Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) Page 8

  She was tough, but alone out here … He could see her time was running out. When they had first discovered Newquay’s Moon, she had been at the helm, a straight-backed pillar of strength who had held the wolves at bay since the End. This place had been her reason for being.

  Then Malverston had moved into the area, and age had taken its toll on her energy. As she had slowed, the landowner’s influence had grown. And one day, he had simply claimed the town for his own, rigging an impromptu election to pacify the populace. Since then, Alice McKinley had remained here in this hut, slowly fading.

  James suspected he was one of few to ever visit. He was drawn to her door more than any other. There was something about her, some sliver of the Old World that seemed alive in her despite her filmy corneas and drooping jaw, some secret wisdom that had vanished from so much of the land since the End. He smiled as she tugged him to the grimy table beside the kitchenette and pushed him into a seat before bustling around with the kettle, struggling to light the stove.

  He leaped up. “Please, let me,” he said, taking the splint and bending over the cramped kitchenette. Once the flame had caught, he stepped back, for she was already flapping him away impatiently.

  “I’m no coot,” she croaked, her voice so faded it was barely audible. “Can light my own fire …” She wheezed, and he guessed she was laughing. “You’re a good boy.” She grunted, making tea with laborious unconscious dexterity, something James loved to watch elders do. Another echo of the Old World, a ritual of a world that had moved on. “You should stop visiting me.”

  “And miss your plum cobbler? You know how hard it is to find dessert out east?”

  She laughed, a vibrant and lively sound wholly unbefitting her trembling, failing body. “Now I know that’s the truth. All men are ruled by their bellies, among other things … Speaking of which, I saw you and Master Cain ride in. Those other fools out there might be young, but they’re blinder than I am.” She jeered, “There’s something potent about young hearts. When they get after one another, their spark gets all over everything, hangs in the air.” A ringing pause, then she said, “Who’s the lucky girl?”

  James’s throat filled with putty. He mouthed wordlessly until she turned around with a tray laden with a teapot, cups and saucers, milk, and sugar. Seven billion souls might have disappeared from this Earth, empires emptied, civilisations cut short, but afternoon tea went on. A coy smile sat on her lips, threaded with muted pain as she sat.

  “You knew?”

  “You’ve had something growing inside of you since I first laid eyes on you. As much as I’d like it to be a crush on me, I can’t say that’s it.” That coy smile grew wider. “There are some things that can’t buoy a person up the same way. It’s like nectar, fills you through and through. Even your sacred mission can’t do that, am I right?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She poured the tea, and they sat and drank in companionable silence for a long while. James kept a wary ear out for sounds of violence coming from Malverston’s house, but outside, the town was all but silent. Though his trained ear listened as a matter of course, his head was swimming. Thinking of Beth’s face, the way her hair splashed over her shoulders—just thinking about her brought her scent to his nose, notes of talcum powder and lavender. Somehow, amidst the mud and grit of the orchards and the packed-dirt streets of the town, she took care to smell like that.

  Was it for him, that scent?

  Alice was laughing quietly. James came back to the room slowly. “What?” he said.

  “You’re a bright young thing, but you’re dumb as a bag of wet kittens.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because you’re sitting in the dark, drinking tea with an old bat instead of out there wooing the knickers off your sweetheart.”

  James squirmed. His cheeks were glowing. “I don’t know what I would say,” he muttered.

  He was used to being in control, expounding the wisdom of the Old World to those less fortunate. It had become almost second nature to stand in Alex’s shadow, to be elevated by all that cold, logical knowledge. To get muddled up now with fleshy, hot, raw emotions was turning him around. It was all so … sticky.

  “Say?” Her face grew sombre. “Speak your mind. Life’s too short for nerves and tripping over yourself. Take her by the arms and tell her exactly what you’re thinking.”

  He choked on his tea. “I … I …”

  Her face smoothed, her eyelids fluttering. She put her tea down on the saucer and leaned forwards, milky eyes shimmering. “My darling, none of us have as much time as we think. If you don’t take every chance you ever get by the balls, one day you’ll wake up old and broken, and it’ll be too late.”

  He didn’t reply, just sat nursing his tea.

  In the corner of his eye, he saw a smile return to her lips, threaded with a sympathy that was almost forlorn. “My, my, girls are really going to eat you alive. I hope Ms Tarbuck digs her claws in tight.”

  James started, his knee banging painfully against the table. “How did you know?”

  She rolled her eyes. “This town ain’t a big place, and all I got to do all day is squint out the window trying to see some goddamn thing. So far as I can see of anything, there’s only one other punch-drunk doolally wandering around. She got that same look in her eye. Like I said, it gets in the air.”

  James rubbed his smarting leg, embarrassment forgotten. If she knew, what about Alex? Had he sensed something amiss? Somehow, James didn’t like the idea of Alex finding out. He was liable to think James’s concentration was slipping. And when anything threatened their great destiny or their mission, he was liable to start meddling.

