The dogs were named Tauntaun and Wampa—dumb names, Andy thought, but it was their handler’s doing, some kind of inside joke, and the handler, Roz, was quick-tempered and absolutely indispensable to June and so Andy kept his thoughts about the names to himself. The dogs themselves were magnificent mongrels, littermates, both male: at least forty kilos apiece, brindled coats, big square skulls and powerful jaws, strangely long ears that hung around the dogs’ block faces, making them look a bit like they were wearing women’s wigs. Roz was more trainer than breeder, June had explained to Andy long ago (Roz explained herself to no one but June), but she kept about a dozen dogs, knew all of the neighborhood dogs, and was always on the lookout for what she called hill curs—muddy-colored dogs with muddled pedigrees, tick-resistant, feral but not too wild. Coaxable. She mated the dogs by instinct and whim rather than system, kept the pups she thought she could work with, gave away the ones she couldn’t, drowned the rest. (June had laughed when this disclosure made Andy flinch. “You really are a Zoner, aren’t you? God love you.”) Those she kept she raised up to whatever seemed to be their strength, for there was ever a need in Ruby City for good trained dogs, hunting dogs especially but also guard dogs, herding dogs, and even service dogs, of a sort; after all, blind children out here stayed blind, and if you were lucky enough to get old out-of-zone, you did it without the benefit of laser surgeries and retinal reattachments and even corrective lenses, unless you could get your hands on an old scavenged pair of glasses or something smuggled from in-zone.
The one or two dogs—never more than two—who struck Roz as most versatile in their intelligence, steady, loyal, hale: these she called the princes (whether male or female), and she kept them by her side at all times. When Andy first came to Ruby City eleven years ago, there had been a different prince—Leto, that one was called—a tall, spindle-legged dog with shaggy gray fur and the narrow haunches of a greyhound. Leto had been regal, aloof. Tolerated petting, but didn’t seem to enjoy it. Tauntaun and Wampa, when they weren’t at work, were sweet, loving dogs, kissers, playful as pups. Woolers, June called them. “Look at ’em woolin’,” she’d say, smiling her serene smile down at the dogs wriggling on their backs in a patch of hot sunlight, chortling, rolling each other.
At work now—a condition signaled to them by the leather collars Roz had buckled around their necks—Tauntaun and Wampa trotted seriously through the underbrush, Tauntaun ahead, off-lead, Wampa leashed by a six-meter rope tied off around Roz’s thick waist. Her tracking process was another thing Roz didn’t deign to explain to Andy—but he could gather the basics from watching her. Tauntaun went ahead, sometimes even out of sight, zigging and zagging, nose to the earth. When he caught the scent, he barked, and Wampa answered, lunging forward, slowing reluctantly at a yank on his lead and an unintelligible correction from Roz, then dipping his nose, too, to the ground. The dogs would reunite, sniff each other. Then Roz would cast off again by making some noise from the back of her throat, and Tauntaun became a brown blur, a smudge in the woods ahead.
The morning air was gray. Opaque. That it was morning, and they had only been on the trail for two hours, frustrated Andy—but Roz refused to set out at night, said she was too old and fat to go off gallivanting into the woods during a turd floater, couldn’t even see your own hand in front of your face. What do you want, for me to break my neck? And Andy knew it would be useless to try to track Tia without the dogs. So he agreed to wait. He went to his cot in the bunkhouse, lay back with his boots still on, and looked at the plank ceiling while the cookout revelry continued out by the river, most of Ruby City’s residents oblivious to the tragedy that had just occurred uphill from where they shoveled in plates of barbecue and gulped glasses of foamy beer. June’s call. “I’m not laying that news at the feet of a bunch of happy drunks,” she said. “They’ll go after the hostages, and I’m not sure if even I could stop them. Let’s see if we can bring them some good news first.”
Bring them Tia is what she meant. For what purpose, Andy couldn’t say. He had lived a double life for almost a decade, but it wasn’t a life split neatly into halves. Most of the eleven years, for him, transpired in-zone. And even in his time spent on OLE tours, he could only escape to Ruby City for brief visits, after lights-out, stealing hours from time he was supposed to be sleeping, leading his groups on hikes and hunts the next day in a drowsy fog. A wonder that he had never shot himself in the foot or walked off a cliff. He knew Ruby City less from firsthand experience than he did from encrypted electronic correspondence with its residents and his memories of that three-month-long stay eleven years ago, when June had brought him here, shown him her world and, in so doing, showed him his world back home—the horrendous lie of it. And then she had shown him his purpose. He’d had no regrets. Not even with the sacrifices. But still, he knew only in the abstract what justice looked like in Ruby City, and as furious as he was at Tia, as grief-stricken as he was at the senseless deaths of Leeda and Miles, he didn’t relish the idea of leading Tia to the gallows, or whatever fate Ruby citizens reserved for those who murdered one of their own.
I’m knocked up, Tia had said to him just before boot camp for this excursion had begun. He couldn’t stop remembering her words, the look on her face. The desperation in her eyes that she’d hidden, as she always did, behind a defiant bravado. I might be off my game. And what he could see now, flat on his back on this cot, was that Tia had wanted to be talked out of going on the excursion or even tattled on. OLE had a policy against sending pregnant women, guides or paying customers, on excursions. Liability was too high. Andy could have gone to Larry Abrams, excursion director, and let Tia’s secret slip. She might have been fired for noncompliance, or she might have been moved to an office job at a quarter of her regular salary, but she would have been safe. Why hadn’t he done that? Some screwed-up sense of loyalty? Maybe. He hadn’t wanted to betray her, even to help her. Distraction? That, too. What had popped in his head at her confession was, Great. Of course. His silent work all these years, never really knowing if, or when, his time would come—it had all led up to this trip, and so of course it was just his damn luck that Tia would come up pregnant, that Tia, whom he’d regarded, always, as a real friend—as real a friend as a man whose entire life was a fabrication could hope to make—would be assigned to this excursion at all.