“Sure it is,” I said. “It’s all about the soil. Out here in the scratch, we still have devilry in our dirt. Makes stitched things stay stitched.”
“Never thought you were the sort of girl who believed in magic, Tilly,” Right Ned said in the tone of a man who clearly did not believe in the stuff but had spent years taking money from people who did.
“Stardust, nanomutations, witchery. Whatever you want to call it, Lizard there is breathing because of it.”
Lizard finally got a solid whiff of the dead thing and smacked at the air, sticking out its ropelike tongue to clean first one eye, then the other. It started our way with that half-snake, half-bowlegged-cow waddle that made a person want to point and laugh, except by the time a person got around to doing either of those things, Lizard would be on top of them and they’d be bitten in half.
It opened its big maw and scooped off a third of the beast quick as a hot spoon through ice cream, then lifted its head and swallowed, the lump of meat stuck in its gizzard.
“All right, we’re gold,” I said, as Lizard made contentedclick-huffsounds. “Looks like it’s not going to attack the fence. Or us.” I pulled off my gloves and smacked them across my thigh to scrape away the dirt and slime. “So, are you hungry? ’Cause I could eat.”
Neds shifted his finger off the trigger, set the safety, and leaned the barrel across his shoulder. “I wouldn’t mind a hot breakfast.”
“Good.” I picked up my rifle and slung it over my shoulder, then headed up the dirt lane toward the old farmhouse. “It’s your turn to cook.”
* * *
Left Ned complainedhis whole way through it, but he and Right Ned put up a decent egg and potato scramble.
I made sure Grandma had her share of the meal, ate more than my share, then did the dishes as was only fair. Just as I was drying the last plate, there was a knock at the door.
Neds stopped sharpening the machete they called a pocket knife. He glanced at the door, then at me. We didn’t get unannounced visitors. Ever.
Our nearest neighbors were five miles off. If they needed anything, they’d tap the wire before stopping by.
Grandma in the corner, didn’t seem to notice the knock. She just went right on knitting the twisted wool spooling up off the three pocket-sized sheep that puttered around at her feet. The sheep were another of my dad’s stitched critters, built so they grew self-spinning wool. I’d tried to breed them, thinking I could sell them and make a little money for the repairs on the place, but like most stitched things, they were infertile.
I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and opened the door.
“Are you Matilda Case?” the stranger asked in a voice too calm and nice for someone who was holding his guts in place with one hand.
“I am,” I said, even though Neds always told me I shouldn’t go around giving people my name without having theirs first. “You’re a long way from the cities. Do you need a ride to a hospital?”
The stranger was a couple inches shy of seven feet tall, had a broad sort of face with an arrangement of features that fell into the rustic and handsome category, five o’clock shadow included. His mop of brown hair was shaved close by his ears and finger-combed back off his forehead so that it stuck up a bit—which passed for fashion maybe a hundred years ago.
His shirt, under the gray coat he wore, was high collared, buttoned, and might have once been white. That, along with his dark gray breeches and military boots laced and buckled up to his knees, gave him a distinctly historical sort of look.
Gray clothes meant he was claimed by House Gray, one of the eleven powerful Houses that ruled the modern world’s resources, from technology and agriculture straight on up through defense, fuel, medical, and the gods we worshiped. Gray ruled the human resource—all the people in the world, except for those who claimed the twelfth, powerless House: House Brown. Loosely democratic, House Brown was made up of people who lived off the grid, scraping by without the comforts and amenities of the modern world. House Brown was barely recognized by the other Houses.
I was House Brown, but I wore green, Agriculture, when I needed to trade with nearby businesses. No one from House Gray, or any other House, had ever come to my farm.
I had changed out of my filthy hunting clothes into a pair of faded blue overalls and a checkered shirt. It wasn’t at all House Brown or House Green compliant, but, then, I’d been off grid and below the radar all my life.
Just the way my brother wanted us to be.
“Unless you’re here to sell me something,” I said as I leaned the door shut a bit. “In which case I’ll just save you what air you’ve got left and say no, there’s no Matilda Case living here.”
He didn’t smile, but his eyes pulled up a bit at the bottom and something that looked like humor caught fire in them. That’s when I noticed the color of his eyes: cinnamon red, like mine when I was injured.
I took a step back, startled, and he took a step forward.
Neds racked a round in the shotgun he’d had propped by his knee and then all of us in the kitchen held perfectly still.
Well, except for Grandma. She just kept on singing her knitting song about sunshine through lace and liberty’s death, her fingers slipping yarn into knots, smooth and liquid for a woman of her still-undetermined years.
“Not a single step closer,” Left Ned said, his voice always a little colder and meaner than Right Ned’s. “You have not been invited into this home.”
The stranger looked away from me, and I thought maybe for the first time he noticed that there was a house, a room, and people around us. A whole farm, really: 150 acres tucked back far enough in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania that the nearest fill-up station was thirty miles away.
