rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_f2825b8f-6d0f-544e-9293-48214284dd4e">Chapter 6
The Geiger counter on the dashboard flashed red, ticking over into the danger zone. For a moment, DePaul’s fixed expression slipped, his eyes widening as he saw the telltale flicker that meant they had entered a patch of radioactivity.
“Chin up, rookie,” Irons said from the seat beside him. “Nothing out there I ain’t seen a hundred times.”
Irons was a magistrate in the barony of Cobaltville. He was in his mid-forties, with thick hair that had turned steel-gray, lines around his eyes and mouth, and a scar on his chin where some deviant had taken a potshot at him a dozen years before. He wore the uniform of a magistrate—black molded armor that sheathed his body like an insect’s shell, a bright red shield painted across the left breast to show his rank of office. His helmet was poised on the seat behind him, within easy reach. It was Irons’s job to monitor DePaul—a rookie magistrate in his final year of training, following in the footsteps of his father.
Irons sat next to DePaul, flashing him that fatherly smile that spoke of how he was indulging the lad, not teaching him.
Up front, Bellevue was driving the SandCat, navigating the dirt roads that reached out from Cobaltville like spokes, unpaved and unmarked. Bellevue was a tall man with skin so dark it looked like licorice, picking up the highlights of any illumination so that it seemed to have a sheen. Bellevue was twenty-five and had been active in the field for almost a decade. Like DePaul, like Irons, he had followed in his father’s footsteps, born solely for the task of being a magistrate, drilled from a young age in the ways of Cobaltville law.
“Coming up on Mesa Verde,” Bellevue said from his place at the steering wheel.
DePaul peered out the windshield at the towering sandstone structures that dominated the horizon. Brown-orange in color, the colossal rocks had been carved with windows and doors by human hands, hundreds of years before.
“Pretty different to home, ain’t it?” Irons said.
DePaul shook his head in wonder. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” It was true. He had never had cause to leave the walled confines of Cobaltville in all his seventeen years. This was his first trip beyond ville limits and out into the wild.
DePaul was a young man with jet-black hair and a narrow face. His hair was cut magistrate short and slicked back from his forehead, revealing his widow’s peak. He had dark eyes, a darker brown than his father’s, and those eyes seemed to take in every detail, every nuance of whatever was placed before them. He had been small for his age, but the late blossoming of puberty had given him taut muscles and long legs, and now he regularly outmatched his strongest classmates in any test of physical strength. He remained slender, however, giving him the appearance of a spectre when he dressed in the dark armor of a magistrate.
DePaul was well on the way to becoming a full-fledged one. He had excelled in exams, scoring top marks in knowledge and interpretation of the law. That had not come as a surprise to his father; the boy’s memory had been prodigious even at the age of ten. DePaul showed a steady hand in stress tests, was a crack shot and had survived to become last man standing in five of the six simulations he had been placed in with his classmates this year. In the remaining simulation he had come second only when one of his own team betrayed him at the finishing task.
DePaul was quick-thinking and quick to adapt, and he had displayed endurance that belied his slender frame.
Irons liked the kid, had warmed to him over the last few weeks that they had been stationed together. He had taken DePaul on a few regular patrols of the ville and down in the Tartarus Pits. The lad was all right—quiet maybe, but all right. He certainly had a memory
