CHAPTER 6 - A KILLER GLOW

By lunchtime, the Anjelly sun had turned the whole valley into a skillet of asphalt and rusted buildings. Inside that old garden shed, the holes in the roof shone sunlight through like rods of fire. Mothy and Mote had to huddle in the corner, under a workbench, having learned once already that these holes of light could burn a cancerous red spot onto the skin in seconds.

Trip was mostly protected in his exosuit, which despite being a skin-tight series of segmented armor plates, had a soft interior of light synthetic fur and thousands of powered micro-vents placed at strategic spots over his main arteries and capillary clusters. These brought a safe freon chill to his skin and ensured his blood remained the appropriate temperature. It was a miraculous piece of Ghost technology designed to protect him from gunfire, road rash, sunlight, fire, acid, the vacuum of space, the crushing depths of the sea…

But somehow not bird beaks, he thought.

Mote glistened with sweat and sat flopped under a counter while Mothy slept on her thigh. “It’s hotter’n dog’s balls, man!” Mote cried.

Trip sat with his back to the barricaded door, instinctively putting himself between the two girls and the pecking menace outside. The crows had given up on trying to pry the rooftop open; while their beaks had been great for stabbing through the metal, the extreme sunlight reflected off the material apparently discouraged them by burning their feet.

Trip pulled the smart-paste actuator valve from a holster on his hip. He undid the button on the tubing clip and connected the feed hose to a the smart-paste port on his backpack; on the other side of that port was a can of pressurized gel. He saw from the UI in his visor that the suit breach was on his middle back and well out of reach.

But he tried anyways. Trip wrenched his arm back and tried to get the valve’s nozzle to stick under the plating so he could seal the breach. From Mote’s perspective, this made him look like a man trying to transform into a pretzel.

“You got a sand leech in yer armor or something?” Mote asked. Mothy had fallen asleep with her head flopped over her big sister’s lap.

Trip paused. The idea of something called a ‘sand leech’ having wriggled into his armor caused a small squirt of panic to liven up his central nervous system. “Small breach,” he said, as cool and professional as he could. The suit mask’s voice distorter helped him maintain an air of forbidding monstrosity despite the fact that he was now in a state of mild panic imagining tiny leeches crawling all over his skin.

“You’re gonna dislocate your shoulder, dude.” Mote said. Mothy stirred fitfully in Mote’s lap. Mote stroked her little sister’s big head of fuzzy blue hair.

Trip puffed a sigh. He extended his arm toward Mote, gesturing with the nozzle in his hand for her to come over. Mote set Mothy’s head on an empty shampoo bottle, then tiptoed across the shed; she hopped between rays of sunlight as she did.

Mote flopped down next to Trip, took the nozzle, and looked up under the plates on his back. The tear was pretty obvious, even to her untrained eye

“Stick the nozzle up under the plate,” instructed Trip. “Be gent- AAAAAAAAH!”

Trip shrieked as Mote SQUEEZED the nozzle and fully-engaged the compressed smart-paste dispenser. This caused a jet of super-chilled paste to web across his thin, interior wetsuit; it felt like a bouquet of icy eels sliming their way across his back.

“All done!” Mote shoved the nozzle back into his belt and sat down next to him.

Trip turned his back and felt the hardening smart-paste crack along his skin. Now it felt like he had wet sand in his suit. But at least his UI informed him that the breach was sealed.

Mote watched Mothy lying under the counter, breathing shallow breaths and not even sweating anymore. “Is my sister ok…?”

“She needs water and cool air,” said Trip, who knew from thermal vision that the girl had heat stroke. “We have to get out of here, preferably now.”

“But the crows, dude…”

“Well now that the immediate issue taken care of, thanks to your, uh… help…”

Mote grinned and held up her hand for a fist bump. Trip tentatively smooshed his knuckles against hers. Mote mimicked an explosion sound, sending flecks of spit across Trip’s visor. Mote laughed and tumbled backwards with her hands gripping her skates. He recognized their logo.

