Emergence (Eden's Root Trilogy) (31 page)

“Yes, b
ut they’re alive Darryl. That’s the important thing. Carter says he’s going to release them when he does everyone else.”

“Visiting hours are up
, girls.” A creepy sing-song drifted down from the watchtower. Mouth.

“Lucy,
” Fi said, “they’re giving us an hour each day with you. I know Darryl can only come when it’s dark enough, but that should be enough contact to get us through.” Her words came faster as she saw their two escorts open the gate and enter. “I promise you all,” she added, her heart squeezing, “we’re going to get you out of here.”

She
grabbed Kiara in a desperate embrace. With each crunch of the Lobos’ feet in the yard, her mind urged, “Let go! Let go!” but it was like the message was shorting somewhere in her spine, before it got to her arms. They wouldn’t unlock. Kiara grunted and squirmed, peeling away from her grasp and then stepping back, her little jaw set. Fi sucked in, burned by the dark flash in her sister’s eyes.
Toughen up
, it said.
Be Fi.

Fi stood, nodding, and swallowed her tears.
She steeled herself to do the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. Harder than giving birth to Luke. Harder than tottering for endless miles on stick legs. Harder than watching her mother fade, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, until she’d disassembled and floated back into the clouds from which she came. Through all of it, all of the death and pain and loss, this was the worst part. Without another word, she turned and left her little sister in Hell.

------------- Fi --------------

“I wish we could find some way to get inside, Sara, that’s all I’m saying.”
Fi eyed the armory from her peripheral vision as she stumbled beneath the weight of the compost buckets. She and Sara had managed to wrangle extra opportunities to case the settlement by volunteering for dish-duty. In order to control the colony’s rations, everyone ate meals together in shifts in the Main Cabin.

The girls worked the giant
pass-through window, grabbing dishes and trays and scrubbing them as fast as was possible before the next wave of Truthers rolled in for their meal. It was a dizzying whirl from the first breakfast until the last dinner, when they were expected to take out the compost.

The
upside to their chosen conscription was that the compost bin was tantalizingly close to the armory. Fi blew a curl out of her eye and shifted Luke on her back. For work she had to secure him there like a papoose or he’d have been hanging right into the mess. “I just don’t want to miss anything, you know?” she added.

“Yeah,” Sara
agreed, as they skirted a group of Lobos coming back from their shifts to the south.

“Hey, girls.”
A familiar, but unwelcome voice made them turn. “Enjoying your new life shoveling shit?” Mouth chortled.

Swallow it,
Fi,
she thought.
Just swallow it.
She raised her chin. “We’re grateful to be safe, yes, Mouth.”

“Ooooooh, always so qui
ck to say the right thing aren’t you, Marie?”

“What do you want, Mouth?”
Sara’s voice was tight.

“Ah, now
, that’s an interesting question.” He opened his mouth and then clamped it shut, his eyes dropping.

Fi whirled and saw Silas watching them in the distance.

“What I want doesn’t matter,” Mouth said, his voice low. “Just remember that, girls. What you want doesn’t matter anymore. Not when you’re one of us.”

He stomped away toward the armory.
The girls continued on to the compost bin, formerly the camp dumpster, and Sara heaved the top open and groaned, waving her hand in front of her nose. “Ugh! All I can say is, ‘Thank God it’s not summer.’”

“Agreed,” Fi said,
clomping up the stairs and onto the platform beside the dumpster. Sara followed and they tossed their buckets of bone and gristle and veggie cuttings into the warm, moist loam.

Sa
ra grabbed a shovel. “You know…” She jammed the shovel into the mix and, straining, turned it over. “…I’m already over Mouth’s big mouth.”

Fi mirrored her, grunting as her shovel dug deep.
“No shit. Ha, ha.”

Sara snorted and then stopped what she was doing.
She stared at the armory. The sun was nearly down and the electric light inside stood out, illuminating the shadows as the Lobos finished their shift change. Fi looked up and noticed her preoccupation. “What’s up, Sar?”

“Shhhhh.
Wait a second.”

The light clicked off
and all the shadows disappeared into the forest...except one.

“I knew it,” Sara said
. “I thought I’d seen Mouth stationed there before. Silas likes to give him all the crappy duties. He’s worked the armory door the past two nights, and it looks like we’re lucky enough that he’s doing it again tonight.”

“Why i
s that lucky?” Fi wiped her brow.

“He keeps talking to us.
And when he said that about what he wants…it just made me wonder. What does he want?” She put her hand on her hip. “You wanna find out? Ten bucks says I can distract him long enough for you to get in there.”

Fi’s heart sped up.
She did want to get inside. “I wouldn’t bet against you, not that ten bucks is much good to anyone anymore.”

Sara mouthed a silent laugh as t
hey closed up the bin. They climbed down in silence and slipped through the darkening wood toward the armory. No one was around. Curfew was coming and the Lobos had headed for their posts or their beds, and the colonists were likely doing the same. They had just a little time before they’d be missed at Nona’s.

When they were fifty feet away, Fi peeled off and headed around the back of the building.
She pressed herself to the cold metal and slowly made her way to the front, where Sara had already engaged Mouth.

“…
where’s your big sister?”

“She
had to take a little break. You know, baby stuff.” Sara’s voice was dismissive. “Soooooo, I had to come back to ask you something, Mouth.”

By now Fi was flush with the entrance and she could see them if she peeked around the corner.
Sara was working her way between Mouth’s line of sight and the armory door. A chain hung through one door handle, but hadn’t yet been threaded through the other.
Perfect.

“You had something to ask me?”
His voice was wary. “And what would that be?”

