“Not sure I can take any more brilliance today.” A snowflake drifted sideways to land on my cheek, then another landed on my forehead, melted, and dripped into the blond hair at my temple.
“I think this sleet is going to turn to snow. Winter looks like it won this last battle.” Ruck bobbed his head as if to reassure me that this was true.
“Your brilliance is too much. You should’ve held back.” I stepped a few feet to the side, out of the way of any drifting snow, as I realized the hole had grown larger. The dry spot where we kept our stash—our jar, at the moment—had shrunk. “Relocating the supplies is going to be rough. I’m not sure where we’re going to be able to find a whole foot of space and forget about how long it’s going to take.”
Ruck let out a laugh as he looked upward, and a sliver of light broke through the clouds, aiming for his head and turning a slice of his hair almost red. “What if we repaired that and then aged it somehow?”
We’d had this conversation so many times, but I understood. I also didn’t relent. “We’ve tried that before. Repairs put a target on our back.”
“But there hasn’t been trouble in these parts since—”
“Since a day after the last time we tried to repair something.” We’d been so happy with ourselves, too, right until a raiding group from Cliffside had stormed our home and taken everything we had stored up for the winter. I’d been so afraid of a Wyrd Blood in their group that I’d hidden in the forest for days, unable to even defend what was ours. I hadn’t been alone. We were too young and few in numbers to do much defending.
Some of us hadn’t made it to spring that year. We found a new building to call home the day after we came back. I’d made everyone swear, no matter what, to never repair another door, window, or wall. We’d be the invisible ones.
Ruck had agreed and regretted it shortly after, but it was a promise I was holding him to for his own good, no matter how he tried to wriggle out of it.
“Maybe if we grew our crew larger?” He kicked the ground, pent-up frustration trying to find an outlet.
“We can’t get past the growing pains and you know it.” That was what it was called when a crew started getting big, but not big enough, quick enough. It had a name because everyone had seen it over and over again. A small crew no one paid attention to, started getting big enough that if it continued to grow, it might become a threat that needed to be squashed. Next thing that happened was the entire crew was massacred in the night.
There was one way to survive. You stayed small enough that no one cared about you, and you occasionally took your lumps. Maybe your stash got wiped out here and there, but you were alive to rebuild.
“Why are you talking like this? We’ve got it good here.” This wasn’t what me and Ruck did. We made a joke of everything. The worse things got, the more we joked about them. That was how you got by when times were bad. If you moped about, you were a goner.
And of all the people in our crew, he was my person. I could lose the others, but not Ruck.
I always thought you could judge a relationship either sideways or vertically. You either knew someone well because you’d been moving along on the timeline with them forever, or because you’d been in such deep shit with them you got blasted with who they were. With Ruck, it was both.
The normal over-the-top tenor of his voice dropped to a soft whisper. “Don’t you ever get tired of being hungry?”
He looked at me, and I saw the young boy I’d met over a decade ago, the one who’d still tear up when he talked about his lost family.
My voice dropped to match his. “There’s things a lot worse than being hungry and cold.”
“How about death? Where’s that rank for you?”
“We won’t die.”
Ruck walked over to a dry patch of wall and slouched against it, shaggy hair falling over his left eye. “I heard there was another raid down the coast at that little upstart. Word is, they were looking for Wyrd Blood.”
“I know. I heard, too.” Actually, we’d heard at the same time, but he knew that. He was reminding me of something I already couldn’t beat out of my head. I found my own patch of wall to lean on. At least I knew what we were discussing now, and it wasn’t the hole in the ceiling.
“We’re weak like this. Too weak. If we grew…”
If we grew, he thought he could help me if they found me. He couldn’t. No one could. There were too many of them. One lord died and another swooped in to fill the vacuum, usually worse than the one before him.
“I’m not going to get caught.”
“You aren’t on your game right now, and don’t tell me I’m wrong. I know you.”
“I’m fine.” I took a step toward the door, looking to end this conversation any way I had to.
“That’s it? We do what we’ve been doing and hope your luck holds?” Ruck said behind me.
“Yes. That’s what we do, because it’s the only sane option.”
I heard someone running up the steps toward us. It was only one set of footsteps, so I knew it wasn’t a raid.
Sinsy burst into the room seconds later. “A chugger’s been spotted!” She bent forward, resting her hands on her legs, her breathing rough.
A chugger. The countries had started trading again. I looked at the hollyhoney and then to Ruck, who was doing the same thing and smiling.
“How far? Which lookout spotted it?” My hand went to my waist, my fingers finding comfort on the hilt. We didn’t often get this much warning.
“The Greenies.”
The Greenies crew were a good twenty miles out, and another small outfit like us. It gave us a good lead, and the tip was well worth the fifteen percent cut of the goods we’d hand over to them.
“How quickly did you catch the signal?” I asked as we all moved in unison. I had to get my bow.
“We caught it quick and replied. Unless they had someone watching, we should be good.”
Replying quickly was key. The Greenies didn’t like to do their own dirty work, and would signal other crews until they got one that responded. Even though the flash of lights they sent were coded for each crew, other crews had been known to scour the area after they saw a signal not meant for them. If they lucked out and looked in the right direction, it meant we might have company when we hijacked a chugger. It had happened enough times in the past.
“Gather the gang. We leave in five.” We had the location. Now it all came down to time. We had to get there first.
Chapter 5
The soft sputtering of a chugger broke the silence of the evening. The chuggers had one purpose: transport goods from one country to another. It had taken twenty years after the worst of the war before any of the countries had started to trade, and it could stop at any moment.
I squinted as I watched the mechanical monster heading toward us. The large black wheels were the first to show as it traveled through the light covering of snow. The hustler’s moon above lit the landscape with its full shine, making it look much more majestic than it felt as the harsh reality of the wind burned the exposed skin of my cheeks. It had taken so long for the chugger to show that I’d begun to doubt the information we’d gotten.
Ruck and I were kneeling behind some brush on a small hill. Marra, Sinsy, and Fetch were stationed on the other side, so if things went south, we had a better chance of some of us surviving. Tiger had pulled the short stick and gotten stuck watching the home front.
Ruck turned his attention away from the road and to me. “The chugger’s coming.”
“I, too, have eyes,” I said, stealing his thunder with my statement of the obvious.
“If we don’t get this one, there might not be another for a while.”