“… are those ZON courier skates?”

“ZON?” Mote was still rolling around on her back with her feet kicked in the air. “You mean like the cool logo on my skates? The Z-O-N? With the little yellow arrow?”

“ZON corporation, yes – Zero One Networking. They’re one of the Trine.”

“What’s a Trine?”

“The Trine Accord and its affiliated labor unions form the heart of SynCon.”

“SynCon?!” Mote leaned back and kung-fu flipped herself onto her feet with a smooth handspring. “That word sounds so tacticool I can’t even stand it!”

“Focus. We need to get out of here before your sister dies from heat stroke.”

“I thought you wanted to kill us.”

“I changed my mind!”

“Wow! Defying orders to save innocent lives – you really are a Ghost of legend.”

Junior agent who eats shit and listens to his fans too much, but close enough.

Chat: “The Taipei Fairies are too wholesome for this world! Protect! Protect!”

Please shut the hell up, Chat, it’s not like you’ll follow me into exile, you’ll just goad me on until I get there so you idiots can have content.

Chat: “YEAH!! CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT!”

Chat used to make him feel motivated and self-confident. But lately, it felt like having someone backseat drive him off of a cliff. Trip didn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) translate into words the feeling of quiet fury he felt at having an entire section of Syndicate civilization lodged into his brain at all times.

The barricaded door shuddered as something slammed into it. It sounded like a large bird hitting a window. Some of the crows were suicide-diving into the door. It didn’t amount to much, one-by-one, but if they balled up into a murder again, that might be different.

Trip caught the priority message from Dr. Tasque on his visual HUD. He unpacked it and had his onboard AI deconstruct the entire process of turning the solid-state battery powering his life support into an EM bomb.

What in the world do they want me to do that for…

… then the reports on the Osmotic Mechanized Neuro-Integration Disease, or OMNID, came piling in. Trip skimmed through it all, his thoughts rattled more and more by the sound of bird bodies going THWUMP against the door of the shed.

… transmitted by terrestrial lifeforms of all kinds… everything past the Cascadian shimmer-line is infected… spreading actively across landlocked territories rich in life i.e. the northern forest and midwestern plains… geo-centric to NorMurica… potentially unable to pass through the Bleaklands due to extreme heat but could be transmitted via bird populations to the jungles of SoMurica… countermeasures include salt, seawater, fire, concentrated sunlight, acid, bleach, and electromagnetic fields…

Trip looked across the shed to little Mothy on the floor, semi-unconscious and overheated from the sweltering air of the shed. He knew she was in the first stages of heatstroke and might not even survive the afternoon’s hottest hours that were yet to come.

And here he was being told to take his suit’s solid-state battery, the only thing keeping him cool, and turn it into an EMP bomb with some anarcho-jury-rigging straight out of a copy of The Operative’s Cookbook.

This of course would leave him exposed to the sweltering Anjelly sun without a powered exosuit – the dark charcoal color of the suit’s tight, segmented plates would have him baking him like a foil-wrapped frittata.

I am not abandoning my armor.

“Hey!” Mote clapped near his ear. “Let’s fucking go, dude! You’re the secret agent genius, here! What’s the play against these stupid birds?!”

“I…” Trip squinted at the blazing sun outside the shed. He realized, then, he could kill two birds with one stone – the literal birds he could probably evade with his cloaking device, and the metaphorical birds (the twins) he could just lock in the shed to die of heat stroke.

Chat: “Don’t you DARE!!!”

Mote turned her eyes away from each other and did her best imitation of an idiot. “Uhhhhh I, I, I, I – WHAT, MAN?! MY SISTER IS DYING, GET IT TOGETHER!”

“I know you’re frightened, but—”

“Frightened?! Yeah, I’m frightened of what I’ll do to your face if you don’t get us out of here! I thought Ghosts were cool and smart and had a plan all the time!”

“You know what,” said Trip, rising to his feet. “Maybe I kill you after all.”

