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Available January 2018
CHAPTER ONE
After spending the last four days of her life hiding out from a deadly solar particle storm in an underground bunker, trapped inside with six treacherous women and a trio of girl assassins, it would be terribly ironic if Scout Shannon died now, plunging headlong into a ditch, because she had never learned to drive.
But Scout wasn’t in a place to appreciate that irony. Not with the front end of the massive rover tipping dizzyingly down into the ravine despite her pushing, pulling, and stomping on every control she could find. She had nothing in her stomach except an excess coffee, but even that was threatening to come back again, the bitterness washing up against her back teeth in spite of her best attempts to swallow it back down. Her hands were so slick with sweat they slipped over the control yoke. She hooked her forearms through it and pulled back as hard as she could, mentally begging for the rover to reverse away from the cliff already.
She wasn’t even sure that was the right thing to do.
The rover hung for a moment, teetering back and forth on the edge of the ravine. She could see loose rocks bounding down past her on either side, first a few bouncing and skittering randomly but then more, like a wave. Entire sheets of gravel were sliding off the hillside to plunge down into the ravine. It was a surreal sight, like the hill was melting, rock like hot wax pouring over jutting boulders and past scrubby trees whose tenacious roots clung stubbornly to the rock face.
Years of sheering winds had twisted the trunks of those little trees into knobby, spiraling shapes that branched off at random. Now those branches shook like the bony arms of ghosts attempting to scare this new disaster away but never succumb to it. Scout wasn’t sure whether she found those defiant trees frightening or comforting. It would, she decided, largely depend on whether she, like the trees, stayed firm or if she was washed away in the tidal wave of loose topsoil.
The two dogs in the rover’s cockpit with Scout were barking like mad. The movement of the rover wasn’t what was bothering them—they had started barking a moment before Scout had lurched over the unseen obstruction in the trail and lost control of the vehicle—although the rocking was tossing them about ruthlessly. Scout was belted into the driver’s seat, but the two dogs were trying desperately to hold themselves still even as they kept barking, heads tipped back as if they were addressing their warning to the sky at large.
Gert, a dark-haired mix of unknown dog breeds, was more or less wedged between the passenger seat and the front console of the rover. Her large head repeatedly impacted against the hard edge of the console but she didn’t wince or even seem to notice. The rat terrier, named Shadow despite his mainly white coloring, was smaller and nearly went tumbling back into the main body of the rover. Scout had to take a hand off the yoke to catch him by the collar before he went flying down the steps. He yelped briefly in surprise but then resumed his anxious barking.
What had set them off in the first place? Scout didn’t have a clue. She tucked the little dog close against her stomach and got her hand back on the yoke, not that there was anything she could do now with none of the rover’s treads actually on the ground.
Besides make things worse. She could usually find a way to manage that.
The rover was still rocking back and forth, the long drop to the bottom of the ravine dipping in and out of view in front of her. The landslide of rocks around her was unceasing. If the rover tipped either way, if its treads touched down on that moving surface, would she be carried away like driftwood on the tide?
No, surely the rover, built to comfortably house a group of four researchers on a long-term expedition, was too heavy to be dislodged so easily.
Still, there was more going on here than her lousy driving. They had hit something, or something had hit them. Had the dogs been barking even before then? Scout wasn’t sure. Her memory of the two events overlapped and refused to settle into a definable sequence.
The teetering slowed, then the rover balanced for a moment at an untenable forty-five-degree angle before settling back on its rear treads. Scout made extra certain she had the engine in reverse before slowly easing her foot down on the pedal. The rover rolled back away from the edge. When the windscreen no longer showed even a hint of the plummet to her death that had been in store for her a moment before, she braked the rover and killed the engine.
Scout slumped over the yoke, trembling all over. She wasn’t nearly recovered enough after the events of the last four days for such stresses. She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, but despite the terror still making her heart pound, no tears came. She was too exhausted for more emotions, apparently.
