Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

to work; spreading out from her every line with patterns and curves, adding complementary shapes that began to look like faces and scenes in the corner of my vision.

I stepped in last, filling the negative spaces in his wake with an endless repetition of regular black spirals: an exercise the Major had taught us as a form of meditation in the long, maddening waits between engagements. It was as good a way as any to take my mind off worrying about Kat.

When it was done, the last mural’s words burned like plasma in the dying light:

WE WERE HERE

Naoto stood back to stare at it. His face twitched. He started to tear up.

“What?” Danae asked.

“This is it,” he said. “This is the most important work I’ve ever done.”

They fell against each other and hugged tightly—but Danae’s eyes stayed open and focused on something in the distance over his shoulder. She pulled back and pointed out over the valley. “What is that?”

There was a squat, sandy hill on the opposite side of the grid-scarred plain of dust. Near its crest, the low sun glittered fiercely on something that would have been invisible at any other hour, or from any other vantage point.

Naoto tapped me on the shoulder. “Can I borrow your gun’s telescope thing?”

I detached the scope, and he peered across at the glimmer. I could just make it out now: a camouflaged housing pod and a small armored vehicle, its windshield catching the last of the sun.

“That old pessimist we met earlier,” Naoto said. “‘Lady Jannison.’ She owns this place. Owned. I heard someone say she lives up on that hill.”

“She wasn’t eager to help us earlier,” Danae said.

“She’s the last person left here who we haven’t technically asked,” he said. “She has some kind of rover up there. She doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to drive it anywhere.”

When I upped the magnification, I could see her, sitting on the hood of the old military antique, staring into the distance. Still smoking.

“Jannison,” Danae whispered to herself. She closed her eyes against the wind. “Olivia.”

“What is it?”

“Naoto, I know her.”

“How?”

She turned to him and lowered her voice to say, “I’m her grandfather.”

I wanted to listen carefully to the rest of what they muttered to each other then. I wanted to contemplate the mystery of whatever she was talking about, but all my attention was on the shard cupped in my hand.

“—use that to our advantage?” Naoto whispered.

“It’s . . . complicated. She thinks I’ve been dead for over fifty years. The last time I saw her, she was only—”

I’d been trying to reach Kat for more than 8 hours now. I’d sent message after message asking her to contact me as soon as she could, while the satellites connecting us had gone on rising and setting, but there had been no response. For a while I had let myself think this was only her revenge for my ignoring all her calls between Antarka and Bloom City, but now my transmissions were bouncing back all at once, with an attached error code—

“Are you coming?” Naoto shouted back at me. I looked up from my shard and followed them up the hill.

The error message read: Recipient address dead.

The road up Jannison’s hill was steep, narrow, and punctuated with bits of old radiation safety equipment, weathered-down and disused: here a station for brushing off shoes, there a trash chute for disposable gear. A few solar-powered Geiger counters ticked away halfheartedly in the long shadows.

When we reached the top, Jannison was still perched on the vehicle’s hood, the orange sunset painting her scowl in sharp relief as we approached. The plastic pod house behind her was bigger than it had appeared from a distance, but bleached and cracked as if abandoned. In its shadow, a patch of dirt was marked off. I counted four crucifixes of welded steel pipe.

“I’d be in a hurry to leave what’s left of this town,” Jannison called down to us. “If I were you.”

“We still need to go east,” Naoto said.

“And I’m still telling you to hitch a ride out of this shithole while you can, wherever that ride happens to be going.”

“Why aren’t you leaving then?”

“Nowhere to go.”

Danae seemed agitated. “That tank is quite an antique,” she observed carefully.

“It’s not a tank,” Jannison responded. “It’s an armored personnel carrier.”

“Combustion engine, mounted bullet gun, steel plating. Second Continental War?”

She shook her head. “Good guess, but it’s older. Late Imperial era. Though I’ve had to settle for a few newer parts here and there.”

“Does it run?” Naoto asked.

She paused to squint down the length of her pipe and spit some smoke in my direction. She said nothing.

“We need to borrow it,” Danae said.

Jannison coughed and laughed. “No.”

“Are you using it?” Naoto asked.

“I spent the last nine years of my life fixing up this Armored Personnel Carrier, you little shit. It’s pretty. That’s what I’m using it for. It’s mine, and I’m keeping it till the Gray comes and pries it from my cold, dead hands. Who the hell are you to ask what I’m using it for?”

“We need to go east,” Danae said. “Frankly, our lives are depending on it, and we’re out of other options.” She put her hands together in prayer. “Is there anything we can say or do or offer, anything at all, that would convince you to let us use it for twenty-four hours? That’s all we need.”

She motioned in my direction and said, “Supposing I say no, I gather your nasty-looking friend is here to waste me with his waver and then you take it from me anyway, right?”

I swallowed hard. I gave Danae a sidelong glance, bracing for her to give me the order, but she only looked down and shook her head guiltily.

“Then, no. There is nothing I would trade for it. No money I’d sell it for. You want money? I’m up to my fucking ears in fucking money. Take it all, for all I care.”

She