Mote was maybe four feet and eleven inches tall, with the hoverskates giving her one more inch at best. Trip towered over her by comparison, a full human head higher than her; yet Mote still stepped to him, planting her fist on his chest plate like she was mashing a big red button.

“Try it,” she barked. “And see what happens!”

Trip backed up, but there wasn’t much space in that tiny shed. He whipped out his pistol and set a hand up between the two of them to make distance, even as he bumped against a wall and sent a rusty rake tumbling to the floor. The clatter woke up Mothy.

“Stop,” Mothy whispered. “Please, help us… I know my sister is… stupid…”

Mote twisted up her little nose. “HEY!”

“… but…” Mothy wheezed. “… she’s brave and fast… she can… distract them…”

Chat: “She’s cute, too! Don’t hurt them!”

Trip grated his teeth at Chat’s interference. But, then Trip realized the EM pulse would wipe out his commlink, too. He’d be mercifully free of the Chat and SynCon for… well, as long as it took for him to get repaired.

Maybe forever…

Chat: “Maybe forever what?”

Nothing. Shut up, Chat.

Trip looked down at Mote and her skates. He holstered his weapon. “Okay,” he said. “Fine. You think you can get them to bunch up around the shed again?”

“OH YEAH!” Mote grabbed the barricaded door, forcing Trip to physically stop her.

“Not NOW!” Trip held her arm. “Wait until I have the countermeasure ready. And listen to me: I’m going to need your help afterwards. Your sister can barely move, and I’m going to be completely exposed. So if we run into any more trouble, you’re going to have to listen to what I say and help to the best of your ability, okay?”

Mote nodded about forty times in the span of three seconds, with the biggest, naughtiest grin she’d ever grinned. “Got you,” she was practically vibrating with excitement. “Got it. Roger that, 10-4.”

“Just…” Trip sank down and tore open his backpack to find the solid-state battery. “… wait.”

He found the battery control panel at the bottom of the backpack. Fortunately, everything in the backpack was replaceable, except for an old family wakizashi, which he removed from the backpack and tied to his exosuit’s belt.

Another crow WHUMPED against the doors as Trip got to work.

The crows had found a shady roost in the ruins of the nearby house. They all sat in silence, some hiding inside of rusted-out pots, others in the crisper drawers of long-dead refrigerators, others still in drawers and cabinets. They were content to watch their trapped prey and wait until the cover of night before attacking the weakened shed roof again.

When Mote burst out of the shed while skating in a conspicuous figure-eight, firing a semi-automatic pistol into the air, and screaming, the crows were collectively startled. At first, they shrank back into their hidey-holes and observed in silence.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Bite my tits, crows! DIE, DIE, DIE, DIE!” Mote pointed the pistol at the ruined house and fired indiscriminate shots all across it, shattering windows, even hitting a pot where a crow hid inside. The crow took the bullet to the chest and the whole flock shuddered in agony.

Click click click went the pistol as the magazine emptied. Mote stared at the weapon, then hurled it into the house to clatter on the broken tile floor. The crows, through whatever sinister intelligence connected them, now knew she was vulnerable. All at once, the flock emptied out of the kitchen as a silent mass of black feathers and razor beaks.

Mote held a charge in her skates. One second, two. Then three... VWEEEE!

The hoverskates then let go of their polarity and sent her flying toward the empty pool near the shed. As they swooped down after her, Trip burst out of the shed with his backpack over one shoulder and Mothy over the other. As the crows chased Mote in circles around the basin of the pool, Trip mashed a rewired switch on the side of the backpack, disconnected the battery cord from his suit, and launched the whole thing into the air. It sailed in a long arc, then crashed down into the bowl of the pool. The detonation was invisible to the naked eye, but even to a lightly-augmented cyborg like Trip…

… he felt his teeth bubble like popcorn and his limbs spasm as the systems supporting his nervous system shorted out. He went from wide-eyed alertness to chest-clutching exhaustion in a split second. His vision tunneled into a pinpoint, and he was sure he would be blind forever. And the heat of so many tiny circuits and semiconductors collectively frying was enough to make him feel like he had hungry ants snacking on little chunks of meat along the surface of his bones in a grand adventure to reach the marrow. He felt like he was imploding a trillion little implosions all at once.

