Chapter 2 Cora #2
"I think he listens to you. I think he came to the supply tent at dawn with a piece of rebar in his hand because he wanted to be near you and could not think of any other reason that would not have cost something.
I think if you sign him on the team, he will go.
I think if you do not sign him on the team, he will follow at a distance because he will not be able to stay.
I think you should sign him on the team and let him pay the cost on the team and not at a distance, because at a distance he is going to die alone. "
"Okay."
"Okay."
"Brec."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
"Don't say thank you. Bring my secondary back. Bring all of them back."
She walked away.
I stood at the supply tent door for a moment. The radio was still crackling from Loren's tent. Crystal was still at it. Nina was still gone.
I went inside and started the pre-cache list.
* * *
Drew came to my tent at dusk.
This was new. Drew did not come to my tent.
Drew came near my tent: at dawn, at the supply tent next to my tent, at the perimeter line that ran behind my tent.
But he did not knock on my tent flap, because knocking would have been an interaction that required a request, and Drew did not make requests.
He knocked anyway. Once. Just the tent pole. The fabric did not have a door to knock on; he knocked on the pole.
"Come in."
He came in. His head was almost at the canvas.
I was kneeling on the floor with the route map in front of me and a small lantern set behind the map so I could see the contour lines.
My ledger was open. I had been counting fuel-can rations for the third time.
I had four columns. I was looking for the column that made the math work.
"Cora."
"Drew."
He sat down across from me. Not on the floor. He sat on the small wooden crate by the tent wall, which kept his head below the canvas seam. He did not look at the map. He looked at the ledger.
"Show me."
I turned the ledger to face him.
He read it. His hands stayed on his knees. He read the ledger the way Drew read everything: fast, then slow, then back to the top once. I watched him read. His eyes did the half-clinical sweep. I had stopped flinching at it three months ago.
"You're short on fuel," he said.
"I know."
"By how much."
"By a column."
"You don't need three caches. You need four. The Springfield cache won't be enough for the return. If you take a hit anywhere east of Albuquerque, you don't have fuel margin to detour."
"I know."
"You knew when you wrote the map."
"Yes."
"So why is the count on the map three caches."
I looked at him.
He was not looking at me. He was looking at the ledger. His hand was still on his knee. His knuckles were calloused on the right side, fourth and fifth metacarpals. Brecca had measured them five months ago and not told anyone.
"Because the fourth cache requires a salvage run I have not been authorized to make."
"To where."
"Barstow. There's a fuel depot the bandit cohort hit in March.
They took the surface tanks. They didn't get the underground.
Cassi's team went in for a recon two months ago and came back with the read that there are still eight thousand gallons of diesel under the depot's south pump.
We have not gone for it because the run requires four trucks and two days and the manpower has been allocated to the perimeter, but if we go for it tomorrow with two trucks and one day. "
"Two trucks is not safe."
"I know."
"You go with two trucks and you hit a bandit ambush at the depot and you lose the trucks and the fuel and the people."
"I know."
He was quiet.
I waited.
"How many people on the salvage run."
"Six."
"Six is one more than the team. You're proposing to commit six people to a one-day Barstow salvage tomorrow, before we leave, and you have not told Loren."
"I was going to ask him in the morning."
"You weren't going to ask him."
I looked at the ledger.
"I was going to do the math first. If the fourth cache works, I ask. If it doesn't, I don't ask and I make do."
Drew set his hand on the ledger. Light. He moved one of the small stones I was using as a row-marker. He rearranged my fuel column.
"You don't go to Barstow," he said. "You take half the gallons you would have taken to Springfield and you put them in the Vegas cache instead, and on the return you reroute through the Bay Area.
The Bay has a Vampyren ally network, anti-Council but the kind anti-Council that just wants to be left alone, not the kind that hunts.
Renn can broker a fuel hand-off. We come home through the Sierra Nevada.
The route is forty miles longer and it saves us a day of pre-mission salvage and it does not put six more people in a Barstow ambush. "
I looked at the ledger.
The numbers worked.
The numbers worked the way numbers worked when someone who could count came to the column and rearranged it. I had been staring at the column for six hours and I had not seen the Bay handoff because the Bay was outside the route map I had been drawing.
