CHAPTER 5

Hell, as Pity had heard the city described, sounded exactly like what she knew of Cessation: hedonistic, ungodly, full of sinners. Outside the CONA embrace, where there was no government, no morals, and no law. As different from the communes as it could be—a city dedicated unto itself.

“Sounds great,” she said.

Max brightened. “Really?”

“No. But I don’t have much choice, do I?” She stared at the locked cabinet. And I’m not going anywhere without my guns.

Santino looked at Olivia, who shrugged. “I say we dump her at the nearest CONA outpost. And that’s only so we didn’t waste our time saving her sorry ass.”

Pity waited as Santino deliberated her fate. It was his decision to make—that much was obvious. Her heart pounded harder with every passing moment, each beat like a shard of glass piercing the back of the eye, but she forced herself to hold his golden-brown gaze. What if he decided to leave her? Were they anywhere near the 87th? By now her father might know they—

A different sort of pain stabbed her.

—she was gone. Pity didn’t know how much dust he’d kick up over her, but she had a good idea what would happen if she ended up back within his reach.

At last, Santino took a deep breath. “Stopping might mean curious officials, and we don’t need that. So we take her with us. But Olivia holds on to her weapons, and, Max, she’s your responsibility. Now and when we get home. Me entiendes?”

Max nodded.

“Great—Maxxy gets a pet and we get another damn passenger.” Olivia stomped over to a storage crate and typed a code into the lock. It clicked open. She drew out a squat metal cylinder. “C’mon, I’ll help you swap the cell.”

Santino checked his rifle. “Let’s be quick. Way things have gone today I don’t want to be idle any longer than we need to. Keep an eye on her, Max.”

“Both eyes,” said Olivia as they exited the front of the vehicle.

“Thank you,” Pity said when they were gone. “For not letting them leave me.”

“No problem.” The rings at the edge of his mouth twitched up. “I know something about needing to get somewhere other than where you’re supposed to be. How are you feeling?”

“My head hurts.” Everything hurt: her bones, her skin, her soul. Finn’s dead. The thought gored her over and over—Finn’s dead, Finn’s dead.

And it’s all my fault.

“Here, hold still.” Max pressed another med injector into Pity’s arm. The pain washed away like dust in a summer rain. “Better?”

She nodded, not trusting her voice. Without the pain to keep them at bay, Finn’s final moments flickered in memory. Why hadn’t she done something? Why had she just watched?

“It’s okay. You don’t need to hold it in.”

“I’m… not…” She curled forward, chest tightening. The room wavered through the gathering tears.

Finn.

“I can’t leave you alone, but I don’t really need both eyes on you, either.” Max put on a pair of headphones and then grabbed a sheaf of papers and some pencils. He sat down at the seating area, turning slightly away. “If you need anything, I’m right here.”

He began to scribble. True to his word, he didn’t so much as glance back, not for the several minutes Pity watched.

Finally, she rolled toward the wall and let the tears flow.

Pity slept. When she woke, Max made her tea. She cried and slept some more, grief and exhaustion coming in shifts. She remained bedridden until the following morning, when, with careful steps, she hobbled over to where Max was washing dishes. They were nearly the same height, and their eyes met when he looked up from the indentation that passed as a sink. For a moment, Pity faltered. His appearance was still an oddity to her, but Max had a disarming air to him, a trait that served to both calm and unnerve her in equal measure. Despite the kindness he’d shown, he was, Pity reminded herself, a stranger.

“Can I help?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “I can’t lie there any longer.”

“You can dry.” He handed her a towel. “Any better this morning?”

She grimaced. “My body feels like one big bruise.”

“What about the rest of you?”

The question hung in the air.

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay. But can we talk about something else?”

“Like what?”

She wiped the water from a plate. “Like who y’all are. You’re not scroungers, and you don’t strike me as drifters.”

“No, we usually stay put in Cessation.”

“Were you born there?”

“No.” Max laughed and scratched the back of his head. His hair was so dark that Pity half expected his hand to come away stained inky black. “But who is? Cessation is someplace you end up, not where you start.”

A weak smile crept onto her lips. “And this vehicle—it’s a mobile command, isn’t it? From the war?”

“You’ve seen one before?”

“Not in person, but I’ve heard about them.” Metal fortresses on treads, mobile commands were predecessors to the near-impenetrable Trans-Rail train cars. It would take a missile strike to even scratch one. Pity thought of the Ranger and felt like a fool. How could she and Finn have thought they were safe? “Where did you get it?”

