“You’re going to trust him?” Left Ned asked over the rattle and rumble.
“He’s offered us protection. I’m not trusting him. I plan to read the fine print.”
“Other Houses would take you in,” Right Ned said.
“I don’t want any House to take me in. I don’t want to be owned or claimed. And if there’s any way out of it, I’ll take it. But there is something bigger than me to protect: House Brown. If they destroy that communication hub, a lot of people are going to suffer.”
“And if they find your father’s beasts?” He lowered his voice, “And the pump house?”
I nodded. Illegal, all of it. Especially the technology in the pump house. “Quinten will be jailed. Grandma too. The land will get stripped. And I’ll lose . . . everything.”
“You’ll lose everything if you claim House Gray,” Left Ned said. “You’re something new, Matilda. Valuable. A modern galvanized. That House will use you as a bargaining chip to get what they want.”
“I am not a thing. And I am no one’s chip.”
After a short silence: “We should have sent him packing,” Right Ned said.
“Well, we didn’t.”
Left Ned grunted. “You should never have taken a stranger in.”
“Really?” I glanced at him. “I trusted you, a stranger, when you first came walking up my property. Gave you a job with no references—remember? Even though you weren’t claimed by a House and weren’t carrying papers.”
He winced, and I caught the slight smile from Right Ned.
Maybe that would be the last of that.
The road switched from rutted dirt to cow-swallowing potholes between patches of pavement. Took some concentration to keep us wheels down until Abraham signaled where he was parked.
“There’s something you should know,” Right Ned said. “Back when he first showed up. When I touched him, I saw something.”
“A vision?”
He shrugged one shoulder. In all the time Neds had been on the farm, he hadn’t ever told me, specifically, what he saw when he touched another person.
“I get, I see . . .” He shook his head, as if there were no words to explain it all.
“A person’s fear, guilt, regret,” Left Ned picked up. “The thing they want to hide. The truth of what they are. That man is not a good man.”
“That man,” Right Ned said, “has notbeena good man. I don’t know what his moral standing is now.”
“What, exactly, did you see?” I asked.
“Him,” Right Ned said. “Younger, unstitched. He was locked behind bars, breathing steadily with a gun in his hand. Blood pooled out from the other side of the bars where another man in a uniform—law enforcement from way back—lay in a heap, dead. He shot a lawman. He’s a criminal, Matilda.”
I nodded. I should be surprised, but, well, the galvanized had organized an uprising and almost overthrown the Houses. Breaking the law hadn’t seemed to concern them then either.
“You said he was unstitched? So the vision you saw was from a long time ago when he was just a human. That’s more than three hundred years ago. Long before the Restructure. People change.”
When the whole world went through the Restructure back in the early-2100s, everything changed. Corporations, countries, powers, joined together to grapple with overpopulation, dwindling resources, and the growing unrest that would have set the world into a crippling worldwide war.
Well, that’s the way the historians wrote it. What most folks whispered was that a few rich families and a few powerful corporations got together and made some deals, drew lines in the monetary sand, erased a few political borders, and staked their claim in wide-reaching resource management worldwide.
The Restructure didn’t go over well with most people the first ten years or so. After twenty years, people had forgotten the way things used to be. After fifty, only crazy fringers and the occasional charismatic criminal brought up the idea that things should go back to the way they had been—individual countries monitoring and monetizing their resources.
In the old world, you lived in a country you claimed as your own.
In the new world, it didn’t matter where you lived. You were claimed by a House—one of the eleven main powers in the world—or chose the twelfth, nearly powerless House Brown. You worked for them, and, in return, they provided for you.
