Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

“The base commander. She’s my boss.”

“How come I never met her? You never told me anything about—”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, kid, and there’s a lot I’m not authorized to tell you. Now’s not the time to play catch-up. Go find your girlfriend and Lilah. Let them tell you their story.”

“Why? What happened? Is Nix okay?”

“She’s not hurt,” said Joe evasively. “Talk to her, talk to Lilah, and then maybe we’ll all have a conversation later. I’m going over to the blockhouse. You have to promise me—swear to me—that you won’t leave Sanctuary again. Not unless I’m with you.”

“Sure,” said Benny, though he was pretty sure he was lying to the man.

32

MILES AND MILES AWAY . . .

“Heads up and eyes forward,” called the guard in the tower. “Trade wagon’s coming in.”

The three fence guards glanced up at him and then followed the direction of his outthrust arm.

“Trade wagon?” wondered Tully, the oldest of the guards. “This time of day?”

His shift partner, Hooper, lifted the binoculars that hung around his neck on a leather strap and stared through the fence. The sun was almost down, and the slanting rays painted the big field and the distant tree line in shades of bloodred, vermilion, and Halloween orange.

“Trade wagon, all right,” he said. “Half a day late and . . . wait . . . I think something’s wrong.”

The youngest of the three, a fence guard trainee, raised his own binoculars. They were an old but expensive pair that had once belonged to his father. His dad was dead, though, killed in a construction accident while helping to build a corn silo. He adjusted the focus.

“The driver’s hurt,” he said.

“How can you tell?” asked Hooper.

“He’s bleeding,” said the young man.

The older men stared and then grunted. “You got good eyes, Morgie,” said Tully.

Morgie Mitchell did not acknowledge the compliment. His eyesight had qualified him as a tower guard, but he wanted to work down here on the ground. In another year they’d let him join the town watch as a cadet. And after that . . . well, when Morgie looked into the future, he saw himself sitting on a tall horse, a shotgun across his lap and a real steel katana slung over his shoulder in the rear fast-draw style Tom always used. That future Morgie wore a Freedom Riders sash and worked the roads from New Eden to Haven and every town in between.

For now he was only an apprentice fence guard. A job of no distinction and long hours.

Morgie was fine with that.

Now was now, and the future was something he’d get to.

The longer the shift, the less time he would have to be alone. And he didn’t believe that he deserved any distinction of any kind. Not yet. He didn’t want the borrowed celebrity that came from having studied with Tom Imura. That was Tom’s fame.

And Tom was dead. Buried out in the Ruin near the charred bones of the evil place Tom had destroyed. Gameland.

Morgie wished he’d been there. He should have been there.

Even if it meant that he would have died there. Even an unmarked grave on that field would mean something.

Tom had changed the world that day. Everyone knew it.

Until Morgie had the age, the strength, the power to change even a splinter of the world, he’d work the jobs he could get.

He continued to study the scene that was unfolding beyond the fence.

The field between Mountainside and the forest was more than half a mile wide. It was thick with weeds except for a few