Once her heart had slowed, she pulled her hands from her face and looked to her dogs. Gert had stopped her frighteningly deep barks, those low rumbles that made her seem particularly hellhoundish. Shadow was still barking now and again, but with the air of a guardian unsure if the danger was really past. Scout put a comforting hand on his head and he gave one last halfhearted woof before settling down onto her lap.
Poor fellow. As bad as those days underground had been for her, they had come far too close to killing Shadow. Scout picked him up in her arms and carried him down to the back of the rover where the stacks of bunks were. She laid him at the foot of the bottom bunk and he curled up on the faded quilt there, turning round and round before finally settling down and tucking his nose under his own paw.
Gert, standing at Scout’s heels, made an inquiring sound. From the head of the bed the cat Tubbins made an equally inquisitive mew and Gert, her worry over Shadow now completely forgotten, tried to leap past Scout to get at the cat she had nearly killed days before. Scout stopped her with a well-placed knee.
“Come on, Gert,” she said, catching the dog’s collar until she had her attention. Gert was twice Shadow’s size but really still a puppy. When she was growling that fearsome growl it was easy to forget how young and innocent she was, but when she looked up at Scout like she was doing now with those warm brown eyes it was hard to remember she was ever anything but cute and harmless.
Scout pressed the button that caused the door to emerge from its recess, creating a little square of space between the dining nook and the bunks. It rolled out about half a meter, then the door swung open, letting in the full blaze of the midmorning sun.
Scout started sweating at once, and she wasn’t even outside yet. But, hot as the air was, she stopped first to pull on the new long-sleeved sun-protective shirt she had found when scrounging for usable items back in Viola’s compound before she had blown the explosives that had blocked all the ways out, the closest she could get to giving those she had left behind a proper burial. The shirt fell midway down her thighs, barely past her cargo shorts, but she smeared sunscreen on her bare calves. She settled her father’s battered old bush hat on her head before leaping down to the ground. Gert jumped down after her, less than gracefully but unbothered by her hard landing.
Scout looked up the slope of the hill behind the rover. What had been old, fractured rock covered with loose grit and sparse crabgrass was now just bare, somewhat more fractured rock. Like someone had swept the ground smooth. Everything remotely loose was all at the bottom of the ravine now.
There was no way she had done all that damage with the rover. And after backtracking a ways along the trail she had been following and finding no obstruction, Scout was beginning to doubt she had hit anything either.
Something had made her lurch, lurch hard and nearly tumble over the cliff. And it had shaken everything around them loose, hard enough to make it all fall away in a sheet. What could do such a thing?
Scout had heard of earthquakes. The southeastern cities on the ocean sometimes reported them. She had never experienced one herself; no one had, not this far north and west. The land was flat here, nothing but prairie all the way to the horizon, split down the middle by the narrow spine of hills she had just been crossing.
Had she just experienced an earthquake?
Then a second thought hit her, sending a chill rippling over her skin despite the already stifling heat of the day. Was it going to happen again?
Scout whistled for Gert and then climbed back into the rover. Just in case, she’d rather be back out on the flat prairie on the far side of the hills as soon as possible. If that was an earthquake, there might be others, and she’d rather be out in the flat grasslands when it struck.
Besides, she had a destination to reach. More than that, she had a mission. And her clock was ticking.
Liam McGillicuddy, the galactic marshal she had been trading messages with, was coming to meet her in three days. His partner, Gertrude Bauer, had died during the solar storm, but she had saved Scout’s life before losing her own. Scout was taking care of all of Gertrude’s things, her gun and badge but also other assorted equipment all attached to a belt Scout wore around her own hips now. She was sure Liam was coming to get it all back; it seemed too valuable not to recover. Some other galactic marshal would probably be carrying all of it soon.
But perhaps Liam himself was coming not just to get the belt but also to meet the girl his partner had died for. And Scout would introduce him to the dog she had named in Gertrude’s honor.
Scout didn’t know why he was coming in person, or what he intended to do, or what she should expect. She had written him a long message telling him everything that had happened since she had met his partner out on a hillside the moment before the solar storm had started. She had reported every poisoning, stabbing, and accidental death that had gone down over the last four days.
