“Of course they didn’t, not when her father’s the butcher of Etaine,” Jiri snarled. “They wouldn’t touch her with a fifty-meter pole. And neither would I.”
“Nobody’s asking you to,” Yalena said coldly.
Melissa turned abruptly and glared at her own friends. “Say what you like, she stopped a rape and God knows what else, before they’d had a chance to do more than rip Dena’s clothes off. And there’s not one of us — not one — who hasn’t wanted to break a few of those bastards’ bones, ourselves. Only we didn’t quite dare, did we? We talk big, but when push came to shove, it wasn’t any of us who stopped it. It was her, by herself, against a whole rotten gang of them. Yalena Khrustinova doesn’t deserve nasty accusations or name-calling from any of us. The only thing I want to know,” she swung around toward Yalena again, “is why.”
Yalena realized that this was one of those moments that forever changed your life, if you were smart enough to recognize it and strong enough to act on it. The first such moment in Yalena’s life came back to haunt her, now, with memory of a ghastly silence that had followed in the wake of screams she still heard in nightmares.
“The last night I spent on Jefferson,” she said in a hoarse voice that sounded nothing like her own, “I got caught in a Granger protest march in Madison. My two best friends in the world were with me. When the P-Squads arrested the Hancock family and lied about it, Ami-Lynn and Charmaine and I went to the protest march. President Zeloc—” she spat the name out like every syllable was pure poison ” — ordered the Bolo to run over an unarmed crowd in the street. I was in that street. So were my friends. My mother…” Her voice shattered.
The other girl’s eyes flinched. They all knew that Kafari Khrustinova was dead. That she’d been murdered by the P-Squads. But they didn’t know the rest.
“My mother pulled me to safety. Just ahead of its treads. My friends were behind me. They didn’t make it. Have you ever seen what’s left when a thirteen-thousand-ton machine runs over a person? There must’ve been six or seven hundred people, just in the city block I was on, that were crushed to death. And you know what was left? Paste. Red, sticky paste, like pureed tomatoes, with smears of hair and shoe leather…”
Somebody whimpered. Yalena didn’t care. About any of them.
“Mom and I crawled away through the sewers. All night, in the sewers, wading through shit and blood, while the lynch mobs pulled people off the PSF farms and chopped them up and hung the pieces on light poles and street signs and burned half the downtown. We finally reached the spaceport and she smuggled me out. And then a trigger-happy P-Squaddie killed her. You know what the hardest thing was, yesterday, when I pulled those bastards off Dena? Not breaking their necks, along with their stinking arms and legs. And now, if you don’t mind, kindly leave me the hell alone!”
She stalked forward.
They parted like reeds before a hurricane.
She actually made it all the way through the gymnasium and halfway across the track before they caught up. One of them, anyway. Melissa Hardy called her name, running to catch up.
“Wait! Yalena, wait!”
She stopped, not even sure why. Melissa closed the gap, breathing hard. Yalena didn’t say anything. Puzzled grey eyes studied her for a long moment.
“I’ve always wondered,” she said slowly, “why you left Jefferson. Why you worked so hard, studying. Why you signed up for C.O.R.P. classes and extreme camping and martial arts. It didn’t fit the pattern POPPA brats follow. I didn’t realize…” She blinked hard for a moment. “I’m sorry about your mother, Yalena. And your friends.” Before Yalena could say anything scathing, she added, “My brother was killed in that street, too.”
Their eyes met and held. Yalena felt a dangerous crack in her emotional armor.
She swallowed hard. Then whispered, “I’m sorry. For a lot of things.”
The other girl said, “I can’t even begin to imagine how you must feel. It’s got to be awful.”
Yalena shook her head. “No. It’s worse. I’m going back. To kill them. All of them.”
The other girl’s breath caught. Then something shifted in her eyes, something Yalena couldn’t name, which left chills slithering along her nerves. When she spoke, there was steel in her voice. “I’m going with you.”
She took the other girl’s measure. Made her decision. “Sounds fair to me. There’ll be fewer targets to hit, with two of us.”
It was more than a pact, more than a holy alliance.
It was a promise. A threat.
And POPPA’s death.
They shook on it.
II
Kafari had lost a lot of weight, but she wasn’t the only person on Jefferson who was thinner, these days. Four years of guerilla warfare had left her lean and hard as a jaglitch. She’d occasionally eaten jaglitch, which could be digested — sort of — with the proper enzymes to break the alien proteins down into something a human stomach considered food. Their store of supplies contained plenty of enzymes, pilfered from pharmaceutical warehouses and fish-processing plants.
Dinny Ghamal stepped into the cavern Kafari called headquarters this week. He was whipcord tough, his face scarred and chiseled by torture and grief, but his eyes were still human. Emmeline had survived. She’d given birth to their first child, a son, six months after their rescue from Nineveh Base. It was a hell of a time and place to begin a family, but it had given many of Kafari’s troops heart, reminding them that life could hold onto its sweetness and wonder, even in the midst of desperate struggle and hardship. The boy was the unofficial mascot of the entire rebellion. Dinny’s wife, unable to travel fast or far while nursing an infant, had become a crackerjack code breaker, hacking into sophisticated systems that Kafari had taught her how to open. Dinny’s wife served the rebellion well. So did Dinny. He bent low to duck under the rocky entrance to her “office.”
“Commodore,” he nodded, indicating with a single word that someone besides her own most trusted staff officers was somewhere in the camp, “the new supply teams are underway. It’s a good haul, sir. We hit three food-distribution centers and wrecked what we couldn’t transport. There’ll be a passel of hungry Subbies, tomorrow. They’ll really be furious by the end of the week. POPPA will have to tighten the rations again.”
His smile was predatory, sharp, full of fangs.
So was hers. “Good.”
“I have other reports in from the field, sir,” Dinny added. “And pouches from several couriers.”
“Let’s hear the reports, please.”
“Team Gamma Five reports success without casualties.”
“Oh, thank God,” Kafari whispered, closing her eyes against the sudden sting of tears. A penetration team had gone to Lakoska Holding Facility with orders to disrupt the wholesale deportation of convicted dissidents to the Hanatos “work camp.” Their target had been Lakoska’s barracks, housing more than five hundred dissidents and protestors. Most of them were Grangers, but a surprising number were urbanites desperate for food and medical care and willing to steal to get them. A few were just ordinary looters. Kafari’s team of computer hackers had cracked the security codes on Lakoska’s transportation schedule. They’d found the date and time of the highly classified transfer that would’ve sent the newly convicted prisoners to Hanatos tomorrow morning.
Team Gamma Five had, perforce, struck tonight.
Kafari had tried to rescue the prisoners already in Hanatos camp. Tried hard, just six days ago. Her entire team had died in the attempt. Their lives had bought the freedom of just five prisoners, who managed to escape during the wild confusion. Of those five, only one had made it out of the wilderness. Hanatos had been constructed, with great care and ruthless foresight, smack in the middle of prime jaglitch habitat. Once the remaining guards had killed Kafari’s team — none of her people had allowed themselves to be taken alive — the retaliatory executions had commenced. The P-Squads had slaughtered fifty prisoners and made two hundred new arrests for every guard her team had killed in the attempt.