“Must have been a real good v ille.”
Krysty smiled at the old man. “Yeah, it was. But all things change. That was why we… why we were moving on.”
“Your ville a good place, lover?” she asked Ryan.
“Seemed so, then. Until I saw the skull that was hid under the smiles.”
“Life’s a deal of hard traveling,” J.B. said sagely, sur-prising everyone. Homespun philosophy wasn’t nor-mally what you heard from the Armorer.
Jak and Lori were working with the stern steering oar, slowly propelling the raft toward the western shore, now only a couple of miles away. It was backbreaking, soul-destroying work, and they’d found from painful experi-ence that it could only be done in pairs. Any more and chaos followed with everyone knocking and pushing into everyone else.
It took them close to four hours to move roughly half the distance they needed to reach the land.
The waters around them had gotten more and more polluted. Dead fish and birds hung suspended, rotting and
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half-eaten, bones coated with a yellow grease. An hour back they’d poled past the corpse of a massive shark-a great white, at least fifty feet from porcine snout to the mangled tip of its tail. It hadn’t been dead long, and its flat little eye still rolled incuriously toward the rich violet sky.
“Jaws,” Doc muttered, enigmatic as ever.
The beach, sand dunes rolling back toward a line of low scrub, was now less than a half mile off. The sun had sunk well behind the hazy bulk of the land. In the last quarter mile they’d finally broken clear of the stickiest of the wa-tery dreck, but the bitter labor had taken its toll.
Doc Tanner had collapsed, muttering feverishly about painted ships and painted oceans. Lori had fainted fif-teen minutes later, slumping on the timbers, banging her head again. Despite her reserves of mutie strength, Krysty had given up, sitting down in a heap, her face white and drained. “Sorry, folks,” she said, hoarse with exhaus-tion. “I’ve paid all I can find. Got no more. Sorry.”
It had been left to Jak Lauren, with seemingly bottom-less reserves of stamina in his slight body, J.B. and Ryan, to keep working on the clumsy steering paddle. Heaving it backward and forward, each stroke making the mus-cles of shoulder and spine scream in protest. Each stroke pushed the raft a scant couple of feet nearer to land.
Now the worst was over. Lori, Doc and Krysty had re-covered a little, relishing the cooler breeze coming off the beach. Jak and the Armorer were at the oar.
Krysty smiled weakly at Ryan as they sat together. “I felt awful about stopping.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Could have used the power of the Earth Mother. But it…”
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Ryan squeezed her hand. “No. I’ve seen you after you’ve done that. Not worth it. Only ’bout another half hour and we can get off this bastard raft.”
“You know we were talking ’bout Harmony? And your old ville?”
“Front Royal?”
“Yeah. If we get there and you kick Harvey Cawdor’s ass out of the land… what happens then?”
“Do I get to be the baron? Take over the line? Is that what you mean?”
“Course. Would you take it on? Give up all these mat-trans jumps? Give up all the killing? Settle? That’s why I left Harmony in the first place.”
Ryan looked around them. “We’ve talked ’bout this before. I don’t know, lover. That’s the fucking truth. I just don’t know.”
“Want to spell me, Ryan?” J.B. called.
“Right. One minute.”
“Answer me, lover,” pressed Krysty. “I want to know what I’m getting into when we get down to the Shens and your ville.”
The jagged cut the mutie had inflicted on Ryan’s hand seemed to be healing. He picked at a small piece of rough skin around it, trying to sort out how he wanted to an-swer Krysty’s question.
“A baron holds his ville by his weapons and by fear. That’s always been the way of it. I don’t know if that’s the way I want to live, Krysty.”
“It can change.”
“You can never turn your back when you’re the baron. I was old enough and saw enough before I left Front Royal to know that. You never sit, unless you’ve got your back ‘gainst a wall. You never sleep long and easy. You