Wilders Read online

  “See anything better?”

  “No. But no sleeping this time. I’m not willing to wake up with you gone.”

  They chose a reasonably dry stall, swept it out a little with a branch, and sat against a wooden partition.

  Paula handed Coryn a handful of nuts and dried fruits. Coryn ate, washing the dry food down with water from her canteen. Rain leaked in through the roof and made small wet streaks on the stained concrete floor. Birds twittered in the rafters, and something small and four footed scampered around above them from time to time. The air stank of damp and something sour that Paula identified as mold.

  Altogether, it made for a pretty miserable afternoon. She texted Liselle: Are you all right?

  Of course. You?

  Sure.

  Silence followed. Who would have thought you could feel the absence of people? Before coming Outside, she had never been around an absence of people. She had thought she was alone in the orphanage, but she hadn’t been. Not even close. She poked at her wristlet to turn on music, but the streams didn’t run out here. She tried to sing a few of the songs that she knew, but her voice trembled, surely because of the cold.

  Paula put an arm over her shoulder. “I’m sure the sun will come out soon.”

  “Stupid robot,” she said.

  “Stupid person,” Paula replied.

  “I am,” Coryn said. “I got us way out here.”

  “Hey, that was partly for the horses right?” Paula arched an eyebrow. “You did want to ride a horse.”

  “More than almost anything.”

  “And not a city horse.”

  Coryn perked up. “Are there horses in the city?”

  “South of Tacoma.”

  “I thought the city stopped at Tacoma.”

  Paula stood and looked out, as if worried by something. “It stops on the far side of a few horse farms.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Because you said you were leaving to see Lou.”

  “I am!”

  “So, perfect then? Right? We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I know.”

  “Stupid robot.”

  Paula’s eyes widened and she stood straight, looking toward the barn door. It slammed open and they heard footsteps. Paula ducked, gesturing Coryn down.

  The owners walked casually, apparently unaware that Coryn and Paula were there. Coryn rose and peered carefully over the half wall of the barn stall. Two young men. They wore clean clothes almost nice enough to wear in the city. Water dripped down from the brims of their rain hats and onto their coats. One was tall with black skin, and the other was nut-brown, stocky, and short. The tall dark-skinned one said, “I counted ten in the last pod.”

  “Could you tell what they want?”

  “How? They’re just a bunch of silent dumb robots.”

  Were they collecting information like she was?

  Paula cleared her throat and said, “Hello.”

  The smaller one jumped, and the tall man turned and squinted at them. “What are you doing here?”

  “We came in to get out of the rain,” Coryn replied. “The door wasn’t locked.”

  There was a moment of silence before the taller one said, “Well, that’s not a bad idea. After all, we had it.” He grinned, his smile wide and big, and his voice big as well.

  But if they came close they might see Paula was a bot. Coryn stood up and crossed the open room, holding her hand out. “I’m Coryn. That’s Paula. And there were twelve.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I counted.”

  He laughed. “What were you counting?”

  “Ecobots.”

  He and the taller man exchanged looks. “We were counting cows.”

  “Cows don’t come in pods,” Coryn replied. “They come in herds.”

  “Don’t be a know-it-all.” There was another smile as the tall one held out his hand. “I’m Blessing.”

  “That’s quite a name.” She shook; he could have hidden two of her hands in his. Touching him warmed her, as if he burned a little brighter than she did.

  Blessing gestured toward the smaller man. “It’s even easier to remember his name. This is Day.”

  A huge crack of thunder rattled the barn from the top all the way down. “I guess it’s good we’re in here,” Coryn murmured.

  “So, you and your friend are traveling?” Blessing asked.

  “We are. To the Palouse. What about you?”

  “We’re going the other way.” She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or not, but Blessing sounded a little disappointed at that. Now that they were quiet and close, she thought they might be younger than they’d looked at first. Maybe just a few years older than her, like Lou.