  He finished his tea and cleaned up Alice’s house awhile, dusting, setting things straight, and replacing her woodpile from the stock out in the square. Then he kissed her on the cheek and headed for the door. “I’ll visit again soon.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m too old and no good for this world as it is. Don’t need to go dragging a trailblazer like you down with me.” Now that he was at the door, she looked so much smaller, so much older, a tiny thing gnarled in the dark.

  He strode back to the table, leaned over and gave her arm a squeeze. “You’re blind as a mule, too.”

  Her bitter frown melted away, and then she was laughing again, blowing stale breath over him. She pinched his chin. “Get out of my house, you little shit.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The pigeons were everywhere. Perched upon every rooftop, fence post, and power line across all of New Canterbury. No matter how many times they were shooed and scattered, they circled back and blanketed the city all over again. It had been that same way for over a day now. Some people had started shooting them, but taking down even a dozen birds didn’t make a dent in the flock, and ammunition was precious. Even up on the ridge to the north, overlooking the city, they filled the treeline.

  Robert Strong scoured the hilltop for a full five minutes before breaking cover and stepping out into the high grass. Acrid columns of smoke rose from the series of craters spaced every hundred feet along the ridge: all that remained of New Canterbury’s wind farm. He trod carefully around myriad chunks of charred shrapnel and made his way to the nearest smouldering hole. There was nothing left, not even a stump. The turbines had all been reduced to a medley of particulate glass and molten slag.

  “I can’t believe it’s just gone,” Sarah whispered at his side. Two heads shorter than he, she barely reached his shoulder. His fiancée’s spectacles flashed as she turned in a wide arc, surveying the destruction. “All of it, just gone. How could they have done this?”

  “Explosives. High-grade stuff.”

  “Nobody’s had that kind of thing since the End.”

  “Well, they got it. There’s some pretty serious stuff lying out there in depots and bunkers. All you have to know is where to look.”

  She shivered. “They’re farmers.”

  “They’re angry, and they’re desperate.
People can do terrible things when they’re desperate.”

  They were quiet for a while. Then she said, “The famine was a trigger. This is revenge. I wonder if the radio message was real at all. Maybe it was just some trick to lure the council to London, make us vulnerable.”

  He didn’t reply.

  They had struck without warning while Alexander had led the ambassadorial convoy to London. Most had sought shelter in the cathedral, shivering under the pews like whipped puppies. Others had barricaded themselves in their homes, sweeping their families indoors before nailing the windows shut. Others with the skills to scratch a living in the woods had fled the city altogether.

  Only a handful had remained by his side. No more than half a dozen, out of eight hundred men, women, and children.

  What they would do if they ran into any intruders was anyone’s guess.

  They were all looking to him. Nobody said anything, but there was no mistaking the way they congregated around him. With Alexander gone and Norman in tow, and even Lucian absent, he was all they had.

  But he had never expected this. At six five, his dark skin rippling with muscle, he had always been the brawn, not the brains. But, for now, there was nobody else.

  Retreating up here hadn’t been his plan. He had just needed to get Sarah outside. Since the massacre out at the enemy stronghold, she had barely said a word, just sat swaddled in a pile of blankets with every candle they owned ablaze, waiting for angry hordes to come bursting through the door.

  He watched her carefully as she took in the sight of the wreckage. Her brow twitched each time she looked upon another smoking crater.

  Had he really only proposed to her yesterday? It must have been; he had knelt before her not an hour before the ambassadorial convoy had left for London. The bombs had detonated no more than an hour later. Now, all that seemed like a hundred years ago. Neither of them had slept since then. He shook his head, trying to clear a ringing he knew would only get worse.

  But there would be time for sleep later. Right now, they had to figure out what they were going to do in the short term.

  Sarah turned to him then, and the look in her eye made him wonder whether she had read his mind. “They’re out there, aren’t they?”

  “Probably.”

  “Why haven’t they finished it? If they can do this”—she gestured to the carnage around them—“there’s no way we’d be able to put up much of a fight.”

  “That’s not true. We have some of the best snipers I’ve ever come across. I wouldn’t want to be the one who tries to sneak up on this place unwelcomed.” He managed to keep his voice level, but shame flushed his cheeks. That might have been true with the others around, but with the city scattered and most gunners either holed up with their loved ones or wandering the forest’s nooks and crannies, they were all but defenceless.

  He knew she could see right through him. The arch to her eyebrow only heightened his shame. He forgot how sharp she was sometimes. And, how strong. The sight of the Old World explosives had shattered the nerves of dozens of the toughest men this side of the Thames. He couldn’t blame them; only a handful had seen such power. Only Robert and a few others had witnessed ordnance like that before, in the northern skirmishes during the Early Years. Yet here she was, standing right beside him, shaken, but not beaten. He felt a swell of longing for her, and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “You’re right,” he said. “We wouldn’t be any match for them, not like this.”

  “Then why not finish it? They must know what they’ve done to us. Our elders are gone, we have no power, our guards are all hiding behind locked doors… They’ve razed dozens of settlements to the ground in the last few weeks. Why spare us?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  The wind picked up and skewed the smoke columns to the south, turning the horizon a dirty brown. They could now see clear across the ridge, with a full view of the treeline. The hairs on Robert’s forearms stood on end. There must have been hundreds of pigeons in the trees, all cooing, all watching. At first there had been only a few. Then the explosion had rocked the city, and they had been arriving in a continuous stream since then.

