“Yes, we were,” she says to me, and smiles a very sparing little smile. “Yes, we were. Seems this night is full of surprises.”
“Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Sergeant Fallon removes her own helmet and flashes a grin. “Kameelah fucking Jackson. Still got that big stupid knife you were hauling everywhere?”
Jackson laughs out loud. The teeth she flashes are still perfectly straight and white. “I do, Master Sergeant. It’s in the truck.” Then her smile fades a little. “I’m still going to have to collect your weapons and your comms gear, please.”
“Are we POWs now?” Halley asks. “We just saved your bacon down here, you know. Should count for something, shouldn’t it?”
“You’re not POWs,” Jackson says. “You are making a donation to our cause. And no,” she addresses Sergeant Fallon. “We’re not going to hog-tie you and shoot you like a dog in a basement somewhere. So unsling your goddamn weapons already, and we can have our little reunion sitting down.”
The militia troops lead us to the back of one of the armored vehicles. They’re courteous and surprisingly professional about the whole thing. We surrender all our comms gear and weapons, and Corporal Jackson—I have a hard time thinking of my old squad mate as a major despite the rank insignia on her collars—gathers everything and deactivates the electronic stuff expertly.
“How on Earth did you end up falling in with this lot?” Sergeant Fallon asks her as we file into the armored troop transport.
“Long story,” Jackson says. “After Detroit a few years back, I went looking for the people who sprung that ambush on us. And I found them.”
She waits until we’ve all taken our seats and then straps herself into the jump seat closest to the door and its control panel.
“Funny thing, too. I was going to find them and kill the whole lot of them. For Stratton and Paterson, you know?”
I nod when she looks at me. Stratton and Paterson died the night Sergeant Fallon lost her leg and I got wounded. That was my last drop with the Territorial Army before I got to join the fleet, and hardly a week goes by where I don’t revisit the battle in my dreams, and sometimes my waking hours.
“But you didn’t,” I say.
“No,” she replies, and smiles that enigmatic smile of hers I remember well. “I didn’t. Was going to, for sure. But then I got captured and met the general. He was a colonel back then.”
“And he talked you into joining? You, Kameelah Jackson, the baddest corporal in the 365th?” Sergeant Fallon chuckles. “The man sure can talk, I’ll give him that.”
“Turns out we’ve been shooting at the wrong people all those years,” Jackson says. “Ain’t ashamed to admit I was wrong. About a bunch of things.”
“So you’re the general’s right hand now?” I ask. She looks at me and flashes a quick grin.
“Among other things,” she says. “Among other things.”
The armored troop transport rumbles along for the better part of an hour. Deprived of all our technology, we are blind in the windowless back—not that I would know my way around Detroit even if I had a view. When the transport finally comes to a stop, Sergeant Fallon is asleep, or pretending to be. I am bone-tired after the last few days of constant fear of death and combat, and I want to fall asleep, but my anxious brain won’t let me. The last time I was down here, among the same people, I didn’t get to leave under my own power. I was airlifted out, with two fléchettes in my left side.
The back door of the transport opens and reveals a large underground garage, stuffed full of equipment and vehicle parts. More militia troops in their olive-drab fatigues are milling around or working on gear. We file out of the armored transport and stretch our legs.
“This way,” Jackson says, and gestures toward one end of the hangar-like garage. Halley and I hesitate for a moment, and Jackson rolls her eyes.
“Ain’t no underground execution chamber around here,” she says. “I give you my word we won’t just shoot you in the back of the head.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” I lie.
“Locking you in for the night,” she says. “For your safety. Don’t want to be walking these streets, in those uniforms. Shower and sleep, and tomorrow we’ll talk.”
“I want to stay with my husband,” Halley says, and moves closer to me. “You separate us now, we’re going to have a problem.”
“Of course you can stay together,” Jackson says. “We’re not uncivilized down here, you know.”
CHAPTER 26
I wake up on a military folding cot. Halley is on the cot with me, and she’s still asleep, drawing air in deep and even breaths. The room we are in is not in a basement. There’s a window on one wall, and light streaming in and illuminating the dingy flooring and tired paint on the walls. The blindfolds we were wearing when they led us here last night are on the floor next to our cot. I’ve spent enough time in welfare housing to know that I’m in a PRC apartment somewhere.
I carefully extract myself from Halley’s embrace and climb out of the cot. The only thing I took off last night was my CDU jacket, which is hanging over the back of a chair nearby. The chair is screwed into the floor with lag bolts.
I put my jacket on and look around. The view from the window shows a sunrise over a nearby river. The morning sun is reflecting in a thousand windows out there, all fifth-gen PRC residence towers, clustered in groups of four along the riverbank.
Corporal–Major Jackson’s militia troops frisked us expertly last night and removed all weapons and everything that can be used to communicate, but they left me my personal document pouch and the simple little aluminum ring in it. My dog tags are missing from my neck for the first time in years, confiscated for their locator-beacon function that could trigger an SAR mission if a fleet unit got close enough to this place to pick up the signal.
The kitchenette is bare except for some plastic mugs in the cupboard and half a packet of soy coffee next to them. I draw some water in one of the mugs, add coffee powder, and heat the whole thing up in the food-processor unit for thirty seconds, just like I did back home when I still had to make do with soy-based everything.
When the coffee is ready, I take the mug over to the window and look over the river again while I take a sip. The PRC looks almost peaceful. The coffee is truly awful, but there’s something soothing and familiar about its perfect awfulness.
Halley wakes up a little while later and stretches on the cot like a cat after a nap in the sunshine.
“That smells pretty bad,” she says.
I walk over and sit down on the edge of the cot. She reaches for the mug, and I hand it to her to take a sip.
“Tastes bad, too,” she says, and makes a face.
“Lousy honeymoon,” I say. “Terrible wedding night. Worst bed-and-breakfast ever.”
“An auspicious start,” she says, and we both smile at each other like idiots.
Thirty minutes after I finish my coffee, there’s a knock on the door.
I look at Halley and raise an eyebrow.