  They eyed Paula, who now stood in the open stall door and hadn’t spoken since her initial greeting. Coryn swallowed hard. “This is Paula,” she said carefully. “We’ve been friends a long time.”

  The two men dropped their packs by the door, walked over to her, and exchanged handshakes. As soon as Blessing was done, he turned, caught Coryn’s eye, and said, “She’s a robot.”

  Well. So much for crappy clothes. “Yes. She is. She’s my robot.”

  Day’s eyes had narrowed, although he looked more puzzled than anything else. “So how is she your friend? Is she a sex-bot?”

  Coryn felt the blood rush to her face. “Of course not! She’s been my companion since I was seven. My parents bought her for me.”

  Day laughed. “So she’s like your mom?”

  “No.”

  Paula clarified. “I’m a protector.”

  Day looked curious. “So you’re so important you have a robot protector?”

  Blessing laughed. “No. She’s just from the city.”

  “Fucking city.” Day drawled it out, a familiar slur.

  “Come on,” Coryn said. “You can sit in here. I’d rather listen to you than the rain.” Maybe she’d learn something interesting for Liselle.

  Neither Blessing nor Day sat until after Paula sat, and then they took the opposite barn wall. Day sat easily; Blessing looked a little more like he was folding himself down into place, all long thin legs and long arms. “So what are you looking for in the Palouse?” he asked her.

  She hesitated, then said, “My sister’s there, on RiversEnd Ranch.”

  Blessing whistled. “Really? That’s dangerous. I did two years there.”

  Coryn tensed. Dangerous? “Lou never said that. She talks about riding horses and counting animals and watching the perimeter of the reserve they’re on. It’s huge—takes over parts of three states.”

  Blessing took in a deep breath, his thin chest rising and falling, and his face deadly serious. “Your sister’s name is Lou?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “Red-haired, like me, only her face is thinner and she’s taller. Her eyes are blue. She’s intense, takes everything seriously.”

  “No kidding? If you’re Lou’s sister, you’re my friend. She’s a firebrand—you can’t help but listen to her when she talks.”

  Coryn grinned, eager for more information. “Yeah. That’s my sister. But what’s dangerous?”

  Blessing stretched his arms up and put them down, leaning toward her. “Did she tell you about the wolves and the bears?”

  “No. But that’s part of why she came Outside in the first place. She used to hang pictures of wolves up on her walls.”

  He smiled wide. “She still does. Did she tell you poachers almost killed her two years ago?”

  Coryn leaned toward Blessing. “No. What happened?”

  “She was riding a wildlife circuit when a tagged wolf pack took off, running like hell. She raced toward where they had just been, sending two drones ahead of her.” A huge gust of wind silenced them all for a minute, and after it passed Blessing continued. “She had stationary cameras as well, but I don’t think she took time t
o use them.”

  Coryn could imagine that. “She’s always been passionate.”

  He laughed. “Some idiots were trying to kill the wolves. They’d missed all of them, but horses are a bigger target, and not half as bright as wolves, either. They hit Lou’s gelding in the neck and stopped him, and she fell off. They shot her in the foot and would have done more, except one of the drones got a good shot in and dropped the leader. While the poachers were staring up at the sky, Lou pulled out her own weapons.” He stopped, took a breath, maximized the suspenseful moment. “She didn’t miss.”

  Wow. The word kept running in her head. Wow. Wow. “She killed someone?”

  “Three of them. She’s had to kill more than that.”

  Lou knew how to shoot guns? Coryn couldn’t imagine Lou killing people. She stared at the barn door and listened to raindrops drumming on the roof. She’d known Lou was lying to her with her sweet little letters about nothing, but this was . . . more than a lie. “Nothing like that came in her letters.”

  The smile came again. It wasn’t condescending, it was merely warm, and his voice sounded like he was sharing secrets with her. “You can’t write down most of what happens out here.”

  “I suppose not. Are there police? I mean besides the ecobots?”