“We’re only borrowing it.” He handed her a bowl. “My turn for a question. Why did you run away? You did run away, right?”

“Yes.” She lowered her gaze. “My father was trying to send me to another commune.”

“Why?”

Pity shrugged, wincing at the pain that accompanied the gesture. “Spite, mostly. He hated my mother, never mind she’s been dead for years. Not that there was much in the commune for me anyway… except… except for Finn.” Her breath snagged in her lungs and trembled there, trapped. She gripped the edge of the counter.

“Hey.” Max dropped the cup he was washing. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m fine.” She gasped, unable to get enough air. “It’s… it’s just she…”

“Sit down,” he ordered. “You shouldn’t be on your feet yet.”

Pity backed up against the cot and collapsed, hardly feeling the pain that rippled through her. Tears filled her eyes once more. “She shouldn’t have been with me.” The leaden words tumbled from her tongue, unbidden. “She should be on the commune right now, elbow-deep in an engine. That life was killing me, but she was the one who ended up dead. It’s all my fault.”

“Don’t say that.” The sharpness in Max’s tone pierced her daze. “You weren’t the one who pulled the trigger.”

“But I didn’t do anything to stop it, either. And now…” Pity shuddered as reality bit deep, a warped inversion of her brief, hopeful dream. First east, now west—from the stalwart CONA cities to the biggest den of sinners on the continent. Her brief, hopeful dream was as dead as Finn. Even her guns weren’t in her possession anymore. “Oh, Lord, what am I going to do?”

Max went down on one knee beside her. “You’re going to come with us,” he said calmly, “and figure things out from there. Cessation is… It’s not like what you’ve heard. I mean, it is, but it’s more. There are all sorts there—dissidents and drifters, Ex-Pats, CONA citizens, and free folks. Don’t worry. There’s always work for a girl who—”

Her head snapped up.

“That’s not what I meant!” He searched for a moment. “Look, if you change your mind when we get there, I’ll put you on the train myself. I promise.”

His gray eyes were earnest, without a hint of malice, but Pity recoiled. Everything suddenly seemed like a terrible idea. Maybe it wasn’t too late to go back. Maybe her father wouldn’t kill her.

“Why are you being so nice? I don’t know you… any of you.”

“You don’t,” Max said quietly. “But we helped you when we could have left you behind.”

The door to the cab opened, and Olivia stepped through. She stopped short. “Did I interrupt something?”

“No.” Max got to his feet. “We were discussing what Pity might do once we get to Cessation.”

“Oh, yeah?” Olivia went to a storage bin and fished out an apple. “Did you get around yet to telling her what you do?”

“No,” Pity said, tensing with suspicion. “He didn’t.”

But Max swelled with pride. “I’m with the Theatre.”

She waited. “The Theatre?”

“Don’t they know about us in the communes?” Some of the pride evaporated. “The grandest show since before the Pacific Event? Cessation’s crown jewel of entertainment?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Damn, I really thought you would have heard about us…”

“Heard about who?”

Max threw out his arms with a flourish. “Halcyon Singh’s Theatre Vespertine.”

The name meant nothing. “So… you’re an actor?”

Olivia snickered and took a wet bite of apple.

“Uh, no,” Max replied. “I mean, it’s not that kind of theatre. I do costumes and painting—backdrops, sets, skin.”

“Skin?”

“Some of the costumes are… unconventional.”

“What about you?” Pity said to Olivia. “Are you with the Theatre, too?”

“Me?” The woman chewed and swallowed. “Nope. I’m just a bartender.”

Without another word, Olivia returned to the front cab, closing the door after her. The click of its lock was a grim reminder that, for all intents and purposes, Pity was in a cage. Where she was going—and what she was going to do when she got there—wasn’t entirely in her control. Which meant that she needed to bide her time. Falling to pieces wouldn’t bring Finn back or get her anywhere at all.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Max, “for getting worked up. Y’all have been nothing but kind to me… more or less.”

Max smiled. “Olivia is slow to warm to strangers. Give her some time.”

“Sure,” Pity said aloud, staring at the locked cabinets.

I don’t want her warmth, she thought. I want my guns.

