Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2) (51 page)

“Hardware don’t matter none if Fink’s still got his
grievances. We can give him all the money in the world and it won’t make no
difference as long as he has it out for us.”

“That’s no reason to go getting yourself shot,” Lokes said.

“Will. I’ve got to do this.”

“I’m going with you then,” said Toler.

“Shep,” Lokes said, grabbing him by the forearm. “You gotta
shoot somebody… don’t you miss. You coffing miss, even once, Fink and his gang
ain’t gonna return the favor. Not to mention you gonna pay me back for every
daggum bullet you waste puttin’ a hole in something that don’t bleed.
Understand?”

Toler nodded. He tethered the horses to the built-in ladder
on the side of the railcar, then took Lokes’s gun belts and donned them
himself. Weaver stood, dropping her cipher. Thin clouds of hovering sand
whispered to the ground.

Weaver and Toler emerged from behind the railcar. Squinting
against the daylight, she could make out two silhouettes on the dusty patch of
earth between them and the steel mill. One was Fink; the other was one of his
goons. Weaver suspected it was either Lally McNally or the Weasler, but she
couldn’t tell which.

“That’s a good girl,” Fink said.

Weaver considered dropping to a crouch and sandholing the
bastard where he stood. But on terrain like this, with so much dust and dirt
and pavement in the way, a gambit like that might fail. “We brought you your
money,” she said.

Fink took a step forward, blotting out the light-star behind him.
Weaver saw it was Freckles Hinderson beside him, a pink-faced redhead sporting
a fiery mohawk and sideburns. He carried a shotgun and wore a man’s
chest-baring corset over tight leather leggings which left little to the
imagination.

A skeletal smile crept onto Fink’s face. He ran a knuckle
along his bottom lip as if wiping away the remnants of his last meal. “You’re
late,” he said. “Real late.”

Weaver stood her ground. “It rained.”

“It stopped raining two days ago.”

“Yesterday, part of the city we were in.”

“That right?” He drew out the words, as if convincing himself
to believe her. “Well now. I reckon I’d better charge you a little interest.
Can’t be running low on funds every time there’s a spot of poor weather. What
kind of man would I be if I let every little act of fate put me out?”

“A reasonable one,” Weaver said.

Fink wheezed.

He was laughing, Weaver knew. Judging by the confused frown
on Toler’s face, he didn’t. The shepherd widened his stance, perhaps believing
Fink was experiencing some sort of asthmatic episode.

When Fink’s laughing spell let up, he said, “Let’s have it,
then.”

Weaver tossed him the leather pouch containing what was owed
him. Fink opened it and took a careful look inside. While his gaze was
diverted, she scanned the mill’s various rooftops and blast furnaces, looking
for members of the gang hidden within the network of scaffolding. Toler was
searching too.

Satisfied with the amount she’d given him, Fink closed the
pouch and handed it to Freckles. “Now for the interest.”

Something in the way he said it put a knot in Weaver’s
stomach. His smile was cunning now; creepy. She waited, knowing his interest
had nothing to do with hardware.

“You know what, Ms. Weaver? I always did have myself a
hankerin’ for some of that sweet pussy. Yeah-h-h. What do you say, huh? You
give me and the boys a quick round, and we’ll call it even. Who knows… Lally
might even have herself a go.”

Freckles laughed, a gaping, rotten-toothed guffaw.

He can’t be serious
, Weaver thought.
He’s trying to
make me mad—make me slip up and get myself shot
. If angry was how Fink
wanted her, he was making progress toward that end. “Sit on a cactus, Fink.”

Freckles laughed harder.

“I know you got Lokes back there, bleeding like a stuck pig
and prob’ly still fixin’ to jump out and put one in my skull. There’s only one
way out of this, Ms. Weaver, and that’s doing what I tell you. You pay up, or I
got no choice but to consider your debt unpaid.”

Weaver glanced at Toler. The shepherd had a good poker face
on, but he was struggling by the second to keep it there. At least Fink had
overestimated Lokes and thought he was ready for action. That was an advantage,
however small.

“We paid you what we owe,” Weaver said. “Now be a man of your
word and let us go.”

Fink gave her a patronizing smirk. “I didn’t reckon I’d have
to explain this to you more than once, but here’s how interest works: when
you—”

“Fight for your coffing life, Shep,” Weaver said, dropping to
one knee.

