Chapter 2 Cora
The route map came together in six hours. The council convened in the seventh.
Crystal was not in the room. Crystal was at the radio. Crystal had not left the radio in the seven hours since the three-second click. Mark and Cassi had taken turns sitting with her.
"Route," Loren said.
I unrolled the map. Set the four small river stones I used to weigh corners.
"Mojave foothills to Urbana. I-15 northeast through Vegas, Renn's old province, our best resupply point.
Through Arizona on the surviving stretches of I-40, swinging south of the Petrified Forest because the storm-belt has shifted that way and we'd lose fuel margin to weather.
Down through New Mexico, hitting our first pre-cache at the Gallup truck stop.
" I tapped the map. "Cruz and I dropped fuel and water there in March.
Across the panhandle into Oklahoma. Second cache outside Elk City, dropped in April.
Then up through Missouri into Illinois, third cache outside Springfield, dropped in May.
Urbana approach from the southwest, which is the route the old Free-the-Children network mapped before the radio went dark. "
"How many days." Marta.
"Nine on the road. Three days of extraction operation, minimum, depending on what we find. Eight on the return. Twenty days total, give or take three."
Marta's mouth did the thing it did when she was getting ready to say something hard. I waited.
"And if Hess's cell is dug in at Urbana."
"Renn has been tracking the relay traffic for six weeks. Hess is north of where we're going, last known position, but he moves. If he hits the corridor before we do, the operation becomes extraction-under-fire. We've planned for that."
"You and Renn have planned for that. Drew has not been read into it."
I looked at her. Marta looked at me.
This was the part she wanted me to do in public.
"Drew is on the team."
Marta's jaw set. The rest of the table did not move. Loren let her have the floor.
"You're going to lead a five-person convoy across one thousand eight hundred miles of post-invasion road with a half-Vampyren in the team.
His scent will not register correctly to any Vampyren patrol we encounter.
They will not read him as kin. They will read him as a foreign trace and they will follow it.
You will be marked from Vegas to Urbana. "
"I know what I am asking."
"Why."
I had practiced this answer. I had practiced it for four months, since the morning I had decided Drew would be the fifth person if a fifth person was ever authorized.
"Because half-Vampyren biology does not regress at night the way full Vampyren biology does.
He can hold a night watch alone. The other three nights we have to rotate two-on-one.
Renn is a Vampyren, he degrades after dusk, he is sharper than any human but slower than he is in daylight.
With Drew on solo night, the team sleeps in shifts of three rather than two.
Three days saved on a twenty-day trip. Three days closer to whoever is still alive at Urbana. "
"You can run two-on-one and add ninety minutes per night."
"That ninety minutes per night is twenty-two hours across the trip. We don't have twenty-two hours. Nina is asking for me. If we are even one day late, the count we bring back is smaller than the count that is alive today."
Marta did not blink.
"Renn is a Vampyren warrior. Drew is a twenty-one-year-old half-Vampyren who has been with this camp for nine months and has never carried a blade outside the perimeter line. You are proposing to use him as a tactical asset on a long-range mission."
"He has been carrying a blade outside the perimeter line every dawn for nine months. He just hasn't told you."
The room was quiet.
Mark uncrossed his arms.
"He has." Brecca, finally. Her first words.
Her medic voice, the one she used when she was reporting on something she had measured.
"His knuckles are calloused on the right side, fourth and fifth metacarpals.
Consistent with a heavy-blade grip used in a four-to-six-hour daily pattern.
I noticed it five months ago. I did not bring it up because nothing in the camp's perimeter logs reported night-incident events that would have required it.
" She looked at me. "But the calluses are real. "
Marta closed her eyes for a second. Opened them.
"He is going to die out there, Cora."
"He might."
"And if he dies out there, you will have lost the only adult half-Vampyren the alliance has ever known, and we will not have another one.
We do not know how Auriel's biology will run.
We do not know what she will need to know when she is twenty-one.
We have one Drew. You are taking him out of the camp. "
"I know."
"You know what, Cora."
I took a breath.
"I know that we have one Drew and we have one Deedee and we have one Auriel and we have one camp and we have one window before Hess closes the corridor and one woman on a radio in Urbana saying please.
