“You cost me some water,” the man yelled to Ryan.
“If we were on more friendly terms,” Ryan said, “mebbe I’d feel bad about that. But it isn’t anywhere close to that.”
The man laughed, his voice sounding confident and loud in the canyons between the mounds of wrecked wags. “The way you sound, you’d think it was me between a rock and a hard place instead of you.”
“I’m in here,” Ryan said. “You’re out there with the coldhearts and the dogs. Mebbe another chem storm the way the sky looks.”
“Man can starve to death in there.”
“Not with the rations we found,” Ryan lied. “Figure we can wait in here, see whether we have to take on you or the coldhearts. Doesn’t matter to us.” His words drifted away into the ensuing silence.
“Ryan,” Mildred called.
Glancing over his shoulder, Ryan watched as Krysty opened her eyes and looked around.
“HOW ARE YOU FEELING?”
Krysty looked up into Ryan’s ice-blue eye, noting the worry that was in it. Her hand and arm felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds as she lifted it. She touched his face, dragging her fingertips across his mouth, across the scar that covered half his face. “Like I was hit by a wag,” she said.
Ryan took her hand in his. “What about Phlorin?”
Krysty shook her head and regretted it immediately. “Don’t know, lover. Mind’s all a jumble right now.” Inwardly she was cold, and she didn’t know if that really was the answer or if Phlorin’s presence was making her say that. Was the woman really dead and gone, or was she somehow still around? Krysty hated not knowing. The thing that Ryan had always had with her was trust—even when things were at their worst.
“We’ll worry about that soon enough,” Ryan told her. “Soon as we get out of here.”
“When’s that going to be?” Krysty wanted nothing more than to put the ville behind them. Then a meal from a self-heat and a night sleeping in Ryan’s arms.
“Working on it now,” Ryan told her.
A man called for attention from outside.
“Got to go,” Ryan said.
Krysty nodded, then gazed around the room, seeing everybody that she’d seen earlier when Ryan had killed Phlorin. She didn’t know how they’d come to be inside the building, or even where it was, and that inability to remember scared her. She trusted Ryan and the other companions, but she needed to be independent, too. Lying there like an invalid wasn’t helping. She tried to sit up, but her stomach turned sick on her, revolving in wicked flips. She groaned.
Mildred put her arms around Krysty, helping her get steady. “Easy does it,” the black woman said. “You’ve been through a lot. Don’t rush it.”
“Water,” Krysty gasped, wanting to get rid of the sick taste in her mouth.
Mildred brought up a ring-pull and popped the top. She held the container as Krysty drank. “Go easy with that. Too much and you might make yourself sick.”
Krysty sipped the contents, then settled back into the woman’s arms. She glanced at Dean, who was lying with one ear pressed to the ground for some reason. She thought she’d ask him, but she didn’t have the strength.
“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”
“Cawdor,” Ryan answered. “And yourself?”
“My name’s Naylor.”
Ryan scanned the terrain, watching the baron’s men slither between the stacks of dead wags. Maybe Naylor was giving the appearance of stepping down his hostile actions, but he wasn’t wasting any time in shoring up his position. The man had experience. “You a baron’s man, Naylor?”
“Yeah. Working as sec chief for Baron Curtis Shaker.”
“Don’t know him,” Ryan called back.
“Got a ville down south. Mebbe two weeks ride from here as the crow flies.”
“You got a reason for being in Idaho Falls?”
“I was sent here to find somebody.”
“Can’t be me,” Ryan replied, looking back over the men and women assembled inside the building.
“Man I’m looking for owes the baron some blood,” Naylor said. “If you stand in the way of me getting it back, there’s going to be trouble.”
“I don’t like getting threatened,” Ryan growled, but he cut his eye over the four men in the room. He automatically discounted Clete, the husband. If Naylor had been looking for a man with a wife, the sec chief would have said so.