Chapter 10

Old Dallas had long ago been abandoned to the kudzu, with weekly burning parties fighting a war of attrition to keep the weed on the other side of the green-veined wall. Pervasive rumors insisted that the vines were the only thing holding up the distant crumbling skyline.

Anya smoked one of her sad, crumpled barter cigarettes, which did nothing for her, and waited in the courtyard by the Oldtown gate.

Sunset was almost on them. A pitiful sad affair: dark sky on top, pale sky at the bottom. A simple gradient, no colors or beauty in it at all. A fitting end to the day’s ugliness.

The massive steel gates were opened and closed by cows, big oxen with their horns capped off, hitched to a wheel – and the team was being led into place as Anya watched.

No sign of Shaw.

Anya had passed through Oldtown once or twice on the way to Austin. The zone was fine in the daylight, albeit studded with panhandlers, scrap metal collectors, and feral dogs. At night the NCA locked the city up tighter than a….well. Very tight.

Up on the wall, massive signal fires blazed to life. Last call. No one, not even the President of New Columbia, could order the city gates open again after they closed.

A sign near the exit read YOU ARE ENTERING OLD DALLAS. CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Underneath some joker had scrawled good luck you sory basterds.

Aguilar, the sergeant manning the gate, kept looking Anya up and down as she loitered. The stocky woman was well-armed and armored, with a good ceramic plate vest and a helmet that buckled under her chin.

“Gate’s closing in fifteen minutes,” she cautioned.

Anya gave her a thumbs up.

“Gate’s locking in fifteen minutes,” Aguilar stressed.

Anya added a second thumb. Aguilar threw up her hands and marched off.

The wall was forty feet tall and twelve feet thick, erected in the early days with welded-together hulks of pre-Collapse vehicles, filled in with sand and cement and plated in sheet metal; the legacy of New Columbia’s second president, Melinda Álvaro. Fixed guns and watch stands jutted out at regular intervals. One hundred years, three gates, zero breaches.

The drive sat heavy in Anya’s right pocket. The left pocket bulged around the damned cigar case. Dusk crept up the street; soon it would be too dark for her to talk even if Shaw did show up.

“Five minutes,” Aguilar bellowed, striding by with her torch. No one waited but Anya. “Five minutes til close!”

“She’s got lungs,” Shaw remarked from directly beside her. Anya hadn’t heard him approach. She was beginning to think his earlier clumsiness had been an act. “Your friends are out, by the way. I figured you’d go with them. Your trust touches me, right here.”

He laid a hand on his breast. Anya rolled her eyes.

He was dressed for wild country; no uniform this time, just an assortment of threadbare canvas and wool, completed by mismatched boots. A patch covered his blue eye.

She produced the drive, but didn’t hand it over. Are we going out?

“No, I’m going out.”

She slipped it back into her pocket. I did all the work.

“Last call,” Aguilar proclaimed, making her rounds again. “Y’all coming or going?”

Anya raised her eyebrows and waited.

“Going,” Shaw sighed, adding, “are you at least armed?”

Anya displayed the butt of her stolen revolver, and Shaw sighed again.

He stayed quiet as they passed through the gates, which thumped solidly closed behind them, and crossed the demarcation line of charred foliage.

“I’d like to carry it,” he said, but Anya shook her head firmly. She wasn’t going to let him run off into the night and leave her with nothing but curiosity.

All the buildings within a mile of the gate had been razed and cleared, but charred, collapsed structures darkened the road ahead. There was a road of sorts, cracked pre-Collapse asphalt with entire bushes growing out of it alongside the weeds. Stunted cacti too.

Why Oldtown, Anya asked. The sun was all but gone, and she needed to get her questions out.

“How’s your pre-Cataclysm history,” Shaw asked.

Anya cocked her head. Cataclysm? That’s new.

“Oh, I’m an avid collector of regional slang. It’s the Collapse in the east. Cataclysm in the Federation and parts north. Here it’s the Great War. Elsewhere La Caída, the Calamity, Judgement Day, the Big One…”

It was Anya’s turn to sigh. My history is shit. I know Coalition lies, New Columbian lies.

Shaw laughed, quick and sharp. “I like that. Let me clarify: how did the Republic of Texas prepare for impending war?”

Underground shelters. Dallas held a lottery for entry, winners got to live. Anya shrugged. Why?

“Walk with me and find out.” Shaw fell in beside her. “All the tech we have today came out of the vaults. Everything on the surface was lost to the firestorms, or the cults.”

Everyone knew about the technophobic death cults that had torn down and burned the memory of the old world, sparing very little. It lingered out west. Anya made a circle-up motion with her hand.

Shaw ignored her.

“A few years back a colleague of mine did an inventory of all the functioning non-Coalition computers on the continent. Took him years. Know how many he found?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Three. One in Seattle, one in Houston, and one up in the Canadian Free States.”