The math does not let me keep all of them.
The math lets me move toward the ones that are alive and asking and hope that the ones that are home stay home long enough for us to come back. "
Marta did not answer.
Loren did.
"He goes." Loren's voice did the thing it did when it ended an argument. "On Cora's signature. Not mine."
Cassi, who had been quiet, set her elbows on the table.
"I want to ride point." She said it the way Cassi said everything, like the answer was already settled and the council was being permitted to catch up.
"No." Loren. Immediate.
"Loren."
"No. You have Elena. She walked the kitchen line by herself yesterday for the first time in four months. If you leave Mojave for twenty-one days, she regresses. You are not going."
Cassi's jaw tightened. The general-and-the-daughter argument she had been having with herself for six months, the one I had heard parts of on the perimeter with her at three in the morning when neither of us could sleep, surfaced in her eyes for half a second and then went away. She nodded.
"Fine. But I run point at the gate when you leave. I want my hands on the route at the start."
"Agreed."
Marta stood up. She walked to the tent flap. Stopped. Turned back.
"Cora."
"Yes."
"If you bring back six and you leave a seventh, you tell me before you tell Crystal. I will tell Crystal."
I did not say anything.
She walked out.
* * *
Brecca caught me at the supply tent twenty minutes later. I had the route map under my arm and the pre-cache lists in my hand and I was already running an inventory of what we would need versus what was on the shelves.
"Cora."
"Brec."
"Walk with me."
We walked. The camp at midday was the part of the day I usually liked.
Kitchen smells. Kids in the schoolhouse reading aloud in the singsong of children learning late, who had to be reminded that letters made words.
The slow steady metal-on-metal of the salvage repair line where two old generators were being stripped for parts.
Today I could not feel any of it. My head was on the cache list.
"You're going to lose Sylvia."
"I'm taking Sylvia. Yes."
"You're going to lose her for twenty-one days. Maybe more. Maybe she comes back hurt. Maybe she does not come back."
"I know."
"I am the camp's medic. I have one secondary, and you are taking her. You know what happens if there is a serious wound in the camp while you are gone."
"You handle it."
"Cora."
I stopped. Looked at her. Brecca had Rael's silver-blue glow in the right edge of her hair.
They had been in a fight at the perimeter last night, the one with the small bandit group, and Rael's bond-glow always bloomed strongest in Brecca's hair for a few hours afterward — the way wet pavement keeps the print of a foot long after the foot is gone.
She looked tired. She looked like she had been arguing with herself before she had come to find me.
"I am the camp's medic." Brecca's voice was flat.
"I trained Sylvia. I trained her hard. She can deliver a baby, suture a femoral artery, splint a bone, run a blood transfusion.
I trained her because the camp needed redundancy.
Now you're taking my redundancy, and you are taking it to a place where she will need every skill I taught her, and you are taking it because nobody else can do what you're asking her to do. "
"Yes."
"I'm not arguing with the decision."
"Okay."
"I'm telling you that if you bring her back, I will owe you something I do not know how to owe."
I looked at Brecca. Brecca who had been alone at this camp longer than anyone else, Brecca who had stitched dental-floss sutures into half the people now in this tent line, Brecca who had decided to fall for an alien and never once apologized for it, Brecca who was the only person at the Mojave camp who had ever called me on the count without asking what the count was.
"Bring her back, Brec."
"I will."
"And Drew."
She looked at me.
"What about Drew."
"You know what about Drew."
Brecca was quiet. We had been at the supply tent door now for about a minute. The kitchen smell came across the dirt in waves. Tess was on the second-round breakfast for the salvage line, and the beans had been replaced by something with onions in it.
"You want me to tell you it's a good idea."
"I want you to tell me what you think."
"I think Drew is one of the most carefully constructed people I have ever met.
I think he has built himself, over nine months, into a man who can live in this camp without owing anyone anything, and that took an amount of effort that should not have been required of him, and the effort is going to break him eventually.
I think you are taking him on a trip where he is going to have to either keep paying that effort or stop. I do not know which is worse for him."
"Brec."