“What choice?” he demanded.
“You’ll know when you know.” She rubbed at the headache in her temple, but shook her head when Lana started to rise. “No, it’s okay. The point is, nowhere is safe—that’s something all of you know already. What’s been built can be destroyed. You said there aren’t enough of us here, and you’re right. We need more warriors, more leaders, more healers, and more technicians. I’ve gotten a start on that. I have sixteen hundred and forty-three recruits.”
“Sorry?” Still a little dazed, Will held up a hand.
“She enlisted them on the way,” Simon told him. “Settlement by settlement.”
“Sixteen hundred,” Will murmured.
“And forty-three. I have an accounting, separating the magickals with their skills, the non-magickals with theirs. I have maps. I can show you where some will train in place—but need supplies and equipment.”
“And who’s training them?”
She turned to Duncan again. “Mallick, who trained me, Thomas, an elf elder who leads a group near where I trained with Mallick. Troy, a witch who leads a group of magickals. A man named Boris, who was a soldier like my father. The others will come here when I send for them. We can train them in the fields by the house where we’ll live for now.”
“How many coming here?” Katie asked.
“For now, eight hundred and twenty.”
“Eight … We don’t have the facilities, that’s double the population we’re feeding and clothing and sheltering and schooling.”
“More hands for planting and hunting,” Fallon pointed out. “To build.”
“We can expand at the farm,” Eddie began, and Fred nodded.
“With a little help we could add another greenhouse, even double the crops. And Lana told me today she knows how to create the tropics we’ve been trying to do for years. We’ll have sugar and coffee, cocoa beans, olives. Simon made an olive press. Olive oil.”
“Poe and I’ve made it nearly two hundred miles out.”
“One ninety-one,” Poe confirmed, tapping Kim’s knee.
“Fuel’s the major issue,” Kim said. “But there are places that haven’t been scavenged where we could get fuel. You wipe out eighty, ninety percent of the world’s population, it takes a really long time for the ones who’re left to use up resources. It’s the getting to them.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Flynn, who’d said nothing, absorbed everything, finally spoke. “If flashing’s what I think it is.”
“Physically transporting from one location to another in, well, a flash,” Fallon told him.
“And you can take someone, more than one, with you?”
“Theoretically.”
Flynn stood, offered a hand. “Show them.”
“I haven’t actually—”
“Show them,” he repeated, taking Fallon’s hand.
She felt it from him. Absolute faith. The kind she’d only felt from her family, Mallick and Thomas and a few others.
With that she took him with her to the gardens, a place she knew.
“Do you feel all right?”
“Fine. Elves are used to moving fast. Not that fast, but fast. One second before we go back. They’ll need to talk.”
“Yes, but—”
“They need to,” he repeated. “It’s the weight of responsibility, and the ones not like us will need a little longer. Some of them. I’m with you. I was with you before you were born. They’ll be with you.”
“My father told me about the first time he met you. In the market. The supermarket.”
“Max? But …”
“I talked to him, one Samhain.”
“Oh.” Flynn smiled, no hesitation. “I’m glad, for both of you. We’d better get back. They’ll freak.”
When she flashed them back, Lupa was on his feet. He settled again when Flynn laid a hand on his head.
“Smooth ride” was all he said.
“How many can you take like that, and how far?” Will wanted to know.
“I’m not sure. It takes practice. My mother has the skill, so does Duncan.”
Tonia raised a hand. “I can do it. I haven’t tried it with a passenger. And you’re right. Why haven’t I? Why haven’t we?”
“We don’t know if a non-magickal can handle it,” Duncan pointed out.
“If you need a guinea pig …” Poe started to his feet.
“I’d rather try it with a non-human first,” Fallon said quickly. “A deer. But the point is, we should be able to travel farther and faster, find supplies, more recruits. We need more, so much more, and fully trained, fully armed, before we take back D.C.”
“D.C.?” Arlys lowered her notepad. “You want to take the fight to D.C.?”
“In time. But it’s need, not want.”
“Hold on. You said it was a dead city.”
“It is.” Struggling not to bristle at another interruption, Fallon turned to Duncan. “But they cling to it, the government, the Dark Uncanny. Its symbolism, its history, the broken power structure. While they fight each other, they want us dead or captured. They want to rule over the rest. It’s one of the centers, and one we have to take from them, purify. New York is another, but we’re not ready.”
She lifted her hands as she turned back to the main group. “We’re not ready. I don’t know when we will be. And there are others, more remote places. Underground, some deserted, some where they hold Uncannys. Some where bombs wait for the spark.”
“We’ve talked countless times about that last one.” Because it made her stomach clench, Katie lifted a bottle of faerie wine, topped off her glass. “They used a bomb on Chicago three years ago, another on Dallas two years before. Both were disasters. But that won’t stop some maniac from using one again. Or cutting loose with the nukes.”
“We’ll eliminate them. It has to be a priority. It’ll take time, and even with training, it’s a risk. But it has to be done before we surge on D.C.”
“How do you eliminate bombs?” Katie demanded. “How do you find them in the first place, not just here but all over the world?”
Duncan sat on the arm of her chair, ran a hand down her arm to soothe her. “Magick. Locator spells. Flash a team to the location. Disarm.”
“Not disarm,” Fallon corrected. “What’s disarmed can be armed again. Eliminate. I thought about just transforming, but even a strong spell can be broken.”
“Yeah, that’s a point. Poofing them? Tricky.”
“I’m working on it.”
“You could use some help,” Tonia pointed out. “Duncan and I will help work on it.”
“Excuse me,” Katie said, “while I try not to have a stroke at the idea of teenagers working on ‘poofing’ nuclear weapons.”
Tonia came to sit on the other arm of her mother’s chair, and Hannah to stand behind it.
“Well, the first thing is to find supplies, housing, and everything else another eight hundred people will need.” Hannah laid a hand on Katie’s shoulder. “Maybe we just start there.”
Fallon decided the meeting/party/debate had gone as well as she could expect. She’d had nearly four months’ experience in trying to convince people to do what she needed them to do. It didn’t just take time, she thought, but projecting confidence, and a willingness to compromise on small details.
She discovered someone had brought her a mattress and some sheets, a pillow, a blanket. She’d have to find out who to thank.
No desk yet or worktable, so she prepared to sit on the floor, spread out her maps. But she heard someone moving around in the family room.
Stepping out, she found Colin pacing and poking.
“What are you doing?”
“Just looking around. It’s a pretty cool house. Maybe you can figure out how to get the home theater thing to work.”
“There’s no whatever it is to run it.”
“There’s you and Mom.”
“Maybe. Maybe,” she said again, calculating. “I can work something—for a trade.”
“What do you want?”
Since his last growth spurt he stood eye to eye with her. It occurred to her—with a little annoyance—he’d end up taller than her before much longer.
“I want you to help train the non-magickals, sixteen and under.”
“Kids?” He scoffed from his great age of fifteen.