“What’s out there? Minerals? Water?” he asked.
“I think geothermal.”
“That falls under House Red, Power.”
I ducked the fence, started off toward the hay chute down the field a bit. “Keep an eye out for Pony. It’s a little skittish, so mind the horn.”
He scanned the field as we walked.
“Do you know if House Red is tapping geothermal?” I asked.
“It’s possible. There was a shift in House Red a year ago. Aranda Red stepped up and her father stepped down. She’s been acquiring unclaimed land faster than any other House.”
A geothermal claim would secure that land as House Red without much of a peep from other Houses. Which meant there was no conflicting House to call upon to stop this. The Fesslers’ homestead would be demolished.
There had to be a way to stop them.
“Pony, I presume?” Abraham nodded toward the beast that stepped out from beneath the old apple tree.
Pony was made from parts, just like all Dad’s beasts. The hind of it was zebra, the middle, neck, and head of it horse, and the four chunky legs were bison.
I didn’t know where the horn came from, but it sat the center of its flat forehead just like a unicorn in a storybook. Altogether it wasn’t that bad-looking.
It whickered, but didn’t come any closer to us.
“Who made it?” he asked.
“My dad.”
I stopped by the chute. Neds and I had gotten tired of dragging feed out here in the winter, so we’d built a two-story shed, the top of which held a couple dozen bales of hay—or enough to keep the pony happy for half a month, if needed. It burned through a lot more feed than a horse would.
“He stitched it?”
“Piece by piece.”
“The lizard too?”
“He had a restless head and hands full of ideas. Stand that side of the chute. We’ll need eight bales down and broken.” I pulled the chain. Pulleys got the track moving, and bales of hay lined up nice and smoothly in a row, coming down the ramp to thunk at our feet.
“And the horn?”
“No idea.”
I picked up the first bale, carried it a few yards away from the chute, dropped it, then pulled my knife and cut through the twine.
The pony trotted out away from the tree, then back, unsettled by the commotion.
Abraham had stayed at the chute and was stacking the bales as they fell to keep them from clogging up the system. “What does it do?”
“Mostly? Eat hay. But it can pull or plow if I need it to.”
I rested my hands on my hips and studied him. He moved with a steady grace of a man used to hard work and content in it. The wind caught at the collar of his coat and stirred his hair, pushing it into his eyes as he bent, pulled, twisted, stacked. He looked like he could do this sunup to moon down.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
He glanced over his shoulder and gave me a smile that made me hold my breath from the joy in it.
“Once or twice.”
“Well, well. City boy’s lived out in the scratch. Were you a farmer or stitcher?”
“Back when I lived in the scratch, there wasn’t such a thing as a stitcher. I owned a cherry orchard, raised some livestock and such.”
The bales had stopped falling and the track stilled. He picked up one of the 150-pound bales like it was made of air. “Your turn to answer my question.”
“About?” I strolled over, hefted another bale, and carried it to the feed spot.
Pony was walking our way slowly, head down, sniffing the ground.
“Who made you? How long have you been out here hiding?”
“I was born to my mother and father.”
“In that body?” he nodded at me as he walked back for another bale.
Weird question for most folk. But, I suppose, not for him and me.
“I really am twenty-six,” I said sidestepping the body question. “Do you know where my brother is?”
He dropped another bale, glanced over at Pony, who was nibbling at grass just a few feet away from us. “He claimed House Gray several years ago and requested positions among the histories and libraries in other Houses.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s House Gray, and works in one-year contracts for other Houses. The last House he worked for was House Silver.”
“Vice?” Silver was the House that dealt with entertainment, drugs, sex, and any other pleasure humanity could think up.
I cut the string on the last bale. “Has he been in contact with you?”
“That’s difficult to answer.”
“Yes or no should work.” I stabbed a few flakes of hay off the bale and tossed them to one side, inhaling the sweet, dusty green scent as it drifted up from around my boots.
Pony made another soft sound, easing a little closer.
“Yes.”
“But?”
He was silent as he broke open another bale.
“But?” I repeated waving the pitchfork his way.
“Your brother has a certain . . . intensity,” he said eyeing the tines of my pitchfork. “It seems to run in the family. The last few messages from him have lacked that.”
“Can messages be forged?”
“This is the modern age, Matilda. Everything can be forged.” He scooped up a handful of hay, then walked slowly toward Pony, his hands low.
I set the tines in the ground and leaned one elbow on the handle. “And my mother’s message?”
“We didn’t wait to disprove it. I left the moment it came over the transom. Before any other House could intercept it.”
“So it might not be real?”
He stopped an arm’s length from Pony and held out the hay. Pony nibbled at dirt, trying not to look interested even though its eye was locked on his offering.
“Might not. And yet here you are,” he said. “Just as she said. And here is your farm—your father’s farm. Just as she said. As real as can be.”
