The Travels of Scout Shannon Books 1-3

Chapter 12

12

The jeep that rolled into view was not as heavily armored as the other vehicles parked in the canyon nook, but the design was similar enough to feel like it belonged here. Scout let out a breath of relief; not bandits. The jeep had no extra guns but someone had added plating to the exterior, particularly in the front, where it came to a point intended to ram—or more accurately stab—other vehicles.

Scout couldn’t make out the driver, but a man in the passenger seat was standing, one hand on the roll bar, looking behind them as they came in the gate. He looked older, with a short ponytail of silvery-white hair and many scars crisscrossing the sun-damaged skin of his massive arms. Some looked like burns, others more like the result of some sort of blade. A warrior’s arms. He turned to look forward again and Scout saw eyes the same deep, clear blue as Bente had. He must be her uncle. What was his name? Ken had said it. Right, Arvid.

The moment the jeep was clear, the gate started to close with a low rumble.

“What the heck is that?” Arvid asked, gazing up at the rover.

“Visitor,” Joelle said as she walked out of the dimly lit equipment room to the still-rolling jeep. The driver braked the jeep with a lurch and then stood up to climb out of the door. He landed on the ground in front of Joelle. This had to be her father. He towered over her, but their skin was the same deep shade of brown, and her no-nonsense body language and stern facial expression were a miniature of his.

“Visitor?” he repeated.

“Someone Tucker ran into this afternoon,” Joelle said.

“Tucker,” her father said. “Figures. This isn’t the time to be bringing strangers around.”

“I know. He had reasons, I guess.”

“Tucker was supposed to go see McFarlane,” he said with a frown.

“He did. McFarlane is dead.”

“Dead? How?” But before Joelle could answer, he took a step closer to her. “Did he get my stuff first?”

Joelle shrugged. “I don’t know what happened. He’ll tell you but he won’t tell me. He certainly seemed to be empty-handed. Anyway, with our visitor, we’ve been careful. It’s just one girl, and she’ll be gone in the morning. I didn’t want her leaving at night, maybe drawing attention to us. Since the storm ended we’ve been seeing a lot of motion in this area. Some of it is really close to us. I guess the bandits are getting hungry.”

“It’s not just bandits,” her father said. “War is coming. That’s starting to become obvious to everyone. It’s making people anxious.”

“Nah,” Arvid said with a shake of his head. “They don’t know. It’s just the storm. After a doozy like that one, lots of folks are starting to see the benefit of gathering in larger groups with better shelters.”

Joelle’s father stiffened, his whole body tightening up much like Shadow’s did when he saw something he wanted to chase. Or to fight. Apparently Joelle’s father didn’t like to be contradicted. Arvid, digging in the back of the jeep with his back to the others, didn’t notice his reaction, but Joelle did. Scout couldn’t see her face well enough to make out any expression, but she took half a step forward and touched her father’s arm to get his attention.

“Did you find her?” Joelle asked. She looked past her father to Arvid in the jeep. There was no sign of another passenger, unconscious or otherwise. “Did you at least find what we need?”

“No,” her father said, but some of the tension eased out of his body at her touch. “Arvid and I found her car and followed the tracks to some sort of underground compound, but someone had set off enough explosives to cave the whole place in, probably just this morning. If she was in there, she’s surely dead now.”

“Did you find her body?” Joelle asked.

“Not yet,” her father said. “We’ll have to go back with more people and more equipment. It’s going to be a lot of digging.”

Scout bit her lip. She was very afraid she knew exactly who these men had been looking for and what they had found. Or rather, what they hadn’t found.

They wanted the data disk. Ruth, the governor’s daughter, had been taking it to the rebels. Scout didn’t know what was on it; she only knew Ruth had risked much to get it out of her father’s house but then had hesitated to follow through with her plans. She had worried that bringing it to the rebels wasn’t the right call.

But then she had died, and the decision had been taken out of her hands.

Gertrude had always told her that most times a coincidence was just a coincidence, nothing more, nothing deeper. She had managed to talk Scout out of waiting around for fate to light up a path for her, but this sense that larger forces were leading her around by the nose, laughing as they manipulated her, was hard to shake.

