The Arrivals

Jack nodded.

A few more minutes passed before she added, “He says Ajani is coming off the rails lately. He wanted to warn us.”

“Warn you,” Jack corrected. “Should I ask if he left after you spoke?”

“You shouldn’t have to ask, Jack,” she snapped. Then she sighed. “Do you know how Danny knew where to find us?”

“I don’t.” Jack trusted the rest of the Arrivals. Mostly. Melody had spent some time with Ajani last year, and Jack suspected she still had some contact with his people. She was the most likely source of any information leak; on the other hand, it wasn’t too hard to guess that Jack would be going to see the governor after Mary’s death. Anyone in Gallows could’ve seen them and sent word to Ajani. Hell, Daniel might’ve been in Gallows and heard it himself, for all they knew.

“Was the governor expecting us?” Jack mused.

Beside him, Katherine sighed again. “It sure seemed like it, but I can’t say for certain. If I had any real answers, I’d share them. All I know right now is that the monks were supposed to be looking for peace, but they weren’t; that Soanes wants them dead; that Daniel thinks Ajani is unstable; and that if Mary doesn’t wake up, we’ll have a new Arrival to deal with on top of the rest of the bullshit.”

“What happened to women being the gentler sex?” Jack shot her a pretend grumpy look; he couldn’t stand seeing her look so defeated. “Shouldn’t you be offering some sort of comforting reply?”

Katherine rolled her eyes, but her lips curved in a small smile. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make him relax a little. She was able to hold her own against most of what the Wasteland threw at them, and she was the only one from their world who could do spellwork, but the emotional stuff threw her into maudlin moods, and Jack wasn’t an idiot: he knew his sister still had feelings for Daniel. She shot him often enough to prove to everyone she didn’t, but it wasn’t particularly convincing.

“I’ll figure it all out, Katherine,” Jack promised her quietly. “And whether or not Mary wakes, we’ll get through this too.”

He wished yet again that he’d had the sense to tuck her away in some school back east instead of letting her stay in California with him. If he’d put her where she’d have been safe, she wouldn’t have been brought to the Wasteland; if he’d thought about her safety instead of giving in to his own arrogant belief that he could keep her safe, she’d be in a better world where she could have a proper life. Instead, she was trapped here in the Wasteland, dealing with monsters and death, scuffling in the dirt and blood, and knowing as well as he did that there was no end in sight. He looked over at her and repeated, “I’ll figure it out.”

Unfortunately, the following day, when they were back at camp, Jack had no clearer idea of what to do. They’d know by the next day whether Mary’s death was permanent or not. In some reserve of hope that he still clung to after all these years, he hoped that death in this world would mean waking up back in a better one. He didn’t much care whether that better world was the one they’d once known or some sort of afterlife where the Arrivals would find peace. He told himself Heaven was a child’s hope, but if so many impossible things were real, believing in Heaven, in a forgiving God, seemed a little more possible.

His beliefs had dwindled over the years, but as he sat near Mary he whispered a prayer. Then he decided to do something he’d never done before. While Katherine slept in her tent that night, Jack went to the only other person he’d ever met who was capable of standing up to her.

Edgar looked up as Jack entered the tent. Not surprisingly, Edgar was sitting at his table cleaning his weapons. Before coming to the Wasteland, he had been a hired gun for a thriving crime syndicate, so he was as fastidious about weapons maintenance as Jack was. Edgar wasn’t quite the dapper killer he’d been when he arrived in the Wasteland, but he was still an unusual man. His word was binding; his kills were calculated. The job was business, nothing more, nothing less. His willingness to shoot was only tempered by a sense of loyalty, and Edgar Cordova’s loyalty was very narrowly assigned: Katherine was his beloved; Jack was his boss. As to which of the Reed siblings outranked the other when they were at odds, it varied, depending on what Edgar thought most sensible at the time.

“I need your help,” Jack started.

Edgar resumed cleaning the pistol in front of him and asked, “With what?”

“I hate asking you to stand between Katherine and me,” Jack started.

“But you’re going to.”

Jack stepped farther into the tent. It was as practically laid out as the man who slept in it, utilitarian but with a few unexpected exceptions. In his room in every one of their personal quarters, Edgar had a device that allowed his trousers to hang so they wouldn’t wrinkle and a clothes rack for his shirts and jackets. Beyond his clothing contraptions, Edgar’s tent was very basic. A plain dark wood partition concealed the toilet; a weapons chest stood to the side; and in the middle of the room was a bed. Jack stopped at the small table where Edgar sat.

“She’s having a hard time with Mary’s death,” Jack said.

“She always does when one of us dies.” Edgar wiped down the barrel of the pistol and set it aside. “So do you.”

“True.” Jack didn’t want to talk about his own reaction. Of all the people in this world or the last, Edgar was one of the few he didn’t keep at a distance.

“I want to wait alone with Mary,” he admitted. “I need you to keep my sister out of my tent.”

Edgar shook his head. “Kit won’t be happy.”

“I’ll tell her I ordered you to do it,” Jack offered.

The look Edgar gave him would make more than a few people piss themselves in fear, but Jack knew him better than that. If Edgar were genuinely angry, he wouldn’t waste Jack’s time or his own with scowling.

Once they returned to Jack’s tent, Edgar took one of Jack’s chairs and positioned it outside. As Jack went back inside to wait, Edgar said, “If Mary stays dead, I’m letting Kit past me eventually. You can have until midday.”

