Devil's Vortex

It was time to kick ass.

And whatever Power it was—he didn’t know or care because the fact that it was a big and badass Power was enough—had anointed him as the chosen one to do it.

Now he had concrete goals and the beginning of a plan.

“The Crow elders are still here,” Joe said. He sounded uneasy.

He pointed with a jerk of his chin toward the group of four who stood expectantly nearby, at camp’s edge. Three men and a woman, with gray in their long braids, were wrapped in colorful blankets against the wind’s chilling touch. Their weathered faces showed strong bone structures and jutting noses, with skins the color of old leather. No doubt as a reproach to the mixed-breed Hammerhand, the Council had sent four elders to speak to him and urge his return to the fold.

As if.

After the Big Nuke, most bands of the Blackfoot Confederacy had taken in numerous refugees from fried-out cities, as had many of the First Nations groups that survived the war and skydark. And as most continued to do. The Blackfoot had thrived in doing so and now were preeminent north of what had once been the US-Canada border.

But while they had accepted their share of refugees, and continued to adopt new members regardless of heritage, the stiff-necked Blood people had chosen to maintain an unusual form of discrimination within the tribe—not against mutants, but ceding social standing on the basis of supposed purity of breeding. It was a policy they termed Traditionalism. And one that younger fire-bloods, many but not all mixed race like Hammerhand, disdained as “Trad.”

He looked at them now, standing there all mock humble but really demanding his submission—whether in renaming his band, or better, disbanding it and crawling back on his belly to beg the Council for forgiveness. Arrogant pricks.

He knew in his heart what the dazzling figure from the top of Harney Peak would tell him to do. And although obedience was not in his nature, no more to glowing, floating sky people than the grubbier terrestrial kind, he would follow its words. Because that was the vision he had sought and had gained. And because he knew in its heart it was righteous.

Black Bear, the shortest and stockiest but most senior member of the group, extended the ceremonial coup stick, hooked and feathered, toward Hammerhand.

“Return with us, and become once more one with our land and blood, young man,” he said.

“It’s not too late for you, boy,” said John Tall Person, who as might be expected, was the tallest of the group. Had his back still been straight he’d have been only an inch or three shorter than Hammerhand, which made him a tall man indeed.

Hammerhand’s anger at their arrogant imperiousness was beginning to smoke. “And if I don’t?”

Deer Woman scowled. “Then we shall make you! It will be war.”

“Your answer?” demanded Crow Legs, the final member of the group. His gray hair had been braided into a sort of unicorn horn jutting from the front of his head. Hammerhand thought it made him look comical.

“My answer?” Hammerhand gave them a long, hard look.

Then he turned to his lieutenant, Joe Takes-Blasters.

“For my answer, send their hides back to the Council,” he said. “Without them inside.”

Chapter Three (#ulink_6f94d372-e4c6-582d-b19a-fb6483a8e727)

Krysty’s heart melted as a whimper escaped the form lying on its side in the fetal position on the dirt floor. She felt an overpowering impulse to run to the girl and hug her.

But she fought it down. She was a seasoned campaigner, almost as much as J.B. or Ryan. She knew the girl could be bait in a trap. Or even, unlikely as it seemed, a danger in herself.

She scanned the corners of the cluttered toolshed. There was little to see but shadows. The structure seemed sturdily made, with no cracks to let even the feeble light from outside leak in.

“No danger,” Jak said, then vanished from Krysty’s side into the blowing white clouds of snow. He knew his companions could handle whatever menace a sobbing, freaked-out girl with black pigtails might pose.

“Right,” Ryan said. “Let’s move on.”

“And just leave her?” Krysty demanded.

Ryan looked at her and shrugged. He was a hard man, because he usually needed to be.

Krysty usually did not try to temper that hardness, but when the time came, she reckoned it was part of her job.

But it was J.B. who spoke up first. “I’d like an account of what happened here,” he said. “Best way I know to have a shot at keeping it from happening to us.”

Ryan bared strong white teeth, but he nodded. The little man in the scuffed leather bomber jacket, fedora and round wire-rimmed specs was the ultimate technician of survival. He was even more purely practical than Ryan himself, and when he spoke, he spoke to the point.

Taking that as all the assent she needed, Krysty holstered her Glock 18C and picked her way quickly but carefully through the disarrayed tools. She hunkered down by the girl, who wore a simple black shift with long sleeves.

“What’s your name?” she asked gently. She mostly wanted to try to pierce the other’s veil of uncontrolled emotion before doing anything like touching her. Gentle tones and innocuous words seemed the quickest way.

The girl didn’t look at her. Her eyes were screwed so tightly shut in her snow-pale face that it almost seemed as if she was resisting attempts to pry them open. But her shivering began to slow. The rhythm of her heartbroken sobbing began to break up, like the steps of a runner slowing down.

“It’s all right,” Krysty said. “My name is Krysty and I want to help you.”

“Here, now,” Ryan protested from behind her. “Let’s not go overboard with this.”

“Out of the way, Captain Sensitivity,” Mildred said brusquely. “A healer needed here.”

“But—”

“Healer working here.”

Although Jak had butted heads with Ryan a few months back, that was all in the past now. The two had discovered the hard way how much they needed each other. Same as everybody in their little crew needed everybody else. Before, during and since that time, the other member of the group to challenge Ryan’s authority was Mildred. Krysty reckoned he endured it as much to help keep himself from getting too full of himself and thinking he was infallible—which was a sure recipe to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes, triple quick. But like every one of the companions, she had a specialty. And when she or anyone of them was engaged in his or her work, Ryan knew to back off.

The way, of course, they did with him. Mostly. Krysty had to grin to herself.

“My friend Mildred is coming to help you, too,” Krysty said—fortuitously a moment before she heard the clatter of a tool inadvertently kicked by one of Mildred’s combat boot, and a suppressed curse. “You’re safe now. Why don’t you talk to me? Tell me your name.”

An eye opened. It was brown. It looked startlingly dark in that bloodless face. Krysty had to hope that trauma and terror had drained color from her skin. Otherwise she could hardly be healthy.

The eye rolled, then fixed on Krysty. The sobbing dwindled to a sniffling.

“I—I’m Mariah,” she said.

“Are you hurt, Mariah?” Mildred asked briskly, kneeling next to Krysty. She subtly shouldered the redhead a bit to the side to make room. The two were best friends. As such, Krysty knew that when she was in full-on healer mode, Mildred was as bullheaded businesslike as her man, J. B. Dix, tinkering up a busted blaster—or using one to chill a room full of stonehearts.

“Any blood? Any broken bones? Any bad pains?”

“No,” Mariah said. She moistened her lips with a pale pink tongue. “Can I have some water?”

Mildred promptly pulled a canteen from her belt. With plenty of snow on the ground here near the Black Hills, fresh water wasn’t hard to come by. Fresh chow was another thing entirely.

“Come on,” she said. “Sit up to drink it.”

She let Krysty urge the girl to uncurl her arms from their death grip on her shins. Then Mildred firmly grasped her shoulders and pulled her up to a seated position. Krysty suspected that her friend’s bedside manner, as they would have called it in predark times, would have raised some eyebrows, but no matter how abrupt the dark, stocky woman with the beaded hair plaits might be, she treated her patients far more gently than a girl like this was likely used to. It was how the world was.