She had waited her whole life for the rebels to come and make her one of them. She had been certain that was why she had lived when the rest of her family had died. She had thought her father had saved her for just that purpose.

But he hadn’t. He had had no way of knowing that asteroid was on its way the morning he had given her a package to deliver to the next town and sent her and Shadow on their first solo delivery. Like Gertrude had said, he and her mother just wanted her to have a day away from her colicky little brother, and for them to have a day to give her brother their full attention. Nothing more than that.

And now, the minute the coronal mass ejection event had ended, these rebels had headed out to find information that Scout had inadvertently brought right to them by quite a different route.

Why had Tucker been there, at McFarlane’s hut, at the exact time Scout had shown up there?

Scout squeezed her eyes shut tight and forced herself to stay calm. They had no reason to know she carried just what they were seeking, no reason to even suspect her. And in the morning she would be gone. She had nothing to worry about.

“Malcolm,” Arvid called.

Scout opened her eyes just as Joelle’s father turned to see what the other man was looking at, down on the ground. Arvid pointed at the tracks visible in the loose dust that always danced over the surface of the baked mud.

The rover tracks.

Malcolm came over to get a closer look, then the two men looked up at the rover towering over them. Scout flinched back. She was sitting in the dark with the window opened only a tiny crack—there was no way they could see her—but still she kept her head down.

“What is it?” Joelle asked, stepping closer herself. She also looked from the tracks up to the rover, but then she turned to look at her father with a questioning arch to her eyebrow.

“These look just like the tracks we followed from the wrecked town car to the demolished compound,” her father said.

“That’s crazy,” Joelle said. “Scout’s just a kid. Barely my age.”

“That doesn’t rule out anything, as you well know,” Malcolm said. “How many bandit vehicles have you run off the road? How many trains have you left smoldering on the tracks after we made off with the cargo?”

“I never acted alone,” Joelle said. “Besides, if you met her, you’d know she’s not the type.”

Scout smirked. It was true, she had not wrecked the town car. But she had set the explosives to bring the compound crashing down. She hadn’t had the time to dig nine graves, that had been the only reason for burying the entire compound, but Malcolm and Arvid seemed to suspect some more nefarious motive.

But what was this about Joelle destroying trains? That didn’t sound like the “steal from the bandits” narrative they had been selling before.

“You like her?” Malcolm asked his daughter.

Joelle’s body remained as rigid as ever, her face revealing nothing. “I just met her,” she said stiffly.

“Yes, but what’s your read on her?” he persisted.

“Just what I said. Harmless.”

“Recruiting material?”

“No.” It was a very firm no.

The corner of Malcolm’s mouth went up ever so slightly. “Would Tucker agree with that assessment?”

“You’d have to ask Tucker,” Joelle said coolly. “But in this case, I would question his impartiality.”

“Where did you say he met her?” Malcolm asked, the grin gone.

“At McFarlane’s. Apparently she was looking for him too—McFarlane, I mean—but by the time she got there he was already dead.”

“What did she want with McFarlane?” he asked, a dark, suspicious edge back to his voice.

Joelle shrugged. Malcolm leaned down to grasp both of her shoulders firmly. She flinched, but her father didn’t seem to notice as he leaned in to speak closer to her face.

“We need to know that,” he said. “We need to know what she knows, what she did, and why.”

“Tucker knows more than I do,” Joelle said, not dropping her eyes from her father’s intense gaze.

“Well, like you said. He might not be impartial with this new girl . . .”

“Scout,” Joelle filled in.

“Is she pretty?”

Joelle shrugged. “Not the sort of thing I would notice. Ask—”

“I will ask Tucker, about everything,” Malcolm said. “Don’t worry about that. And I’m sure Tucker has already wormed a goodly amount of information out of her without even knowing she might have what we’re looking for. He’s a sponge for intel, that boy. Very useful. I’m going to wake him up right now to find out. But I want more than one account from her, see how things compare, if she’s a truth-teller.”