Jack nodded and resumed his vigil by Mary’s body. Now that Edgar stood outside to stop Katherine from coming into the tent, Jack would have privacy. None of the other Arrivals were particularly close to Mary; it wouldn’t require any special measures to keep them out. Edgar cared only for Katherine; Francis likewise had a brotherly fondness for Katherine. Melody was too self-centered to be close to much of anyone, and if Hector had emotions, no one knew about it. Part of Jack’s reason was simply a need for privacy if he needed to mourn. The rest was a desire for space in order to think about what might come next for the group. Over the years, the group had fluctuated slightly in number, but right now they were at their lowest. Aside from the emotional toll it would take on Jack and Katherine, losing Mary could cause problems if the next Arrival chose to work for Ajani instead of staying with them.

He sat beside Mary, thinking about what came next, but not finding any answers—or signs of returning life. It wasn’t unheard of for the Arrivals to wake a few hours shy of midday or even at dawn, but it wasn’t typical. Jack knew that, but he hoped all the same. Hours passed in silence, and more than a few prayers passed his lips. He hadn’t realized he’d even remembered them that well until now.

When morning came, Katherine’s cussing and Edgar’s calm words broke the silence, and Jack felt a moment of guilt for keeping Katherine out. His sister wanted to be there for him, and he knew she’d been close with Mary, but the cold truth was that he didn’t want his sister there watching him. He didn’t love Mary, had never known the sort of love Katherine and Edgar shared, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was capable of it. What he did know was that Mary had loved him, and right now he wanted to be worthy of that love.

“If you come back, I’ll try to love you,” he promised.

Mary didn’t stir.

For several more hours, Jack alternated between praying and making promises to the dead woman in his bed, but by midday, she was still motionless.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, and then he left his tent.

Edgar looked up at him when he walked out. Beside him was Katherine. They both opened their mouths to speak, but Jack shook his head and said, “I’m going on patrol.”

His sister reached out to him, wrapping her arms around him, but all he could say was “I’m sorry,” even though the words weren’t any more use to her than they had been to Mary. Yet another of the Arrivals was dead, and in the next few days, someone else would appear in the Wasteland to replace her, and Jack would once again try his best not to fail that person. And all the while he would try to convince him or her not to join Ajani—even though that was the only surefire way Jack knew of to keep the newest Arrival from permanent death. That was the ugly truth of it: if they worked for Ajani, they’d be truly free of death. Unfortunately, they’d also be indebted to the one person in the Wasteland whom Jack would willingly die or kill to destroy.

CHAPTER 5

When Chloe opened her eyes, she was stretched flat on her back, staring up at an odd-looking sky. She wasn’t sure where she was, but she was sure that it was not Washington, D.C. Although she hadn’t seen the whole of the city in the few months she’d lived there, she could pretty much guarantee that there were no sand dunes or fields of what looked like cotton in the heart of the nation’s capital.

All she could move was her head. From her neck down, her body was tingling. She tried to move her legs, to sit, but all that happened was a weird jerking, as if her body was trying but couldn’t complete the movements. She could feel the trickle of sweat rolling off her skin like small insects crawling all over her, but she couldn’t move to wipe it away.

She tried to stave off panic by studying what she could see around her. To her right was a barren stretch of desert surrounded by a sturdy but peculiar-looking metal fence. A rutted road of dirt and sand cut between the desert and the field. The cotton plants had tufts of white on them, but they didn’t look nearly as prickly as real cotton plants.

Above her, the sky looked … wrong. It was mostly blue like skies were supposed to be, but the sun was high above her as if it were midday even though sunset streaks of reds and purples were painted across the blue. She frowned as she looked to her left: there were two moons visible in the sky.

The more she looked, the more she suspected that she had to be hallucinating—except it had been a long time since she’d even smoked a joint much less taken anything that would result in full-color hallucinations. She’d broken her sobriety last night, but that seemed unlikely to have led to something this severe. It wasn’t like she’d been sipping some sort of potentially toxic moonshine. She’d been in a bar where even the well liquors were high end.

The ability to move seemed to be slowly creeping downward. Chloe wiggled her fingers and stretched her arms. The pins-and-needles feeling was a welcome sensation. She fingered the pendant she wore on a chain around her neck. Her aunt had given it to her for five years’ sobriety—which she had ended last night.

The last thing she remembered was having an obscenely overpriced drink in a suit-filled bar. It wasn’t her usual sort of digs, but it was the first place she’d seen after she’d found her fiancé, Andrew, and her boss humping like feral bunnies. She’d walked out of her apartment, the apartment he had moved into only a month ago. She hadn’t even slammed the door. She’d left them there fucking in her home and wandered for a few hours until the warm light of a bar beckoned. It had been a long time since she’d even come close to breaking her sobriety, but it was either that or go home to a bed she couldn’t sleep in now. The images of walking into the bar, of ordering several drinks, of ignoring Andrew’s calls: those were all clear. After that, it was all a blank until she woke up wherever she was now.

“I told you she was bound to be out here,” a man’s voice said.

Chloe turned her head to see a man who looked like he’d stepped out of a western TV show, dressed in patched brown trousers and a plain button-up shirt.

“Don’t be smug, Jack.” The woman who came to stand beside him was wearing a strange skirt that was hitched up above her knees in the front but hung to her ankles in the back. The strange cut of it exposed a pair of what looked like battered red leather boots that laced up to the knee. The peculiar skirt was topped with a snug, low-cut blouse that exposed far more bosom than even the most daring swimsuit Chloe owned.

The woman held out a hand to Chloe. “Name’s Kitty.”

“This is a very vivid hallucination,” Chloe told her.

“And that’s Jack … short for jackass,” Kitty continued as if Chloe hadn’t spoken. She kept her hand outstretched. “Come on now. Standing’s going to hurt no matter when you do it.”