  “They’re everywhere,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She sighed. “I’m tired of not knowing, all this mystery. We can’t live like this.”

  She stroked his arm in slow circles, and he inhaled sharply. They stood like that with the wind blowing smoke into their faces and through their hair until they were deaf to the pigeons’ cooing and the sight of the wreckage had lost its edge.

  Robert brushed Sarah’s hair behind her ear and held her close. He couldn’t believe she could be taken away from him. This was supposed to be their time. He had played protector for too long, putting the needs of others ahead of his own.

  He wanted routine, excitement, and passion—and everything that came with it: lazy days between the sheets, mundanity, petty bickering, and dreams of the future. Not twenty-four hours ago, he had pictured them both old and weathered, sitting upon the porch of a home he had planned to build with his own hands, somewhere quiet where she could read her books and he could work on projects in the shed. Nothing fancy, just simple and real. He wanted it all. And now it could all be stolen from them.

  Everything they had fought for, it could all come to nothing but flames, and death. He hadn’t given up hope, not by a long stretch, but there were moments when all that seemed left for them was to decide what to do with the time they had left.

  Sarah’s fingers traced the defined contours of his forearm, circling higher. His eyes were drawn to the soft swelling below the nape of her neck as she took each breath. He kept stroking her hair as a stirring grew in his loins, and her breathing grew deeper. It seemed to take an age to meet her gaze, each of their heads creeping round until he stared down at her, and she up at him.

  “It’s dangerous out here,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Her hand left his arm and reached up to his cheek. Her voice picked up a smooth bass. How she managed to look so alluring from behind those gawky glasses was beyond reckoning. “We should go back.”

  His hunger peaked, and their lips met in a blur of skin and muddied clothes. He dropped his rifle to the ground—if they were sprung now, then so be it—and held onto sense just long enough to check the ground for shrapnel. Then he was lying her down in the grass, and soon lost all hope of telling her skin from his. For a time, they pushed back the darkness.

  SECOND INTERLUDE

  James returned to the square, but jubilant clattering and laughter still emanated from Malverston’s house. It didn’t sound like it was going to be over anytime soon.

  He wandered towards the edge of town and headed up onto the nearest grassy rise, looking over the surrounding lands. Newquay’s Moon was set to the north of the remains of the coastal city of Newquay itself, on the northern shore of England’s Cornwall peninsula. Up here, a few miles from the seagulls, sand dunes, rotting caravan parks, quaint cobbled streets, and cottages, the hills afforded a good vantage point in every direction. It would be almost impossible to sneak up on the town.

  James loved visiting here. After some of the scant horrors of northern England, and the squabbling bands of proto-societies in the South, this county was a haven. It was hotter too, warmed by the Gulf Stream, and so exotic foodstuffs could be grown, with the right care and attention—on occasion they succeeded in growing things that used to be imported from the tropics, before the End. It was only from here that the British Isles could source fresh strawberries, tea, peaches, and maybe even a few miniature bananas.

  Consequently, places like Newquay’s Moon, though they looked dirty and hard pressed on the surface, had grown fat and wealthy on the profits of their labour. Coupled with the relative peace they had found, the persistence of some kind of law, and the lack of barbarous raiders prowling the countryside, James was someti
mes at a loss to explain how it had survived. An island of civility on the edge of a country set to tear itself apart.

  That was why they were here, now. They needed Newquay’s Moon on their side before it was discovered. Because, eventually, somebody with truly bad intentions would stumble across places like this. And when they did, one of the Old World’s last echoes would vanish to the sound of screams and trickling blood.

  James took a deep breath of the coastal winds and surveyed the orchards in the valleys afar. Was Beth down there?

  A cooing brought him back from scanning the rows of peaches. Instinct brought his arm up to shoulder height. A moment later a fluttering beat about his head, and a wood pigeon alighted upon his elbow.

  “Morning, Chuck,” James said. He took note of the other pigeons in nearby trees, perched upon rooftops, and circling overhead. They always managed to find him. “Mail?”

  Chuck cooed. Tied to his leg, tucked neatly in a leather slot James had crafted himself, was a tiny scroll of paper. James tweezed it free and unfurled it, reading Lucian’s sloppy handwriting upon it:

  Come at once, need you both. L.

  He frowned, tucked the scrap into his pocket, and looked over his shoulder. The door to Malverston’s was still shut fast. He couldn’t just go barging in on them; Alex’s way was always a delicate one, and interrupting was bound to scupper his wily words.

  But Lucian wouldn’t have sent a message unless he had to. The others needed them.

  A few years before, perhaps he would have gotten itchy feet. But he’d been in too many scrapes for a few words to faze him. They were always at the crux of some kind of crisis. Instead, he took a handful of seeds from a pouch at his belt and offered them to Chuck, who obliged by digging in.

  What could be going on back home that was bad enough to send word all this way? Even if they rode hard, it would take over a day to get back. And that would put an end to their careful plans for Newquay’s Moon and the surrounding villages.