2
Rose was drinking coffee behind the wheel of her EarthCruiser, her feet on the secret compartment with the stored canisters of steam inside, when the knock came at her door. A knock this early could only mean more trouble.
“Yes,” she said. “Come in.”
It was Long Paul, wearing a robe over childish pajamas with racing cars on them. “The pay phone in the Lodge started ringing. At first I let it go, thought it was a wrong number, and besides, I was making coffee in the kitchen. But it kept on, so I answered. It was that girl. She wanted to talk to you. She said she’d call back in five minutes.”
Silent Sarey sat up in bed, blinking through her bangs, the covers clutched around her shoulders like a shawl.
“Go,” Rose told her.
Sarey did so, without a word. Rose watched through the EarthCruiser’s wide windshield as Sarey trudged barefooted back to the Bounder she had shared with Snake.
That girl.
Instead of running and hiding, the bitchgirl was making telephone calls. Talk about brassbound nerve. Her own idea? That was a little hard to believe, wasn’t it?
“What were you doing up and bustling in the kitchen so early?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
She turned toward him. Just a tall, elderly fellow with thinning hair and bifocals sitting at the end of his nose. A rube could pass him on the street every day for a year without seeing him, but he wasn’t without certain abilities. Paul didn’t have Snake’s sleeper talent, or the late Grampa Flick’s locator talent, but he was a decent persuader. If he happened to suggest that a rube slap his wife’s face—or a stranger’s, for that matter—that face would be slapped, and briskly. Everyone in the True had their little skills; it was how they got along.
“Let me see your arms, Paulie.”
He sighed and brushed the sleeves of his robe and pajamas up to his wrinkly elbows. The red spots were there.
“When did they break?”
“Saw the first couple yesterday afternoon.”
“Fever?”
“Yuh. Some.”
She gazed into his honest, trusting eyes and felt like hugging him. Some had run, but Long Paul was still here. So were most of the others. Surely enough to take care of the bitchgirl if she were really foolish enough to show her face. And she might be. What girl of thirteen wasn’t foolish?
“You’re going to be all right,” she said.
He sighed again. “Hope so. If not, it’s been a damn good run.”
“None of that talk. Everyone who sticks is going to be all right. It’s my promise, and I keep my promises. Now let’s see what our little friend from New Hampshire has to say for herself.”
3
Less than a minute after Rose settled into a chair next to the big plastic bingo drum (with her cooling mug of coffee beside it), the Lodge’s pay telephone exploded with a twentieth-century clatter that made her jump. She let it ring twice before lifting the receiver from the cradle and speaking in her most modulated voice. “Hello, dear. You could have reached out to my mind, you know. It would have saved you long-distance charges.”
A thing the bitchgirl would have been very unwise to try. Abra Stone wasn’t the only one who could lay traps.
“I’m coming for you,” the girl said. The voice was so young, so fresh! Rose thought of all the useful steam that would come with that freshness and felt greed rise in her like an unslaked thirst.
“So you’ve said. Are you sure you really want to do that, dear?”
“Will you be there if I do? Or only your trained rats?”
Rose felt a trill of anger. Not helpful, but of course she had never been much of a morning person.
“Why would I not be, dear?” She kept her voice calm and slightly indulgent—the voice of a mother (or so she imagined; she had never been one) speaking to a tantrum-prone toddler.
“Because you’re a coward.”
“I’m curious to know what you base that assumption on,” Rose said. Her tone was the same—indulgent, slightly amused—but her hand had tightened on the phone, and pressed it harder against her ear. “Never having met me.”
“Sure I have. Inside my head, and I sent you running with your tail between your legs. And you kill kids. Only cowards kill kids.”
You don’t need to justify yourself to a child, she told herself. Especially not a rube. But she heard herself saying, “You know nothing about us. What we are, or what we have to do in order to survive.”
“A tribe of cowards is what you are,” the bitchgirl said. “You think you’re so talented and so strong, but the only thing you’re really good at is eating and living long lives. You’re like hyenas. You kill the weak and then run away. Cowards.”
The contempt in her voice was like acid in Rose’s ear. “That’s not true!”
“And you’re the chief coward. You wouldn’t come after me, would you? No, not you. You sent those others instead.”