House Immortal

  —from the journal of L.U.C.

  Boston Sue was my nearest, paranoid, highly armed neighbor lady. I rang her up on the landline, and she answered on the vid.

  “Bo,” I said, shifting so I was in view of the camera. “I need a favor.”

  Bo was a large woman, with dozens of neat, thin black braids that draped around to fall in loops at either side of her pierced and decorated ears. Her eyes were deep set and dark and missed nothing. Her skin was darker than mine and so smooth and unstitched, it was like she was carved of the softest clay.

  She was probably twenty or so years older than me and wore a gun the way most women wore purses—as a deadly accessory. Today’s little number was a semiautomatic, nestled in the folds of her brown and green tie-dyed dress.

  “You heard the drones pass over?” Bo asked.

  “I heard them,” I said. “It’s trouble I kicked up.”

  “Trouble?”

  “House trouble.”

  “Tilly, what did you do that requires drones flying over our privacy?”

  “Better you don’t know. But I do have a favor to ask,” I said. “Can you come stay with Grandma for a few weeks? I promise I’ll get in touch after a day or so.”

  “Sure, sure,” she said. “Anything you need, baby sweet.”

  “The beasts are fed and should be fine for a couple weeks. Neds are going with me.”

  “Don’t tell me any more. Simple is better. Take care of yourself and come home safe, you hear?”

  “Promise.”

  “How can I reach you?” she asked.

  “I’ll take the walkie-talkie. You know how to reach me.”

  “I do, I do. Good luck, Matilda.”

  “Thank you.” I ended the link then tromped up the stairs, turning off the light before I shut the door behind me.

  Time to say good-bye to Grandma.

  “Grandma?” I said, pushing open her door and turning on the table lamp. “I’m going to be gone for a little while.”

  “It’s today?” Grandma asked.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “I’m taking a trip.”

  She sat up, and the sheep tumbled down the quilt. I saved one from going off the edge, tucked it in the crook of my arm, and rubbed its soft little ears.

  “You aren’t going looking like that, are you, dear?” she asked.

  I realized I was still in a tank top and shorts. Great. I’d been mostly naked in front of Abraham. Well, I guess that made us even.

  “I’ll change and pack a bag,” I said. “But I’ll be back in to say good-bye, okay?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Get your things.”

  I dropped the sheep on her bed. All three of them panicked in a circle, then wedged themselves headfirst into her pillow.

  I hurried to my room and pulled on a soft tan tank top and shrugged into my favorite shirt—a green military with cutoff sleeves that had been Quinten’s. I slipped into khaki pants, then wrapped my gun belt around my hips and holstered my old Colt revolver. Yes, I was going into a city, but I was not going unarmed.

  My coat hung over the back of the old willow chair next to my bookshelf. I put my coat on, then dug around my dresser top, looking for where I’d left my fake ID chit.

  Found it, stuck it in my pocket. What else? I spun a slow circle, taking in, maybe for the last time, all the things I could call my own. Books, the little circus animals Neds had carved for me, a string of glass beads looped across my mother’s lace curtains, my bed with the down coverlet.

  A change of clothes seemed practical, so I pulled an old canvas duffel out of my closet and shoved in a pair of jeans, underwear, a shirt, a sweater, socks, and, just in case, I threw in a spare of each. Then some extra bullets, my hunting knives, and the ancient modified walkie-talkie I’d brought up from the basement. Just for good luck, I added in a silver charm bracelet that had been my mother’s, and a couple of packets of seeds I’d been saving.

  Good enough.

  I slung the duffel over my shoulder and turned to leave.

  “You aren’t going into town looking like that, are you, dear?” Grandma stood in the doorway of my room.

  She must have thought she was going with me, and had dressed in a dark walking skirt, sensible shoes, and a warm sweater over her lacy pink blouse.

  I took her by the arm and guided her down the hallway a bit, back to her room.

  “This will be fine, I promise. It doesn’t matter what I look like.”

  “Oh, my dear child,” she said. “It all matters. Very much. This is our chance to make things right.” She caught at my hand and pulled me the rest of the way into her room, tugging me over to her bed.

  “We don’t have time, Grandma,” I said.

  “We always have time,” she insisted. “We are Cases, after all.” For a little thing, she had a strong grip. “Now, let’s see to getting you properly outfitted. You are going to the city, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. But you aren’t. You’ll be staying here.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Do you know what’s happening?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’m going to find Quinten and make sure our property is registered so we can keep it. I might have to . . . take a job with a House in the city for a while. Bo’s going to stay here with you. She should be here in a couple minutes. I promise I’ll call.”

  She pulled the ridiculously long cream scarf off her bed. I couldn’t tell if she was listening to me.

  “Here you are,” she said. “All the spare seconds I could find.” She draped the scarf around my neck three times and it still dragged the floor.

  “Grandma.”

  “Let’s loosen this a bit and get another round in.” She tugged and wrapped, and I let her.

  This might be the last time I saw her for a long time.

  “This is your special scarf,” I said.