So we’re going to Houston, Anya asked, belatedly wondering if Shaw planned on walking the whole way, and whether she really cared enough to follow him.

“My colleague later found one in the UT,” Shaw pressed on. “The village worshipped it, thought the symbols on its screen were a divine message. Actually they were low power warnings. The high priest was in back on a pedal genny.”

Fascinating. Anya regretted all those times she’d wished for someone to talk to.

“They ate him after the truth came out. We later discovered a fourth intact, non-functioning device; it’s taken almost a decade to get it working again. Guess where it is.”

Anya stepped in front of Shaw, stopping him in his tracks. Why not just say we were going to the Dallas vault, she demanded.

“Because I like to tell stories,” Shaw grinned, before continuing in sign,* and we’re being followed.*

Even though she was neither a child nor an idiot, Anya almost looked. Instead she listened, and heard telltale rustling in the brush behind and to the left. Coyotes?

Shaw shook his head and pulled out a flat plastic disc that unfolded in his hands, becoming a little cylindrical lantern that cast a soft white glow on the ground at his feet. He caught her staring at it and smiled wider, but offered no explanation.

They reached the river, angling through the remnants of buildings too ruined to shelter anything but weeds. This had been a park. A thin ribbon of fetid water shone silver in the gloom below a cracked concrete bank where people used to walk, listening to music. Listening…

Anya focused. Shaw was right: three people, a dozen yards back.

Five yards.

One.

The attack erupted out of the brush, and Anya flung her arm instinctively over her eyes as Shaw wrenched the base of the lantern all the way around, flooding the area with blazing light.

Someone screamed.

For all her engineered calm she hadn’t felt this alive since she was flooring the Ranger’s accelerator, gunning through the chaos in Delphi. This was where she belonged, the only thing she’d ever been good at. The thing she’d been made for.

Anya felt it go dark again. She adjusted her footing, opened her eyes, and booted the nearest man square in the stomach. The revolver kicked as he staggered. He crumpled to the dirt.

The next charged at her half-blind, but Anya stepped aside and let him stumble right into Shaw’s knife.

The third circled, staying well back, then broke off and sprinted into the dark.

“Well,” Shaw said, as the man he’d knifed gurgled uselessly at his feet. “That was anticlimactic.”

Naturally. They were just scavengers, exiles or willing inhabitants of the overgrown, lawless ruins.

Anya got a look at the blade as Shaw cleaned and sheathed it. As long as her forearm and gently tapered at the tip, it looked like it should have a number engraved just below the hilt — but he was no Operative.

She whistled through her teeth to get his attention. Whose knife is that?

For the briefest instant, Shaw’s demeanor wavered. A hollow, tired look sat underneath — but that smile snapped back into place almost immediately.

“Someone I used to know,” he said. “Shall we?”

He said nothing else for quite a while, but he did hum softly in time to his footsteps. Anya hated humming. Maybe she’d touched a nerve, maybe he was intentionally tormenting her.

The shells of buildings they passed got bigger. Broken bridges slumped into the mud, damming the meager current. Up ahead, skyscraper corpses blocked out the stars.

Finally Shaw stopped and unfolded a small plastic map.

“We’re close,” he said, turning in a circle. “We’re looking for a dome with a fifty-foot diameter. Maybe twenty feet high.”

Not my first secret base, Anya signed.

A rhythmic thumping rolled out of the distance, carried by the water, and she felt gooseflesh prickle the back of her neck. Something howled.

Everything looked the same in the dark, but the fires here smelled recent; smoke still hung in the air… no, the wind shifted and Anya caught the aroma of roasting meat. Light flickered through the ruins about half a mile upstream; a different fire.

The hellish summer sun had reduced most of the river to cracked mud flats. Anya vaulted the man-made embankment and picked her way along the edge. Shaw followed; he must have seen it too.

A campfire burned in a circle of cleared vegetation. Anya pointed to the outline of a concrete dome on the other side of the blaze, and Shaw smacked her on the back in a display of startling camaraderie.

A bearded man with snarled black hair prowled the clearing, barefoot, a rifle cradled in his arms. Behind him a woman in deerskins bashed the butt of her own rifle against the rusted metal vault door. A sullen teenage boy turned a spit. A spear lay on the ground next to him.

They didn’t have to watch long; first Anya heard pounding feet, then labored breaths as a woman tore into the camp and collapsed.

“Attacked,” she wheezed. “Coupla soldiers from the town, I got blinded. Jones and Fig are dead.”

“How many’s a couple,” the deerskin-clad woman demanded.

The newcomer considered, panting, still flat on her back. “Six.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Anya saw Shaw’s delighted smile reappear.

Rifle spat on the ground. “They want our spot.”

“They’re not getting it,” Deerskins said. “Keep your eyes open.”

Two each, Shaw signed, checking his weapons. Ready?

More than ready. Her vision tightened, her heart and respiration steadied. Not the boy.

