AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His cheeks tensed with the hint of a smile, and he shook his head. “It’s that hot.” He laughed dryly. “Been living out here for years, and I still haven’t grown accustomed to the dry heat.”
My wrung-out heart ached for Fin and his many losses, not least among them his home on the coast.
“We’re close. Look,” he said, pointing to the way ahead.
A dark strip cut through the sun-bleached ground from one horizon to the other. At the front of our train of horses, Callon veered left to travel parallel to the dark strip.
I squinted. “Is thata road?” I looked at Fin. “Out here?”
“It was a highway from before the Turn,” he said, nodding slowly as he gazed at it. Heatwaves rose off the ancient asphalt, distorting the air.
“Peoplelivedout here?” I raised my eyebrows. “Voluntarily?”
“Not many,” Fin said, glancing at me sidelong. “But the desert’s not as forbidding as it looks. It has its own unique kind of allure.”
I studied him out of the corner of my eye, wondering if he meant that or if he was just saying that to make the best of an unpleasant situation.
“And there’s the Pearsonville outpost,” Fin said, his attention focused on the way ahead.
I followed his line of sight, spotting the boxy outline of a small building beyond the gradual rise of a low slope stretching out from the foothills we had just left behind. A short string of even smaller structures came into view as we drew closer, leaning precariously. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. The whole place looked like it was about to collapse in on itself.
“Thisis the outpost?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
The corner of Fin’s mouth twitched. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?”
I snorted a laugh.
“That’s the point,” he said. “We reinforced the main building from within but preserved the original exterior for camouflage. Anything thatappearedsturdier would have drawn unwanted attention.”
I frowned, studying the cluster of buildings as we approached, noting a third structure, nearest us, fallen to the pressures of time. It lay in a heap of rotted wood, broken glass, and rusted metal. A half dozen decrepit ancient vehicles lined one side of the collapsed building. Another structure appeared to be one strong gust away from joining the other on the ground.
Signs were intermittently nailed along the top of buildings:Hotel, Barber Shop, General Store.
My brow furrowed. “Was this a town?”
“At one point,” Fin said. “I think, in the end, it was an Old West museum.”
I looked at him and shook my head. “I don’t know what that means. What isOld West?”
“It was what our ancestors called this area centuries before the Turn.” He pointed to the narrow, precariously leaning structures. “That’s a ghost town.” He shrugged. “It’s what the early settlements out here looked like before the big cities like San Francisco and Seattle rose up.”
I was very familiar with San Francisco, of course. Its ruins were the bones lying beneath Corvo City, after all. But I had only ever read of the ancient city calledSeattle, though I was fairly familiar with the settlement that had risen there since the Turn, the Evergreen Nation, thanks to the emissaries from that strange land who had visited Castle Corvo.
“We turned that into a stable,” Fin went on, speaking of the long “ghost town” structure. “We needed a hidden place for horses. Wouldn’t do us much good to work so hard to conceal the outpost if we left the horses out in the open.”
We were close enough that, now that he had mentioned the longer structure was used as a stable, I could make out the shadow of a horse’s head moving through one of the broken windows.
Fin pointed to the larger, boxy building, maybe fifty yards ahead. “That’s where we’ll actually be staying.”
At the head of our group, Callon stopped his horse and raised a hand to his mouth, whistling a complex combination of tones that was clearly a signal.
I glanced at Fin, my eyebrows rising.
“We always station a null here to hide the mind signatures from any who venture nearby,” Fin explained. Which meant Callon hadn’t been able to telepathically communicate with the people posted here. Our arrival would be a complete surprise to them. “Callon is letting them know we’re friendlies.”
On cue, a door on the side of the larger building opened, and three people emerged—a shrewd-eyed, middle-aged woman, a hawkish man of around the same age, and a slim, androgynous teenager with dark, close-cropped hair. I figured the latter was the null. Otherwise, I couldn’t imagine why Fin’s people would allow a relative child to take up what was undoubtedly a dangerous post.
The woman’s hard features softened when her eyes landed on Callon, and her lips spread into a broad grin. He had that effect on pretty much everyone.
