he turned to his lieutenant, Joe Takes-Blasters.
“For my answer, send their hides back to the Council,” he said. “Without them inside.”
Krysty’s heart melted as a whimper escaped the form lying on its side in the fetal position on the dirt floor. She felt an overpowering impulse to run to the girl and hug her.
But she fought it down. She was a seasoned campaigner, almost as much as J.B. or Ryan. She knew the girl could be bait in a trap. Or even, unlikely as it seemed, a danger in herself.
She scanned the corners of the cluttered toolshed. There was little to see but shadows. The structure seemed sturdily made, with no cracks to let even the feeble light from outside leak in.
“No danger,” Jak said, then vanished from Krysty’s side into the blowing white clouds of snow. He knew his companions could handle whatever menace a sobbing, freaked-out girl with black pigtails might pose.
“Right,” Ryan said. “Let’s move on.”
“And just leave her?” Krysty demanded.
Ryan looked at her and shrugged. He was a hard man, because he usually needed to be.
Krysty usually did not try to temper that hardness, but when the time came, she reckoned it was part of her job.
But it was J.B. who spoke up first. “I’d like an account of what happened here,” he said. “Best way I know to have a shot at keeping it from happening to us.”
Ryan bared strong white teeth, but he nodded. The little man in the scuffed leather bomber jacket, fedora and round wire-rimmed specs was the ultimate technician of survival. He was even more purely practical than Ryan himself, and when he spoke, he spoke to the point.
Taking that as all the assent she needed, Krysty holstered her Glock 18C and picked her way quickly but carefully through the disarrayed tools. She hunkered down by the girl, who wore a simple black shift with long sleeves.
“What’s your name?” she asked gently. She mostly wanted to try to pierce the other’s veil of uncontrolled emotion before doing anything like touching her. Gentle tones and innocuous words seemed the quickest way.
The girl didn’t look at her. Her eyes were screwed so tightly shut in her snow-pale face that it almost seemed as if she was resisting attempts to pry them open. But her shivering began to slow. The rhythm of her heartbroken sobbing began to break up, like the steps of a runner slowing down.
“It’s all right,” Krysty said. “My name is Krysty and I want to help you.”
“Here, now,” Ryan protested from behind her. “Let’s not go overboard with this.”
“Out of the way, Captain Sensitivity,” Mildred said brusquely. “A healer needed here.”
“But—”
“Healer working here.”
Although Jak had butted heads with Ryan a few months back, that was all in the past now. The two had discovered the hard way how much they needed each other. Same as everybody in their little crew needed everybody else. Before, during and since that time, the other member of the group to challenge Ryan’s authority was Mildred. Krysty reckoned he endured it as much to help keep himself from getting too full of himself and thinking he was infallible—which was a sure recipe to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes, triple quick. But like every one of the companions, she had a specialty. And when she or anyone of them was engaged in his or her work, Ryan knew to back off.
The way, of course, they did with him. Mostly. Krysty had to grin to herself.
“My friend Mildred is coming to help you, too,” Krysty said—fortuitously a moment before she heard the clatter of a tool inadvertently kicked by one of Mildred’s combat boot, and a suppressed curse. “You’re safe now. Why don’t you talk to me? Tell me your name.”
An eye opened. It was brown. It looked startlingly dark in that bloodless face. Krysty had to hope that trauma and terror had drained color from her skin. Otherwise she could hardly be healthy.
The eye rolled, then fixed on Krysty. The sobbing dwindled to a sniffling.
“I—I’m Mariah,” she said.
“Are you hurt, Mariah?” Mildred asked briskly, kneeling next to Krysty. She subtly shouldered the redhead a bit to the side to make room. The two were best friends. As such, Krysty knew that when she was in full-on healer mode, Mildred was as bullheaded businesslike as her man, J. B. Dix, tinkering up a busted blaster—or using one to chill a room full of stonehearts.
“Any blood? Any broken bones? Any bad pains?”
“No,” Mariah said. She moistened her lips with a pale pink tongue. “Can I have some water?”
Mildred promptly pulled a canteen from her belt. With plenty of snow on the ground here near the Black Hills, fresh water wasn’t hard to come by. Fresh chow was another thing entirely.
“Come on,” she said. “Sit up to drink it.”
She let Krysty urge the girl to uncurl her arms from their death grip on her shins. Then Mildred firmly grasped her shoulders and pulled her up to a seated position. Krysty suspected that her friend’s bedside manner, as they would have called it in predark times, would have raised some eyebrows, but no matter how abrupt the dark, stocky woman with the beaded hair plaits might be, she treated her patients far more gently than a girl like this was likely used to. It was how the world was.
Mariah took the canteen and drank thirstily, her eyes squeezed shut. Krysty noticed that she didn’t spill a drop.
After a moment Mildred eased the canteen back from the girl’s lips. “Not too much at a time, or you’ll just throw it back up again. Breathe.”
For a moment Mariah clutched at the bottle like a nursing baby at the breast. Then she dropped her hand to her lap. Her eyes focused, first on Mildred, then Krysty again. Then they swept over Ryan, J.B., Ricky and Doc, looking in from the doorway.
Jak’s friends had put themselves in position to counter whatever threats may have lurked in the toolshed. He, of course, had moved on. His business now was to secure the rest of the small farm settlement and report back to the rest.
Mariah appeared to become more in control of herself. Some color was coming back to her cheeks. Krysty still reckoned she likely was as naturally pale as the redhead was herself.
“I’m Mariah,” she said again. “What do you want from me?”
“That’s a good question,” J.B. said, scratching his neck. Evidently deciding the scared child—she looked now to Krysty to be in her early teens—offered little immediate threat, he had tipped the barrel of his combat shotgun toward the slanted roof. “I can’t really think of a thing.”
“Information,” Ryan rasped. “What happened here? And who did it to whom?”
“What do you mean?” the girl asked.
“That’s