“I think she is,” Joelle said.

Malcolm looked at her closely, then released her shoulders to straighten back up. “You’re a good judge of character. I’ve long relied on that. I’m relying on that again now. No need to wake her now, I don’t want her panicking or thinking something is going on here. Just, when she’s up in the morning, be there. Talk with her. Be friendly. But sound her out, see what she knows. You know what I’m looking for?”

“Of course,” Joelle said. “I’ll find out.”

“Without her suspecting you’re pumping her for information?”

“I took that as said,” Joelle said.

“Of course you did. You’re your mother’s daughter for sure.” He gave her a fond smile, then took the bag Arvid held out for him, and the two men headed to the compound interior.

The bags over their shoulders were clinking, a dull metallic clink, as they walked. Weapons, Scout guessed.

They had gone out to meet Ruth, the governor’s daughter, just as they had arranged to do before the solar storm started. Ruth had been expecting an exchange of information, a meeting around a table with pastries and coffee or tea, all parties neatly dressed and well spoken. Not that Scout had ever spoken with Ruth about it—Ruth who had been the first of all of them to die during the storm—but Scout had seen at once that Ruth was mid swan dive, about to plunge into deeper, murkier waters than she had known existed.

Scout could sympathize with that. Her life before her family had died had done nothing to prepare her for her life after.

These scarred, sun-ravaged fellows had been about to meet her, with a bag of guns apiece. The little girl Ruth had been traveling with, Clementine, had been a deadly force with or without weapons, but she had never actually been on Ruth’s side. She had been an assassin who only looked like a normal tween girl, waiting for the perfect moment before she made her move.

Scout watched Joelle standing alone in the semidarkness of the canyon nook behind the rover. The sun would be up soon, and Joelle didn’t look like she’d slept a wink. She had her hands in her vest pockets, her eyes on the toe of her boot gently erasing the lines from the rover treads in the dust. Then she looked up at the rover itself and Scout felt like their eyes met, just for a moment.

But maybe not. Joelle turned and walked back to the equipment room and Scout was once more alone with her sleeping dogs.

Scout considered the massive wheel locking the gate doors together. It didn’t look like anything could blast that open, even if she had kept some of Ottilie’s explosives, which she hadn’t. The hinges on either side that fastened the doors to the rock walls of the canyon itself were harder to judge. The bolts didn’t look so very large, but there was no way to tell how deeply into the rock they penetrated. A short bolt of that width might pull free of the rock at the first push from the rover’s armored body, but a longer bolt? Maybe not.

And firing up the engines, ramming the back end of the rover into the gate, gunning up the engine to batter those doors down? None of that was going to be anything like quiet.

Scout slipped down from the top bunk and went to the kitchenette to fire up the coffee maker. She briefly regretted not bringing the last of the jolo with her before destroying the compound, but after four days of drinking bottle after bottle, she had grown sick of it. Now, not even a full day later, she was craving that double hit of sugar and caffeine again.

She would just have to make due with coffee, bitter as it was. It didn’t really matter, so long as it kept her awake and alert.

While the coffee was brewing, Scout got dressed. Then she touched the disks still hidden in her pocket. They weren’t compatible with anything in the rover or with Gertrude’s equipment. She had no way of reading what they contained. But something in the equipment room she was never allowed to look at might be compatible.

If threatened, would she give the disks up? Without knowing what they contained, what the rebellion planned to do with the contents, how many lives might be threatened if she surrendered what she had? How could she weigh the risks?

Scout poured herself a large mug of coffee and took it to the dining nook. She took a long drink of hot, bitter coffee and sighed. She couldn’t. So she had to assume the worst. She had to be prepared to do anything to keep every secret that had been entrusted to her.

She hoped when Liam arrived he would have something that could read these things. And that when she finally saw what she had been carrying this entire time she didn’t have cause to regret anything she did now in ignorance. But somehow she doubted she’d be that lucky.

There was just no way she wasn’t going to mess something up.

Pushing away that thought, Scout took another slug of coffee and settled in to wait for dawn and Joelle.