“That you, little man?” Crow called through the darkness. “That you?”
My heart sank in my guts as I staggered back down into the city. It was pitch black now, the clouds plugging the stars and painting the moon. The rain had settled into a drizzle. Harvesters lay broken on the ground, and the surviving pirates were huddled in stooped patches. But Crow stood tall and wide, towering above everyone. And everything.
He’d lost his beard. All the hair on his head had been singed off, replaced by blood and blisters. His clothes hung off him, torn and frayed, as if he’d been trying to shed them but had given up halfway through.
Crow’s grin split the dark as I approached him. “Happy to see you,” he said. “Though you look about as bad as I feel.”
“You got out,” I said, as if saying the words might make me believe them.
“Aye. With bodies before me. And bodies behind.” Crow studied his hands, his forearms. “Can still feel the poor bastards sticky on my skin.”
“Are there more?”
“Don’t know. Was a mighty big split in the hull. But Miss Zee was in there. Her mother also.”
“How’d they catch you?”
“In the corn.”
“Poachers?”
“Agents.”
“Agents don’t grab folk off the road.”
“They do now.”
I thought about what that could mean — GenTech agents handing off slaves to King Harvest. And I thought about how it made heading west now seem a whole lot more dangerous, seeing as the cornfields are never short of those bastards in the purple suits.
“What the hell was he gonna do with all those people?” I said.
“I don’t know.” Crow shrugged. “But a ship that size, I’d say whatever he been doing it for, he been doing it a long time.”
“Wait,” I said, remembering what Zee had told me. “You used to work for GenTech. Before you worked for Frost.”
Crow laughed that low rumble of his. “Indeed I did, little man. Indeed I did.”
“You were looking for trees.”
He quit laughing and his eyes changed. “Looking?” he said. “No, I wasn’t looking. But they found me, you might say. And now I think you’d better take me with you.”
“Take you with me?”
“Miss Zee said you hell bent on finding the Promised Land, in which case you need what I need. Vega’s the only place you can find the GPS. So you best head west. And that being so, I’d say you need me.”
“Why?” said Alpha, coming up behind me. “So you can get caught by agents again?”
Crow turned to her. He licked his broken lips. And then he turned back to me. “The cornfields are a maze, tree builder. Big as the South Wall. And the forty ain’t the only way of crossing it.”
“There’s another way?”
“GenTech got plenty of ways. Some of them unguarded. Some of them unwatched.”
“Then why not just head there yourself?”
“Oh, I would, little man. I would. But where’s my wheels? Know what I mean? You get us moving, and I can show us the way.”
“What makes you think I got wheels?”
“The pirates got trucks. And this pirate girl likes you.” He stared at the two of us, lifting his chin as if that single motion made him in control of everything. “Course she does,” he said, his melted face suddenly bleeding he was grinning so hard. “Told you before, little man. You’re crazy cool.”
A mist rolled in from the south, and at the forest it was too dark to see. Just gray clouds moving through the metal, drizzle sprinkling at the trees. Alpha and Crow were passed out sleeping in the city, but I’d come back to retrieve Sal. And Hina.
I stepped through the slippery undergrowth, a dead Harvester’s plastic boots on my feet. I knocked at the base of the statue, called for Sal, but when there was no reply I rummaged through my soggy tools, found my headlamp, and then shimmied under the foot and pried the panel free.
They were all the way at the end of the outstretched leg, Sal curled up against Hina and both of them crashed out cold. There was a sweetness they held in sleeping that neither of them showed awake. They looked peaceful. Calm. I lowered my headlamp and rested against the curve of the statue.
I tried to conjure some feeling for the mother whose arms I’d once slept in. She’d been from the northern lands, Pop had told me. And she’d starved to death before I was able to remember her. But she’d taught Pop to read, which I’d always thought a real good gift. I guess you got to take what you can get.
I leaned back and tried to picture what had happened between my father and this woman who now slept across from me, her arms held tight around her adopted son. Pop must have loved her real fierce to build such a statue, and I reckoned that meant she must have loved him in return. But I’d really little idea about the way of such things. And whatever had happened, whatever had been felt, their paths had got split in the end.
Hina wound up gambled away and ended up raising a daughter with a fat junky bastard. And my father met my mother and then dragged me around the Steel Cities, faking nature in a world where none survived.
Or did it?
I thought of waking the woman, staring into those silver eyes of hers and asking her what she knew. Ask her about my father. About that tree curved around her belly. Because it seemed strange that this tattoo Pop must have known so well now led to the same place he’d been taken.
The night felt heavy and my eyes drooped. And before I could think anymore or get up or move, I was sleeping, my headlamp still shining, its batteries burning, and by the time I woke up the thing was useless.
But it didn’t matter. When I woke up, the sun was back out and I could hear Alpha calling my name from the forest.
“Where’s Crow?” I asked Alpha as I hurried out through the base of the statue, squinting at the sky.
“Still sleeping,” she said. “Like a dead man. If the dead could snore.”
“Good.” I didn’t want Crow to see the forest. Or the statue. I figured anything I knew that the watcher didn’t, just might prove useful somewhere down the line.
Sal crept out behind me, all sweaty and pale in the heat of morning. He slumped down, yawning.
“Your friend?” said Alpha.
“I guess.”
“So where’s the woman?”
As if she’d been summoned, Hina crawled out of the statue, all matted down and her muscles straining. I tell you, it was like watching that statue give birth to itself. And I remembered what Zee had said, how Frost had gotten this woman hooked on the crystal. So I reckoned Hina was now facing the worst kind of sober. Along with the fact that her daughter was dead.
“We’re heading to Vega,” I said, helping her to her feet. “And I reckon you should come on with us, but I ain’t gonna make you if you don’t want to go.”
“I can’t stay here,” Hina said, keeping her back to the statue. She seemed to shrink as the sun beat down. But her eyes were as cold as ever.
“You said something,” I said, dropping my voice. “About those fake Harvesters.”
She stared at me. Not blinking.
But I couldn’t talk to her about my old man. Not in front of Sal. He was someone else I might need advantages over, somewhere on down the line.
Every vehicle the pirates owned had been torched and left to smolder on the clay, their giant steel carcasses still steaming.