Toler Glaive was a shepherd; he buttered his bread with
desperate battles and last-ditch efforts. He knew his way around a six-gun,
sure enough. Both were blazing by the time Weaver had the sand raised again.
She threw it at Fink and his gang in a blinding gale, leaving Toler’s bullets
clear and unopposed for the split seconds it took them to get downrange.

Freckles dropped first, hands clutching sand-stung eyes,
chest and thigh stinging with magnum slugs. Fink took two bullets but didn’t go
down. He drew blind and shot wild, a revolver so long it took a second or two
to see the whole thing.
A long revolver for a long man
, Weaver thought
as she began to run out of sand. Had she been in the desert, the sandstorm she
conjured with this cipher would’ve been a marvel to behold; fierce, turbid,
extensive in duration, and near-limitless in fuel. As it stood, she was
reaching the end of her supply after only a few seconds. She could only pray
those seconds had made the difference.

Toler was running out, too. He was running out of targets.
Fink finally fell twitching with a hole in his cheek, leaving Toler to swivel
between furnace towers and the machine shop roof. There were no visible members
of Fink’s gang in the steel mill’s tangle of metal mezzanines. Though the
sandstorm had probably blinded the whole gang momentarily, it also made them
harder to spot from the ground.

“Let’s go,” Toler said, waving her forward. He jogged up and
shot Fink in the head, then picked up Fink’s long-barreled revolver and shot
Freckles with it. He tossed her Freckles’s shotgun and the pouch full of hardware,
then said, “Keep up,” and sprinted for the nearest blast furnace.

Weaver jogged after him. There was little help she could give
him now; she’d picked up every grain of sand in the area and shoved it away.
This was why she hated cities. Pavement. Concrete. Steel. It was everywhere,
and she was powerless to wield it.

They reached the base of the blast furnace and put their
backs to it, taking a moment to catch their breaths.

“How are you with those things?” Toler asked, nodding at the
shotgun.

“I stay as far away from ‘em as possible,” she admitted.
“Never had much use for ‘em.”

“Well you’ve got use for them now. I’m going to need you. How
many people in Fink’s gang?”

Weaver shrugged. “Half a dozen, last I counted. Which was a
while ago.”

“Okay, so we have no idea how many are left or where they
are. This is some shit, Jallika.”

“You sound like Will.”

“There’s one big difference between me and him: I’m not
blaming you. This isn’t your fault. It’s his, if it’s anyone’s. These bastards
aren’t going to stop hunting you as long as they live. What else can you do
with your sand powers?”

“Without any sand? Nothing,” she said. “We’re in way over our
heads.”

“That might be true, but I’m not running all the way to
Unterberg with a bunch of freaks on our heels. I don’t think you want that,
either. We’ve got to end this.”

“I’m telling you, Toler. I come up on one of them, they’ll
blow me away before I can point this coffing thing in the right direction.”

Toler frowned. “You used up all the sand around here?”

“Sent it about half a horizon thataway.”

“You sure you got everything?”

She glared at him.

Toler rapped his knuckles against the side of the blast
furnace, a thick stony sound. “These things are open at the top, you know.
Years’ worth of sandstorms have come through here and dropped their treasures
inside.”

“How am I supposed to get at it, you reckon? Climb to the top
and fall in?”

“There’ll be a way in around the other side,” Toler said. “A
tap hole or something. Don’t know how big it’ll be. You might have to squeeze
through.”

“If there’s sand in there, I’ll make it work.”

“I’ll cover you.”

Weaver pressed herself against the massive cylindrical
furnace and peered around the side. The shotgun was heavy, and she couldn’t
find a comfortable position for it. “Looks clear.”

“I’ve got you,” Toler said, touching her on the shoulder.

She turned back. “Why are you sticking your neck out for us?”

“Because Lokes was right. Without you, I’d still be in that
mall, starving to death on two broken legs. Now go.”

Toler watched the network of scaffolded walkways above them
with Fink’s long revolver poised in his hands while Weaver circled the furnace.
She kept one hand on the wall and held the shotgun under her arm, crouching as
she ran. Soon she came to an opening, a low rectangle a few feet across, with a
wide, shallow trough running out from it. She ducked inside.

