Chapter 3

Freeport’s barber-surgeon was extracting teeth when Michael kicked his door in. He still wore his Operative uniform, complete with insignia, sidearm, and knife, and the man was justifiably terrified.

He threw up his hands, one still holding a pair of bloody pliers. His patient had already dived out the window and crashed into something down below.

“Help her,” Michael said, pointing to Lily. “Now.”

The man operated on his dining table. Anya forced him at gunpoint to sterilize his tools and wash his hands. Back in the bedroom his wife and children cowered, too terrified to weep.

Anya closed the door on them. The work began.

Blood had long since soaked through the bandages on Lily’s side. When the hapless surgeon began to peel them off, she made a half-conscious choking sound. Anya had to haul Michael bodily from the room and deposit him in the pantry with the potatoes and the water barrel.

“If she dies…” He let the sentence fade off into the half-light. Somehow it was still a threat. His jaw worked and his hand clenched and unclenched at his side. He shivered.

“I feel the bullet,” the surgeon called, from the other room.

Of course he did. Of course it was still in there, of course neither of them had said anything. Anya poked Michael in the chest, then pointed at the floor. Reluctantly, he nodded.

“Hold her down,” the surgeon told her when she returned. He was still scared shitless, but his training was starting to take over. Anya could empathize.

She obliged him.

The man passed a scalpel through the flame of his lantern and cut dispassionately into Lily’s side. She whimpered and twitched, but it wasn’t difficult to keep her still.

“My family,” the surgeon said. His hands were steady but his voice was not. “Please don’t hurt them.”

For once Anya’s voicelessness worked in her favor; clearly he thought her stern silence was disagreement, because he added, “She’s lost too much blood and there’s too much damage. Kill me if you have to, but spare them. Please.”

Unfortunately Michael heard that, and Anya was once again forced to wrestle him into the pantry. She held him immobile, one arm around his chest and the other against his throat.

There was blood under her fingernails and in all the lines and seams of her hands. She felt the staccato galloping of his heart against her chest as he tried and failed to break out of her grasp. At some point her chokehold became an embrace. Finally he stopped fighting.

Anya set him on his feet, straightened his collar and lapels, and patted his cheek. Not quite a smack. She pointed to the ground again and held position until he nodded jerkily, like an automaton.

When she returned a misshapen pellet sat on the table and the surgeon was suturing layers of skin and muscle together with gut thread. Sweat darkened his shirt and blood pooled on the table.

It would be easy to tell the man the truth: that Anya was actually a captain in the New Columbian Army, that he and his family were perfectly safe, and that he would eventually be compensated. Less effective, though. Less fun.

Actually, upon reflection, she was not having fun.

“Do you know her blood type?”

Didn’t matter. Anya was O negative, they were all O negative. She took off her coat, rolled up her sleeve, and sat.

The man’s hands shook in earnest now. There were all sorts of rumors about Operatives in the borderlands: invincible, immortal, infernal. But the needle pierced Anya’s skin, and after some tapping and twisting of cordage the surgeon found a complementary vein in Lily’s skinny arm.

Blood began to flow. Anya whistled for Michael.

He sat at the table. His restless hand left red smudges on Lily’s cheek and forehead. He felt for her pulse one more time, then slumped forward in a dead faint, his head smacking against the wood hard enough to make Anya wince.

The surgeon checked his pulse, then made two terrified, abbreviated attempts to rouse him while Anya held the tubing up with her free hand and longed to be unconscious too.

“It looks like…is he going through withdrawal?”

Michael wasn’t going through anything; he was at the precipice. He was about to jump. Then he would go through it, and hopefully he would come out. Sometimes they didn’t.

Anya snapped her fingers and mimed writing. The surgeon fetched a slate and a piece of greasy chalk. He didn’t question her lack of speech.

She scrawled: Antibiotics?

“Penicillin.”

Oh good, the most useless one. Use it. Next ferry?

“Tomorrow. They…it goes three times a week.” He checked Michael’s pulse and respiration, then finished applying a bandage to Lily’s side. “She won’t live.”

She erased the slate. We leave in the morning. You are dismissed.

The man scampered off. Not to comfort his loved ones, Anya noticed, but into the pantry. She thumbed the rifle off safety and laid it in her lap.

Lily’s chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly. Her lips were a bit less blue. Someone had to get what they wanted out of all of this, Anya thought. The law of averages insisted on it.

The surgeon bustled back into the room and Anya’s finger twitched onto the trigger — but he only carried a pail of water and a mop.

“I want no trouble with the Coalition,” he said, eyes downcast, as he scrubbed Lily’s blood from the floor and table. “If you make a fist and squeeze, the blood will flow more quickly.”

Anya obliged him.

“I’ll send my boy to the pier to book you passage on tomorrow’s ferry. Two tickets.”

She shook her head and lifted three fingers.

“I’m sorry,” he said, glancing at Michael. Still out. “I’m surgeon, not a—”

Lily opened one eye. “…did you sterilize the knife?”

It was barely a whisper.

“I…I did, yes.”

“He got stabbed. In the back.” Her pinkie finger extended laboriously toward Michael. Then her head lolled to the side again.

Anya couldn’t help it. It was impossible. She covered her face in her hand and laughed.

The choking, wheezing sound clearly upset the surgeon, who nevertheless cleaned and stitched a mean-looking puncture in Michael’s shoulder before beating a hasty retreat. Anya heard the bedroom door lock before something heavy was pushed in front of it.

Just a little more, she thought, offering it up to the universe at large. Keep our luck going just a little longer.

