Ma Rickets is waiting for us on the porch when I drag the Beast to a halt on the crumbled asphalt in front of the diner. She’s got one arm crossed over her chest, the other propped against it as she drags, long and hard, on a hand-rolled cigarette. She don’t move as I swing out of the Beast, covered in blood and ash. Don’t blink when the kid joins me. But when I pop the trunk on Ratta, she makes a small, sharp, hissing sound and stubs the cigarette out against the wall.
One ear of her bunny slippers flops back and forth as she strides over, scrawny legs eating up the ground. I step aside, give her room. She puts one hand on the door to the hatch and the other on her hip, leaning over Ratta with her nose wrinkled up tight. Ratta hasn’t moved or said a word since we passed the nopales, but her chest is rising and falling. Slowly.
“What happened?” Ma Rickets asks.
I shrug. “Gut shot.”
Ma Rickets spears me with her glare, leaning away from the Beast to stare up at the unctuous smoke smearing the stark blue sky. “Speak truth, Riley.”
“Mercs working for an escaped Pac-At operative hit her camp. Burned the fields. Went for the water.”
“They dead?”
“All except the operative.”
“Why?”
“Couldn’t find her.”
Ma Rickets chews that over a long moment, and under her glare I want to shift my weight, to explain myself, but I put a lid on the urge, stare back at her. Let her see the blood and soot and ash covering me like a thin cocoon.
“Bring her here,” she says.
Ratta makes a small sound as I pick her up, carry her wedding-style across the threshold into the diner. My stomach rumbles at the scents of frying meat and black pepper, mingling with the sweeter smells of sticky syrup and pancake batter. Saliva fills my mouth and I swallow it back, following Ma Rickets to the center of the dining room. The hypnotizing smells have hooked more than me. The augments take a lot out of you, and the kid’s shifting her weight, darting guilty glances at the kitchen.
Ratta first. Ma Rickets sweeps a long table clean with the back of her arm, dropping jam packets and plastic salt and pepper shakers to the ground. She jabs one insistent finger at the table, and I lay Ratta out, stepping aside as soon as the woman’s out of my arms. Ma Rickets hovers over her like the vultures that dog my heels. Her shadow makes Ratta’s skin grey.
“Kid,” she says without looking up. “You know how to boil water?”
The kid squirms, twists her gloved fingers together. She don’t. It’s not the kind of thing we get taught.
“I’ll show her.”
Ma Rickets snorts, grabs kitchen shears from her apron pocket, and hesitates. “Grab some grain alcohol while you’re back there.”
Right. Ratta wouldn’t have the augments to keep her clear of infection. For all I know, I killed her by tossing her in the Beast’s dirty hatch. But she was dead anyway, so I figure it don’t matter too much.
“Crank the burner up to high and put a pot full of water on. Tap’s over there,” I tell Omega.
She’s quick, I’ll give her that. She flies around that kitchen with the same ease she had the battlefield, getting multiple pots of water going, just in case. Ma Rickets is going to be pissed about the extra gas expenditure, though, so I tell her to leave it to one burner for now, and grab a jar full of clear, nostril-singeing fluid.
Ma Rickets is deep in her work when I come out, doesn’t even look up as I set the jar down next to her and pop the lid. She’s magicked up a first-aid kit from somewhere, but it’s like none I’ve ever seen. The supplies aren’t amateur, for one. There’s a wide variety of all the instruments one might need to treat a bullet wound, including some forceps to pull the bullet out. Not the kind of stuff that comes standard in a kitchen kit.
She senses me hovering and grunts. “Is it worth the breath to tell you to forget you saw this?”
“Naw,” I drawl, folding my arms as she peers up at me from her work. A little bit of blood has spattered her cheek, bright red against her dark skin. “And I’m sorry I brought her to you. Couldn’t think where else to go.”
She sniffs and turns back to the wound, yanks the bullet out, and nods to herself as it clinks into a stainless steel tray shaped like a kidney. “Those idiots at the camp wouldn’t know a bullet from a gallstone. You did right. Now get out of my way, I’ll holler if I need you.” She chews her lip. “Send me the kid.”
That’s fine by me. I send the kid in and go to the busted-up patio in front of the diner, settling myself onto one of the rusted bistro chairs Ma Rickets keeps out front. No one actually eats out here, but it gives me a clear view of the road out Pesco Ridge way, so I can see the thin plume of dust rise up like an omen and drift toward me. By the time the Boulder Boys arrive with the woman and a few other of Ratta’s crew, I’m bored half to tears waiting. But I can’t risk leaving, not yet. Alpha might decide to come for Omega, and I need to be there when she does.
“She’s living,” I say when Right-Boulder comes up to me, and jerk my head toward the door. “Ma Rickets is seeing to her. I wouldn’t interrupt, if I were you.”
His desire to check on Ratta crashes face-first into his fear of angering the dragon of the badlands and it almost makes me laugh, how twisted up his face gets, but that soon passes as the door swings open and Ma Rickets rolls on out, wiping her bloodied hands off on her apron.
“Ratta will make it,” she announces. I’ve never seen so much relief on so many faces. Hope’s usually not my business. “And y’all can go in to see her, but don’t try to wake her up for fuck’s sake.”
They’re damn near bowing, bent over so far their heads are on their knees, as they wriggle around Ma Rickets to get inside the diner. I’m quiet while Ma Rickets finishes wiping off her hands. She pulls a cigarette from her apron pocket, same pocket she took the kitchen shears from, and sparks it up with a dented lighter.
After a long drag, she drops the lighter back in her pocket. Without looking at me, she says, “You and me, we gotta talk.”
An emotion I’m not familiar with jumps inside of me. It’s not fear—I know that one, even if we’re not all that well acquainted—but something closer to anticipation. Like I’m standing with my back to a cliff, and Ma Rickets is gearing up to give me a shove.
“Then talk,” I say.
She cranes her head around to me and I shrivel in my seat. “Follow.”
I follow, leaving the kid with the Boulder Boys, because even they aren’t thick enough to kidnap a kid out of Ma Rickets’s domain.