"You've been thinking about this."
"For four months."
"You haven't been authorized for four months."
"I haven't been on the team for four months."
"Drew."
He looked up. Met my eye. The half-clinical sweep dropped. He looked at me the way he had looked at me at dawn that morning, past my shoulder, the not-saying, and then his eyes came back.
"I've been thinking about this for four months because you have been planning this trip for four months and I have been listening from twenty feet away every time you and Loren had a conversation about it.
The math doesn't work for three caches. The math works for two caches and a Bay handoff.
I have been not saying so for four months because it was not my map.
It is your map. It is still your map. But you asked me here and you turned the ledger toward me, and now I am telling you. "
I sat back.
"Why didn't you say so before."
"Because before, you had not signed me on the team."
The lantern hissed. The canvas creaked. Outside, someone was singing.
Renn at the southern fire, the low Vampyren chant he sang at dusk that was not for a god and not for a dead one but for the sun going down, a thing his unit had done before invasion, a thing he still did.
The chant was not mournful. It was just a thing he did.
"Drew."
"Yes."
"What else have you not said."
He was quiet for a long time. He looked at the ledger. He looked at his hand on the ledger. He moved his hand off the ledger. He set it back on his knee.
"That if Hess is at Urbana, Renn cannot take him in a clean fight.
Renn was a Vegas scout, not a frontline warrior.
Hess is two-decade Council-loyalist combat, in a hard turn anti-Council four years ago.
The skill gap is real. Renn knows it. Renn has not told you because telling you would have meant the team needed a different fifth, and Renn does not know who the different fifth would be. "
"You."
"Me."
"You think you can take Hess."
"No."
"Then."
"I can be the second. Renn opens. I close.
Two-on-one against a frontline Council warrior is the only fight that ends with Hess down and the team intact.
Three-on-one would have been better. Three-on-one means Cruz, and Cruz is a Marine, and a Marine in a blade-fight is just another body. So it's two-on-one. Renn and me."
I looked at him for a long time.
"You've been planning to fight Hess for four months."
"I've been planning the possibility of fighting Hess for four months. It is not the same."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"Why."
He looked at me. He did not answer. His face did the not-saying.
I did not press it.
I rolled up the route map. I closed the ledger. I picked up the second small stone he had moved and I set it back where it had been, and then I set it where he had set it, and then I left it where he had set it.
"Tomorrow morning we re-cache for the Bay route. The salvage list changes. The team meets at the strip at oh-six-hundred to load. We leave at oh-seven."
"Yes."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
His head moved. Not a nod. A small angle, the kind of motion he made when he was registering a sentence he did not have a return-sentence for. He stood up. He had to bend slightly to clear the canvas. He went to the door.
He stopped.
"Cora."
"Yes."
"You said six."
I held the ledger.
"I did."
"At the council. You said six."
"I know."
"That's the first time I have heard you say six out loud."
I did not say anything.
He waited.
I did not say anything.
He nodded once and went out.
* * *
Crystal came to my tent at midnight.
She had the photograph in her hand.
She had had the photograph in her hand for eight months. Sleeping with it, eating with it, doing the shortwave calls with it next to the radio, walking the perimeter with it in her shirt pocket. She had not let anyone else hold it.
She held it out to me.
It was a Polaroid. Faded. The chemical had bled at the corners.
A girl, maybe five years old in the picture, on a porch with a yellow dog, summer light, her hair in two braids, both braids coming undone the way a kid's braids did when she'd been running.
Her smile was missing a tooth. Her hands were dirty.
There was a smear of something, popsicle, maybe, at the corner of her mouth.
"That's from year one," Crystal said. "Two months after we got her to Urbana. Mara took it. There's only one. There aren't going to be more, because the camera was lost when the creche moved, and we did not get a new one."
I took the photograph.
"She'll have grown."
"I know."
"She might not look like this anymore."
"I know."
Crystal sat down on my crate. Drew's crate. Her hands were on her knees the same way Drew's had been.
"You bring her home, Cora."
"I will."
"And if you cannot bring her home."
"I will bring her home."
"Cora."
"Crystal. I will bring her home."
She nodded. She did not stand up. She sat on the crate. After a while she said: