Chapter 31: Heartland, Pt. 1

New Columbia sprawled and rolled in all directions, a golden wilderness studded with rocking grasshopper-like machines, watchtowers, herds of cattle, settlements, on and on towards an unreachable horizon.

They rode under the widest, bluest sky Lily had ever seen. How could there be blue sky and wheat fields here when in the north they ate boiled tree bark and scratched divots in the hard earth for a miserable crop, hoping for a harvest that could yield one meal a day after tax and tribute.

The worst of it was, she couldn’t even ask.

Anya’s face was incredibly expressive; she didn’t just talk with her hands, but with her entire body. She’d taught Lily a few signs — ‘fire’, ‘wait’, ‘horse’, ‘motherfucker’ — but it wasn’t enough to answer a growing mountain of questions.

Why, for example, had she been so eager to help, to abandon her life in New Columbia, her partner…

Then there was the other thing. The thumbnail-sized patch of discolored skin at the base of Anya’s skull, visible when she wore her pale hair up.

Even without the language barrier there was no way Lily could turn to this person she barely knew and say, oh by the way, did the Coalition wipe your memory too?

So they rode in silence.

Another thing Lily would never say: sometimes when Anya roused her to take her turn at watch, she woke with a different name on her lips. In the dark it was an easy mistake to make, an assumption based on a half-awake glimpse of fair hair and restless hands.

It hurt.

On the seventh morning she woke and saw two people sitting by the fire. Aiden looked up from a small kettle nestled in the coals and waved. The dreams had been terrible that night, so Lily rolled over and tried to grab a few more minutes of sleep before—

Wait.

She sat up, 63’s knife half out of its sheath, but Anya shook her head and made a patting motion.

“Morning,” Aiden said, rolling a tin cup between his palms.

Lily scanned the surrounding brush for soldiers in brown and tan fatigues.

“I came alone,” he assured her. “I’ve never seen Owen so pissed. No way I was sticking around long enough to get blamed, so here I am.”

Lily splashed a little water onto her tired face. “I don’t want you.”

“I don’t want you either. You’re mean.”

Anya scowled and signed furiously to Aiden, her body rigid, her expression fierce. He signed right back, but after a minute his shoulders slumped.

“Well, I’m coming with you whether you tell me why or not,” he said, pouring a cup from the kettle. “You want some coffee?”

Lily absolutely did not. She rubbed the handle of the long knife. “If you get in my way, if you try anything…”

“Not everyone’s out to get you, girl,” Aiden said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Army of three beats an army of two, right?”

She looked to Anya, and the other woman nodded and laid a hand on Aiden’s shoulder.

“Fine,” Lily said, feeling anything but.

—

Signs painted in shocking reds and whites blocked off the road ahead, vivid against the hard-baked earth. The land was hot and empty, home only to scrub and gaunt, drooping trees, but Aiden announced with great ceremony that they’d come to the border. He said it like Lily should know why that was funny.

“I thought this was all New Columbia,” she said, kicking her sore left leg free from the stirrup to hang loose.

“Technically it is, but about…oh, ten years ago, this chunk of it decided to demand independence. A lot of it is swamp, and no one wants to fight in a swamp, so we kind of let em be for a while,” Aiden laughed. “We had bigger problems. Shit, you remember the Union?”

Lily shook her head. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

“Well, it was this little cult in the Midlands trying to revive the good old US of A.” Aiden rolled his eyes. “Anyway, couple years after Nola goes rogue, their separatist army rolls into the Union capital with wagons full of guns and shakes hands with the bastard that ran the show, uh…”

He snapped his fingers. “Anya, what was that motherfucker’s name. The Union warlord.”

Anya shrugged and dismounted, pulling a thin, telescoping metal stick out of her saddlebags and sweeping it slowly back and forth over the ground.

“Anyways, he turned traitor and sold ‘em all down the river. Now the Union’s gone and the Coalition’s got fuckin’ Nola, and that Union kapo is probably living the good life in Delphi.”

Lily took a sip from her canteen. Her hand shook, but her voice stayed steady. “So New Columbia never made an alliance with the Union.”

“Hell no. What did the Union have that we needed? A minor port on the Brown River? I guess they had the Coalition’s southwest flank, for all the good it did them.”

Anya waved from up the trail and gave a thumbs up.

“All clear. We’ll go careful anyway. Dismount and don’t touch anything.” Aiden took his own advice; dirt puffed up where his boots hit the trail.

Lily found that her fingers were locked around the reins; she considered them as if they were foreign objects. Her legs, too, refused to move.

Leather creaked and unseen insects buzzed. The horses’ tails swished. A hawk fell like a stone, wings folded tight against its streamlined body, snapping them open at the last instant and pulling out of the dive with something squirming in its talons.

The foundations of Lily’s life had crumbled to sand, one after another. This last revelation made no difference now, almost a decade after buzzards picked Castor’s bones clean. She had to pull herself together.

Anya was coming back for her horse when she froze, hand on her pistol. Listening.

Lily heard it too: something moved. In the brush. She jerked her rifle from its leather sleeve and thumbed the selector off safety. “Show yourself or I’ll shoot!”

“Girl, what in the hell—”

“I’m gonna count to fucking three,” she continued, sighting on the bush, finger curling around the trigger. “One. Two.”

She fired and her horse danced sideways, but she sent another round into the chamber, waiting.

As the sharp report died away, Aiden came up alongside her.

“What the hell was that,” he demanded.

“I thought—” Lily’s mouth clicked shut.

The brush was knee-high and sparse. It wouldn’t give cover to anything, let alone the human shape she could’ve sworn was crouching behind it.

