“Oh, it belongs to you?” Butch sneered. “This all your place?”
“We work for the Quartermans. We have a right to be here.” The man waggled his handgun. “You, all of you, get out!”
Amos shrugged. Another half dozen of Erich’s people had come in, most of them with assault rifles held calmly at their sides. The servants were all huddled together in the middle of the room. If they’d had any skill or practice, there would have been two or three snipers up in the rafters, ready to start picking the bad guys off while these folks kept their attention low, but Amos didn’t see anyone. “I kinda don’t think the Quartermans are coming back. We’re going to take some of their stuff. But anything we can’t use, you should feel welcome to.”
The man’s face hardened, and Amos got ready for there to be a lot of dead people. But before Erich’s people lifted their guns, Peaches interrupted.
“You’re… you’re Stokes, right?” The front man – Stokes, apparently – lowered the gun, confused as Peaches stepped forward. “It’s me. Clarissa Mao.”
“Miss Clarissa?” Stokes blinked. The gun wavered. He heard Butch mutter “Fucking seriously?” under her breath, but no one started firing. “Miss Clarissa! What are you doing here?”
“Trying to leave,” Peaches said, with a laugh in her voice. “What are you here for?”
Stokes smiled at her, and then nervously at Amos and Erich and all the others, shining his teeth at them like the beam from a deeply insecure lighthouse. “The evacuation order came when the second rock came down. The Quartermans all left. Took the ship, and gone. They all went. The Cooks, the Falkners, old man Landborn. Everyone, they took their ships and left. Told us the security would keep us safe until relief came. But there’s no relief, and the security? They’re thugs. They tell us we have to pay them since the Quartermans are gone, but what do we have?”
“All the Quartermans’ shit,” Amos said. “Which brings me back to my first point.”
“Are there any ships?” Peaches said. “We need a ship. Just to get us to Luna. That’s why we came here.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. The Bergavins left the Zhang Guo. It is in their hangar. We can take you there, Miss Clarissa, but —”
A sharp whistle came from the side door. From the street outside it. Butch met Amos’ gaze. “Company,” she said.
The streets on the island were wide. Roomy. Big enough to haul a ship down to the bridge. The security patrol car had the claw-and-eye logo of Pinkwater. Its headlights cut a wide cone through the darkness. Erich stood with his good hand up to shield his eyes. Two men were swaggering up toward him.
“Well now,” the first man said. “What have we got here?”
Erich backed away, limping. “No trouble, sir,” he said.
“How about if I determine that,” the lead man said. “Get on the fucking ground.” He had a cowboy hat on and his hand on the butt of his pistol. Amos smiled. The warmth in his belly and his arms was the same kind he got when he heard a familiar song after a long time. It was just pleasant. “I said get on the ground you crippled sonofabitch! You do it now, or I’ll fuck your fucking eyeholes!”
“Peaches?” Amos called as he strode out into the light. The two security men drew their pistols and pointed them at him. “Hey, Peaches, you back there?”
“Yes?” she said. It sounded like she was in the side door. That was fine. He saw the pair of security men clock the rest of Erich’s people in the gloom. They were mostly silhouetted, but their bodies went tense. Always a bad moment, seeing you brought a knife to a gunfight.
“See, this is what I was talking about,” Amos called. “Things start falling apart, and the tribes get small. These guys, probably good upstanding folks when there’s a boss to answer to. Clients. Shareholders.” He turned to the man in the hat and grinned amiably. “Hey,” he said.
“Um. Hey,” Hat said.
Amos nodded and called back toward the hangar. “Thing is you take that away, they’re guys with guns. They act like guys with guns. Do guys-with-guns stuff. Right?”
“I follow you,” Peaches said.
“You should put your guns down,” Amos said to Hat. “We’ve got just a shitload more of them than you do. So really.”
“You heard the man,” Butch said. “Guns on the ground, please.”
The security men glanced at each other.
“We could have just shot you,” Amos said. As Hat and his partner slowly lowered their guns to the pavement, Amos raised his voice again. “So Peaches, these guys? They go from being protectors of this big tribe with what’s-his-name and them inside the tribe to being protectors of their own little tribe, and those folks on the outside of it. It’s all about who’s in and who’s out.”