The silence between them is almost palpable, filling the shadowed and cobwebby corners of the large living area with a turbulent, humming energy.
Their gazes break at the same time. Maggie looks over at a painting hanging above the mantle in the living room. Dakota looks down at her hands. The ring finger of her left hand looks strangely naked; the small band of paler flesh highlighted like an afterimage of a life long past.
Seven years, Dakota thinks, her thumb rubbing over the pale, soft skin. A time for beginnings. A time for endings. A generation. An itch. Seven virtues and seven vices. Paradise and damnation. Confusion? Maybe. Guilt? A little of that, too.
She sighs.
“I have a room to myself in the back of the house,” Allen says, very softly. “One of the perks of being CO.” She smiles a little. “I’d like to share it with you tonight.”
Dakota looks up then, her gaze piercing and direct. The sharply etched plains of her face soften just slightly, and Allen is stunned once again by the woman’s striking beauty.
“I’d like that.”
8
When Dakota next awakens, it’s still dark, and she knows without looking that dawn is a long way off. She stretches slightly, then settles, arms comfortably curled around the warm body in her arms. For a moment, she thinks she’s dreaming, but the hair that brushes against her chest is shorter and coarser than what she’s used to, and the body draped across her is more muscular and compact. It awakens her to the reality of her situation, but the reality is, in truth, not all that unpleasant.
Maggie hums sleepily and, lifting her head just slightly, presses a kiss to the warm, bare breast upon which she is resting her head. “Mmm. Good morning.” Her voice is deep and sleep burred and the sound of it reaches into Koda’s belly and twists it pleasantly.
“It is that.”
“What time is it?”
In an automatic reflex, Dakota looks over at the nightstand, but of course, the clock that stands there is blank without the electricity needed to run it.
“Damn,” Maggie says, chuckling. “Forgot about that.” Reaching across Koda’s body, she picks up the watch she’s left on the nightstand and peers into it through sleep blurred eyes. “0320. Good thing I don’t need much sleep, hmm?”
“You could always grab a little more.”
Maggie laughs, a throaty chuckle. “With you here? Naked? Darling, sleep is the last thing I plan on grabbing.”
A strong hand slides up a muscled thigh, and Maggie slides with it, reaching Dakota’s tempting lips and entangling her own in a deep, luscious kiss. “Dear god, woman,” she pants when she finally pulls away. “I never thought I’d say this to another human being, but you’ve got flying beat by a long mile.”
Dakota’s deep chuckle follows her down to sensual oblivion.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream….”
1
KIRSTEN HUDDLES BEFORE the dying fire, watching the play of scarlet and orange amid the black remains of the embers. She is wrapped in her own sleeping bag, shielded from the concrete floor by a pair of thin mattresses pulled off one of the bunk beds. Asimov is stretched out on another with his head in her lap. She rubs his ears absently.
The small cabin is warm. She has before her the prospect of the first comfortable night since the insurrection began. She has a hot meal inside her, even if it was only canned stew set in the ashes, and has cleaned up as best she can with water warmed the same way and a bar of looted soap. She needs to sleep.
Over and over in her mind, Kirsten replays her encounter with the men at the barricade. Over and over she imagines it differently: introducing herself as a refugee fleeing toward her family in Indiana, perhaps. Shaking hands, accepting their hospitality and a temporary alliance. She is almost certain she could have trusted them far enough to set her safely on her way.
And over and over, she imagines what would have happened if she had been wrong. And what would have happened after that, will probably still happen if she doesn’t get through to the droid facility at Minot.
Outside the snow is falling again, hissing softly as it drifts past the windows. It is the one bit of luck she has had today, the new fall obscuring the ruts made by her tires on the deserted roads. The dead men’s companions had not followed her, or if they had, they had set out too late to catch up before the light failed and the clouds closed in again. Rural areas are as dangerous to her as the urban centers. In the cities the droids will still be hunting down humans. In the farm counties, the humans who remain will be defending their homes and families against the droids.
But it’s not that simple. All wars have collaborators. If there are no humans who have been spared as decoys, there will be. If there are none who cooperate for their own safety and their families’, there will be. And she can never, never, take a chance that another person is not a collaborator. Too much rides on her own survival for her to be trusting or merciful.
Kirsten banks the fire and pulls her makeshift bed closer to the hearth. Because there is nothing else to do, she stretches out full length on the mattress, Asimov rousing just long enough to move up beside her. She does not expect to sleep, but can at least allow her aching muscles as much ease as warmth and rest allow.
She moves through a twilight world. All about her the snow lies heavy: on the ground, in the forks of the branches that spread bare above her head. The sky is white, too, the light diffused and dim. Asimov paces at her side, his huge paws spread to carry him across the surface lynx-fashion. Her own feet do not sink into the snow. When she looks down, she sees only a faint, shadowless impression in the crust where she has stepped.
Above her, in the sky over a clearing, a hawk hangs at the hover. It gives one long and ringing cry, then banks and flies off toward what she knows to be the west, though there is no sun to give direction.
Then she sees it, a shape drifting through the trees, keeping pace with her. Kirsten’s heart seems to stop, then slams against her breastbone, but strangely it is not fear that sets her blood to racing. Somewhere deep in her mind is the knowledge that this is something she has searched for, has waited for, longer than she can remember. She tries to call out to whatever it is, but her throat closes around the words.
The ground begins to rise abruptly, and she realizes that she is climbing one of the ancient earthworks that dot the Hopewell Valley. The forest thins as she scales the top, and there laid out before her, stretching away infinitely far into horizonless space, is a long, sinuous mound in the shape of a serpent, coiling and uncoiling, doubling back on itself in rhythmic curves only to spiral outward again. There are tracks here, the prints of a large animal moving swiftly. Kirsten sets out to follow, placing her own feet in the pad marks that somehow remain undisturbed behind her. Asimov lopes along beside her, a strange eagerness in the play of rippling muscle under his black and silver coat.
Then she sees it. Straight ahead, directly in her path where nothing but air had been a nanosecond before, is a wolf. Its fur is covered in rimefrost, and it regards her with eyes of a startling sky-blue.
Its gaze lasts only a moment. Without warning, the ground gives way beneath Kirsten’s feet, and she is falling, falling through space as the stars streak past, plunging into atmosphere finally as clouds billow around her, plummeting toward a black rock island in a mighty river where she will shatter into atoms. For a moment she thinks that she may survive with no more than a few bones broken, or that she can perhaps deflect her trajectory for a landing in that impossibly blue water.
Don’t be a damned idiot, she tells herself. You know you’re going to die.
The rock rises up to meet her, and she strikes with an impact that jerks her bolt upright in her sleeping bag, to find the hearth still warm and Asimov whuffling softly in his own dreams.