His response had been terse: just a set of coordinates and the words MEET ME.
Scout didn’t know what that meant or why he couldn’t say more. But his prior exchanges with Gertrude said he was not a terse man. There had to be a reason.
Scout had spent the days after Gertrude’s death, the days she was still trapped underground by the ongoing coronal mass ejection event bathing the surface of her planet with deadly solar particles, researching Gertrude’s last mission, the one she had left uncompleted. It had not been an official mission. Technically, she had been on a long-overdue vacation. In reality, she had been chasing down a man that she had caught once before but who had later gone free on a technicality.
Gertrude had known he was guilty; her own grandmother was among those he had conned and left destitute on a forgotten world even harsher than Scout’s home world of Amatheon. So Gertrude had taken a leave of absence to chase him. Scout got the sense that her boss had pretended not to know what she was really up to. She doubted he would be able to do the same for Liam if he tried to finish what Gertrude had started. Two galactic marshals using their vacation time to pursue the same personal vendetta was probably the sort of thing that would get a boss in trouble from the bigger boss, Scout guessed. Maybe that was why his reply had been so short. His boss might be reading his messages, to be sure he didn’t break any rules.
But Scout could. She could find the con man in the next three days and drag him to where Liam was going to land his ship to meet her. Gertrude had accumulated more evidence; it was all on the tablet in a pouch on the belt. That evidence plus the recaptured culprit—Scout didn’t know anything about galactic law, but surely that would be enough.
She knew all the steps to take to find this man and bring him to Liam. She was less sure what to do with the two data disks hidden deep in her front pocket. She couldn’t read them herself, but she knew they contained information that the Planet Dwellers wanted, the Space Farers had proved they would kill for, and the rebellion that lurked in the hills had attempted to secure for their own uses.
Scout didn’t know which of the three she could trust. She was pretty sure it was none of the above. For now, she kept the secrets others had died for safe in her pocket where she could always feel them pressing into her thigh. Maybe she could ask Liam what she should do.
If he turned out to be trustworthy. Scout couldn’t be sure until she met him.
Scout looked down at the navigation screen, then got the rover rolling again in the direction of the flashing dot. Prairie Springs. Nothing more than an unremarkable little town in the middle of the grasslands. She had visited on a few occasions before, she seemed to remember, but she was only heading that way because it was the closest town to the hidden compound where she had waited out the storm.
But she also knew Ruby, the woman who ran the public house in this town, and Ruby had access to the network run by all the public houses in all the towns. If anyone had seen her quarry, that network would know and could point her in the right direction.
Scout sat back in her seat, starting to relax now that the trail was flattening out and the grass around her was changing from the stunted, scrubby tufts of the hill country to the tall, waving stalks of the prairie. She wanted justice for Gertrude, but that wasn’t the only reason she was going to find this guy. She also kind of hoped that if she showed up to the rendezvous with the fugitive in tow, Liam might be impressed with her skill and gumption, and he might be just a little more inclined to finish that other thing Gertrude had left undone.
Gertrude had promised to take Scout off this world, to show her the galaxy. And now the thought that had never entered her mind before four days ago was her entire focus. She had to leave this place. And finding this man, this Farlane McFarlane, was her key.
CHAPTER TWO
The sun was approaching its zenith when Prairie Springs finally came into view. Scout could just make out the roof of the public house—the tallest building in most towns—over the nodding heads of the tall grasses making a golden tunnel over the narrow trail. On her bike she’d be almost completely enclosed by the grasses, but in the rover she was higher, the tops of the grain still below even the level of her feet. Scout wasn’t used to this perspective, but she judged she had a few minutes yet before she reached her destination.
Her stomach growled, frustrated at the all-coffee diet she had been subsisting on since before dawn. But Shadow had come up the steps some time ago to curl up on her lap and she didn’t want to wake him. She looked around the driver’s seat. The rover’s prior owners, the Planet Dweller Ottilie and her Space Farer companion Ebba, had lived in this vehicle full time, always on the move. Surely they had stashed some food up here in the cockpit?
