The Sight (10 page)

Liam snorted. “That sounds like bureaucratic bullshit.”

“I don't disagree. But it's another reason why your taking a look at Couturie would be beneficial.”

“They won't be prepared for it,” I said, and Gunnar nodded.

“What about me?” Gavin asked.

“You have an apartment to fumigate,” Liam said, and Tadji and Gunnar both wrinkled their noses.

“Do I want to know why?” she asked.

“You do not,” I promised.

Liam glanced at me. “Are you going to make me sell beets?”

“And collards.” I waved a bunch of leaves at him. “Delicious, delicious collards.”

“Ham hocks are the only good things about collards,” Liam said, but fished his keys from his pockets, put them on the table. “Get what you need, and let's head out.”

I
t took a little more than an hour to get the okay from the Commandant. Technically, we didn't need permission to drive across New Orleans and sell some beets, and the Reveillon bounty was still in effect, which made its members fair play for Liam. But we also didn't want to make things worse for Containment—or spook Reveillon.

“Joint Ops thinks it's a long shot,” Gunnar said. “That the tattoo only indicates one of the Reveillon bombers lived at Camp Couturie previously, not that it's now the Reveillon HQ. They also think the odds of actually finding something in the ‘canvas labyrinth' are low enough that it's not worth the effort to move an active team from their search quadrant into the park.”

Liam smiled. “But we're expendable?”

Gunnar's features went stony. “Not even funny as a joke. Joint Ops is playing the odds, and the camp isn't the priority.” He looked from Liam to me. “But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful.”

“When have I ever been less than careful?” I asked.

The look on their faces was less than flattering.

—

“So,” Liam began, when we climbed into his rickety truck. “Tell me about this practice with Malachi.”

I guessed Tadji and Gunnar had been able to bait him.

“We practiced,” I said. “Hence the name.”

“What?” he asked, driving through French Quarter streets that would have once been full of people shopping, drinking, and dancing in Second Lines.

“Generally, anticipating the unexpected. And he gave me homework.”

Liam pulled onto Rampart. “What kind of homework?”

“The kind during which I practice my magic.” I slid him a glance. “Why are you giving me the third degree?”

His jaw worked as he eased the truck around a tree that had fallen into the street. There was no road crew in New Orleans these days. We'd have to tell Gunnar about the obstacle, if he didn't already know.

“Because he is who he is.”

“Because he's a Paranormal? You sound like Reveillon.”

“You know that's not what I meant. Because he is who he is. And because you are who you are.”

Slowly, I turned back to him, eyes narrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you should be careful. He's powerful.” He paused. “And he looks at you . . . like he covets you.”

That had me staring at the street again with enormous eyes. It wasn't that he didn't like Malachi—he didn't trust him, at least not with me.

Good,
I decided, when I'd processed the feelings. Liam was wrong—dead wrong—but I didn't mind if he felt as unbalanced as I did. I was unbalanced, after all, because of him.

“He doesn't covet me,” I said. “He thinks I'm a novelty—a human with totally green magic who he can teach and observe. And he'll
keep teaching me until I'm not a threat to him, myself, or anyone else.”

Liam tapped his fingers on the steering well. “All right, then.”

“Damn right it's all right,” I muttered. “I'm the boss of me.”

He snorted. “You should probably tell Gunnar that. He didn't get the memo.”

He was quiet for a moment, then groped blindly for something beneath the front seat, pulled out an old beige cassette tape. For the first time, I realized he'd added an old tape player to the truck.

“I see you share my love of antiques,” I said.

By way of answer, Liam popped the tape into the slot. “Born on the Bayou” spilled into the car.

“All right, then,” I said, and relaxed back against the seat. “Apology accepted.”

And with heat and music and sunshine, we drove.

—

City Park was enormous, more than a thousand acres of meadows, trees, trails, and ponds. It had once housed the New Orleans Botanical Garden, the New Orleans Museum of Art, an amusement park, and a wooded area known as Couturie Forest—but that had been before the war.

