Good answer. Kaldar considered his options. He could load them on the wyvern and take them back, which would take two days there and two days back. Too long. He had no reason to trust Alex Callahan. For all he knew, the junkie was calling his supposedly hateful sister right now with a warning. If he delayed, he risked losing Audrey. Not to mention that Lady Virai would be less than pleased. In fact, after she was done with him, they wouldn’t even be able to harvest his organs.
He could load the kids on the wyvern and send them off with Gaston while he made his own way up the coast to Washington State. Going through the Edge on his own was out of the question—it was a wilderness. Going through the Weird was too dangerous—the Democracy of California consisted of a collection of baronies only loosely organized into a country. Each baron had his own private army at his disposal. They disliked their neighbors, but they hated outsiders. That left him with traveling through the Broken in a stolen car, ready to be pulled over by every highway patrolman with half a brain.
He could also just take the kids with him. It was the only solution that still permitted him to do his job. There would be hell to pay, but he would worry about it when the time came.
Kaldar leveled a heavy stare at George. “Tell me why I shouldn’t load you on the wyvern and send you back to the loving arms of your sister?”
“We can be useful,” George said.
“How? You think that you’re smarter than everyone around you, and he”—Kaldar pointed at the backseat—“he can’t control himself and starts breaking legs if someone looks at him for half a second too long. What I do requires perfect timing, resolve, and cold temper, none of which you’ve demonstrated so far.”
George blushed.
“The fact that you’re turning pink, like a happy bride, tells me you aren’t well suited for my line of work.”
The blush died. “We can be useful.”
“Nobody pays attention to us because we’re kids,” Jack said from the backseat. “I can go anywhere. I can climb a wall, listen to the conversation, and tell it back to you word for word. George can animate a mouse, send it to a locked room, and tell you what’s inside.”
“We can speak three languages fluently,” George said. “We’re trained in self-defense, we know the protocol, and we’re motivated.”
“By what, exactly?” Kaldar asked.
“We’re Edge Trash,” George said. “No matter how perfect we are, we’ll never be accepted completely. I can never hold a political post like Declan, and if I could attain it, I wouldn’t have the kind of influence he does.”
Kaldar glanced at him. Now that was interesting. “What makes you think that?”
George looked back and held his gaze. “Declan’s uncle tried to enroll me into Selena University. It’s the best school in Adrianglia. I scored in the top one percent of nine hundred applicants. I was denied admission. They know that Declan can pay for my school. They just don’t want the likes of me on their admission scrolls.”
Welcome to the real world, kid. The Weird ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. For all of their reforms and talk of equality, pedigree still mattered in the Weird.
“Jack can at least do the military, but he has to get his temper under control. I can’t,” George said. “I’m fast and strong, and I can fight well; but I don’t have the endurance. I’ve worked on it for two years, and a ten-mile run leaves me nearly dead. I can’t put on a fifty-pound backpack and march thirty miles in one day. I will never be good at it. But I could be good at this.”
“The Mirror doesn’t care if we’re Edge Trash,” Jack said. “It doesn’t care that I’m a changeling, either.”
This was ridiculous. These two kids thought they were good enough to go up against ruthless killers, augmented with magic and trained to murder. Two fools, full of innocent arrogance. Was he ever that young? No. No, he wasn’t.
“This isn’t an exercise or a drill. Nobody will blow the whistle and make the other side stop shooting while we huddle up and review what we did wrong. This is the real shit. People I go up against kill children. They won’t hesitate. They will slit your throats and never think about it again. Your lives mean less to them than the life of a mosquito.”
“We’re not children,” George said. “You killed your first man when you were fourteen.”
He would have to wire Gaston’s mouth shut.
“I was fighting in a family feud. It was about pride and hate and survival. And I had my family around me. It’s different when you’re in a group. Crowd mentality kicks in.”
Kaldar made a right turn and slowed. The boundary bit down on them with its blunt teeth. The kids gasped. The car kept rolling, the pressure grinding him, compressing his bones, then, suddenly, they were through. George coughed.
“We’re a crowd,” Jack said.
Kaldar sighed. “More like a gang of idiots, and I am the biggest moron in it.”
George coughed carefully. “Would that make you the Chief Moron then?”
Kaldar parked the car under a tree and rapped his knuckles against George’s head. The boy grimaced.
“Gaston does that, too,” Jack reflected.
“Family punishment.” Kaldar got out of the car. “You will come with me to Washington. I need to find a woman there. You will not get in my way. No more unsupervised outings, no more field trips, and no more fights. You do as you are told, when you are told, or I will hog-tie you, load your scrawny behinds onto that wyvern, and have Gaston hand-deliver you home to your sister with a pretty little ribbon tied over your mouths. Understood?”
“Understood,” the two voices chorused.
As they headed up the path, he checked the gray shape in Jack’s arms. “How’s the cat?”
“He’ll be okay,” Jack said. “He just needs someone to take care of him for a while.”
Don’t we all, Kaldar reflected. Don’t we all.
FOUR