“Yes,” Miranda said, “just how long have you been listening in on our private conversation, Doc? Bit like spying, isn’t it? Lot like spying.”
“Not at all, my dear young lady.” He repeated the bow. “I have only this moment entered the building. But, what sort of conversation could be so secret that you needs must accuse me of being some sort of snoop? Not, I trust, some kind of guilty conscience, my dear Miranda?”
“Fuck you.”
“Hey!” Michael stood. “There’s no need for that, Miranda.”
Doc smiled. “I can’t begin to imagine why such stern anger from so pretty a face. It isn’t as though this innocent maiden was attempting to suborn you from your friends and your duty, is it, Michael?”
“Sub born? Don’t know what”
“To suborn, Michael. To seek to persuade another to perform a wrongful act. I suppose that means something like, let us imagine, trying to encourage someone to betray their friends. You take my meaning, Michael.”
“Yeah, Doc.”
“Perhaps we could stroll together, back to our quarters, Michael.”
“Sure,” he replied, not meeting Miranda’s scornful stare. “Feel sort of tired.”
“Good night, sweet lady.” Doc didn’t bow this time, simply inclining his head briefly. “May choirs of angels sing thee to they rest.”
“Like I said, fuck you, Doc. And fuck you, too, Mike. Fuck all of you.”
AFTER MAKING SLOW and gentle love together, Ryan and Krysty fell into an easy sleep. But in the middle of the night, Ryan found himself trapped in a bizarre dream.
He was swimming deep beneath the ocean, in water so crystal clear that it was possible to see for miles. Also, he could breathe under the water, as though he had gills like a fish.
There was a large white chair, crusted with coral and lumps of rose quartz. In it, beckoning Ryan toward him with his battered Armalite, was the Trader.
Before he could swim closer, Ryan woke up.
It took him some time before he slipped again into sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It had been snowing for nearly three days, banking up against the walls of the line shack that had been home to Abe for the past week.
He had hoped to reach the coast before the great blizzard came swooping down from the Cascade Mountains to the east, but the pewter-colored clouds were too fast and too close for him. For a few hours the wind had shifted direction to the west, bringing the bitter taste of salt onto Abe’s lips, offering the brief expectation of making it down to the gray Pacific Ocean. It couldn’t be more than twenty or thirty miles away, down through a series of mazelike valleys.
It wasn’t a part of the world that Abe knew. There was a vague memory of riding there, years ago, in War Wag One at the Trader’s shoulder. But he couldn’t pin any fast details to the blurred recollection. There had been a city on the coast that he thought had been called Seattle, which had been an endlessly rambling series of ruins.
It was Abe’s hunt for the Trader that had brought him this far north.
Following rumor, myth, legend and gossip, the trail led him ever farther into that bleak and lonely country beyond the frontiers of what had been old California. The trail was already marked with graves and with a number of corpses, some of them the responsibility of a darkened figure carrying a battered Armalite, a stooped and gray shadow with the remnants of a hacking cough who was always moving on.
For Abe the chimera was always around the next corner in the trail. He’d been in a ville only a month before, a week before
“Yesterday, and he left a brace of sec men kicking in their own blood and guts. Baron put a jack price on the stranger’s grizzled head, but there was no rush to join the posse to try and hunt him down.”
Abe had been so close, but there had been an earth-fall that had blocked off one of the high trails, forcing him to detour thirty miles to the east before he could pick up again on the tracks of the man who might be the Trader.