  “Yes, and that is why I am giving it to you.” She stopped fussing with the scarf and placed her palms against my cheeks.

  “You are so unexpected,” she said. “A miracle and hope. Your parents loved you dearly. Do you know that?”

  I nodded, surprised. She never spoke of Mom and Dad.

  “This will not be easy to do. But I think you are the key, Matilda. You can change our future. Don’t be afraid to do what you know is right, no matter what that stubborn brother of yours says.”

  “What do you mean, I’m a key?” I was totally lost. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Do you understand what this scarf holds? What the wool can give it?”

  “Time?”

  “Time,” she agreed.

  When I was younger, she told me that the little sheep had a way of attracting wasted moments sort of like dry air attracts static electricity. She believed those fragments of time were caught in the thread that made the scarf.

  And while it all sounded like a load of hooey to me, I did have a dragon that could distill the healing properties of nano in its scales. There might be some truth to what she said.

  “I’ve given you as much time as I can. If you need it, when you need it,” she corrected, patting the scarf again, “pull the stitches out.”

  “All right,” I said, humoring her. “Thank you, Grandma.” I gave her a big hug, and she squeezed me back.

  “Good luck, my dear.” She turned and stooped a bit to shoo the sheep back toward her rocking chair by the window. Then she picked up her needles, and with the sheep at her feet, cast on new stitches, as if I wasn’t even in the room with her.

  “Good-bye,” I said softly. I left. Picked up my rifle in the kitchen and threw two large jars of jelly, a couple of good needles, and the spools of life thread into my duffel, then I was out the door.

  Neds were already at the barn with the truck. The engine was runnin
g, and he leaned on the open passenger’s door.

  Abraham stood a slight distance away from him and the truck, staring at the night sky.

  “Problem?” I asked.

  “A sky dark enough for stars,” he said. “I miss that.”

  “Where did you leave your car?” I asked as I got in the truck.

  Neds hadn’t gotten in yet. He was giving Abraham a double-barreled glare.

  There probably wasn’t room enough in the cab of the truck for all of us.

  Abraham must have figured that out. He stepped up into the truck bed, the springs dipping under his weight. He leaned toward my open window. “Just down the north road. I’ll let you know where to turn off.”

  I nodded at him in my side-view mirror, and he settled himself, scanning the sky. I hoped he really was looking for stars and not satellites or drones or some other thing up there that could blast my land apart.

  I drove along the pasture to where the rutted trail met up with a slightly less rutted lane.

  “You’re going to trust him?” Left Ned asked over the rattle and rumble.

  “He’s offered us protection. I’m not trusting him. I plan to read the fine print.”

  “Other Houses would take you in,” Right Ned said.

  “I don’t want any House to take me in. I don’t want to be owned or claimed. And if there’s any way out of it, I’ll take it. But there is something bigger than me to protect: House Brown. If they destroy that communication hub, a lot of people are going to suffer.”

  “And if they find your father’s beasts?” He lowered his voice, “And the pump house?”

  I nodded. Illegal, all of it. Especially the technology in the pump house. “Quinten will be jailed. Grandma too. The land will get stripped. And I’ll lose . . . everything.”

  “You’ll lose everything if you claim House Gray,” Left Ned said. “You’re something new, Matilda. Valuable. A modern galvanized. That House will use you as a bargaining chip to get what they want.”

  “I am not a thing. And I am no one’s chip.”

  After a short silence: “We should have sent him packing,” Right Ned said.

  “Well, we didn’t.”

  Left Ned grunted. “You should never have taken a stranger in.”

  “Really?” I glanced at him. “I trusted you, a stranger, when you first came walking up my property. Gave you a job with no references—remember? Even though you weren’t claimed by a House and weren’t carrying papers.”

  He winced, and I caught the slight smile from Right Ned.

  Maybe that would be the last of that.

  The road switched from rutted dirt to cow-swallowing potholes between patches of pavement. Took some concentration to keep us wheels down until Abraham signaled where he was parked.

  “There’s something you should know,” Right Ned said. “Back when he first showed up. When I touched him, I saw something.”

  “A vision?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. In all the time Neds had been on the farm, he hadn’t ever told me, specifically, what he saw when he touched another person.

  “I get, I see . . .” He shook his head, as if there were no words to explain it all.

  “A person’s fear, guilt, regret,” Left Ned picked up. “The thing they want to hide. The truth of what they are. That man is not a good man.”

  “That man,” Right Ned said, “has not been a good man. I don’t know what his moral standing is now.”

  “What, exactly, did you see?” I asked.

  “Him,” Right Ned said. “Younger, unstitched. He was locked behind bars, breathing steadily with a gun in his hand. Blood pooled out from the other side of the bars where another man in a uniform—law enforcement from way back—lay in a heap, dead. He shot a lawman. He’s a criminal, Matilda.”

  I nodded. I should be surprised, but, well, the galvanized had organized an uprising and almost overthrown the Houses. Breaking the law hadn’t seemed to concern them then either.