Scout found a little compartment under the console just to the left of her left knee and tapped it open. Sure enough: protein bars. Scout took one and tore off the label without glancing at it. The different flavors were beyond her palate’s ability to discern anyway. She took a large bite of the bar and tried not to involve her tongue much as she chewed it. The food was technically nonperishable, but in her lifelong experience, every bar tasted like dust anyway.
Amatheon was in a perpetual state of being one good harvest away from real bounty. Even Scout, young and mostly uneducated as she was, knew that it was odd for an agricultural planet to import most of its food from other parts of the galaxy. Years of listening to grown-ups debate politics had yet to give her any answers as to why this was still the situation after more than a century of colonization. She doubted she would ever understand it.
But it didn’t really matter. Whatever it took, when Liam landed at the meeting point in three days, she was going to convince him to take her away from here. This had stopped being her home the day her parents and baby brother died. All the years in between had been just her waiting to go.
And she was so ready to go. She didn’t really belong to any particular place anymore. She had been born under the dome of a city, but that city was gone now. Obliterated. Nothing remained save a crater the prairie grass had not yet reclaimed. She had been just a kid when it still stood but she still remembered the gleaming whiteness of the city, the prefabricated buildings dropped from space and assembled on the surface. Like a child’s building blocks, they had only come in a few basic shapes but could be combined in infinite varieties. Cities had wide boulevards with fountains and overflowing planters, long straight roads lined with businesses grouped into districts, and endless twisting alleyways full of surprises both wonderful and otherwise.
But towns on Amatheon weren’t simply small versions of cities. They had never been part of the prefabricated colonization plans. They had sprung up wherever people had gotten sick of life under the domes. Everything about the towns was different from the cities, starting with the fact that they were open to the world around them. Cities were accessible only through a small number of highly controlled gates. Towns, on the other hand, usually had a wall like Prairie Springs had to separate farmland from town and to keep the wind from filling the town with clouds of dust and wheat chaff. But in Prairie Springs, rather than a gate, there was a gateway, nothing more than an opening in the wall with no door and no guard.
The gate into Prairie Springs was too narrow for the rover, so Scout pulled off the road to park out of the way against the wall. Gert sleeping at her feet made it difficult to work the pedals, but she managed a respectably neat stop before killing the engine. The sudden loss of the engine’s hum was almost deafening and woke both the dogs.
Shadow yawned with a squeak, then hopped off Scout’s lap to stretch himself out. He had gotten a bit thinner over the last few days, but the muscles under his white fur were as tight as ever. He looked up at her, his dark eyes peering out of the bandit mask pattern of the black spot covering his head. Then he ran down the stairs to the back of the rover. Gert followed, the white tip at the very end of her tail a blur, the entire back half of her sleek black body wiggling back and forth as it powered that thumping wag.
“You guys are going to stay here,” she said to the dogs, who had both started jumping excitedly the moment she put on the old bush hat. Shadow sat down, his posture straight and formal. He knew what she meant. Gert just kept wagging her tail. It thumped so loudly against the leg of the kitchen table it must be hurting her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She looked up at Scout as if she really wished she knew what Scout meant.
Scout sighed. She needed to make training this dog a priority. “Sit, Gert,” she said. Shadow stiffened his already perfect sitting form, but Gert missed the hint. “Never mind,” Scout said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
She went over to the bunk beds built into the back of the rover and leaned into the bottom one. “Hello, Tubbins,” Scout said. The cat gave a soft mew. Scout gathered him up, pillow and all, and put him gently inside an empty plastic crate. She tapped the opening mechanism on the door with her elbow, keeping Gert back with her knee as the dog tried to get a better look at the cat in the crate in her arms. The cat hissed his displeasure. The two were most decidedly not friends.
“Down, Gert,” Scout said. As soon as the door was open wide enough, she stepped out, dropping to the ground nearly a meter below. She turned back to the rover. “Stay, dogs,” she commanded, then jabbed the mechanism to shut the door. Shadow remained as he was at formal attention, but Gert stood at the edge of the rover with her head out the door until the closing metal hatch finally forced her to step back.