“No, you didn’t.” Aiden pawed through the vegetation, coming up with a limp, bloody hare. “Look at that. Stopped the whole Coalition by yourself, good job.”

Lily swallowed her protests and smoothed out her face, going flat and cold. It was getting worse.

“Give me that rifle,” Aiden said, shoving the rabbit into a canvas sack hanging from his saddle. A slow red stain spread across the bottom. “Don’t make me come and take it.”

Her finger curled around the trigger. “Fuck you.”

Anya shoved them apart and made a sharp twisting gesture with her open-palmed hands. When she turned to Lily her expression was calm. She motioned for her to put the rifle down and made a one-handed sign, eyebrows rising.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” Lily resleeved the weapon. “Let’s just go.”

She wasn’t fine. The blood still sang in her ears. Aiden was looking at her like she’d spit in his coffee and worse, there was pity on Anya’s face.

Lily dragged her horse around the signs and onto the road ahead, and she didn’t look back to see if the others were following.

—

The two month ride to Delphi had seemed like such a small thing in Dallas, especially stacked against the nine that had already passed. Anya had a map with disputed borders outlined in red ink, and the square of waterproof paper belied the distance.

On the well-maintained roads of the time Before, in its miraculous vehicles, the trip would’ve taken a couple days. Aiden claimed they could have flown and been there in hours.

Lily existed because of the Collapse. If the bombs never fell, her faceless mercenary father wouldn’t have bought a few nights in her mother’s bed on his way to some petty conflict. The land would have been populated by different people fighting different wars. Still, she hungered for a world she’d never see.

The days cooled. Rust tinged the trees. It was a relief to be woken in the middle of the night by the sound of explosions like distant thunder, to see the northern sky shaded red-orange and know they were nearing the front.

They bought Regulars’ uniforms from a rag-peddler, haggling over specimens with more discreet bloodstains, and bypassed the fringes of the Border War to head up through the UT along the same route Lily had taken west almost two years ago.

Time, like distance, gained proportion. Lily felt it most keenly when they passed the heaped, burned ruins of a wilderness outpost. She tried not to look at the bones.

The buildings had also fallen victim to Coalition thoroughness, so they retreated to the trees and camped in the shelter of a windbreak where, in another life, Lily had extended her hand to a dying man. She huddled down where he’d sat, wrapped herself tight in a coat that no longer smelled like him, and didn’t sleep.

Finally, a week and a half behind schedule, they reached the tent city that crowded around Delphi’s walls, straddling the banks of a swollen river. Again, memory slapped Lily across the face: she had limped into this settlement as a child of eighteen, broken in body and spirit. What was she now?

They spent the night there to hammer Lily’s plan into a serviceable shape. The population of the slum was transient; no one noticed a few new faces. Not even Anya’s.

An overhang of ripped and patched canvas sheltered their tiny fire. Two people had already tried to sell Lily something and three had come looking to purchase, but she’d given them all the same answer: her knife, tilted to catch the firelight.

Now there was peace.

“There’s a way into Alpha Base from the Undermarket,” Lily said, scrubbing a stubborn stain on the back of her uniform jacket. It was almost invisible now, and she’d mended the bullet hole. “There’ll be minimal security, probably just one of those hand-scan panels. We’ll go in at low tide.”

“And you know this how?” Aiden looked genuinely curious; a first.

Lily set aside the wire brush. “I lived down there. Everybody knew about the door. I saw Regulars, even an Operative…but they never came or went from street level.”

“Never’s a big word.”

News traveled fast in the dark. So did Regulars eager to trade plastic ration tokens for alcohol and flesh. In the winter, in the rain, their clothes and hair had been bone dry.

“They never came from the surface,” Lily reiterated. “Once we’re in, we’ll be able to use the maintenance access crawlspaces to—”

“Let me make sure I understand,” Aiden sighed, taking a swallow from his flask. “We’re gonna wade through five hundred years of raw sewage, bust in through a convenient secret door, and hide in the walls. That’s your plan.”

“Yes.”

“And — let’s just do a thought exercise here — what the fuck are you going to do when you realize this is a pipe dream?” Aiden extended his flask to Lily, and took another swallow when she shook her head. “Go in through the front door?”

“We’d have to get Anya a uniform first,” Lily said.

Aiden stared at her. Then he took a long, long drink.

“No one breaks into Coalition bases.” She folded her uniform neatly into her pack and drew the knife, testing its edge. “I guarantee they won’t be expecting it. Whetstone?”

“You guarantee, huh,” Aiden grumbled, all but throwing it at her. “You can’t guarantee shit, and that that brings me to my second point. What if your man is dead. What if he’s so brainwashed he shoots you on sight. What if he isn’t stationed in Delphi anymore. What if the break-in goes perfectly but you die because you don’t have a plan to break out?”

“All you have to do is get me in,” Lily said. “After that it doesn’t matter. Go home. I don’t care.”

A rag ball flew past their shelter and rolled off between two tents, chased by a pack of scrambling, threadbare children. Anya jogged after them, her face flushed and glowing.

“I love her to pieces,” Aiden said, quietly. “But I wouldn’t do this for her, and she sure as fuck wouldn’t do it for me. She’s here for you and I can’t think of an earthly reason why.”

“Maybe she’s a better person than you think she is,” Lily replied. “And you’re just a prick.”

Anya gave a breathy, hoarse laugh and feigned a lunge for the ball. The children scattered, shrieking with glee as she gave chase.

“Let’s just try not to get ourselves killed,” Aiden said.

Lily took the flask. “I’ll drink to that.”