And then his eyes remembered how to see without optic nerve stimulation. His pores recalled the biological wonder that was sweat, which made his exosuit less of a protective sleeve of armor and more of a foil wrapped around a hot burrito.

As he tried to stand it felt like his whole body was moving against hurricane winds; he was running with full resistance and no motion-assist in his exosuit.

I’m dying, Chat.

But there was no Chat. His head was silent, save for his own thoughts. This realization sent a surge of euphoria through him. It threw him to his feet, despite the resistance of his gear.

Trip ran to the edge of the pool to see Mote had tumbled face-first when her skates shorted out from the EMP blast. They were nothing more than knee-high clunky boots now and would need to be repaired later (if they could be salvaged at all). Mote sprang up with a bloody grin – Trip could see a gap where one of her front cuspid teeth had been knocked clean out.

As for the crows, they were a twitching, black mass tumbled neatly into a pile at the center of the pool basin, stunned and roasting in the high noon sun. Trip reached down into the pool to help Mote up, but she declined his offer and vaulted up top by herself.

“Let’s go!” Said Mote. “Papaw is gonna leave by twilight!”

Trip looked around the yard for any kind of relief from the sun. He saw an old, weathered beach umbrella and went over to wrench it out of a plastic table. The umbrella still worked, with some jostling, and he put it over his shoulder as a shield from the sun’s brutality.

“My water stash is just up the hill,” Trip pointed the way they’d come down. “Look, your sister has heat stroke. I’m going to call the local drone to airlift her back to your people.”

At the mentioning of sending Mothy away, Mote squinted at him. “Why should I trust you?”

“You can’t, I guess. Shit, it’s hot…” Trip felt himself sweating inside his suit. He had to peel off his mask and stick it to his belt.

Mote saw his face for the first time. Trip was a young man with dark hair, tanned skin, and narrow eyes that were an unusual shade of pale blue. His cheekbones were princely, his jaw chiseled, and he was as clean-shaven as a porcelain dish.

Trip forced the kindest smile he could manage. But as this short, neon monkey girl stared into his soul, Trip got the distinct feeling she found him lacking. “We’re gonna walk up that hill together,” said Mote. “Got it, Ghost-baby?”

“Listen to me, if I wanted you both dead, I’d have just popped on my cloak and left you to die in that shed. I’m endangering my own survival and going against the direct orders of a senior Ghost to get you two back to safety – is that good enough for you?”

“Naw,” said Mote. “S’just words.”

Trip pulled out an old-fashioned flare gun, pointed it at the bright blue sky, and pulled the trigger. The flare shot straight out, then exploded in a high-pitched sonic signal that would communicate with the nearby cache drone and call for pickup.

When he looked back down, Mote was gone. A moment later, his knee buckled forward from a blow to the joint. His instincts caused him to drop Mothy and the umbrella and roll forward to face his assailant in a readied stance. When he did so, he sprang up to see Mote catch her sister’s limp body in her outstretched arms. Mote hooked her leg back and bounced the falling umbrella up to rest on her shoulder with the ease of an acrobat going through a mundane floor routine.

Trip recognized a kind of psychotic gleam in Mote’s bright yellow eyes. They were the eyes of a warrior, possibly even a killer. “I told you,” said Mote, “if you try anything, I’ll kill you.”

“I believe you.” Trip backed up and unslung his sniper rifle from his shoulder.

The standoff between the two of them sat in silence for a few long seconds. A bead of sweat trickled down into Trip’s eye, forcing him to squint. The sun was eating him alive.

Trip trained his rifle toward Mote.

Mote grinned. Or maybe it was a sneer of contempt. Trip wasn’t sure, but either way, she made a point of smiling and showing off her sharp, simian teeth and the flecks of blood still on her lips from the knocked-out tooth earlier. She spat a glob of spit, blood, and sparkling pink, residual shampoo onto the concrete. It sizzled on contact.

