Page 42 of Up in Smoke

“Their feed is in our supply, and we have six months for them from the looks of it.”

What the hell was I going to do with live chickens? How would we take care of them? “We’re getting live chickens?”

“I’m just glad the beef and goat will be coming already butchered. There must have been either frozen meat or livestock on one of the trains.” Sandro pointed at one of the other rooms. “I have a freezer in there, which can hold plenty of frozen meat. But he’s definitely trying to butter me up.”

“Without the actual butter.”

“There’s butter, and I bet it’s frozen. There’s sugar, salt, and plenty of flour and corn meal, too. I’ll be able to keep us fed while we handle our business here. The dates have most things delivered in monthly intervals, although the meat will probably be delivered all at once. He knows I have the chest freezer; I’d ordered one for him in my early days here as a gesture of good will—and proof I could perform shipment miracles to go along with my pretty words. We’ll have to stick around in the morning to accept the first delivery, but that’s fine.” Flipping the page, he continued to read, wrinkling his nose. “He wants to triple the size of Asylum, turning everything under Tulsa into his personal playground. He also wants more reinforcements of the roof, as he has plans to turn the city above into a business sector while he holds the residents hostage underground from the looks of it.”

“Which implies he means to keep the choirs controlling the storms so he can determine which places are safe and which aren’t?” I guessed.

“That’s one possibility. Another possibility is he’s trying to cultivate the residents to want him to be the permanent leader. Then he can revive nearby cities that have been wiped out and start the process all over again, turning Tulsa into the capitol of the Alley.”

“Isn’t it basically already?”

“Basically. It would be pretty tough to stop that part of his plans. Right now, Tulsa is the heart of the Alley.”

I wrinkled my nose and eyed the stack of papers including the supplies. “Is there any chance he’s trying to be a good citizen?”

“That is a possibility, which is why we’re going to have to be careful and confirm the truth before we act. The next few weeks, I expect we’ll be doing a lot of information gathering to discover what he’s up to and why.” Sandro flipped through the rest of the papers, shaking his head and muttering while he read them. “This looks fairly normal in terms of what he tosses my way whenever I come back after being out of the Alley or Tulsa for a while. I figure I’ll end up doing heavy magical lifting three to four hours every few days. Have you ever been tested for if you’re a hybrid? And I don’t mean in terms of shapeshifting. I want to see if we can convince him you have latent abilities in other fields.”

“I’ve experimented, but not with any real direction. Is there a way to get a hold of a residency list for Asylum?”

“Worried about some friends?” Sandro asked.

I nodded. “I want to know if the kids from the martial arts center managed to escape, and the restaurant, too.”

Well, Brent from the restaurant. If he was right—and had correctly identified the bodies—there wasn’t anyone else. For the most part, I believed him, although I’d misidentified bodies before.

A bad blow tended to leave the survivors guessing at who lived and who died. Hope, in its painful way, refused to die. Either way, I would find out soon enough.

“Most of the kids should be in Asylum, but I don’t know if all of them made it. The restaurant got hit hard, but at least the owner made it into Asylum. I don’t know if any of them will be permanent residents, though. Mansfield has been a bit weird about that. I’m still baffled why he has so much interest in the martial arts center—or in the kids learning there.” Gathering up the deeds, he stacked them and returned them to the Manila envelope. “I’ll leave the supply papers out, as we’ll need them to inventory the delivery tomorrow. We should do an inventorying of your cellar, too.”

“There was a weapon cache in the cellar. Swords, knives, and things like that. I don’t know if there are any guns in some of the boxes.”

Sandro twisted around to stare in the general direction of the room that held the cellar’s contents. “There could be. It’s entirely possible. That elevates the importance of doing that inventory. We can do it on my laptop. If you tell me what we have while I do the typing, we should be able to get it done quickly, and we can stock the kitchen with the canned goods while we’re at it.”

“That sounds like a good plan. So, deliveries in the morning, check in with everyone I know after the deliveries, and organize this place after that? We’ll save the venture out west for the next day?”

“That sounds like a good idea, and that’ll look natural to Mansfield and anyone he has spying on us—and yes, he’s absolutely going to spy on us. There’s a reason he keeps bugging my house.”

“He’s bugged the entirety of Asylum,” I muttered.

“Yes, he has. He’s always been careful to keep a close eye on everything, but that surprises me. I get monitoring some people, but to monitor everyone’s homes?”

“The apartments are really small, especially in the townhouse rows; I’ve been to one before. A black market operator lives down here, and I would sneak in to get info from him sometimes. He was the one who told me about the hunters after me, including you.” I could understand why Mansfield would want to keep a close eye on someone like Noah. “What do you think Mansfield uses black market operators for down here?”

“Illegals, especially weapons and ammunition, and they’re useful for checking out the various bounties, both legal and illegal, in the system. I don’t make use of the black market system, but I’m aware of it, I know how to access it, and I sometimes monitor it for anything interesting. Your bounty was routed through the legal system, in case you’re curious. I did check to see if there was an illegal bounty out for you, but there wasn’t one. Whoever wanted you dead and gone was acting of their own volition.”

“But why?” I sat back in my chair and frowned. “I mean, I’m a scavenger. I survived by taking stuff from ruins and selling it off, but I don’t think I’d taken anything worth killing me over.”

“I can think of a few reasons,” Sandro admitted.

“Really? What reasons?”

“Jealousy. You’re an attractive woman, you had the attention of every bounty hunter in the area, and you were bringing down a pretty penny on the bounty market. Sometimes, a hunter gets jealous of other hunters and will kill a target. If they can’t get the money, no one will. It’s ridiculous, but it’s happened more times than I care to think about.”

I grimaced at the thought of someone being that petty. “I don’t want to die because someone is that stupid, Sandro.”