The crowd is too shell-shocked to cheer their liberation. The scenes of death and destruction surpass anything Bam has seen before. It’s worse than the carnage at the Graveyard. The harvest camp has been burned to the ground. There are no living adults visible. Bam doesn’t know if any escaped Starkey’s dark vengeance against the world.
“What’s he going to do with the tithes?” asks Bree. Bam turns to see several armed storks guarding a cluster of tithes, who are in the process of being taken captive, since they aren’t taking well to freedom.
“Who knows,” Bam says. “Maybe he’ll turn them into slaves. Maybe he’ll put them in the stew.”
“Gross,” says one of her team members, a tousled-haired kid whose name Bam doesn’t know. “You don’t think he’d really do that, do you?”
The fact that the kid can ask that, as if it’s a real possibility, tells Bam that she’s not the only one who thinks Starkey is out of his freaking mind. Yes, he has a tight core of loyalists who seem to suckle all the vengeance and vitriol he can feed them—but how much doubt is there among the others? How much support would she have if she were to challenge his leadership? Probably just enough to get her and her coconspirators executed as traitors to the cause.
To her right she sees Jeevan stumbling out of a ruined hedge, his face bleeding. Bam looks down and tears out a pocket in her khakis, giving it to Jeevan to blot his bleeding forehead.
“Your team’s looking well rested,” Starkey says when he sees her. He offers Bam something that resembles a grin, but not quite.
“You’re the one who told us to take the loading dock,” she tells him coldly. “There wasn’t much action there.”
He has no comment to that. “Load up, ship out,” he orders, and strides away.
There are nondescript trucks waiting just down the road. The drivers, all supplied by the clapper movement, will take varied routes to deliver them back to the power plant, many hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime.
Hayden, along with Starkey’s little harem and all the other kids who did not take part in this attack, was left there to wait for a triumphant homecoming. Bam finds herself anxious to unburden on Hayden everything that happened here today. She must tell someone—must confess her feelings about it. How strange that Hayden has become her confessor.
Load up. Ship out.
The windowless truck that brought them here, and now takes them back, doesn’t feel all that different from an unwind transport truck. The lack of control over her own freedom is every bit as oppressive as incarceration. Bam checks to make sure that all weapons are disarmed and piled in a corner of the truck as they begin their journey, so they don’t become playthings. She listens to snippets of conversations around her. There aren’t many.
“Do you think there are clappers who didn’t clap and they’re in the trucks?”
“I get carsick when I can’t look out a window.”
“Austin Lee! Did anyone see Austin Lee? Please someone tell me you’ve seen him!”
“Starkey says we’re getting better. Next time will be easier.”
Then, loud and defiant, Jeevan says, “I miss the Graveyard.”
That brings silence from everyone. And now that he has their attention, Jeevan says, even more loudly, “I miss the way Connor did things.” It is brave; it is foolhardy. Bam didn’t know that Jeevan had it in him.
No one responds for a few moments. Then a voice from the back says, “So do I.”
Bam waits to see if anyone one else voices an opinion, but no one does. Still, she can tell from many of their faces that they agree. They’re just afraid to say so.
“Well,” says Bam, “maybe it can be like that again.”
She pushes it no further, because she knows that some of the kids in the truck are the kind that worship Starkey, which means word of this conversation will get back to him. Even now, Garson DeGrutte is eying her bitterly. She takes a deep breath, and lets it out, then tries to offer Jeevan a comforting smile, but there isn’t much comfort in it, because she knows the next war may not be at a harvest camp at all.
17 • Argent
Many miles to the north, Argent Skinner continues to ride shotgun beside Jasper Nelson in a U-Haul van, having added a fifth AWOL to their catch. According to Nelson, five healthy AWOLs can bring twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars. Although math was never Argent’s forte, he’s already figured that a haul like this once a week could bring one-point-five million in a year and still leave time for vacation.
Their destination is a Canadian border city called Sarnia, which has the dubious distinction of being the most polluted city in Canada, what with the remains of old petroleum companies and the Chemical Valley corporations that still spew mysterious waste into the water and air. Some might consider Divan Umanov to be part of Sarnia’s pollution—but to Argent, the mysterious black-market dealer could be his personal savior.
“So, what do we call him?” Argent asks Nelson when they cross the bridge into Canada. “Does he have a title or anything?”
Nelson sighs, as if to telegraph how put out he is by the question. “I’ve heard people refer to him as a flesh lord, but he doesn’t like that. He’s a businessman. He calls himself an independent supplier of biological upgrades.”
Argent laughs at that, and Nelson returns a frown that cancels out anything jovial. “He takes his profession very seriously. You’d be wise to do the same.”
• • •
Divan is not there when they offload the five AWOLs at the Porsche dealership that serves as a front for his operation.
“He spends, now, much of his time ‘camping,’ ” they are told by an employee of undefined eastern European background, whose English skills are marginal at best. Nelson explains that “camping” is code for time spent overseeing his harvest camp. It’s a place that not even Nelson has ever seen.
“He flies in, he flies out,” Nelson tells Argent. “It’s not my business to know where he does his unwinding, as long as I get paid for the AWOLs I bring him.” And although Argent has a curious streak, the last thing he’d ever want would be a tour of a black-market harvest camp.
“You will please be his guests at his private residence until he should return,” they are told, and are given the keys to a dealership Porsche to make the drive. Argent’s the one who grabs the keys from the man’s hands, but gives them to Nelson, knowing the alternative would be getting tranq’d again. Shocking the monkey has apparently paid off.
“Sweet ride, but isn’t he afraid we might steal it?” Argent asks Nelson as they take to the road. Nelson laughs at the suggestion and doesn’t dignify him with an answer.
• • •
The residence turns out to be a simple A-frame cabin on a wooded bluff overlooking Lake Huron, four hours north of Sarnia. The cabin appears unremarkable and indistinguishable from all the other woodsy A-frames in the area. Argent is profoundly disappointed.
“He lives in that thing? We drove all the way here for this?”
The first hint that things are not as they seem is the butler who greets them. Argent finds it odd that a structure this small would require a servant. Then, once they enter the “cabin,” all of Argent’s perceptions and assumptions take a dramatic shift.
The angular A of the cabin is very literally the tip of the iceberg, because its ever-widening base extends underground for three more stories, creating space within the structure at least ten times its appearance from the outside. Inconspicuous windows are carved into the stone of the bluff, giving the “cabin” a glorious view of the lake, and the décor could match the ritziest of mountain lodges. Everything’s crafted from fine polished wood. The walls are festooned with the mounted heads of a tiger, a rhino, a polar bear, and a dozen other extinct species.