“What am I gonna do to you like this?” Mote threw her sister over her shoulder, turned her back to him, and pushed through a nearby broken chain-link fence. She then trudged up the hill, carrying Mothy and the umbrella with a surprising, wiry strength.

“I got my hands full,” Mote said. “And my skates are broken. So I guess if you were gonna shoot, you’d have shot.”

Trip felt whiplash from Mote’s rapid thought processes and equally rapid emotional responses. Now the girl was calm and resigned. “Right,” said Trip, walking behind her, rifle still in hand, but lowered. He flipped the safety back on. “My drone will be here in a minute. It’ll have fluid and some supplies to get us up the hill.”

“We got drones like that on the convoy too.”

“Do we just give you people everything?”

“Nah, fella,” said Mote. “We buy it fair and square, typically down at The Iguana, at the rail markets. Yellow River Tribe moves your goods through the Bleaklands, so you mermaids can keep your tails wet. In exchange, we get toys – man, how is it I meet my first Ghost and he’s some ign’ernt greenhorn baby boy that don’t know nothin’ about nothin’?”

“Just your luck, I guess.” Trip took a steadying breath and wiped at his sweaty face with one of his very non-absorbent, armor-encased hands; it smeared sweat around and brought no relief.

The march up the dusty hillside was demented. While the drone managed to bring them SPF 100 sunscreen spray, GelAid electrolyte drinks (pina colada flavor only), and an extra umbrella fresh from the cache’s 3D printer, none of this saved them from the sheer ruggedness of the terrain. The drone’s weight limit prevented all three of them from piling on and hitching a ride, and Trip, on his honor, refused to leave the girls unescorted up the hill.

They were halfway up the hill and hours into their trip when Trip realized he’d forgotten to collect his sidearm.

That’ll be one more black mark on my record when the debrief finally comes and I give my AAR. I’m so fucked. But… no. No sense worrying about it, focus.

The silence after thinking so clearly was, at first, startling. There was no Chat to give the corner of his vision a scroll, no SynCon voice translating feedback and orders to his brain. He was alone, with one foot marching in front of the other, up the dusty trails of a dead valley. The excitement still lingered, but now there was a building terror in his guts – it was that old terror his primate heart remembered from a not-so-long-ago time when the elements were the gods and goddesses of all human fortune or catastrophe.

It was one thing to harness the power of the sun for solar energy using the plates of his exosuit. It was another thing to just die of thirst and exposure, alone and disconnected, with no one logged into his stream to even hear his final words.

On the brighter side, Mothy was awake and feeling better with the shade of the umbrella and some GelAid in her belly. She still needed to be carried, given the shock to her system.

“We need to rest,” Trip planted his umbrella in the sandy dirt and flopped down in the shade. Mote set Mothy down too and put up her own umbrella.

“I can hear them starting the Big Rev!” Mote pointed up to the top of the ridge, where the sound of electric guitar rose and fell over the roar of engines. “Convoy’s got a schedule, and we gotta keep moving or they’ll leave without us!”

“A ten-minute break will be alright, then it’s a short hike back home.”

Mote licked her dry lips and felt her legs wobbling underneath her. She was still carrying Mothy and had been for hours. Her sugar was probably low.

“You got more of that full-sugar GelAid?” Mote asked.

“The drone will come back soon; it’s programmed to keep coming.” Trip cracked open a cooling pack and sunk his face into chilled, chemical relief. His voice was muffled by it. “Did you two even think about hiking back up this hill, before you ran down there?”

“Well sir, I’ll be honest… nope.” Mote admitted.

“She does this a lot,” Mothy said, resting against Mote’s shoulder. “Always ready for an adventure, but never thinking about how she’s gonna get out of trouble once she’s forty-meters deep in it.”

“At least I go on adventures!” Mote kicked at dirt.

Mothy hugged Mote and closed her compound eyes. “I had fun. I know it’ll be okay.”

