Krysty scowled at him, the girl abruptly launched herself at her. Blasters whipped up, but instead of attacking her, Mariah was suddenly clinging to her and sobbing. Krysty judged herself lucky she’d been on her knees; otherwise the girl, slight as she was, might’ve bowled her over backward.
“Krysty’s right,” Mildred announced as the redhead began to stroke Mariah’s head and murmur soothingly to her. “We can’t just leave her out in the middle of this god-awful wasteland.”
“But she’s been living here just fine all along,” J.B. said.
“When she had a family and a working farm around her,” Mildred shot back. “What is wrong with you, John? Where’s your compassion?”
He blinked at her through the round lenses of his specs. “Compassion?” He sounded as if the word was unfamiliar to him.
“There’s food,” the girl said, still sobbing and her face pressed sideways to Krysty’s neck. “Supplies. Powder and shot.”
“Jak,” Ryan called out. “You still out there?”
“Yeah?”
“How trashed is the place?”
“Chills everywhere,” the albino said in his customary clipped and often cryptic speech. “Chill parts, too.”
“They get around to pissing down the well?” J.B. asked. “Or tossing any chills down it for poison?”
“No,” Jak said.
“So the mutant blackguards got no chance to indulge in an orgy of wanton stickies vandalism,” Doc said.
“Before Elias put the chop on ’em,” J.B. added.
“Sounds like,” Ryan said. “Thanks. We’ll make sure to leave plenty for you. And now—”
Krysty put her arms around the girl’s thin, shaking shoulders. She was actively shivering now, not just to the timing of her sobs.
“Ryan, no,” she said.
“You know as well as I do we can’t go picking up every stray we stumble across,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to look out for ourselves.”
With a final sniffle, Mariah stopped weeping, or at least stopped weeping as vigorously. The trembling subsided, too, but did not stop.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Ryan looked blank. “You mean stumbling around in the storm?” Mildred supplied helpfully.
Mariah nodded.
“Let’s say we’re new in the district,” Mildred said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said—grudgingly, because information was a trade good itself. But clearly he saw nothing to be lost by imparting a few morsels to the foundling.
“You looking for work?” Mariah asked.
“Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. We could use a gig.”
Their supplies had gotten low. The stocks of food and such the girl had mentioned—and fresh water from the well—would tide them over for a spell. But they were always looking for ways to sustain themselves, and mebbe get ahead, even, for the lean times that inevitably followed.
“I know a place,” Mariah said. “A ville nearby. The baron’s always looking for help, and he ain’t triple bad, as barons go.”
“We don’t hire on as mercies,” Ryan said.
“No. Not that.” Mariah paused. “I—I can take you there.”
Ryan sighed. “We’re outvoted, J.B.,” he said. “Even if it’s just Mildred and Krysty against the rest of us.”
“I don’t mind her coming along,” Ricky said.
“Put a sock in it,” Ryan replied without heat.
“I have no objection to it,” Doc put in. “Perhaps performing the occasional humane gesture might remind us of our own humanity.”
“I don’t see how that loads any blasters for us,” Ryan said. “But you can come with us as far as this ville.”
Mariah let go of Krysty to spring for Ryan. She caught him around the waist in a powerful hug and pressed her cheek against his breastbone.
“Fireblast!” he exclaimed. “You can come as long as you don’t hug me anymore, understand?”
“Please,” the painfully gaunt blonde woman said, falling to her knees on the short, winter-scorched Badlands grass before two glowing avatars. “I did what you told me. Now let me have my daughter back. I beg you!”
“What wretches these people are,” Dr. Oates said to Dr. Sandler over the suppressed channel. “Hardly worth the trouble to rule.”
He might have reminded his colleague that they could just as well speak aloud in this vile, cowering being’s presence for all the difference it would make. But he did not. Habit was key to discipline, in communications as in every area of life. Discipline was a goal in itself.
Especially when one’s collective goal was full-spectrum dominance over this entire timeline.
By the same mode he told her, “They can be shaped into useful vessels, into which to pour our leadership and enlightened thinking.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
Aloud he said to his supplicant, “What have you done? Report, that we may judge your performance.”
“I told him to go up Harney Peak to seek a vision. I told him to eat the magic mushrooms to put himself in the proper receptive state. I betrayed my people, because you told me that’s what I needed to do. Isn’t that enough for you?” the blonde woman asked.
“How did you betray your people?” Dr. Oates asked. “Inasmuch as your people are Absaroka, and Hammerhand a Blackfoot—and a coldheart outcast at that?”
The woman wrung her hands. “Because their trust in me encompasses the sanctity of my visions! If it were known I gave...false advice to Hammerhand, we would suffer disgrace, loss of standing in councils and even mebbe war!”
“The advice we told you to give was not false,” Dr. Sandler said. “The subject climbed the peak as you instructed him to. And there he received the vision he desired. What falsehood was there?”
“But the vision wasn’t real. It was an illusion you created. Wasn’t it?”
“What a pathetic beast,” Dr. Oates said inaudibly to the wretch. “To imagine there can be any such thing as a ‘real’ vision.”
“The credulity of our two-legged cattle