Lily woke in the middle of the night, delirious, asking for Michael, for water, and for her mother. In that order. She got two of the three and went immediately back to sleep, and when she woke again her fever had broken.

Multiple transfusions of Operative blood, Anya decided, and perhaps preternatural stubbornness. Divine intervention was not off the table.

In the morning Lily painfully explained the Courser’s location and all the things that might be stripped from it and sold. Too taken aback by the sight of her sitting up, albeit supported by Michael, the surgeon accepted this as payment without contest.

He also produced a fat burlap sack. When he handed it over he cringed, as if waiting to be contradicted or punished.

“An Operative came through Freeport two years ago,” he said. “He killed more than a dozen people like it was a game. Children too. But you two are…forgive me, I don’t want to…”

Anya jerked open the mouth of the bag and found it full of civilian clothing.

“I thought…maybe, you might be…” He mopped his balding head with a handkerchief. “I don’t mean to assume. I just…”

Anya handed the sack to Michael. She gestured vaguely at him to explain, but it was Lily who spoke.

“Thank you,” she said. “Burn our uniforms when we go.”

The surgeon made a wet sound of utter relief. He covered his mouth with his hand and nodded rapidly, then made a hasty retreat. Perhaps to tell his wife that none of them would be murdered after all.

Another Operative? In Freeport? That was concerning. The Coalition didn’t come this far west, into neutral territory.

Freeport’s streets were early-morning quiet when they set out. Drunks nodded in gutters, shopkeepers opened their shutters, dogs ate last night’s vomit off the ground and beggar children picked through refuse.

The trio drew a few odd glances on their way to the pier, but no one interfered. To get by in a place like this it was necessary to mind your own ever-loving business, which is what had always endeared Freeport to Anya. Despite the smells.

She toted Lily on her back like a rucksack; neither of them enjoyed it very much, but at least Lily was alive enough to groan occasionally. She’d had a generous helping of clear liquor at the surgeon’s house, for the pain, so that was about all she was capable of.

Michael’s face was the color of a corpse. He constantly watched his feet and still managed to stumble, but like a good little soldier he’d held onto his rifle.

At the docks the ferry waited; a fat, squat thing welded together from at least three other crafts. The deck was piled high with crates.

A boatman perched on a stool blocking the gangplank. Begrudgingly, he examined the stamped tin faces of their tickets.

Gulls shrieked and shit all around them. After much consideration and laborious sounding-out of words he spat a stream of brown juice onto the deck and said, “These tickets is for livestock. Sheep and goats.”

Unbelievable. Anya wished she’d kept her uniform; she gestured wearily for Michael to speak, hoisting Lily higher up on her back.

“Let us on the boat,” he said, every word an ordeal.

The crewman paused, squinting. “Or?”

“No ‘or’. Let us on. Here.” Michael unceremoniously shoved his rifle into the man’s hands. “Good enough?”

“Er…but these tickets is for sheep.”

Michael wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “Move.”

Still utterly perplexed, the man did as he was told.

Michael kept looking at Lily as they boarded. Presumably she looked back at him or made some sign, because each time he would nod and take a few more steps. Anya, who was exhausted to the bone, her back and knees and heart aching, desperately willed him to suck it up for a few more minutes.

He made it on board. Then down the stairs to the hold. Then he missed the last step and recovered by reflex only. He shook like he was freezing and didn’t seem to notice the other passengers.

On Anya’s back, Lily gagged.

The low-ceilinged space was redolent with the sharp odor of lanolin and urine. Behind a netted barrier towards the prow a herd of bedraggled sheep milled around on a hay strewn-floor.

Anya sighed. She kicked Michael’s foot and jerked her chin towards the stern, and he marched there doggedly. It looked dry, at least. Imagine if after all this Lily picked up an infection. Wouldn’t that just be grand.

Beneath a small barred window, Michael rocked abruptly to a halt as if out of gas and looked at Anya with unfocused eyes.

“We’re done?” He asked this almost conversationally.

She gave him a thumbs up, and he collapsed. First to his knees, then the rest of the way.

Anya deposited Lily next to him. They slumped automatically together like a pair of rag dolls on a shelf.

Wearily, and with much more dignity, Anya sat herself down and let her head thunk back against the bulkhead. It must be nice. Love like a magnetic field. Any kind of love at all.

Even though the joint crises of pursuit and grievous injury had been overcome, there was still one last miserable hurdle to clear before they were home free.

Michael was about to have the worst week of his life.

He might survive it. Withdrawal was awful, but worse was suddenly feeling: pain, hunger, exhaustion…it was like a dam breaking. He would drown or emerge from the flood reborn.

Between the deceased Operative 23’s pill case and his own, there was more than enough to safely, slowly taper off.

Half-dozing, Anya formulated a plan as they pushed off from the deck, sheep screaming, whistle blowing.

She remembered the schedule that had been imposed on her in that NCA hospital camp, years ago. The same schedule she was supposed to keep if she ran out of medication on campaign, back when she was a number.

Half doses of yellow and red, full dose of blue; that was the first week. She had the dead Operative 23’s pill case and the one that had been in Michael’s pocket. There would be more than enough.

Once they were safely underway, she woke him for the first dose.

He knocked her hand away, the stubborn bastard. “Throw it overboard. All of it.”

So Anya gave him a bucket instead. He knew what would happen and she was unwilling to mother him. Or argue.

That evening he asked for Lily, for the drugs, and for a bullet in the head. In that order. He got one of the three, lay his head in her lap, and didn’t speak again for five days.

Neither of them thanked her. Neither of them blamed her either. More importantly, neither of them died. It was better than Anya had expected, and it was the end of her good luck.