  Day spoke up. “Ecobots will kill you faster than you know.”

  “Some saved me.”

  Blessing shrugged. “They do that too. Can’t ever tell.”

  “Is Lou okay now? Is she safe?”

  Another epic gust of wind rattled through cracks in the old, dry wood, and a chilly finger of it reached into the stall, making her shiver. Blessing spoke quietly. “She was okay when I last saw her. That was almost a year ago. Did she tell you about the Returners?”

  “I read about them. I thought maybe they were a story someone made up to scare us into staying in the city.”

  Day looked at her like she was the best amusement he’d had in weeks. Unlike Blessing, the smaller man always seemed to be watching.

  Blessing leaned back against the wall and stretched his long legs out on front of him. He looked around at all of them, pausing to be sure he had everyone’s attention, even Paula’s. The look in his bright eyes suggested he was setting them up for a story. “There are many people who hated the great land-taking that went with the beginning of the restoration and the rewilding. There were winners and losers. The people who owned land in the cities got to keep it, big cities and little cities alike.

  “Landlords in Seacouver stayed landlords, shopkeepers in Cle Elum kept their stores. But the farmers? Out. All of them replaced by fake food and food grown in towers in the cities or put out of growing feed by the ban on eating big animals. Even though the great taking happened twenty years ago, people remember. The Returners took the money they were paid and used it to fight the government instead of moving into a city. Sure, some of the Returners live quietly on government land, and mostly they get ignored if they aren’t doing harm. But others created little armies that roam the west trying to foil the ecobots and the NGO enforcers and everyone else working on the grand design.”

  He paused for breath, giving Coryn a moment to think. “So how many Returners are there? Didn’t most people already live in cities before this happened?”

  “Most still leaves out hundreds of thousands of people. This is a big state. Nobody knows how many live Outside. They travel and live in small groups.” He put great emphasis on his words, making the story seem like something in an AR passion play instead of a real tale. Blessing dropped his voice to a loud whisper. “Perhaps, sometimes, they even live here.”

  Coryn giggled, a reaction to his theatrics, and maybe a show of nerves at the wind outside. The giggle felt out of place and she stopped herself.

  Blessing didn’t even seem to notice. He continued, “A lot of ranchers lost land when the Palouse became a reserve. It takes days to ride across the hills there, and often times we’d find small groups of Returners camped in the draws by water, or reoccupying barns that hadn’t been burned down yet. Some days they’d just attack us. Volunteers and Wilders, regular people all the way, and the damned Returners would just attack us as if we took their land.” He stopped and stretched again, folding and unfolding. He drank a little from a silver flask he pulled out of his pocket, wiped his long-fingered hand across his thin mouth. “Two of our work parties disappeared entirely. We think they were killed and buried, and some—”

  A fierce gust threw the roof from the barn. Wood smashed onto the driveway outside, splintering and cracking as it fell. Wind flew inside, circling. It tugged at her, as if it could pull her up and away. She screamed.

  Paula grabbed her, one hand pulling on a piece of barn wall and the other holding onto Coryn.

  Blessing and Day scrambled away, staying low, wind yanking at them so hard she expected them to go through the hole in the wall like autumn leaves.

  Coryn barely had time to think tornado! before it ripped through a wall and threw a ceramic pot at another wall. The pot shattered, and flying shards hit her, one slicing through her new jeans and into her flesh. Hot blood spurted onto the shreds of cloth and trickled down her leg. Instantly, Paula’s hand pressed on the cut, stopping the blood.

  The wind stopped as abruptly as it had appeared, as if that final fury had spent all of its energy.

  Blessing stared at the broken pieces of barn. Day went to his pack.

  Coryn’s voice came out in stammers. “Was that a tornado?”

  Day came back with a blue towel that he ripped in half, looking up at Paula. “It’s clean.”

  Paula took it.