Sara curled an end of
her newly chopped hair around her finger and twirled it. She looked at the ground and scuffed her toe, fluttering her long skirt. “When you said that earlier, about what we want…” She took one step closer to him.

Just one more step
, Fi thought.

“Yeah?”

Mouth closed the gap and Fi bolted through the door.
The waning amber light of sunset barely penetrated and she fumbled for her matchbook. With a quick glance back at the door, she struck and quickly cupped the blue flame. The armory was surprisingly orderly, with weapons grouped by type. Fi wasn’t surprised to see lots of “clubs” like bats, pipes, and hammers. Those seemed to be what the Lobos carried in greatest abundance.

On stacks of wooden pallets, the “knives” category was laid out by type, with machetes being the most common.
The good news was that the “guns” category was relatively small, just as they’d thought. The main problem that Fi could see was the AK-47s carried by the cliff guards.
Eden’s AK-47s
, she thought angrily. Otherwise, there were only a handful of long-barreled rifles and handguns. She was counting and taking stock of the types when her gaze settled on a pile of plastic bins on the floor. She popped the top of one. “Whoa.”

The bin
contained boxes of ammo. Lots and lots of ammo. Her match flickered out at the same time that there was a bump from the door. She cursed and held her breath, but there was no further sound. She struck another match and popped the top of the other two bins.

Her heart pounded as she counted the boxes.
Jesus, they had at least 50,000 rounds!
It was insane. Her heart sank at the image of their Army being mowed down in the first five minutes of the siege. No matter what Diaspora brought, this was too much.

Her mind raced and she did the only thing she could think of…she grabbed a box of AK-47 rounds and jammed it into her pocket.
And with that she became a whirlwind, her hands searching and seizing, feverishly shoving the boxes into every pocket and when those filled, then jamming more into the leggings beneath her skirt. Her heart pounded and her hands shook, but she had to do it. She might never get another chance like this and every box she could steal was another chance for her own Army to survive.

Another sound from the door stopped her cold.
She stepped on the match, grinding it into the dirt, and crawled back to the front. She peeked out just in time to see Sara scolding Mouth. Sara’s eyes darted her way for a second, and then she drew back her hand and slapped Mouth across the face. He reeled and Fi slipped out the door and around the corner.

“What the hell is wrong with you, girlie?”
Mouth was furious. “You came on to me!”

“I did NOT!”
Sara wheeled, heading back toward the cabins at a rapid clip.

“
Goddamned tease.” Mouth spit and then rubbed his face. “Ooof. Hits like a ton of bricks, that girl.”

He ran the chain through the door handles of the armory and locked it.
Fi held her breath as she waited for him to turn away. Once his attention was diverted, she picked her way back to the compost bin. Luke had started to fuss and she jostled him on her back slightly, encouraging the noise. She wanted Mouth to see her.

She rounded the corner and stepped out into the open, brushing her hands as if she’d just finished her work.
It was difficult to walk normally with the ammunition jammed against her skin, but all she had to do was make it back to Nona’s. Then she and Sara could figure out what to do next.

“Hey, Marie,” Mouth called
from his post. “Tell that sister of yours to stay the hell away from me.”

She
waved dismissively, putting her head down and hustling back to Nona’s. It was more of a challenge than she’d expected. The boxes of ammo seemed to burn against her skin, their edges and corners gouging her. They screamed for her to hurry, but every time that she moved quickly the rounds clinked, the sound freezing her in her tracks. After several rounds of this rush-and-freeze cycle Fi stopped.
I must look like a lunatic
, she thought.
Thank God it’s dark.
Despite her desire to sprint to safety she was going to have to play it cool.

It took her fifteen minutes of picking her way down the path and trying to appear simply leisurely, rather than packed to the gills wi
th bullets. The darker it got, the more worried she grew as curfew approached. She was just steps from Nona’s when a Lobo approached, blocking her path. It was a man she didn’t know with a shaved head and a partially torn left ear.
Yuk.
Her mind couldn’t help but wonder what caused that. An unwilling girl biting it off, perhaps?

“Hey,
girl. What’re you doing out after curfew?” His voice was high and tinny, no match for his boxy frame. His eyes searched her up and down and she flushed reflexively.

Sweat trickled down her back and legs,
winding past the boxes squeezed against her. “Sorry, the baby was fussy. Had to take it slow.” With a silent apology to her son, she bounced him a little more than usual and he startled awake, mewling the warning cries that come before the true maelstrom. “Shoot,” she said, pretending to be annoyed. “Now you woke him up again. I live just over there,” she pointed, sighing. “You know, with Nona?”

At this point Luke let loose with a full belly wail and the Lobo’s face twisted in disgust.
He waved her past. “Just make it quick.”

“So sorry my
baby
didn’t understand the
curfew
,” she said, as she hurried away, glaring.

Relieved, she moved as quickly as she could without making noise.
She slipped into Nona’s with a wave. Luke was still screaming so Nona didn’t try to stop her as she joined a frantic Sara in their little closet.

“Fi, where were you?” she whispered in her ear, bouncing, her hands working with pent-up energy.
“I was freaking out. I thought you got caught.”

“Me too,” she whispered back, finally registering
the hammering in her chest.
Holy crap, that had been close!
She tried to focus on calming Luke, but the only thing she could think was, “Now what?” She’d been so intent on making it back to Nona’s that she hadn’t really planned any further than that.

She gave Sara an apologetic smile.
“Sorry, Sar. I can explain. But first I think we have a bigger problem.” She pulled up her skirt with her free hand, exposing the lumps and bumps of the ammo boxes.