mansion and onto the dusty road beyond. Rosalia kept herself in the prime of physical fitness, and Brigid noted how little the exertion seemed to affect her.
There was a paved road a little way beyond the forgotten mansion, and carts and scratch-built automobiles rolled down the street now and then, passing the two women as they made their way to their destination. Beside the road it was mostly open ground, sandy red earth giving the whole area a blushlike tint. Now and then the two travelers would pass a shack that had been constructed at the side of the road, and Brigid might spot a woman there by the porch, sitting down to darn the holes in a pair of man’s socks or leaning over to water the potted plants proudly arrayed by the front door.
“Who lives here?” Brigid asked as they passed one of the shacks.
Rosalia looked around her. “People. Just people. Why, what did you expect? Caballeros and banditos, swashbuckling their way down the streets?”
Brigid shook her head. “It’s just you forget sometimes what the world really is, all the people who make up its diversity and color.”
Marching onward down the road, Rosalia turned back and smiled. “I thought you never forgot anything,” she teased.
“I don’t know,” Brigid mused. “The world we inhabit—Cerberus—it’s all so frenetic. I guess I do forget sometimes that a normal world is out here.”
“Life’s not just memory, is it?” Rosalia observed. “It’s for living.”
Together, the two women continued along the road until Rosalia found the junction she had been searching for. The road itself continued on, but a rough dirt track had begun to run parallel to it at about fifteen feet away, rutted wheel marks crisscrossing between the two.
“Come on,” Rosalia instructed, stepping off the paved road.
Brigid followed, joining her companion on the other track.
Before long, the track veered away from the paved road once more, following a gentle incline that ultimately led into the mountains.
They walked for another quarter hour, following the path through the foothills and around the mountains themselves.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Brigid asked once, gazing around the desolate, uninhabited path.
Rosalia simply turned to her and smiled, offering nothing more than the incline of her head.
Eventually the narrow path dropped again, and Brigid saw buildings waiting in the distance, hidden within the recess of the valleys. The buildings were white-painted stucco, no doubt to reflect the sun’s heat during the daytime, now turned pink by its setting glare. Most of the buildings were just one-story, sprawling structures that accommodated perhaps five or more rooms, but there were a few two-story buildings, one with a high steeple dominating its western side. A few people could be seen milling between the buildings, and the occasional sound of voices and laughter came from below.
“Does this place have a name?” Brigid asked as she trekked with Rosalia along the pathway.
“Not anymore,” Rosalia told her with a shrug.
Brigid knew better than to probe her reticent companion too deeply, and together she and Rosalia marched past a sprawling graveyard that sat about a mile from the town itself. The graves were indicated by simple gravestones, each one marked not by a name but merely a number. Some of them looked more than a hundred years old, and not a single one had flowers.
All around, fields of crops were waiting to be harvested, a herd of cows and a sheep flock grazing in other fields patterned with long grass. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that this hidden community could feed itself. Brigid guessed it had perhaps sprung from some old survivalist troop dating back to the nukecaust that had reshaped the world.
“Do you come from around here?” Brigid asked as they walked toward the town’s outskirts.
“No,” Rosalia said. “I was schooled here. In the nunnery, over there.”
Brigid looked, saw the little chapel with its bell tower. It was just two stories high and built of stucco like the rest of the town, and it was probably the largest single building here.
The sun setting to their left, the two women walked past the simple stone marker that indicated the town limits, with Rosalia leading the way toward the nunnery. “You’ll like it here,” she promised. “It’s quiet.”
Brigid thanked her. She had agreed to come here when Lakesh had proposed it because it meant relief from the incessant questions from her colleagues. Rosalia was different. She didn’t ask questions; she just seemed to listen and to observe. Before they had left Cerberus, she had assured Brigid that she would take her to a place of tranquillity and meditation. It sounded preferable to therapy from Reba DeFore and, away from Cerberus and still carrying the interphaser, Brigid knew she could just run and keep running if she chose to, until she finally disappeared.
They walked through the open gates to the nunnery, an arch that was high enough to accommodate a horse and cart, and stepped into the courtyard within. Whatever Brigid had expected, she was left dumbfounded by what she saw. Women, all of them young and many of them still just girls, were involved in various forms of combat, throwing one another on straw mats, engaged in swordplay, shooting arrows at targets and working nunchakus in a furious display of fighting prowess.
“What kind of place is this?” Brigid said, taking everything in.
“I told you already,” Rosalia explained. “It’s a school.”
* * *
HOW LONG HAD IT BEEN? Black John Jefferson’s eyesight was dimming as he trudged heavily along the stone corridor. The walls to either side of him sloped subtly inward, narrowing the tunnel at its roof, fourteen feet above his dipped head. The walls themselves were solid, and the whole tunnel echoed with each heavy footstep.
“Where is this place?” Black John muttered, his words echoing.
He had climbed down the stone steps, slowly and heavily, his blood spilling onto each one as he passed. In his weak and wounded state, the stairs seemed to go on for a long time, and the light from the sky above had narrowed to just a single foot-wide shaft by the time he found the bottom stair.
Down there, Black John had trudged on, step by laborious step, following the only path he could see in the dim light from the stairs. There should be sconces here, or some other way to light the area, he felt sure, but he could find none. His head was reeling too much to care.
It took twenty minutes to walk the corridor, each footstep like running a marathon now, blood filling his blouse and streaming down his legs. His wounds just wouldn’t scab over anymore; they had been pulled about too much.
Ahead of him a doorway led into an open room. He stopped on its threshold and leaned heavily against the wall, his breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps that echoed through the underground maze. In the darkness, he could only see hints of the room beyond. It was wide, roughly circular, and it seemed to take up the whole expanse of the building. Furthermore, there didn’t seem to be any furniture in the room, only a broad floor covered in dust.
Well, he had come this far, hadn’t he?
Black John removed his hand from the wall, and when he did so a bloody