Her eyes on Scout’s were full of abandoned hurt, then the hatch clicked shut.
Crate in arms, Scout walked through the gate into the town proper. Prairie Springs had grown since she had been here last, new homes built from prefabricated panels crowding into the spaces between the older homes built from repurposed storage containers. The Space Farer logo that had once adorned the containers had mostly been scrubbed away, but a few faded stylized rockets remained.
If things kept going like they had been, there would be a renewed zest among the Planet Farers for removing those soon. Scout hoped to be gone long before that point. She had seen enough Planet Dweller–versus–Space Farer conflict in the last four days to last her a lifetime.
When she reached the public house in the center of town, she saw that the massive doors angled into the ground on both sides of the base of the building had been thrown open wide to let air pass through. Scout could imagine that after four days of all of the townspeople huddling together down there to wait out the solar storm it needed a good airing out.
A group of children streamed in and out of the open doors that led underground, carrying out old laundry and empty containers and bringing in canisters filled with water and food from the back of the public house. It used to be that the coronal mass ejection events only reached the surface during rare, powerful storms, every year or so. Now they were happening more and more often. They lasted longer and were more powerful, too intense to risk being caught out of doors as Scout so nearly had.
This planet was scarcely habitable anymore, particularly not for a nomad like Scout. She couldn’t wait to leave it behind.
Scout climbed the steps to the public house, pausing in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the dark interior. A public house was always dark compared to the bright sun outside; having once been a separate compartment of the spaceship that had brought the first settlers to Amatheon, it had no windows. After the cities had been established, the empty compartments were dropped from orbit, scattered in a network around the cities to house the early explorers when they ventured out from under the domes. The satellites that created the protective shield against radiation hadn’t been completed in those days and it was crucial that the explorers always had a shelter close at hand in case of solar storms.
After the days of the explorers, the compartments had briefly been supply depots, little used and in danger of being forgotten entirely. But just in the last few decades there had been a movement—nothing organized, just a general dissatisfaction with city life that led to more and more people living outside of the domes. The public houses with their ability to protect from coronal mass ejection events were the obvious choice for shelter.
Now the towns had largely outgrown that confined space, spreading out into separate buildings, but the structure that no longer actually housed the public was still the center of town life. Now they were part meeting place, part general store, and part bar. Scout’s work delivering packages on her bike had largely been between such public houses. The proprietors maintained a communication network so shortages in one community could be alleviated by supplies from another.
But they also used them for gossip.
“Can I help you?” a woman asked.
Scout’s sun-dazzled eyes took a moment to pick out the speaker, a woman with massive arms and red hair pulled into something between a ponytail and a bun. She was the proprietor, Ruby Collins. She had also once been one of Scout’s mother’s closest friends, back before she died.
“Hey,” Scout said, stepping up to set the crate on the counter.
Ruby peered at her suspiciously for a moment before her eyes lit up with recognition. “As I live and breathe, Scout Shannon!” she exclaimed. “I almost didn’t recognize you. I thought someone had stolen your father’s hat!”
“It’s been a few years,” Scout admitted.
“More than that,” Ruby said, coming around the counter to gather Scout up in a stifling hug. “You’re shooting up like a weed.” She released Scout from the hug but grasped both of Scout’s arms to hold her still as she looked right into Scout’s eyes. “You’re older in lots of ways, I reckon. You weather this last storm okay?”
“Well enough,” Scout said. “I sheltered with some strangers with political issues they took out on each other.”
“Sounds miserable,” Ruby said, then tapped the crate. “What’s this?”
“Just a cat that fell into my care. I can’t keep him, of course. The dogs are more than enough work. I have two now. I was hoping you might know someone who’d take him? He’s old but healthy. Goes by the name Tubbins.”
“Hello, Tubbins,” Ruby said, reaching into the crate to pull out the large orange cat. Tubbins was purring loudly. She turned him around in her hands to look into his yellow eyes. “I reckon I can take him. Could stand the company. It gets too quiet here at night now that the kids have grown.”
