He nodded and reached forward, ending our link.
I sat there a moment, not breathing.
I’d handled situations like this dozens of times since Quinten had left, but it was never easy. Sometimes we won and got information out soon enough to either shut down the House operation or at least warn House Brown people enough in advance that they could take their valuables and run.
Sometimes we lost.
The odds were never on House Brown’s side. But that didn’t mean any of us were about to stop fighting.
7
The government’s army buried the dead. Hundreds of men, women, and children planted in mass graves at the foot of Alveré Case’s tower. The newspapers reported a smallpox outbreak. The newspapers lied.—1910
—from the journal of L.U.C.
The door opened and boots started down the stairs. I’d been living with Neds long enough to know the cadence of his stride.
“Tilly?” he said, ducking the low beam before stepping into the cluttered main room. “I heard the bell.”
“It’s the Fesslers’ place.”
“Nevada? Middle of the desert?” Right Ned asked.
I nodded, pulling the maps up across the screens and monitors over Quinten’s station. “Heavy equipment headed their way about thirty miles out. Braiden’s worried. He wants to stand or die.”
“Stupid,” Left Ned said. “I say run and live any day. Why are they a House target? There’s nothing out there except sand and grit.”
“Geothermal, maybe?” I scooted my chair back and walked over to study the screens. “Wasn’t there something about the coal shipments being diverted from Big Vegas?”
“Couple months back?” Right Ned said.
“I think so. Check the reports, will you?”
Neds got busy running through hot data—information we’d flagged as important—House movements, rumors of developments or advancements, failures in supply lines.
Sometimes we could make sense of it, like when House Yellow, Technology, built a manufacturing facility right next to the gold-mining operation. They’d won ten years of the mine’s proceeds from some kind of in-House settlement with House Orange. Welton Yellow had built the facility to test, improve, and maintain the clever new technologies he developed to dig gold out of the dirt, technology that doubled the mine’s production. A technology Welton Yellow refused to share with any of House Orange’s other mining sites.
Sometimes we just flagged things that might come in handy—weather changes, crop failure or excess, drone movement, and the like.
“I don’t like him,” Right Ned said as he scrolled through the last six months or so of data.
“Abraham?”
“I understand you had to patch him up.”
I waited for his question. For the reason he’d come down here.
“Just.” He looked up from my laptop, where he’d sat to shuffle through information. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” I wiped the screens and pulled up secondary satellite and ground views. “You know how I am with hurt things.”
“He’s not a thing, Matilda,” Right Ned said. “He’s a galvanized tied to a House. Eyes and ears and mouth straight to the head of his House. Whatever he knows, they know.”
“What was I supposed to do? Feed him to Lizard?”
“Now you’re thinking,” Left Ned said.
“Look.” I turned and leaned my hip against the curved bank of keyboards beneath the screens. “I know he’s trouble. I know I’m in deep here with my promise to go with him. But there was a drone locked onto him. They already know our house is here and our farm. And while I can claim House Brown, I’m not so sure I have rights. Human rights.”