Within she found signs of recent squatters, empty cartons and
frayed blankets and discarded clothing. Toler was right; her boot landed on two
inches of coarse, gritty sand. Drifts clung to the side walls, sloping like
miniature dunes, a stockpile separated from the earth by the concrete floor
below. Hers for the taking. The furnace walls soared upward, tapering toward a
round opening onto the clear sky above.

Weaver wasted no time. She leaned the shotgun against the
wall, then knelt and gathered every grain in the silo, piling it all at the
center. She could create a barrier strong enough to walk on, but not one so
strong it could stop a bullet. With Fink’s gang spread out across the towers
and rooftops, the best she could hope for was to create a visual obstruction.

Toler’s footsteps rang softly on the metal staircase outside.
What’s he doing?
she wondered with alarm.
That crazy dway don’t even
know whether I found sand in here
. She wanted to stop him, but she dare not
call out for fear of giving away their position.

A gunshot.

She rushed to the opening and looked out to see Dockerel
Trelk topple over the railing of a catwalk and tumble fifty feet to the machine
factory roof, ricocheting off a pipe on his way down. Lally McNally darted out
from behind an HVAC unit and dragged Dockerel back in her muscular arms. Toler
fired a shot, but the bullet punctured the unit’s metal frame and pinged around
harmlessly inside. Lally vanished where the roofline obstructed Weaver’s view.

Crouching, she woke the sand and sent it crawling across the
factory yard to gather in a beige staircase against the machine shop, shifting
and seething in place. Shotgun in hand, she raced for the steps, heartbeat
thumping. Toler fired another shot from above, this time toward one of the
blast furnace catwalks. Weaver heard the shot strike metal.

She hit the stairs and darted to the roof, holding the
shotgun at her hip. The moment her boots left the stairs, the sand followed
her, swirling around her feet in a great skittering maelstrom. She found Lally
behind the HVAC unit, applying pressure to Dockerel’s chest with both hands as
his blood pumped out around her fingers.

Lally looked up to find Weaver’s gun barrel in her face. “We
give up,” she said, her tone pleading. “We surrender. Please, help him. He’s
gonna die, you don’t do nothing.”

Weaver wanted nothing more than to squeeze that trigger and
watch another one of Fink’s posse fade into memory. But she’d told Toler the
truth earlier—she’d never had much use for guns. The sand was her weapon.
“Dock’s beyond my help now,” she said. “Any cipher I put on him is only gonna
delay what’s bound to happen.”

Lally flushed red. When she let up on Dock’s chest and sat back
against the unit, tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I can’t do this no more,
Jal. End it for me. End it all now, will you?”

“I ain’t gonna end nothing,” Weaver said, lowering the
shotgun. She let the swirling sand spiral to rest across the rooftop expanse.
“And neither are you. Fink’s dead. Call your folks off and let’s make peace.
Ain’t none of you got a bone to pick with me and Will can’t be solved with some
hardware and a handshake. Let’s quit playing this game and go our separate ways
as friends. Maybe not friends, but better’n enemies.”

Another gunshot, this one from the furnace towers above them.
A wounded Guy Ulrich limped along a high catwalk while Toler chased him down.

“Toler, leave off,” Weaver screamed.

The shepherd stopped to frown down at her. “What do you mean?
I’ve got him.”

“The fight’s over. We’re calling the whole thing off.”

Lally McNally stood and hollered to her cohorts, advising
them to do the same. Then she pointed at the shotgun Weaver was holding and
said, “Ain’t but one shell in that thing, you know. Freckles wasn’t even sure
it was good.” She touched her own weapon, a black handgun she’d shoved into her
waistband. “We all down to our last couple. Fink was the only one with a full
load. Once y’all got his gun, we knew we was in for it.”

“How’s that, exactly?” Weaver asked. “Y’all know where to
find good ammo at.”

“We’s dead broke, Jal. Have been for weeks. That’s how come
Fink was so testy ‘bout the money you owed him. Coffing jackass pushed his luck
too far. Always told him that. I said, ‘
One of these days, Fink, you gonna
push your luck too far
.’ Well, there you have it. Today was that day. He
figured he’d got the upper hand, no reason to give it up so easy. See what else
he could squeeze out of you ‘fore he was done.”