her charms—and immediately felt guilty for it.
As Jack, Katherine, and Chloe reached the perimeter of the camp, Jack saw Edgar leaning against the barrel that served as a stool at the guard point. He looked at them with his usual methodical assessment.
“Kit,” Edgar said with no obvious inflection. Then the taciturn man glanced at Chloe, who rested half asleep in Jack’s arms. “Jack … and …?”
“Chloe.” The girl lifted her head from Jack’s shoulder and looked at Edgar. “I’m not sure of anything else today, but I’m definitely Chloe.”
Jack lowered Chloe’s feet to the ground, but he kept an arm around her waist. She wavered a little as she stood, but despite the exhaustion, shock, and lingering travel sickness, she was upright. In truth, she was doing remarkably well. “Go with Katherine, Chloe. You’re safe here.”
Without any of her usual sass, Katherine stepped up to Chloe’s other side and wrapped an arm around her middle just under Jack’s arm. “Lean on me,” she offered.
Once Chloe shifted her weight onto Katherine, Jack lowered his arm and released the woman into his sister’s care.
Edgar lit a cigarillo. He was studying Katherine as intently as he always did when she returned to camp after a patrol. Katherine continued pretending not to notice, but neither of them persuaded anyone—including themselves. If anything ever happened to Edgar, Jack would have no idea how to look after his sister. He was tempted to lock the two of them in a room to sort themselves out, but he’d tried that once before with less than grand results.
The two women slowly tottered toward Katherine’s tent. Once they were inside and Katherine closed the tent flap, Jack turned to Edgar. “She’s the new Arrival.”
“I figured, but you don’t usually cart them in like that,” Edgar said, holding out a second neatly wrapped cigarillo.
Jack shook his head. “Can’t. I need to do another patrol, and the stink of that makes it harder to scent what’s around me.”
Mutely, Edgar pocketed the cigarillo.
“You’ll stay at the gate?” Jack prompted.
Edgar took a drag and exhaled a plume of smoke before he answered. “I don’t shirk my duties, Jack. I’ll talk to her after my shift.” His tone was mild enough, but he was undoubtedly already tense after Katherine had insisted on going out with Jack. Typically, Edgar patrolled with Katherine; he stood night watch when she was in camp. Right now Katherine was struggling. She never coped well when one of the Arrivals died, worse when it was someone like Mary, whom she’d called a friend.
Jack nodded. It was the best he could hope for, all things considered.
“What’s she like?” Edgar asked.
“The new Arrival? Hard to say.” Jack pulled his attention away from the tent. “She kept calling us hallucinations.”
Edgar snorted. “Another Francis. Did she tell you her ‘real name’ was Dewdrop or Star?”
Jack grinned. “No. Near as I can tell, she isn’t from the same years as him. She feels … newer than anyone else has been.”
Each new Arrival wasn’t from a later time than his or her predecessors, but they were from a general window of time. Jack and Katherine had lived in the late 1800s; Mary had been from almost a century later. No one had come from a time earlier than Jack’s, and everyone else was from the 1900s. The areas weren’t the same either. Edgar was from Chicago; Melody wouldn’t give the same answer twice on where she was from. Francis thought he’d been in somewhere called Seattle when he’d been brought over to the Wasteland.
Jack and Katherine had been the first, and Jack had spent more than a few nights wondering if they were all here as a result of something he’d done forever ago. He had no idea what that something could’ve been, and he’d thought on it often enough the past twenty-six years. He’d also spent years trying to figure out a pattern to the times and places, but he’d had very little luck. All he knew for sure was that those who arrived in this world needed someone to help guide them, and he’d taken that task as his own. The transition to this world was hard. If he could have spared everyone from having to make it, he would.
For a moment, the only sound was the crackling of the tobacco in Edgar’s lit cigarillo. Neither he nor Jack mentioned the fact that they’d been expecting Chloe—or someone like her. Nor did they mention the worry that she’d attract Ajani’s attention too soon.
Jack had been waiting for that peculiar itch under his skin that always heralded a new Arrival; he’d wondered more than a few times if Ajani felt the same thing, but there was nothing to indicate that Ajani was anything more than a Wastelander who’d found the Arrivals particularly useful as employees. For Jack, though, there was a pull to a particular location, generally near to where the last of their group had died. Even without a sense of it, Jack would know to watch for the Arrival. Mary had only been dead a little over a week, but the replacement almost always arrived within a month. That was how it went: when one of them finally died, someone else arrived in the Wasteland. The only oddity was that Chloe had arrived much sooner than they usually did.
Edgar interrupted Jack’s musing when he asked, “Do you need me to do anything?” His tone said what his words didn’t: he had no special thing in mind, but if Jack did, he’d be obliging. That was one of the joys of dealing with Edgar: there wasn’t a lot of guesswork where he was concerned.
Jack pondered the question. Sometimes he had a better sense than others about what to do about the new ones. With Edgar, Jack had known almost instantly that he needed to keep the man away from any weapons until Edgar had determined that the Arrivals weren’t a threat to him. With some of the others—people long dead now—they’d had to keep weapons out of reach to keep them from harming themselves. Chloe didn’t fit into either of those categories.
“Not right now,” Jack said. “Maybe take Katherine out tomorrow so I can talk to Chloe without her hovering and badgering.”
Edgar nodded.
“I don’t know if she mentioned it, but Daniel was in Covenant.” Jack kept his voice pitched low.
“She hadn’t mentioned it yet.” Edgar’s characteristic calm failed a little; his nostrils flared and his lips pressed together tightly. In a blink, though, the expression vanished, and he asked in a deceptively calm voice, “Anything interesting happen?”
“Katherine shot him,” Jack started, and then he summarized what he knew of the meeting. He paused a moment before adding, “He warned her that Ajani is crazier than usual of late. I trust my sister, but she’s far too forgiving where Daniel is concerned.”
“I’m not.”
“Likewise.” Out of habit, Jack flicked open the chambers of his revolvers. Neither the silver bullets in the right gun nor the cold iron ones in the left were much use against demons, but there were plenty of other monsters in the dark.
Silently, Edgar held out one of the shotguns that they kept at the perimeter for patrols—or for any attempts at infiltration. Jack took it, cracked the barrel to check that it was loaded, and ignored Edgar’s small snort when he did so. They both knew it was loaded, and they both knew that neither one of them would be able to walk into the darkness without checking for himself. Trust didn’t outweigh habit.
