“Hey, Jak, notice anything?” Dean whispered to the albino as they entered another, more heavily populated zone of the ville.
“Mebbe,” Jak replied carefully, with one eye on the sec men surrounding them.
“A lot of these people look the same?” Dean continued, forgetting the proximity of the sec force with whom they had hunted.
“People all same anyway,” Jak said pointedly, flashing a warning glance at the young Cawdor.
“Yeah, mebbe,” Dean said slowly, too lost in thought to be noticing Jak’s true meaning.
“Nice ville you got,” the Armorer said, taking in the surroundings. “Good guard system—especially the tunnel complex.”
“Yeah, we like to keep it tight and safe,” Harvey answered, warming to a theme close to his heart. “There’s a shitload of tunnels and basements in this old ville, but we keep ourselves pretty much to one sector, making sure that the others always have a watch on. There’s not many folks about these parts, but we like to keep ourselves to ourselves.”
“Yeah, so you’ve said before,” Krysty replied, trying to keep the note of suspicion out of her voice. But she couldn’t stop the curls of her hair coiling tight to her throat and collarbone.
They continued through the populated area. Some basements leading off of the tunnels had been converted wholesale into living units, or areas where vital survival trades were practiced. There was a cobbler and blacksmith, an area that seemed to act as a communal kitchen and dining area for at least that sector, and an armory. J.B. caught this in passing, and could see that there were two women at work dismantling and cleaning blasters. There were boxes lining the walls, and the smell of oil and cordite hung in the air around the cordoned-off area.
“We don’t have as many blasters as some villes, stranger, but we like to keep them in good working order. You never know when you may need them, right?” Bodie murmured to the Armorer, a hint of warning in his voice.
J.B., taking it for now, said nothing.
Looking around, Ryan could see that they had quite a crowd following them, and other people appeared from tunnels leading off their route as word spread that they had returned with the chilled young.
By the time they reached the central hall, they had a crowd behind them that had to have constituted most of the ville.
“Just how many people you got under here?” Ryan asked Harvey, casting a look over his shoulder.
“Two-fifty, mebbe three hundred,” the sec chief replied. “Not much mutie business, either. We get enough people traveling through to keep us pretty mixed in the old gene pool.”
Ryan’s eye narrowed, even though he said nothing. It was more than a little unusual to find such a knowledge of genetics expressed so casually in any ville in the Deathlands, let alone one that was relatively isolated.
They came to a halt in the center of the large room.
It was circular, draped in somberly colored swathes of old material that lent it a shadowy, dusty air. At the far end a long wooden table, with high-backed chairs, stood on a small dais, imposing over the rest of the arena. The hall itself had to have been part of a deep foundation, as it had a rough earthen floor, yet, the walls visible through the gaps in the drapes were of concrete. Through one such gap, Ryan could see the ragged edge of a floor that had been torn down— or had fallen—at some point in the past. That accounted for the surprisingly high and impressive ceiling.
The sec party put the poles down in the center of the hall. Harvey’s sec men stepped back from the bundles of chilled and stinking flesh; Ryan’s people did likewise. Casting a glance over his shoulder, Jak saw that the rear of the hall was now full of ville dwellers, yet there was an eerie silence among them, with not even any sobs to break that silence.
“What now?” Ryan asked Harvey, noting Jak’s unease.
The sec chief said nothing, but gestured toward the table and the high-backed chairs.
Two people had somehow slipped into the room from some secret entrance. One was a large, thickset man who was just under six feet, and looked like his muscular frame was beginning to run to fat. He wheezed slightly under his long, flowing gray hair and long gray beard, but his eyes were still sharp, moving with a deliberate slowness over the chilled children and then over the outsiders among the sec group.