Liam drove around the park to get the lay of the land. Nothing much had changed in the months since I was here, except that everything looked a little more worn. The white canvas tents—seven years since they'd been put up by FEMA, the military, the Red Cross—were still in neat rows, but the canvas was patched and dingy. The ground between the tents had been worn to dirt, and electrical wires skipped from tent to tent. Someone had figured out how to tie the tents to the grid, for what good that did.

In contrast to the still-straight rows, nature had crept in at the edges of the park, softening the lines of what had been a long rectangle of ponds and meadows.

Liam had turned off the music, the world outside quiet as we drove through. “The camp has a mayor,” I said, gestured to the small stone cabin where he lived. “I met him the last time I was here, and I don't see him as being involved with Reveillon. He's a belly laugher.”

Liam chuckled. “A what?”

“A belly laugher.” I put a hand on my stomach, offered a round, hearty laugh. “He has a belly, and a very big laugh.”

“So Santa Claus runs Camp Couturie,” Liam said. “Appropriate, since we were just hoping for Christmas.”

He pulled the truck off into the edge of the grass near the circular Popp Fountain, which had become the formal entrance to the camp. It didn't run anymore, and someone had stuck a hand-drawn
WELCOME TO CAMP C
OUTURIE
sign into the dry pipe in the middle.

We got out of the truck, walked around to the tailgate. I waited while Liam untied the rope to lower it. I pulled a pencil out of the cigar box I'd brought to make change, wound my hair through it.

“Hot,” I said as Liam's glance skittered from my hair back to the truck.

“Very.” He pulled the boxes toward us. “You know where we're going?”

“I do. And it's my store, so I'm in charge.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, with a drawl.

I just rolled my eyes. “There's a different attitude here. Follow my lead.”

“Don't take ridiculous chances.”

“We live in a war zone by choice,” I pointed out, hefting a box. “We take chances every day.”

The market was held at the fountain, between the columns that
surrounded it. Tables filled the gaps where some of the columns had been, which make it look a little like Stonehenge. We walked around to look for an empty table, passing collections of old clothes, electronics, vetiver leaves and roots, plastic junk, and pretty much everything else.

On the other side of the fountain, where the lines of tents began, the curious and suspicious watched us from doorways and plastic patio furniture. Not unlike Devil's Isle, but I doubted they'd appreciate the comparison.

I nodded at those we passed, but I didn't smile. I hadn't been here often enough for them to recognize me, and smiling strangers walking through the compound would look suspicious. I tried to look uninterested in the tents and focused on finding a spot.

We found a table with a few inches of shade, at least for a little while. I put my box on the table, gestured Liam to do the same.

“Afternoon,” said the woman at the next table, suspicion narrowing her dark eyes. She sat on a folding stool, a ball of purple yarn in her lap and two busy knitting needles in her pale hands. She wore jeans and a faded LSU T-shirt—definitely not the tunics worn by Reveillon.

I almost dismissed the knitting, but the bright gleam of metal had me looking again. They weren't needles—they were arrows, long and golden. She'd turned Para weapons into craft tools. I'd read Dickens in high school before the war, and there was something very Madame Defarge about that.

I took two Royal Mercantile aprons out of the box, passed one to Liam. I pulled the top canvas loop over my head and doubled the long straps around my waist.

“Good afternoon,” I said, then glanced around. “Rule used to be tables were first come, first served, but it's been a few months since I've been here. Do I need to check in with someone?”

“You find an empty table, it's yours.”

“Good,” I said, and began taking beets and bundles of greens, the stems tied with twine, from the box and spreading them across the table.

She took in the Royal Merc logo, put down her knitting. “I'm Lonnie. Lonnie Dear.”

“Claire and Liam,” I said. “We came up from the Quarter.” I put my hands on my hips and looked down at the spread of vegetables. “I haven't been able to convince the Containment types that collards are good for them.”

“Collards are good eating,” she said, nodding with approval that I'd been trying to spread the gospel.

I glanced at her table, which was loaded with rows of cassette and video tapes. “Hey, Liam,” I said, and gestured. “You can find something different for the ride home.”

“You criticizing my taste in music?” he asked, smiling at Lonnie and walking around her table to get a look at the merchandise.

Lonnie watched him, her expression slightly awed, like she was viewing a fine piece of sculpture for the first time.

