brow.
Other members of the group muttered their assent as they cooked the vermin over their little, contained fire.
Domi backed across the room on light feet until she was standing beside Edwards, her pistol still pointed firmly at the hooded man sprawled on the floor. Wisely, the hooded man stayed where he was, his eyes locked on the silver barrel of Domi’s CombatMaster.
“These guys are looking for a baron,” Edwards explained.
“So I heard,” Domi replied, her words laced with cynicism. She glanced over her shoulder, turning her attention from the hooded man for a moment while she addressed the group. “Care to explain why your friend here attacked me?” she asked.
“He’s a Magistrate,” the ginger-haired woman who had first addressed Edwards explained. “You must have broken laws.”
Domi spoke to Edwards out of the side of her mouth, keeping her voice low. “The way he attacked me—guy was no Mag. Way too sloppy.”
Edwards addressed the ginger woman, his gaze taking in the other people in the group before him. “Has your friend here been a Mag for long?” he asked. When no one answered, Edwards turned to the hooded form lying on the floor, casually turning his gun over in his hand so that it caught the light. “Well?”
The man in the hood groaned as he spoke. “Three days,” he said. “Volunteered three days ago. Ville needs Magistrates, right? What the hell did your freak girlfriend hit me with?”
Domi reacted angrily. “What did you call me?” she asked, taking a menacing step toward the self-proclaimed Magistrate, jabbing her gun at his face.
“Mutie, right?” the hooded man asked. “Figures.”
Domi looked irritated, but Edwards told her to ignore the man’s comments.
“So,” Edwards asked, “you’re all here building a ville? That right?”
As one, the group of stragglers shook their heads. “No, sir,” said the stubbled man in the woollen cap, “we came back. This is how people should live. Within walls. Within rules. There’s a place for you here. Can’t you feel that?”
Though not a man given to introspection, Edwards was taken aback. “I think you want to be careful what you breathe in around here,” was all he could think to say. “Lot of nasty crap in the atmosphere just now. Quake churned up a lot of shit.”
The stubbled man nodded. “Thank you, sir. Won’t you stay and help us to rebuild?”
Edwards smiled and shook his head. “Not today, ace.”
As the people stood watching the strangers in their midst, grease from one of the cooking birds spit and the fire flared brighter for a second.
Wary of the locals around them, Edwards and Domi made their way slowly out of the sunken building, both of them feeling somewhat unsettled by what they had seen.
“Seven of them,” Edwards growled, “and they’re planning on rebuilding a ville. Waiting for the new baron to appear. Crazy.”
“The villes do shitty things to people,” Domi told him. “Mangle them.” She glanced back, confirming that no one was following them.
“But there’s no barons anymore,” Edwards pointed out. “They all vanished and became overlords. So what’s drawing these people back?”
Domi stopped for a moment, fixing Edwards with her demonic eyes. “Like I said, the villes mangle people. Give them tangle-brain. The Outlanders know this, and that’s why we didn’t come to the villes unless we had to.”
Edwards looked at the petite woman, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Didn’t you grow up in Cobaltville, Domi?” he asked.
“No,” Domi told him, shaking her head. “Settled there for money. Saw the way people were on the inside.”
“Hah.” Edwards laughed. “You make it sound like a prison.”
Domi said nothing. While she had recognized the differences in ville dwellers from Outlanders, she had never seen anything quite like this—people coming back, choosing to live in the ruins while they waited for the next epoch to begin. It was almost as if the villes themselves had some kind of magnetic pull over their citizens. Domi, who had spent a portion of her life as a sex slave in Cobaltville, knew little of the scientific principles of magnetism, but she understood fatal attraction all too well.
Outside of the wrecked skeleton that had once been a building, Domi and Edwards found Harrington sitting on a mound of rubble that looked out over the ruined streets. He had found three chunks of rubble and was juggling them while he waited for his partners.
“You find anything?” Harrington asked when he noticed Edwards and Domi approaching.
“What do you think you’re doing, man?” Edwards barked. “This is a danger zone—gotta keep alert.”
“I am alert,” Harrington replied petulantly. “You think I can juggle like this when I’m asleep?”
Edwards shook his head, muttering something about eccentric scientists.
“We found a wannabe Magistrate,” Domi explained, “and a group of people waiting for the next baron.”
Harrington sighed. “And so the system reboots itself,” he said. “Are we reverting back to…well, the Deathlands era? Jumped-up little barons fighting it out for their little piece of land?”
“There’s no baron,” Edwards clarified. “They just think there will be. So they’re waiting here, eating rats and setting up a hierarchy of Magistrates to keep the peace.”
Domi looked around her, taking in the ruined structures of the ville once more, seeing the mangled struts where its old Administrative Monolith had once stood noble and proud. “Somehow, the villes call to people,” she said. “Like boys in heat, hormones drawing them to the honey trap.”
Edwards shook his head. “You may be right, but it’s all way over my head.”
Chapter 2
“They say that the gods came from the sky,” Papa Hurbon said as he led the three-strong party through the Djévo room, his wooden leg clomping on the decking of the floor.
Ohio Blue’s response was to offer the man an indulgent smile. “I never held much stock in gods,” she admitted as they walked through the large room of the wooden shack, its air as hot and as damp as the night sweats.
Ohio Blue had brought two bodyguards with her—a man and a woman—who followed her and Hurbon as they paced slowly through the room, moving just as fast as Hurbon’s false leg would allow. As per the rules of the meeting, her bodyguards were unarmed, and in return Hurbon had kept his own people out of sight, though it was understood that they could appear in a moment upon his request.
Blue felt the man’s eyes play across her for a moment. She was a tall, slender woman in her midthirties, and her thick, long blond hair was cut in a peekaboo style, leaving only her left eye boldly visible. The eye was a brilliant blue, dazzling as a polished sapphire.
