“Maggie,” Rissa says, a note of warning in her voice.
“No, we need to know the truth.”
“Know what truth?” Ben asks.
I hesitate, and Aaron says, “Gideon is my brother. My foster brother. We grew up together in a Mormon foster family in St. George.”
“What?” Ben takes a step back from him, hand over her heart. “Did you know, Maggie? Rissa?”
“We suspected,” I admit. “And the question, Aaron, is whether your loyalty lies with us or with him.”
Aaron shoulders rise on a prolonged shrug. “I got no love for my brother. He and I parted in the worst of ways. Me on my feet and him bearing a dozen cuts from my knife, bleeding him out.”
“Something you regret,” I say, pushing back.
“Something I regret,” he says, nodding. “A man shouldn’t knife his brother, no matter his offense. But me regretting ain’t going to change a thing. He needed to die then, and seems like he needs to die now.” His eyes bore into me, trying hard to convince. Too hard? I don’t know.
“And why was that, exactly, that your brother needed killing?” I ask. “What happened between the two of you?”
“Knifetown,” he says flatly. “Knifetown happened.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’s going to have to be.”
“You can’t expect us to trust you—”
“I don’t expect no trust. We have a deal and I’ll stick to my deal. I’m good for that.”
“I need to know whose side—”
“Maggie,” Rissa says. “He’s on our side. If he says he’s good to his word, I believe him.”
I don’t. But maybe I don’t have to. Maybe Rissa’s asking me to trust her, same way I asked her to trust me about Kai. And maybe I owe her the same courtesy, friend to friend.
“Aaron’s proven himself,” she says. “He helped us at Knifetown, and he found Ben in Page. He’s on our side.”
All those things could be self-serving. We were a means to an escape from a place he hated, and knowing that Ben was set on killing his brother one way or another, keeping her close would be a smart move. Nevertheless . . .
“Okay. He’s your responsibility,” I say. “Whatever he does, it’s on you.”
Rissa touches Aaron’s arm possessively. Nods once.
“Aaron,” Ben says, her voice no more than a whisper. “You could have told me.”
Aaron reaches for the hat he doesn’t have anymore, as if to tug it down. Instead he brushes an empty hand across his forehead, smoothing his hair. “Sorry, Ben,” he says, and he actually sounds sorry. “Sometimes a man is so used to keeping secrets, he doesn’t know how to stop keeping them. We get through this, I’ll do better by you. That’s a promise.”
She nods, but it’s clear that his confession is bothering her. Maybe it was easier to want Gideon dead when he was just a bad guy. Harder when he’s a real person, the brother of a friend.
“Ben, why don’t you come with me?” I say. “I want to go back and get another look at the maps in Kai’s room. Make sure I didn’t miss anything obvious.”
“Aaron and I will head for the Glen Canyon Dam,” Rissa offers. “Wait for you at the crossing.”
“What if you run into Gideon and the Swarm?”
“I know how to stay hidden,” Rissa reassures me. “Besides, we won’t engage. Just observe. As long as you two don’t linger, we’ll be fine.”
Chapter 39
Ben and I head back down to the compound. The solar-powered lights along the footpath are still glowing a pale gold, but the lights in the building itself are off. We reach the wing of rooms where Kai was. I stop and press my face to a glass door randomly. The room inside is deserted. Bed unmade, clothes still visible. I spot a half-eaten apple sitting on a desk. “They left in a hurry. Everything’s still here. They didn’t even pack.”
“So they’re coming back?”
“No one’s coming back,” I say, knowing it’s true.
We reach Kai’s room, and I push open the unlocked glass door. Step across the threshold. Ben follows. I flick on a lamp and the room lights up. The books are all still here, but the maps on the wall have been hastily torn down, the corners still taped to the walls. And the notebook Kai was writing in is gone.
Ben walks to the wall, puts a hand against the empty space. “How are we going to find him now?”
“Well,” I say, stepping over the wealth of books strewn across the floor, “my guess is he went to Glen Canyon Dam, but just in case . . .” I spot a pair of black dress pants draped over the back of a chair. Reach into the pocket and pull out the tissue, exactly where I expected it to be. “We have this.”
Ben comes over, curious. “What is that?”
I pull the material apart to show her the bloodstain. “Insurance policy.”
She takes if from my hand. Holds it up and sniffs. “How can you be sure it’s his blood?”
“I’m sure. I just need you to do your thing.”
Her face falls, and she catches her bottom lip between her teeth, clearly bothered.
“No?” I ask.
She walks to the desk chair and sits, weighing the bloody tissue in her hand. “I think I’m ready to tell you how I got my clan power.”
Damn. Not the best timing, but she’s sitting there with her head down and her feet swinging nervously, and I know I have to hear her out. I walk over to Kai’s abandoned bed and clear a spot to sit. “Okay, Ben, I’m listening.”
She exhales, clearly bracing herself to tell me her story. “You know my parents were Protectors in the Energy Wars, right? That they died outside Pawhuska, defending Osage land.”
“The Little Keystone,” I say. “You told me.”
She nods sadly. “One night Oilers raided the camp. I don’t remember much. Just the chaos. And the noise. The sound of automatic gunfire, my mom and dad arguing, people yelling. And then people screaming as they died. My parents were warriors and they were needed to defend the camp, so my mom told me to hide. Find a place and hide until she came to find me. So I went to hide in the pipeline—”
“Wait, the pipeline?”
“They’d already installed it, when the Osage were tied up in court and couldn’t stop them, but the crude hadn’t started flowing yet. It was empty and us kids at camp would play in it sometimes. Hide-and-seek, that sort of thing. The adults would yell at us when they found us, and we’d promise never to do it again, but it was still the best hiding place I knew. Plus, it was safe in the pipes. No way Oilers would destroy their own equipment.”
It sounds like a terrible idea to me, but I keep my mouth shut.
“I remember crawling in and pulling the port closed. The sound of the lock engaging. My mom had warned me it might be a few days before she could find me, so not to panic. She promised she would come back for me.”
“But she didn’t,” I say, voice quiet.
She shakes her head. “That was the last time I saw her. Or my dad. I waited, you know. I don’t know how long. Days? A week? Long enough that the food and water in my backpack had run out and the smell of my own waste was making me sick.”
“Jesus, Ben.”
“But you know what, Maggie? You can’t open those ports from the inside. I didn’t know. But that wasn’t even the worst part,” she says, rubbing her hands against her pants, the scratch of her palms against fabric loud in the room. “Turns out Oilers were raiding the camp to clear it because they got the court order to let the crude flow.”
She swallows, her hands making fists. And I can only imagine the horror of being in that small dark pipe for days alone, not knowing if your parents were alive or dead. And then the terror she must have felt, hearing the rush of crude coming for her and not being able to outrun it. Swept away on a dark sea of oil.