“Thanks,” Scout said. That was one responsibility she could check off her list.
“How much you want for him?” Ruby asked.
“He’s not mine to sell,” Scout said. “But I was hoping you could help me with another thing.”
“Surely,” Ruby said, cradling the cat in her arms and scratching all around his ears. Tubbins purred in perfect bliss.
Scout took the tablet off her belt and set it on the counter, then pulled a single round reflective lens out of her pocket and placed it over her left eye. She closed her right eye as she tapped her way through the tablet’s menus. Ruby was frowning slightly as she watched. From what she could see, Scout was tapping away at a blank gray slab.
Scout found the photograph she was searching for and turned the tablet to face Ruby. She plucked the lens from where it had adhered to her face and held it out for Ruby.
“You have to look with this,” she explained.
Ruby looked skeptical, but she took the lens and copied Scout’s gestures. “Where did you get this?” Ruby asked, fascinated. Scout knew the feeling. This technology was far beyond anything they had on their remote, rural planet.
“It was sort of a gift from one of the strangers I waited out the storm with,” Scout said. “Have you seen the man in the photo?”
Ruby was looking around the room, watching as the display inside the lens fed her impossible amounts of information about the world around her: how far away everything was, the temperature and humidity of the air, the time of day to the nanosecond. Scout nudged the tablet a little closer and Ruby finally looked down at it. It looked like a featureless stone tablet to Scout now, but she knew that Ruby, with the lens on her face, could see the image of a man staring up at her.
“Can’t say that I have,” Ruby said after a moment’s consideration, plucking the lens from her face and dropping it next to the tablet. “Farlane McFarlane. Sounds like a fake name. He’s distinctive-looking, though, isn’t he? With that twist to the end of his nose. Let me ask the network,” Ruby said, disappearing into her office behind the counter, the cat still nestled contentedly in her arms.
Scout put the tablet and the lens away, looking back over her shoulder as something momentarily blocked out the sun streaming through the doorway. Someone must have just walked past; there was no one behind her now. Scout pushed back her battered bush hat to run a hand through her short blonde curls that had been molded down with sweat. She had only been out of the controlled environment of the rover’s interior for a few moments and already she was a stinky mess.
“I’ve got a lead for you,” Ruby said, emerging from the back room and pouring the cat back into the pillow-lined crate. “You know Flat Valley, just north of here?”
“I think so,” Scout said, although she wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter; she wasn’t alone on her bike anymore. The rover’s navigation system would tell her the way.
“Yolanda in Flat Valley knows your fellow. He’s not what you call a regular, but she’s seen him more than once. No one there knows who he is or what he’s doing for a living. He comes into town for supplies now and again. Just food, nothing suspicious, but they don’t like strangers in those parts. It’s a bit north of here.” She gave Scout a significant look and Scout nodded. She knew what Ruby was saying. North meant further from the cities. The people out that way tended toward a certain stubborn independence. They had fled from the people who had fled the cities in the first place.
“Thanks,” Scout said. She started toward the door but turned back. “Say, Ruby, did you guys feel an earthquake about midmorning?”
“An earthquake? Here?” Ruby asked.
Scout nodded.
“We don’t get earthquakes in these parts.”
“That’s what I thought. Still, something weird happened on the road here. Any strange rumors from the hills?”
“Just the usual,” Ruby said. “Bandits robbing folks. Rebels doing whatever it is that rebels do. If that’s the way you are going, you take care.”
“I will,” Scout said. “It was good seeing you.” She didn’t add, “one last time.”
Scout settled her hat back on her head before stepping outside, hands in her pockets as she walked back to the town gate.
Beyond the town walls, the villagers were running farm machinery, harvesting the overripe grain. The constant whir of the motors filled the air, punctuated by bursts of thrashing sounds as the grain was pulled through.
Then Scout heard something else, something not quite drowned out by the roar of the machines.
Something was wrong. Her dogs were barking. Not happy barks or even warning barks. These were barks of raw panic.
She pulled her hands from her pockets and broke into a run.