Pony raised its head, and Abraham leaned away from the horn and lifted his hand so Pony could wrap its lips around the hay. He ran his other hand down Pony’s neck.
The man looked as comfortable out here as a frog in a puddle.
“Could I see it?” I asked. “My mother’s message?” It came out a little softer than I’d meant.
The look that crossed his face—kindness and regret—was more than I knew how to deal with.
“Or not,” I said. “It’s fine. This is enough for Pony. Let’s go.”
I strode to the truck, tossed the pitchfork in the back, and got behind the wheel.
Abraham gave Pony one more pat, then propped the pitchfork over his shoulder and sauntered back to the truck. He put the pitchfork in the back and got in.
“I’ll show you her message,” he said. “When we get to House Gray. I promise.”
“Thank you.” I started the engine and drove through the falling dusk.
• • •
By the time we made it to the pond where the leapers liked to nest, I’d accepted that my mother’s message was something I’d have to face.
Her death wasn’t a new truth, but hope had sharpened the edges of it again.
What worried me more was my brother. If the latest messages from him had been forged, who had forged them and why? And, more importantly, where was he?
Abraham had been silent on the drive, a courtesy I appreciated.
“You can stay in the truck,” I said. “I’ll handle the leapers.”
He opened the door and got out of the truck anyway.
“So far I’ve seen a dragon and unicorn,” he said. “Leapers brings all kinds of thoughts to mind.”
“They’re just pond crawlers.”
I retrieved a bag of apples out of the back of the truck. Leapers didn’t need apples to survive, but they were intelligent, determined little things that would stray far and wide for fruit.
I opened the bag and tossed an apple into the brackish pond.
Abraham leaned against the truck, searching the shadows.
“Up,” I suggested.
He looked up at the trees that overhung the water.
A rattle of leaves was all that announced the leapers.
I tossed another apple into the pond.
“Spiders?” he asked.
“Not quite.”
The leapers lived up to their name and came hopping out of the trees and into the pond with fist-sized splashes. They wrapped their little tentacles around the apples, which were bigger than them.
“Octopuses? Tree octopuses?”
“They aren’t supposed to climb trees, but one of them figured out where the fruit was, and, well.” I shrugged.
“Your father stitched little land octopuses?” he asked.
“Oh, these aren’t his. Or at least I don’t think so. These have been here as long as any of us can remember. Mutated. Teeth. Poison.”
“With a taste for apples?”
“Yes. And they will go miles to find them. Which, in turn, gets them killed and us blamed. Our neighbors don’t much appreciate it when they swarm a tree and scuttle off with all the best fruit.”
“Why don’t you get rid of them?”
I shrugged. “They’re not doing any harm. Well, not much. They are poisonous, so it’s not like you want them crawling up your legs. But they’re kind of cute.” I grinned as one of the leapers landed on an apple and fell off. It draped a greenish tentacle over the fruit, hugging it like it had just found a lost friend.
Most of the little monsters found an apple to hug and bob along with. I finished throwing the rest of the fruit in there. It should keep them out of the neighbors’ crops for a month.
“That’s a lot of apples,” he said.
“Just being practical. If I’m going into the city with you, I want things tied down here so it’s not chaos when I come back.”
He made a hm sound.
“What?” I wadded up the burlap bag and tucked it under the pitchforks in the truck.
“I can’t guarantee you’ll be back here any time soon.” He got into the truck. I got in too.
“I don’t need your guarantee. I can negotiate my own life, thank you.”
“You’ll be claimed by House Gray.”
The lights on the old truck cut a watery yellow swath through the creeping dusk as we made our way to the barn.
“Yes. And I’m sure House Gray will want me to do . . . something for them.” I glanced over at him, looking for a clue as to what they might want me for.
“Something,” he agreed.
Not helpful. Okay. Fine. “After I do that, I’ll come back here. Home. Where I belong.”
“You’re galvanized. You belong to a House.”
“I have a House.”
“House Brown? That loosely connected group of drifters, failures, and malcontents doesn’t count.”
“You fought for those malcontents once, Mr. House Gray.”
“I’ve never stopped,” he said. “I just know when to change tactics. Do you understand that out of all the experiments, trials, and advances over the past two centuries no one has succeeded in creating a new galvanized?”
“Well, there’s me.”
“Yes. There’s you. Unregistered, un-Housed—and Brown doesn’t count,” he said before I could argue. “Until this morning, unknown to any of us. If you are made different enough to feel, then an awful lot of people will go to extremes to find out just what makes you tick.”
“What, like showing up on my doorstep, bleeding and claiming I need protection on nothing but a message from a long-dead parent? Didn’t think I was all that special.”
“I didn’t say she was alive. Just that we had a message from her. And rare is the term I’d use.”
