War Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 5) by Aaron Ritchey (best short novels .TXT) 📕

“Part of it, Cavatica, a big part of it was timing. I’d lost everything. Shar had as well. And under fire? Things can get complicated. We look for connections.”

I flashed back to my first kiss with Micaiah. While June Mai’s outlaws shot at us. If I’d met him at a school dance, would we have come together like trains colliding?

“What else?” I asked. “You said part. What’s the other part?”

She let out a long breath. “Your sister was closed up tight. But she wanted to open to the world. I like that. I like helping women open to parts of life they’d thought impossible to them. And you’re right, I’m older. I was looking to settle down. I love Sharlotte, Cavatica, like no one else. You know how she is. She has such a poetry about her.”

Sharlotte, a cowgirl poet, who’d spent most of her life only reciting to-do lists and prayers. In that order.

I had to chuckle. “What’s she going to say when we tell her about this?”

“Now that’s going to be awkward,” June Mai said, a little lilt to her voice. “But you aren’t gillian. She is.”

“How do you know anything about me?”

“That boy. He has your heart. You might have played about some, but we both know that you’re attracted to men. There’s a lot of pretty women around the camp, and I watched you. You don’t check out girls like I do.”

“You shouldn’t be watching me. Or other girls.” I frowned. “But whatever.”

Unbelievably, my body was getting warm. When I first hit the river, I thought I’d never be warm again.

“Maybe you can’t forgive me,” June Mai said, “but can you accept me as your sister-in-law? I said ‘until death do us part’ to your sister and I meant it.”

They really had married. Then I thought about growing up during the Sterility Epidemic, and how so many of us girls thought we’d spend our lives alone. The stupidity of the New Morality movement had convinced many that heterosexual monogamy was their only choice.

But Sharlotte had beaten the odds and found someone to spend the rest of her life with. Was I really going to hate the person she’d chosen? That would’ve been just plain mean.

“I’ll accept the marriage, June, but I’m always going to have a hard time with you.”

“And yet,” she said, “you forgave Rachel for her many crimes.”

She had me there, and I realized just how smart my sister’s wife was. Smart, observant, strong, and powerful—my sister had found quite a woman to share her life with.

When I didn’t say anything, she smiled. Her teeth glowed in the dark. “Checkmate.”

“Remind me not to argue with you ever again,” I said.

We took turns leaving the warmth of the survival blanket to wring out clothes. We’d get rid of the water then come right back to the warmth. It wasn’t a sexual kind of thing ’cause in the end, she was right. I wasn’t gillian. And she was my sister’s, forever and ever.

Too bad forevers have a way of not lasting as long as we want them to.

In the distance, explosions lit up the night and shattered the still. Even from where we were, we could hear the shouts, the gunfire and consternation.

“There’s only one person in the world who could make that much noise,” I muttered.

“Wren,” June Mai said.

(iii)

June Mai and I rigged the explosives in damp clothes stiffening in the cold. She lumped them by the abutment and placed them by the piers in the middle of the river. There were stones exposed to get us there.

We used every last warming packet we had for our feet and fingers. The synthetic material helped, so in the end, I didn’t die of hypothermia and thanks to my sister-in-law, frostbite wouldn’t chew off any of my extremities.

I thought of Wren out there, creating distractions with her automatic grenade launcher, lighting up Confluence Park and giving those guards on duty something to do. I figured she’d run east, and circle around, maybe come home that night.

If she wasn’t captured.

If she wasn’t killed.

June Mai saw my face. “You know,” she said, “someday Wren is going to go and not come back.”

“Shut up, June,” I barked. Then I thought about it more. “You know something? It’s what she wants. Wren wants to end the pain, and she won’t do it herself ’cause us Wellers weren’t born for suicide.”

Other than me... reaching out to the electric fence... but I didn’t mention that.

“We fight, June, and we die, and we escape the jackering pain. So once Wren finds a fight she can’t win, she’ll have won in the end.”

“That’s not a victory,” June Mai said in a soft voice. “That is a suicide.”

Nothing I could say to that except, “Checkmate for you again.”

June told me that Sharlotte and Baptista had taken off to return to our base at the fire station. We’d rendezvous there.

So that left me and my sister-in-law alone as we walked home. Colfax to Kipling, it was a long way to go, but we had hours of night left and were both in top physical condition.

The streets were empty, though the ARK bombing raids had flattened buildings and blown craters that we had to walk around.

Walked past the old Casa Bonita still intact. Found Kipling, turned left. Walked under 6th Avenue. Walked south past the hulking shell of another blasted-out King Soopers.

June Mai was obviously still thinking about Wren. She asked, “What about you, Cavatica? You looking for the same escape? What has this war done to you?”

I laughed instead of cried. “I sure am a lot thinner. I always wanted to be thin and now I feel every one of my goddamn muscles. We should do a YouTube infomercial. The Juniper diet and exercise program.”

June Mai wasn’t laughing. “So, you aren’t going to answer my question.”

I sighed. “Everyone is so worried about me. Well, when this is over, when you and I are in Burlington