“Who?”
“The tax men. They came from the city. Said we owed them things. My father dressed me up as a boy most of my life, so they didn’t know I was female, or they would have taken me too. But my father never paid. Said the Event had done one good thing. It had made us free. But we had to move around a lot...”
“Tax evasion,” Alexios murmurs.
I cringe, hearing the war cry in his soft voice.
“That’s what they said when they came... but the last time they came... they saw me. I wasn’t wearing my boy clothes. I had put on a dress... My mother’s dress. They wanted me then. They tried to take me. My father wouldn’t let them. Usually we ran, but this time he fought to give me a chance to get away.” I take a deep, shuddering breath. “They killed him.”
“I’m sorry...” Silver says.
I pluck at the silk of my dress. “These things are dangerous. They get people killed. Every time I have worn one of these, someone has died. First my father, then the sheriff. I should take this off.”
I see a look pass between them. Silver shakes his head at Alexios, who, when I turn my head, I see is wearing a smirk. “Now is not the time,” Silver mutters before turning his attention back to me.
“Dresses aren’t dangerous,” he comforts me. “Nothing bad is going to happen just because you put one on. Your father was a tragedy. The sheriff was a deserved death. But now you are safe. You have us, and...”
Before he can finish, a bloodcurdling scream cuts through our conversation. It is followed by another, and many more, drowned out by the sound of heavy projectile fire.
We rush toward it, all of us drawn by an instinctual call to chaos.
In the banquet hall, death is being dealt indiscriminately. There are multiple men in armored suits, bearing automatic weaponry. They are firing into the crowd, into the food, into the roof and the walls and through the windows. The room is awash in explosions of meat, both food and human flesh.
“Where is the girl? Bring us the girl!” Harsh mechanical voices boom above death screams. “Surrender the prime female!”
They’re here for me. They’re killing for me. There’s a coldness and an almost mechanical approach to it that is sickening to behold. Every target is assessed as being not me, and killed. I see three men drop in the blink of an eye.
I panic. My mercenaries do not.
“We go,” Silver says. “Now.”
Alexios picks me up and slings me over his shoulder and we run. They do not look back, they do not hesitate.
Carried like a sack of potatoes, I see very little aside from the floor and the gleaming of the moon on the paths over which Alexios is running.
“Out this way, the secret passage,” Silver hisses.
I am a passenger in this horrible nightmare. I only saw a few seconds of what was happening inside that hall, but those few seconds play over and over, the sounds and the sights and even the smells reinventing themselves in my mind.
Alexios and Silver are efficient and quick. They avoid the streets and stick to the bushes, just as I once did, but they do it so much better.
The wall that made it impossible for me to leave is no obstacle to them. Alexios puts me down for a moment to bend over and give Silver a base off which to leap. Silver grabs the top of the wall with his fingers and pulls himself up, then leans back over so Alexios can hoist me up and half-throw me into the air. Silver catches my wrists and pulls me the rest of the way, then he climbs back down and hangs by his hands, giving Alexios the chance to grab his leg and climb up himself. In less than a minute, they have me over an unclimbable obstacle. The process repeats itself on the other side. Silver tosses me down to Alexios, who catches me as if I weigh nothing.
They say almost nothing to each other, but they seem to know where they are going, and what they are doing. Silver grabs me up this time and we are off again.
There are soldiers everywhere, citizens in the streets. I worry that they are rioting against me again, but the little snippets of rage I hear are not about me. Whoever is on these streets, inside the sheriff’s residence, shooting down the rich, the powerful, is not from Dallas.
We leave the city entirely, move into the scrubby outland I know so well. The smell of the dirt rushes into my nose and I feel a rush of heady freedom shooting through my veins. It’s wrong to feel that now, with so much chaos and carnage behind me. There is a heavy weight in the pit of my stomach that tells me many are dead. Not my mercenaries though. They can’t die. They are above death. Beyond it. They can keep me safe, no matter what.
Suddenly, we are going down. Alexios pulls an old piece of iron sheeting aside, and we enter a small cave built into the side of a rock. There they settle me on a stretcher. This is a camp of some kind, a hidden one.
“A secret base?”
“A supply stop and safe rendezvous point,” Alexios says.
“The others should join us soon,” Silver agrees. “Let’s have a hot drink.”
They put a little gas stove on and brew up some hot tea. It’s busy work for all of us, both the making and the consuming. I’m more scared than I want them to know. Maybe they feel the same way. I can see the worry written on their faces.