  “You said he was unstitched? So the vision you saw was from a long time ago when he was just a human. That’s more than three hundred years ago. Long before the Restructure. People change.”

  When the whole world went through the Restructure back in the early-2100s, everything changed. Corporations, countries, powers, joined together to grapple with overpopulation, dwindling resources, and the growing unrest that would have set the world into a crippling worldwide war.

  Well, that’s the way the historians wrote it. What most folks whispered was that a few rich families and a few powerful corporations got together and made some deals, drew lines in the monetary sand, erased a few political borders, and staked their claim in wide-reaching resource management worldwide.

  The Restructure didn’t go over well with most people the first ten years or so. After twenty years, people had forgotten the way things used to be. After fifty, only crazy fringers and the occasional charismatic criminal brought up the idea that things should go back to the way they had been—individual countries monitoring and monetizing their resources.

  In the old world, you lived in a country you claimed as your own.

  In the new world, it didn’t matter where you lived. You were claimed by a House—one of the eleven main powers in the world—or chose the twelfth, nearly powerless House Brown. You worked for them, and, in return, they provided for you.

  That was the sales pitch anyway.

  “Yeah, well, he’s not people,” Left Ned said. “And back when he was, he killed in cold blood. What do you think about that, Matilda?”

  I thought Abraham was a very dangerous man. But I’d thought that since I’d met him.

  “I think I’ll stand and face this problem straight on. I’m done hiding.”

  Abraham pounded on the back window. I slowed down a bit and glanced at him in my rearview. He pointed to the left. “Turn here,” he shouted over the wind.

  No road, no pull-off, just a break between the trees where a few had fallen in the windstorm we’d had last winter.

  I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, headlights revealing the glint of metal—his car tucked back under the trees.

  The truck dipped and sprang back on its shocks as Abraham jumped out of the bed.

  “Here.” He strode off into the brush.

  I killed the engine and pulled the keys.

  “You could still go back,” Right Ned said, staring out into the darkness. “We could run. On our own terms. Our own way.”

  “We could,” I said. “But I have a brother to save, a property to keep, and all the people in House Brown to protect. You don’t have to follow me, Ned. As a matter of fact, it might be smarter that you don’t.”

  Right Ned gave me the ghost of a smile. “I ain’t ever been the smartest man.”

  Left Ned swore quietly.

  I gave them both a smile.

  I got out of the truck, hefted my duffel, and shouldered my rifle, then walked over to Abraham’s car.

  Abraham had disappeared inside the driver’s side of the big gray hunk of curves and creases. The car looked like it was made of gray silk ironed and pressed into shape, no seams except where the doors slid aside.

  Compared to the rusty old lump of my truck, it was smooth as moonlight on water.

  I took the front passenger’s side, and Neds got in back.

  Abraham’s fingerprint shut and locked all the doors, then started the engine, which caused a bunch of lights to flash but made no sound.

  In seconds, we were out on the road with no sense of contact with the pavement. I didn’t think we were flying, but the thing had good enough suspension we might as well have been.

  Abraham took the thirty-mile-an-hour road at over a hundred. Darkness rushed past the windows. Within fifteen minutes, we were so far off my property, I wouldn’t be able to walk back
without stopping for the night.

  Make that two.

  “How long until we get there?” I asked.

  “Fifteen minutes until we hit a transfer tunnel. After that, half an hour or so,” Abraham said.

  “Chicago?” Right Ned asked.

  “Yes.”

  I wondered how my farmhand had known that.

  None of us said anything more. After a few minutes, the car veered to the right, and a clank rang out from beneath the tires. The ramp locked on to carry us to the tunnel.

  I’d only ridden the speed tubes once: a very short trip between our place and North Carolina that would have taken several hours on the road, but was over in a matter of minutes in the elevated tubes. I had been frightened at the time, because Quinten had said it was an emergency trip to buy some things we needed.

  Although we’d done more than that.

  We’d met someone, one of Dad’s partners at House White, I think, though he’d carefully worn gray to indicate a human-service position as he helped us with our shopping. Even as a child, I’d thought that strange.

  Quinten was more than capable of doing his own shopping, strange city or not, emergency or not. And the man we met never said his name.

  Even more telling: Quinten never spoke of him again.

  I was pretty sure we took home an extra box in our shopping bags that we hadn’t bought off any store shelf. A box the man had slipped into our bags.

  When I was older and thought about it, I wondered why the man looked so much like my brother, although older and sadder. Their eyes were the same, and something about the curve of their chins and shape of forehead had made them similar.

  I remembered the older man had patted Quinten’s shoulder once, while I ate my first gelato.

  He may have been an uncle. I’d never asked. It was just one brief afternoon in a child’s life. I’d been more interested in the vanilla on my spoon than the family I’d never see again.

  “Almost there,” Abraham said, as he finished inputting our destination, our business, our passenger list, and, of course, the credits to pay for the ride.

  Then that dizzying sense of being off the ground while simultaneously rising at a steep angle hit my stomach and head as the pod and car was launched.