Been there, sister,
I thought.

Liam picked up a tape. “What's an Ace of Bass?”

“It means you should stick with CCR,” I said, and smiled as a girl emerged from the tents, crossed the twenty or so yards between us to look over the vegetables. She was thin but well toned, her body in that not-quite stage between woman and child, her hair in braids across her dark shoulders. No tunic for her, either. She wore cutoff jeans and a worn tank top.

“How much for the beets?”

“Two for a dollar,” I said with a smile.

She nodded soberly, pulled a dollar from her front pocket, offered it to me.

“You need a bag?” I asked.

She shook her head, picked up two beets, and scampered back to the tents.

First purchase a success. Now we just needed some information.

“The Eagles,” Liam said proudly, putting his new purchase carefully in the box.

I couldn't help laughing. “If it survived the war, I think it could survive a trip home from the market.”

“No harm in being careful,” he said, coming to stand beside me again, hands behind his back. “I'm ready for the retail onslaught.”

“Good to know,” I said with a smile.

“You hear about that trouble in the Quarter yesterday?”

I glanced at Lonnie, heart tripping. That was the kind of question that opened doors. “We were there,” I said, and let her see the truth of it—the horror of it—in my eyes.

“Folks are talking about it,” she said. “Everyone's got an opinion.”

A leading question, but an understandable one.

“That's New Orleans,” Liam said noncommittally.

“What kinds of opinions do folks have?” I asked. “Seems like what happened was pretty cut-and-dried. Lot of folks died.”

Her arrow needles clacked together. “Well, but none would be dead if it weren't for the Paranormals.”

“You mean if they hadn't attacked us? Sure. That was the catalyst.”

She seemed satisfied by my answer.

“I'm surprised word got out here so fast.” I wasn't really surprised; Gavin had found out about it in the hinterlands, after all. I wanted to know how she'd found out. Had reports traveled, or had folks in Camp Couturie known what was going to happen?

“People talk,” Lonnie said, and this time, there was a hint of suspicion in her eyes. “I mean, it's good you have a solid communication
network. It just takes a while even in the Quarter to get news about anything.”

“Except Containment,” Liam added, his voice carrying a perfect, subtle edge of disgust. “With the Cabildo, barracks, Devil's Isle, we always know what they're about.”

“We hear things,” Lonnie said. “News gets here eventually. As for living in the Quarter, I certainly couldn't do it.”

“Why's that?” Liam asked.

“Being monitored all the time. It's practically martial law being so close to the prison. To Containment.”

Weren't there magic monitors in Camp Couturie? I glanced around, and didn't see the familiar black boxes. But Containment had installed them even through rural areas, so maybe the Campers had taken them down. Or maybe the camp had simply been forgotten.

The woman executed what looked like a very complicated loop and twist of the yarn, then put it down again. “I'm a good Christian woman and I don't take with magic. But humans weren't to blame for what happened, for the war, and we aren't children. We don't need cameras on us twenty-four-seven. That's fascism.”

She was saying the kinds of things someone who wanted to take up arms against Containment might say. But they weren't the types of things Ezekiel had said, or the manifesto had discussed. Reveillon didn't care about privacy. They didn't care about the Constitution. They cared about annihilation.

“Can't argue with that,” Liam said, stepping beside me and looking out over the camp. “It's hard to live under the scrutiny. To feel normal. I guess you have more freedom out here. To live the way you want.”

“We don't have much,” she agreed. “But we have our freedom, and we have our community. Don't need much else than that.”

So Lonnie was content with her lot. Did everyone in Camp Couturie feel that way?

—

People milled around the table, probably as much to get a look at us as to inspect the things we'd brought to sell. I sold a few more beets and a few bunches of collards, and traded some for two Mason jars of cane syrup, a spool of handmade hemp twine, and a small paper bag of deer jerky. You never knew what you'd find in the country.

As they inspected me, I inspected them. None wore tunics, but maybe those had just been “special occasion” outfits for Reveillon. These people looked like they lived off the land, and that land was hard. Lean bodies and faces that worked hard for what they had, to make a life in a place that had only been meant for temporary living.