Chapter 13 #2
"That's exactly her. That's what she is. She just killed a man and reloaded and it didn't touch her, it didn't move her at all, because there's nothing in there, Francis, there's nothing behind those eyes, it all drained out or was never there, and she'll kill anybody, anybody who crosses her,
and feel nothing. That's the vampire. That's the thing I loved. God help me. That's the thing I loved."
Francis lay in the dark and watched the small woman by the fire, calm, still, holding a coach gun she'd just emptied into a man, and he understood, in his bones, that Dale and Ruth had been right about everything.
That Sarah was not a warlord's soft woman.
That Sarah was something colder and more dangerous than Macklemore himself.
That the crack in the wolf was, in fact, a second predator, a quieter one, sitting at the wolf's right hand, and that anyone who reached for Sarah thinking to use her had better understand exactly what they were reaching for.
"We melt off," Francis breathed. "Now. Slow. Before anybody looks this way. Dale. With me. Now."
And Dale, with a terrible effort, tore his eyes off the woman by the fire, and the two of them began, slow and grey and silent, to withdraw into the dark, away from the crossroads, away from the camp, away from Sarah and the man she'd just killed without a flicker.
But Francis's mind was already working, cold and clear.
Because he had just seen something enormous.
He had seen that Sarah killed her own. That Sarah made the Combine's own men afraid. That there was contempt for her among Macklemore's soldiers, contempt like Jenner's, contempt that got you killed but that surely, surely, others still carried quietly, swallowed, resented.
A woman the boss's own men feared and hated. A woman who killed her own to keep them in line. A soft spot in the Combine that was not soft at all, but was, maybe, a fracture. A fault line. A place where the whole thing might be split.
If Jenner had hated Sarah, others did too. And men who hated the boss's woman, who feared her, who'd watched her murder one of their own by a fire, those were men who might, if the right thread were pulled, turn.
Francis withdrew into the dark with Dale, and carried the image of Sarah reloading the coach gun over Jenner's body, and began, cold and careful, to understand that the crack in Stanley Macklemore's kingdom might be even deeper than he'd hoped.
And more dangerous to reach than he'd ever imagined.
They put three miles between themselves and the crossroads before they stopped.
Dale was shaken. Francis could see it even in the dark, the way the old man moved, stiff and wrong, the twenty years torn back open.
They holed up in a dry culvert under a dead road, out of the wind, and Francis let the old man sit with it a while before he spoke.
"You all right," Francis said finally.
"No," Dale said. "But I will be. Give me a minute."
He was quiet. "It's one thing to remember a woman. It's another to see her. After twenty years. Kill a man and reload like she's shelling peas."
He shook his head slowly. "I keep thinking, that could've been me. In the dark, with my chest open. If I'd stayed. If I'd crossed her. That's what she does to the ones who cross her. And I loved her. That's the part that." He stopped. "That's the part."
"You don't have to talk about it," Francis said.
"No," Dale said. "I do. Because you need to understand it, if you're going to try and use her. So listen."
He gathered himself. "What you just saw. That wasn't rage. Jenner was raging. Sarah wasn't. She was calm the whole time. That's the thing you have to understand about her. She never gets angry. She never loses control. She does the coldest possible thing at the coldest possible moment,
and it looks like violence, but it's not, it's arithmetic. She killed Jenner because Jenner was a threat to her position and killing him ended the threat and made every other man afraid to be the next Jenner. Cold. Calculated. Not one degree of heat in it."
Francis listened. It fit. It fit with everything.
"She's like Macklemore, then," Francis said. "Cold. Calculating. A manager."
"She's worse than Macklemore," Dale said.
"Because Macklemore wants things. Fuel, power, the harvest, the kingdom. He's greedy, and greedy men are predictable, you know what they'll reach for. Sarah doesn't want things. Sarah wants to be safe, and warm, and taken care of, forever, and she'll do anything, anything,
to stay attached to whoever can give her that. She doesn't love Macklemore. She doesn't love anybody. She's attached to his strength the way a tick's attached to a dog. And the day something stronger comes along, she'll be off him and onto it before his body's cold."
He looked at Francis. "That's the thread you're thinking about pulling, isn't it. I can see it. You're thinking, a woman who's only loyal to strength, who'd jump to whatever's stronger."
Francis was quiet.