They hit the desert a day later. Though she remained confined to the back of the vehicle, Pity didn’t need to see it. She was familiar with the parched, empty steppe shown in CONA broadcasts, the edge of the lifeless scar left by the Pacific Event more than fifty years before. To this day no one knew exactly what had happened—the nature of the weapon or who had unleashed it or even whether it had been an intentional act. Only that it had left huge portions of the world uninhabitable and erased civilizations that had endured for millennia.

The bleak history that led up to it was well documented, though: escalating global conflicts, overpopulation-driven biological terrorism that left so many infertile. The aftermath of the Pacific Event was little better, the desperate exodus eastward too much for an already strained nation to bear. In comparison, the conflict waged between the Confederation of North America and the United Patriot Front hardly seemed worth spilling a tear over. Bloody as it had been, it was an ugly sort of proof that life could, and would, go on.

Is it the same for you? she asked herself. How much can you lose and still go on?

Without windows in the vehicle, Pity measured time in meals. It was morning when Max made breakfast, night when he said it was time for dinner. She helped him cook, though there wasn’t much to it: open a pack, heat something up, add water to something else. Still, the work helped to quiet the grim ruminations that stumbled through her head like drunks: where she was going, what she was going to do, and what an artist, a bartender, and a soldier were doing in the middle of nowhere with a mobile command.

And Finn, left behind to rot.

In late afternoon on the third day, the door to the cab opened.

“We’re almost at Last Stop,” Santino called, still strapped into the driver’s seat.

Max, fussing over the status display on one of the larger storage containers, looked up. “Can I bring Pity up front?”

“Why not? Olivia, you drive. Pity, take her seat.”

Pity put down the rag she was wiping the counter with. “Last Stop?”

“The last station on the Trans-Rail, ten miles outside the border of Cessation.” Santino slipped into the back. “Cargo five-by-five, Max? I want it ready to move as soon as we get to Cas.”

“All set.” Max took Pity by the arm and practically pushed her through the door.

A curved control board took up half the front cab. The rest of the space was filled with the operators’ seats. Pity climbed into the empty one.

Max leaned in over her shoulder and pointed. “There’s the station.”

“And more,” Olivia said as they drew closer, her tone grim. “Might want to close your eyes, kid.”

It was too late. Pity had seen the station. With the Trans-Rail line running into the center, it was little more than a sprawling mass of dark buildings growing darker as the sun set. But there was no mistaking what lay just outside its razor-wire fencing. From a scaffold hung half a dozen bodies, their shadows gouging long, dark fissures across the baked earth. As the mobile command passed by, Pity could see a painted placard above them, bearing the CONA seal and one word: CRIMINALS.

She suppressed a shudder, thankful for the black hoods hiding the corpses’ faces. “What did they do?”

“Who knows.” Olivia accelerated, leaving the ugly sight behind. “Murdered a whole squad of CONA soldiers. Stole a heel of bread. It’s not the crime that’s the point. It’s the warning.”

Max sighed. “Even though they have little presence this far out, CONA authority officially ends at Last Stop.” A note of bitterness crept into his voice. “A fact they like to remind Cessation of. Step one foot over the line and… Well, I’m sorry. That’s not what I wanted you to see.”

Pity remembered the scrounger. “I’ve seen worse. It’s just that… I don’t know.”

Olivia looked at her askew. “You expected that sort of thing from the other side of the equation?”

Pity didn’t answer, not wanting to admit Olivia was right. She would have ascribed such a grotesque act to Cessation or dissidents long before CONA. Even the scrounger her father had caught would never have been displayed so.

Unease filled her. It was more than the hanged men; she was now truly beyond the world she knew, in the company of strangers. And yet…

Max put a hand on her shoulder. Maybe he was only steadying himself, but some of her distress receded. He was also nothing like she had imagined a dissident to be. With no reason to, he’d helped her. And despite her better judgment, she was beginning to trust him.

Don’t be stupid, she reminded herself. Max might be all right, but you don’t know what’s coming.

For a while there was nothing to see except desert, stained orange by the setting sun. Then, as true night descended, a haze of light appeared, bleeding out of the ground. That luminescence resolved itself into colors and silhouettes. As she realized what she was seeing, she gasped, eliciting a chuckle from Max.

Olivia rolled her eyes. “He never gets tired of this part.”

In the windshield, Max’s reflection grinned like a child, his piercings glinting and winking. “Welcome to Cessation, Serendipity Jones,” he said. “The last place on the continent where you can do whatever the hell you want.”