s hand.

A moment of awkward silence passed between them. Then the noise of the emptying hall was carried on the wind, and the sound of people tramping home reached their ears. It was time to re-join the crowd before his absence was noticed. He backed away. “If you need me,” he said, “use the birds. They know where to find me.”

Then he was moving through the peach trees, heading uphill. Some time later Beth’s voice trickled from the darkness. “Stay safe, Pigeon Keeper.”

Minutes later, he and Alexander were riding across open fields, unspeaking. What had to be done had been done, and despite the turmoil roiling in his gut at the thought of what Malverston might do to Beth, he put Newquay’s Moon out of his mind, and turned his attention to the others back home.

Sarah was in constant motion, flitting back and forth between the endless reams of rescued art, cassette tapes, DVDs, records, books and computer components, all perfectly preserved in vacuum-sealed plastic baggies. She checked each one, nodding and muttering to herself as she made her way through the myriad rows that filled the vastness of the catacombs. Decades of salvage work lay before them, the world before the End in miniature.

At least, that’s how she and Alexander sold it. All Robert saw was a whole lot of useless junk, the leftovers of those dead and gone. The electronics were fried, little more than dust; the art was nice to look at, but he couldn’t see the appeal of most of it—hell, he could have replicated half of it with a potato dipped in paint; and the books, well, he was never one for reading. Not that he would ever admit that to Sarah.

Robert watched her with fascination. He had never been here before. Precious few were even aware this place existed beneath the streets of New Canterbury. He had been charged with guarding the heavy doors by Alexander, but this labyrinth of halls and tunnels had never been for his eyes. Everything was too delicate to let a lumbering oaf like him inside.

“I’m not sure how I can help,” Robert said.

She was flitting back and forth in a blaze of motion, checking minute details to which he was blind.

How did she keep track of anything amidst all this chaos? The mountains of Old World refuse seemed to stretch on forever.

She stepped away into the aisle, her gaze scouring the floor. “You’re a tracker,” she said, “so track.”

“What?”

“Somebody’s been in here.”

Robert looked at the floor, bare brushed concrete, and cleared his throat. “How can you tell?”

“I can’t, not for sure.” She frowned. “But some of it is missing.”

Robert couldn’t help glancing away from her at the enormity of the collection. There were dozens of other halls just like it, each just as full. “I don’t want to tell you your business, but are you sure you’re not just imagining it? There’s so much …”

“I know every item we catalogued,” she said. He could see the hurt in her eyes. “Every one. They all have their own look and feel, their own imperfections, and their own place. And some of them are gone.” She looked confused, but there was no uncertainty about that look. To her mind, at least, a very frugal thief was at large.

“I can’t track in here,” he said.

She scoffed, spectacles shining under the harsh artificial lights. Her eyes were magnified to enormous proportions by the thick lenses. “You’re the best tracker we have. You sniffed out the office building where they …” She stopped, brows furrowed, and shook her head.

Where the enemy had been holed up. Where they slaughtered all those people, while we watched.

It had marked her, being exposed to the real world like that. She had been trussed up under the safe haven Alexander had created for too long. Too many of the city’s people had. If he was right, they were all in for a hard ride, because things were about to get a hell of a lot worse.

“It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “There’s no magic second sight. I can only read the ground when there’s something that can be disturbed: bent blades of grass, snapped twigs, impressions in the mud, that kind of thing.”

She didn’t seem to be listening. “What would anybody want with this stuff?”

What do
we
want with it?
Robert stopped himself from saying.

He stepped up behind her and gripped her shoulders, dwarfed by his hands. “We’ve been through a lot, lately. It’s okay if things are getting to you. Even the toughest bastards crack if you put them under enough pressure.”

She tensed, and slowly turned around to face him. “I’m not crazy, Robert.” Her gaze had turned to ice.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it. Like I’m losing my marbles, seeing things.”

“We’re all tired.” He gently turned her around and started walking them back towards the surface.

We don’t have time to chase relics
.
I have to check the perimeter.

But he wasn’t leaving her down here. “Why don’t we go back topside and get some fresh air? You probably put it all someplace else—”

She wrestled from his grip and stepped away. “Stop treating me like I’m made of glass!” she yelled.

He froze. His thoughts of checking in with the perimeter guard vanished. He said, “I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. You have been since they started shooting the slaves. Like you think I’m going to fall apart at any point. Well, I’m not, all right?” Her lip was quivering, but her cheeks were crimson red. “You might get to play hero for some people, but I’m not some fainting damsel that you get to swoop in and save.” Her voice cracked and she took a deep breath.