“What war?” Marta asked.
June shook her head and exhaled in an exasperated way. “Good lord. That you even have to ask that.” She turned to Andy. “Enlighten me. What sort of poor treatment did they get?”
“We had a loss of life, ma’am,” Andy said.
“Ha!” said Lee, again from the back of the group. “Loss of life! Ha!” He waved a finger at Violet. “That—that thing right there, she shot my friend in the head.”
June pushed between Wes and Wendy Tanaka to get to Lee. The mild smile—the slight upturn at the corners of her lips—flattened. Her jaw stiffened. “What did you call her?”
Lee had well over a foot on June, but he dropped his chin and fixed his gaze on his twisting hands. “Nothing. I’m just angry. I saw my friend murdered.”
“I gave the order,” Andy said. “The man was dying anyway. He wouldn’t have made it here.”
“He was not dying!” Lee said. “That’s a lie! He got bitten but we Stamped him.”
“We didn’t do shit,” Andy said. “You stood around with your thumb up your ass and I Stamped him. But it wasn’t quick enough. He had an infestation. He came and showed me the rash after the rest of you bedded down.”
“That’s a lie,” Lee repeated, but with less fire. “You couldn’t know if he’d caught Shreve’s. It had only been a few hours.”
“The bite was right over the jugular,” Andy told June. “He’d have bled out after the hatching. We didn’t have the time or the resources to patch him up. I made a judgment call.”
“A good and necessary call,” June said. She looked at Lee. “Mr.—”
“Flannigan,” Lee said. “Lee Flannigan.”
“Mr. Flannigan, my people haven’t been on the receiving end of much fairness and humanity, but we’re a decent sort, and I think you’ll find I’m a pretty reasonable woman. Tonight you’ll sleep under a real roof with food and even liquor in your belly, if you’re inclined to a nip. We even have a decent little bluegrass trio that’ll play. That sounds nice, doesn’t it?”
He nodded, hesitantly.
She drew closer to him.
“But if I ever, ever hear you talk about Violet that way again, I will shoot you in the head myself. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Lee said hoarsely.
The quiet mirth was back on her face and she craned her head to the left and right, taking in the rest of the group. “And you? We’re all in agreement? We understand one another?”
Marta nodded along with the rest of them. Her horror, embarrassingly, was kept in check by the promise of food. Liquor. Rest.
“That’s good,” June said. “Well, now that we’ve dispensed with all that ugliness, let me show you where you can take a load off.”
Nine
Ruby City had a central gathering structure built, at a first glance, in the pleasingly haphazard fashion of its other major public spaces. A second look, however—and this second look, for Wes, happened as June and Curtis led the OLE group across the river and steeply uphill, to a grassy, flattop mound upon which the building perched like a porkpie hat—revealed a more surprising, even ingenious use of cast-off and repurposed materials. The outer walls, which formed a cylindrical base for a conical roof, were log columns connected by an assembled puzzle of mulled-together windows—single, double-hung, clear-paned, stained glass. Some of the windows were open, slid up or pushed out.
“We call it Town Hall,” June said, breathing easily despite the steep climb, “but it’s a bit of everything for us. Meeting space, church. Dance hall. You name it. We finished the major construction work ten years ago. It took a year, and that doesn’t count all of the time we spent making scavenging runs and stockpiling salvage.”
“What’s with the hill?” Wes asked. He sensed that there was betrayal in his interest—that his fellow hostages saw it this way—but he couldn’t help himself. He was exhausted and terrified and so hungry that even those barbecued squirrels back in town verged on tempting, but he’d be truly lost if he ever gave up his curiosity about the world. It was so central to who he was, to how he’d made his fortune. And the more he knew about the place—the more he understood—the likelier he’d be to recognize a way out when he saw one.
“It was a Cherokee mound. It would have had a roundhouse structure on it similar to this one, so we decided to base our design on that.”
“Fascinating,” Wendy Tanaka said. Her voice was brittle.
June considered Wendy. “It is, actually. The Cherokee interest me very much. I feel a kinship with them. I’d say ‘for obvious reasons,’ but I suspect that they wouldn’t be obvious to you.”
Wendy’s temple was a blue-black bruise still crusted with dried blood, so tender-looking that Wes winced an apologetic look each time his eye caught hers. She shrugged dully, apparently unmoved by June’s reproof.
“You might not be surprised to learn that nearly a quarter of the Ruby City citizens are of Cherokee descent. Most of the residents on the reservation didn’t get the zone vestments they were promised.”
“Neither did the rest of us, for that matter,” Curtis said.
“True, true,” said June. They had reached the top of the mound. The Town Hall had a beautiful, almost grand entryway: large, wooden double doors, which had been sanded and oiled to a creamy luster, flanked by sidelights of a multicolored glass mosaic. Above the doors, a transom, also in mosaic glass, spelled out “Ruby City.”
June ran her hand down the filigreed carving on one of the doors. “These came out of an Episcopal church in Asheville. I don’t like to ransack lovely old architecture, but plenty of other people are willing to, so it becomes a matter of sifting through what’s left. I hear there’s a pack of folks living at the Biltmore who’ve more or less trashed it. Pity.” She unhasped the brass latch and threw the doors open. “But we’ve all got bigger things to worry about now, of course.”
The Town Hall from outside was impressive; from inside, it stole the breath away. Wes, filing in beside Marta, craned his head left and right in wonder at the view through the many-sized windows into the river valley and the Smoky Mountain range beyond. The Little Tennessee below them gleamed silver in the strong midday light. The fall foliage rivaled the color of the intermittent panes of stained glass, which threw rainbow light on the plank floors. Beams climbed from each log post to join high above them, and from this central point dangled a large wagon wheel hung with five unlit lanterns. It was only after taking all of this in that Wes noticed, on the far end of the roundhouse, a table laden with what appeared to be some kind of food and a large, bright orange insulated water cooler—the kind you saw at football games (not that Wes ever went to football games). His throat clenched, tacky with thirst, at the sight of that cooler.