  “It must have been,” Blessing said. “I’ve never felt wind that could pick me up.”

  “Last week’s storm was almost as bad,” Coryn countered.

  “Half,” he said.

  She didn’t argue.

  Paula wrapped the towel around Coryn’s leg, being careful that only Coryn’s jeans touched her skin.

  Well, now she’d look even less like a recent refuge from Seacouver.

  The clouds had opened into blue sky above them, and beyond there were fewer and higher clouds, although some still looked like rain. A sudden gift of late afternoon light washed over everything and turned it sparkling and clean. Blessing looked even darker in the natural light, and taller and thinner, and she and Paula looked soaked. Day grinned. “We’re safe. Not dry, but not as wet as we might have been.”

  “You always see the good,” Blessing said.

  “And you tell a great story.”

  “Someone’s got to talk. Stories out here need to be told.”

  Day merely grunted.

  The moment felt awkward. If they were done sheltering in the barn, and they were really traveling in two different directions, they should split up here. “So you were saying that two work parties disappeared . . .”

  Blessing led them to some large rocks that had been dragged into a line by the edge of the gravel drive that led to the barn. They had to work their way around parts of the shattered roof. He perched on the tallest rock, making him much taller than Coryn, especially once she sat down on a smaller rock near him. It was damp, but so was she, and the sun was the best chance they had of drying off. Day also sat. Paula stood, her back to the barn, watching across the street as if trying to be sure no rabid groups of Returners came on them unawares.

  Blessing started in again. “So two work parties disappeared from the farm, and one more was ambushed and everybody but one was killed.”

  Paula interrupted him. “How many people work on the farm?”

  He closed his eyes and tilted his head back. “Maybe three hundred and seventy or so all the time. Fifty or sixty more in the summer.” He glanced at Coryn. “That’s what you’re going for right? Summer work?”

  “Sure. What else happens out there? How dangerous is it?”

  “Do you have a contract?”

  She stood up, which still left her below him. “Blessing, how dangerous is it?”<
br />
  “Hold onto your curiosity and sit back down. You can’t have the whole story in the one answer to a question. That’s no way to understand.”

  Coryn glanced at Paula, but there was nothing in Paula’s face that gave away her thoughts or provided any advice. Ever since Coryn turned into an adult, that was the face Paula chose to present the most. She’d wanted it to be that way, but there were times she hated it as well. She sat back down and chewed on a fingernail.

  “So Lou is a boss,” Blessing began again. “She’s got to handle Returners. They’re pathetic, wanting to go back to the way of living that almost killed us all. But there’s children with them and families—you can’t just kill all of them, or even lock them up. Sometimes the Foundation sends cops, but more often she’s got to rely on the ecobots, which means she has to convince them to uphold the law.”

  “Isn’t that what they do?”

  “They can act when it’s about protecting the land. They’re forbidden from getting between humans and humans unless they get orders from on high.”

  So why had they helped her? “How hard is that? Getting someone to give the ecobots orders?”

  Day laughed, one of the few spontaneous things she’d seen him do.

  Blessing said, “The ecobots mostly tell us what to do. Out here, there’s the Wilders—that’s us and people like Lou who work for the NGOs, and a bunch of other people—and there’s the robots that work with for the Wilders, or the Wilders work for them—hard to tell on any given day but I would call the ecobots Wilders, and there’s the Returners.”

  “Is that all?”

  “There’s wanderers, like you.”

  She sighed. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked such an open-ended question.

  “Scientists,” Day said. “They travel in packs with protector-bots.” He added to the list. “A few people out for the adventure of it all.”

  Blessing thumped his thumb on his thigh like a drum. “Crazies.”

  Day grinned. “Loners. Gotta remember the loners.”

  “Everybody that doesn’t fit anywhere else is out here somewhere,” Blessing said. “Psychopaths, too. And saints. We’re all Outside.”

  “There’s psychopaths in the city, too. Trust me.”