Shaw gave her a long look. The knife was already in his hand. Then he shrugged, nodded, and they burst up and over the bank together into the firelight.

It unfolded as a series of still images. The man had his rifle only half-raised when he crumpled with Anya’s knife in his neck. She grabbed the weapon as he fell and took out Deerskins with a single shot. Forehead, dead center.

Before she hit the ground the last target scrambled to her feet and tore off into the night again. Anya fired, but she was lost to the dark. A born survivor.

“I thought we were each taking one,” Shaw said, scooping up Deerskins’ weapon and examining it. On the ground, Rifle clutched at his neck, arterial blood gushing through his fingers. Shaw put a bullet in him. “There.”

The boy backed up against the vault door, spear braced like he was hunting pigs, face bone white. His feet slid in the soft earth.

“I ain’t scairt of you,” he panted.

Anya laid down the rifle and motioned for him to run.

“She won’t kill you, son. Get out of here before I do.” Shaw flapped his hand in a shooing motion.

The boy dug in, trembling so much the tip of his spear made figure-eights in the air. “Get back. This’s our spot!”

Shaw fired over his head. The boy flinched, but held his ground.

“I’m gonna be rich. Gonna move into the city.” He jabbed the spear at Anya, who was out of range but close enough to see the shiny X-brand on the kid’s cheek. Petty criminal. “Laney promised.”

With over-dramatic slowness, Shaw ejected the spent cartridge and sent another into the chamber. “You even know what you’re about to die over?”

“Tech!” The boy’s voice cracked. He was younger than he looked — twelve, thirteen. “Guns and ammo, food enough for forever!”

Anya grabbed the barrel, forced it down. Tell him he can have it all once we’re in.

Shaw sighed, shouldering the rifle. “You must’ve been a terrible Operative.”

Actually she’d been the best of her batch, but it was irrelevant now. Operative 23 died in the Border War. Anya was something else. She was certain she was something else.

“Fine. Step aside son. I’m going to open this door, and you can have whatever’s inside,” Shaw said, “except what’s on the lowest level. One hundred and forty-nine for you, one for me. I think that’s fair.”

The boy hesitated, then lowered his spear and shuffled out of the way. His face made strange shapes as he looked at the bodies on the ground.

“You didn’t have to shoot Laney,” he said, his voice low and miserable.

Shaw opened a control panel and entered a very involved code before standing back, hands on his hips.

Nothing.

He thumped the panel with his fist, and the foot-thick door groaned open with a rush of stale air that extinguished the fire. Automatic lights flickered to life, illuminating a long, sloping hallway. Familiarity and half-memories tightened Anya’s throat.

It was barely open before the kid tore off inside; Shaw took aim, but saw Anya watching and sighed, a little too dramatically. The boy skidded around the corner and out of sight.

“You know the vault is empty, right,” he said, leaving the safety off. “Stripped bare.”

Anya pushed past him and into the shelter. I know.

“Cold,” Shaw said, appreciatively. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

The blue tile floor was cracked and faded, the walls dingy with neglect. It had been two centuries since the Collapse and more than one since the vault had opened; anything useful had walked out the door with the survivors.

“Administration,” Shaw said, pointing to a cracked, lopsided wall directory. “Level 150. That’s us.”

On the other side of the defunct decontamination locks and a row of dead elevators, an endless stairway spiraled down into the dark.

The air grew colder and thinner as they descended past vacant dormitories and barren grow farms, all the beds empty. Each breath tasted stale and canned. Lights flickered to life in front of them and died in their wake.

Is your colleague still down here? Would they still be able to breathe on level 150 if the air circulation fans were off, that was the real question.

“No, he’s on a new assignment.” Shaw’s breath came short. His boots clanged on the metal stairs.

Whose orders?

Shaw just looked at her, his permanently raised eyebrow doing all the work. “That’s need-to-know information.”

Are you Coalition?

“Surely I should be asking you that,” Shaw mused. “You know what? I’ll tell you one personal detail. It’s only fair, since I know everything about you. You can pick.”

Whose knife are you carrying?

The smile wavered, then slid sideways off Shaw’s face. “What a waste of a question,” he said. “But all right. It was my mother’s.”

He kept right on walking. Anya stumbled, missed two steps, and nearly plummeted into the dark.

She jogged past the stenciled Level 29 on the wall, gasping a little as she caught up with Shaw. Of course it was the obvious explanation, but still she found herself asking. Mother? Adopted?

He didn’t seem bothered by anything but the paper-thin air.

“No, all natural,” he panted. “I take it you didn’t know it was possible. Now I’m concerned. Have your male counterparts been leaving behind an army of little blue-eyed bastards?”

Anya had never yearned for motherhood. During training they’d all been told they were biologically incapable of reproduction, and the pharmaceutical regimen had removed the physical urge to try…

Shaw was right. It was a waste of a question, and now she had a hundred more.