“Well, rare doesn’t mean I’m going to roll over and let a House tell me what to do. I stand with Brown.”
He grit his back teeth together so hard, the muscle at his jaw popped out.
I pulled up in front of the barn, which was set just a short ways off from the house, and wondered if he was the yelling type.
“How many friends?” Abraham asked, not yelling.
“Are malcontents?”
“How many of your friends are in the path of the heavy equipment?”
“A dozen families,” I said.
“Tell them to pack and leave. It’s the safest thing to do.”
“They won’t listen. It’s their land and they intend to stay.”
“How far out are the machines?”
“Thirty miles. There’s still time.”
“For what?”
I licked dust off my bottom lip. “Neds have reminded me that you are not on our side, Mr. House Gray. The deal was for you to answer my questions, not the other way around.”
“Neds don’t know me.”
“Neither do I.”
He said something under his breath in that language I didn’t understand, pushed open the door, and started pacing.
I walked over to the fence attached to the barn and let myself into the pen.
“Do you want my help?” he finally asked.
“Will it mean I owe you a favor?”
“It means I can buy your friends some time.”
“They don’t want time. They want their homes.”
He leaned his elbows against the top of the fence, his boot hooked up on the lowest rail, as he stared at the chickens running around at my feet. He looked comfortable in that pose, natural to this kind of life, and handsome enough that needful fire spread out through me again.
What was wrong with me? We had just been arguing. I shouldn’t be thinking about what his touch would feel like, about what his lips would feel like against my skin.
Irritated. That’s how he made me feel. I ignored him and my own body and everything else about today that was driving me mad, and checked the automatic grain feeder instead.
“Those aren’t chickens,” he said after a bit.
“They’re part chicken.”
“And part lizard?”
“Lizard neck and tail. Bat wings.” I tested the water trough, and then shooed away the hissing flock so I could unlatch the gate.
“Mythology would call them cockatrice,” he noted.
“Fancy. We call them chickens.”
“It’s the Fesslers’ place, is it?” he said.
That stopped my breathing for a second.
“How do you know the Fesslers?”
“As you pointed out, the galvanized began House Brown. I knew old Gertie Fessler. She claimed a patch of desert around those parts. If her descendants are anything like her, they are pigheaded and devil-tempered. And you’re right. They’d rather stand ground and die.”
“That’s nice to hear,” I said.
“What?”
“That I’m right.”
A smile crept up the corners of his mouth. “About the Fesslers.”
“About everything.”
“Odds are against you there.”
“I’ve never been afraid of playing the odds, Mr. House Gray. Now let’s go get some dinner.”
9
The first to fall under the scientist’s knife was a man who had survived the Wings of Mercury. When he, the undead, took his first breath, they knew the experiment had not failed completely.—1914
—from the journal of L.U.C.
We left the truck where it was and walked up to the house. My feet had been running these paths since I was just a child, and I knew every bend and rock and
rise.
Abraham didn’t have the same luck. But for a man who insisted he couldn’t feel his feet—or any other part of him—he did a remarkably good job of not stumbling.
We stomped mud off our boots before letting ourselves into the kitchen.
The light was turned down low, but a loaf of fresh-cut bread and a pot of roast and vegetables were left on the table, along with a note.
“Secret admirer?” Abraham turned to wash his hands in the sink.
I picked up the note. “Farmhand.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What romantic-nonsense age did you come from where a note has to be from an admirer? Wait—don’t answer that, Mr. 1492.”
He chuckled. “Did he quit?”
“Neds wouldn’t quit on a note. He just said Grandma turned in for the night and so did he.”
“That all?” He dried his hands on the towel, watching me.
It wasn’t all. Neds had also said he didn’t know what had taken us so long to feed the animals, nor what else we might have been doing. Plus, he said he hadn’t found anything useful in the basement. Which meant we had a big fat zero for ideas on how to stop House Red.
“That’s all.” I crumpled the note and shoved it in my pocket. “Make yourself a sandwich. I’ll put on water for tea.”
I traded places with him, washed my hands, and filled the pot with water before placing it on the stove. We cooked with electricity, since the pump house generated more than enough for our small farm.
Abraham wasn’t shy about putting a sandwich together. He sat at the table and was a few bites into it by the time I put down two mugs and poured water over the mint and chamomile.
I made a sandwich and sat at the table with a sigh.
“Rough day?” he asked, piling some vegetables on his plate.
“I’ve had worse. Much worse.” I took a bite and rolled my eyes at the flavor that burst through my mouth. Neds could cook, and even simple meals were a feast when he put his mind to it.
And he had cooked to impress tonight.
“For instance?” he pressed, already making up a second sandwich.
“Well, nobody died today. That’s a plus. How’s your wound?”
He swallowed tea and nodded. “Better than it should be. I don’t suppose you’d sell me some of that jelly?”