Because that was exactly what he'd been thinking.
"If she's only loyal to strength," Francis said slowly, "then she's loyal to Macklemore only as long as Macklemore looks like the strongest thing on the plain. And the day he doesn't. The day something breaks his kingdom, burns his fuel, kills his men, makes him look weak."
"She turns," Dale said. "Yeah. That's the ugly truth of her. The day Macklemore looks like he's losing, Sarah's not going down with him. She'll be looking for the next strong thing. And if you've arranged for the next strong thing to be you, or your rebellion."
His pale eyes gleamed. "Then she might just hand you Macklemore herself. To buy her way onto the winning side. She'd do it without blinking. She'd feel nothing. She's done it before. She did it to me, when I stopped being strong enough. She just moved on."
Francis sat in the dark culvert and turned it over, cold and complete.
"So the play isn't to reach out to her now," he said.
"Now she thinks Macklemore's the strongest thing on the plain, so now she's loyal to him. Reaching out now just gets me a coach gun in the chest, or worse, gets me handed to Macklemore because turning me in is what keeps her safe with the strong man."
"Now, she'd turn you in," Dale agreed. "Absolutely she would."
"But later," Francis said. "When the fuel's burning. When his trucks are dying and his men are afraid and the rebellion's real and Macklemore starts to look like a man who's losing. Then."
"Then she's yours for the taking," Dale said quietly.
"Then she'll come to you. Or she'll be reachable, at least. Because then you're the strong thing, and she goes to strength like water goes downhill."
He shook his head. "It's the coldest thing I've ever said about a person I loved. But it's true. You don't recruit Sarah. You make yourself win, and then Sarah recruits herself to you. That's the only way she works. That's the only way she's ever worked."
Francis nodded slowly.
Another piece. The last piece, maybe, of understanding the Combine.
You didn't turn Sarah with a clever word or an appeal.
You turned her by winning. By making Macklemore weak.
And then the vampire at his right hand would peel off on her own, drawn to the new strength, and take with her everything she knew.
But you had to win first. You had to make it real first.
Which meant everything came back to the fuel. To the trucks. To the harvest. To the war.
"All right," Francis said. "Then we set Sarah aside. For now. We don't reach for her. We win, and then we see if she comes. But we don't build the plan around her, because a plan built around a person like that is a plan built on sand."
He looked at Dale. "We build the plan around the thing that's solid. The fuel. That's the throne. We burn the throne, and everything else follows, Sarah included."
Dale nodded, and something like relief moved across his face. Relief at not having to reach for her.
"Good," he said. "That's smart. That's the smart cold thing. Ruth would've said the same." He swallowed the name. "So. The fuel. Let's build it right."
And so, in a dry culvert under a dead road, the two of them built the plan.
It was, Francis knew, still incomplete. He had not scouted the warehouse with his own eyes yet, not up close.
That was still to come, the most dangerous part, the actual reading of the fuel depot, the count of the guards, the finding of the exact way in.
But with Dale's knowledge he could build the frame of it now, and fill in the details when he'd seen it himself.
The shape of it was this.
The rebellion would rise at the harvest.
That was the moment. When Macklemore's trucks fanned out across the plain to collect the season's take, farm to farm, that was when the Combine was most spread out, most committed, most vulnerable.
Fifteen trucks' worth of men couldn't be in fifty places at once.
At harvest, the wolf had to leave his den and scatter his strength across a hundred miles of fields.
And that was when they'd strike the fuel.
While the trucks were out collecting, spread thin, far from home, a small grey team, Francis's team, would hit the depot.
Burn the tanks. Take the throne. And do it timed so that the Combine's trucks, scattered across the plain, would run out of fuel with no depot to refill them, stranded far from home, one by one, in hostile country, in the middle of a rising.
Because that was the other half of it. The army.
The frightened farms, woven together by Francis and Dale over these weeks, all of them warned, all of them ready, all of them waiting for the signal.
And the signal would be the fire. The fuel depot burning on the horizon, a great pillar of black smoke, visible for fifty miles across the flat plain, the beacon that said now, rise now, the wolf is burning, take back your harvest.
And the farms would rise. Each one, against the truck that came to collect from it.
A truck of Combine men, stranded, low on fuel, far from home, arriving at a farm they thought was frightened and finding, instead, a farm that had been waiting, warned, ready, armed.