Price filled the mule's nosebag and Bee rooted inside one of the abandoned houses for firewood. Duvalier stretched herself out next to a ditch and took off her boots.
The hills around Laurelton were close. A hundred men, properly posted, could make sure that whatever transpired here couldn't be seen by anything but aircraft or satellites.
Ahn-Kha poked around the road, examining potholes. "Strange sort of road, my David," Ahn-Kha said.
Valentine joined him. Like the tracks, it ended in weeds to the north. The south part-
-had been patched.
Valentine trotted a few hundred yards south.
There was a filled gap in the road at a washout, recent enough for the asphalt to still be black-blueish, rather than gray-green. The Kurians weren't much on infrastructure maintenance even in their best-run principalities; they didn't like anything that traveled faster than a Reaper could run. . . .
Valentine examined the weeds and bracken bordering the station. Sure enough, there were three gaps, definite paths leading from the tracks to the road. Quick-growing grasses had sprung up, but no brambles or saplings, though they were thick on the west side of the tracks.
"A farewell feast," Price said, revealing a sausage wrapped in wax paper and a loaf of bread. "Unless you want to come back with us."
Valentine handed him Everready's Reaper teeth. "More than earned. If I had another set I'd give them to you, with my initials written on them."
"If you see the old squatter again, let him know I appreciate being able to repay the debt. What are you going to do next?"
Valentine rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. "You said you'd brought in men to the Ordnance?"
Price consulted a scuffed leather notebook and extracted a card from a pocket. "Yup. I'm 31458 here in Ohio." He passed it to Valentine.
The card had the number, and some kind of seal featuring a man in a toga holding one hand over his heart and the other outstretched, over a pyramid with an eye at the top. "Meaning what?"
Price shrugged. "Dunno. They always recorded my number when I brought a man in, though."
"How hard is it to get one of those?"
"I didn't even know I had to have one. They gave it to me when I brought my first man in. I was going to stop at one of the cop stations and look at what kind of warrants are out. Long as I'm up this way, maybe someone's hiding out in Kentucky I can bring in. Make the trip profitable in more than a spiritual sense."
"Mind if I tag along?"
"Not at all."
"Let's walk along the road on the way back to the river."
After lunch they walked single file down the side of the road. Valentine stayed in the center of the road, crisscrossing it, checking blown debris, the patchwork repairs, anything for some kind of sign. He found a few old ruts that he suspected were made by heavy trucks, but they were so weathered that he could only guess at the type of vehicle.
"So we did all this for nothing?" Duvalier asked when they took a rest halt. "We're just going back?"
There was a welcome tenderness to her voice; she'd been cold since Valentine had turned the mutual slaughter she'd tried to start into a victory for the Bulletproof.
"Wherever they take the women, it has to be pretty close. I want to start searching. Seems to me it's got to be within a few miles. Otherwise they'd bring the train somewhere else, or right to where they want them. We'll just start searching, using a grid with the station as a base point."
"Why are we still with Stinky, then?"
"To set us up as bounty hunters. It's not far from what we're really doing, and it would explain us poking around in the woods."
"I don't like it here. These hills and trees, all wet and black. It's like they're closing off the sky. I haven't liked this job; just one misery after another."
Valentine looked up from yet another worthless mark that wasn't a track. "I'm glad you're here. I'd have been hung months ago if it wasn't for you and Ahn-Kha, most likely."
"The Lifeweavers were watching over us all back there. But they don't know about us being here. How can they know we need their help?"
Duvalier's worshipful naivete when it came to humanity's allies took strange forms sometimes. "Not sure how they could help us now," Valentine said.