“Yeah,” I said, pulling down my hood. “It’s for the tree I’m building.”
Frost’s eyes grew as fat as the rest of him.
“It’s really you?”
I nodded, and Frost laughed.
“Crow was supposed to cut your damn throat.”
“You can take that up with Crow, if you like. He’s here, too.”
“Is he, now? So we all made it, did we? You and me. The watcher.” Frost made a slimy grin. “And the pretty little thing.”
“How the hell’d you find this place?”
“Even agents can be bargained with.”
“Coordinates didn’t work so well, I guess.”
“No matter. Keep digging and you find the dirt you need. Went and got myself employed.” Frost spread his arms wide, showing off his purple threads.
“You should know your boy’s dead.”
“My boy?” Frost’s grin broke down and his jaw clamped tight. “I left him behind. To keep him safe.”
“You don’t keep someone safe by ditching them,” I said. “Sal came looking for you. And now he’s dead.”
Frost blinked at the snow. “Tell me you’re lying.”
“I ain’t lying. They killed him.”
Frost’s hands were shaking, and he pulled his gloves off to scratch around at his knuckles and at the back of his arms. Been awhile since he’d had his fix, I reckoned. Not a whole lot of crystal on Promise Island.
“Your wife’s dead, too,” I told him, and Frost’s hands stopped shaking.
“My wife?” His anger grew him taller, stretched his face into a grin you’d not call smiling. “She made you feel wrong just wanting her. And besides, there seems to be no shortage of that woman running around.”
“Well, the one you were married to is dead.”
Frost waved his hand in the air, like he was dismissing his grief. But I wondered if maybe he’d needed Hina like he needed the crystal, if maybe it’s the needing that leaves you spiky and torn.
“Plenty more where that came from,” Frost said. “Though she was an awfully lovely bit of ass.”
Suddenly I got the feeling Crow was right. I couldn’t deal with this guy. Glued to a vice that can ruin the best of them. And Frost weren’t the best of them, not by a midnight mile.
But I needed him. And I let him talk.
“The Creator, now she’s a real ballbuster, I’m thinking. But let’s face it, she’s getting a bit long in the tooth. Zee, on the other hand, now isn’t she something? Why else you think I kept the little bitch around?”
“Got it all figured out, don’t you, fat man?”
“Man’s gotta have a plan, tree builder.”
“So what the hell you doing out here?”
“Well, first of all.” He pointed at the trees. “They’re lovely, I’m sure you agree. And second, I aim to smuggle one back with me. To the mainland. I can’t sell something to GenTech they already own, but you might remember you were supposed to be building me a forest. And I’m going to put one of these things right in the darn middle of it. Just see if I don’t.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. People will pay plenty to see themselves a real tree.”
“The locusts, Frost. You got a plan for them as well?”
“Glass,” he said, looking like I was the idiot. “I’m gonna cage it up in glass. Keep it safe.”
“You’re a fool,” I said, and I strode right up to him. “You’re a fat piece of grease and I could turn you over to them. Right now.”
“But you’re not going to, are you? You followed me out here, I figure you got something to say.”
“You’re thinking too small,” I said. “That’s your problem. One of these trees ain’t gonna get you nowhere at all.”
“Go on.”
“What you really need is something the locusts can’t go eating. What you really want is the thing that makes GenTech different from the rest of us.”
“You mean that thing in the Orchard.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Nice little pipe dream you got there, Mister B. But maybe you didn’t spot the troop of heavily armed agents. Or see the doors that open according to only one key.”
“There’s a whole army I guarantee would be happy to start fighting. Just gotta wake them up, that’s all.”
Frost stared at the hill. He chewed his lip.
“They’d need weapons,” he said finally.
“You’re an agent, aren’t you? Can’t you track down some guns?”
Frost gazed back and forth between me and the trees.
“Who’s in on this?” he said.
“You and me. And Crow.”
“What about Zee?”
“Yeah. She’s coming with us.”
“Then you can have my help. But I get her. I get Zee when we’re finished.”
“Okay,” I said, and a switch got flipped inside me. Frost could not leave the island, that’s what I was telling myself. He just could not leave this place.
The fat man reached out his hand with the missing finger. And I shook it. Maybe I shouldn’t have.
But I did.
One hour past sunset and everything would change. By my best guess, that was when the medicine would start turning the prisoners into something that weren’t human. That’s when we’d lose our army. And that’s when I’d lose Alpha.
But that wasn’t going to happen, I told myself.
I wouldn’t let it.
The sun set around three, and there’d be an hour of darkness for Frost to smuggle the weapons into the bunker and shut down the system so as to wake up the prisoners. My job was to create a diversion. But I also had to find a way to get the key to the Orchard. I figured the first job was pretty easy. The second task, not so much.
Frost was a gamble. I knew that. Any way you looked at it, he was nothing but risk. But what else could I do but try and use him? Way things had unfolded, Zee couldn’t be trusted to keep her mouth shut. And Crow couldn’t even walk.
I kept asking Zee to check on him, and she’d wade off through the snow then shuffle back to the forest, but the news was always the same.
No news.
The morning passed too quick, and I got sloppy with my work. I built a single tree in the middle of the clearing. Just one damn tree. But without my normal tools, and maybe because of the way I was feeling, nothing seemed to go quite right with it.
I was tired. Running on fumes. But I bent the rusty iron into a twelve-foot funnel, and that’s what I buried in the ground. Then I broke up the tubes and used the metal for branches that I set to turn on the hubcaps, rigging cans and broken glass where the leaves should have spun.
Told you. Kind of a rush job.
The important part was what I did with the cable. And with that big metal drum. I patched up the drum so it’d hold without leaking, and then I built it into the crown of the tree. I strung the cable out of the drum and ran it all the way around the forest. Took me ages. I had to set it just right, connecting all the treetops into one giant wire canopy.
One other thing — before I ran that cable out, I’d soaked it in a big old barrel. A barrel full of the same stuff I’d poured inside the metal drum that I’d tied high in the tree.
Juice.
My secret ingredient.
Remember, when you build it’s all about the details. Well, this was a detail that was going to make this forest come alive, all right. It’d be illuminated brighter than all the LEDs you could harness.
And then it would burn.
Right down to the ground.
Zee got back from checking on Crow just as I finished rigging up the cables. The cold air was pretty ripe on account of all the juice, and Zee scrunched her nose as she stared at the tree.