Trip watched Mote’s face tremble and tear up. Mote returned her sister’s hug, all but squeezing the breath out of her. “You’re too good for this world, Mothy!”

“—hrrrrk!” Mothy coughed. Mote let go and patted her sister’s head.

Trip couldn’t help but smile at the two of them. In that moment, at least, he felt justified in his decision to spare their lives and face the consequences later.

“Do you two have names?” Trip asked.

“Mote!”

“Mothy.”

Trip nodded. “Mote, Mothy. Okay, well, I’m Trip. Nice to meet you.”

“You’re a credit to your Syndicate, Mr. Trip.” Mote beamed, warm and sincere.

Trip glanced out to the city horizon and saw the sun finally dipping toward the dark of twilight. Against the fading light of the sky, he saw the familiar dot of his supply drone, coming up from the cache with a fresh batch of goodies.

Mote saw it too and clapped her hands with glee. But Mothy, with her keen eyes, saw something else stirring in the city below.

“More birds,” Mothy whispered.

“What?!” Mote squinted at the horizon. All she saw was mirage heat and rusted spires. But then a great shadow, shaped like a triangle, then a square, then a hexagram, then a cylinder, rose up from the ruins.

The drone got so close they could hear it buzzing and see its wings. But the great shadow followed it close behind, and then, swallowed the drone whole in a mass of black feathers.

Natural adrenaline had Trip shooting up to his feet. He left his umbrella behind and grabbed at Mote and Mothy to pull them to their feet. “Run until you get home, don’t look back.”

The girls hesitated when they saw the brave look on his face. He whipped out his flare gun and pointed it toward the murder of crows in the sky. “GO!” He screamed.

Mote and Mothy scrambled straight up the dusty hill, off trail, on their hands and feet. They followed the unmistakable roar of the Big Rev just up the ridge.

Trip loaded another screamer flare into his flare gun, snapped it shut, and fired. The projectile arced into the mass of crows, then exploded in a thunderclap of high-frequency sound. He could see what must have been hundreds of crows blown out of the flock to fall down like a rain of soot. But hundreds more remained.

The murder molded into a massive triangle and pointed toward him. Then it dove.

Trip loaded his last screamer into the flare gun and fired. Once again, it exploded into the flock and sent pieces of it flying down to earth. It made little difference.

Within seconds, the flock would engulf him. He holstered the flare gun, pulled on his mask, and drew his wakizashi. He slid his fingers down the blade and saw the red eyes of his exosuit mask lenses reflected in the four-hundred-year-old metal, just as keen and polished as the day his twentieth-century ancestors forged it.

Watashi wa meiyo o motte shinimasu.

私は名誉をもって死にます。

I die with honor.

But he was robbed of the chance.

Papaw’s voice bellowed so loud it rose over the Big Rev’s screaming V12 engines:

“LIGHT IT UP!”

It was a good thing Trip had put his mask on. The flock erupted into a fireball of bursting, miniature suns, and would have scorched his retinas down to charcoal pits without the protection of his suit lenses. He felt a heat tens of times hotter than the worst of noon blooming over his front. He dove face-first into the dust.

He heard Mote shout from higher up the hillside.

“YEEEEEEEAH WHITE PHOSPHOROUS, BITCH!”

Trip rolled onto his back and peeked up at the hill and sky. He saw Pawpaw chewing on a cigar at the top of the hill, trucker cap on, hands in his oil-stained jean pockets. On either side of him was a line of flak buggies with gunners in the seats, scouts on the poles, their engines roaring. Searchlights scanned the hillside and the darkening sky.

The Big Rev’s guitar solo rose to a needling crescendo, and that’s when Trip knew they were within minutes of taking off to the next phase of their convoy.

A searchlight blinded Trip. He heard the clanging gearboxes of a dozen heavy-duty turrets swivel to point at him. He tried to engage his cloak but had forgotten his battery was shot.

He was made. Trip wiped his hand down his blade to clean off dust, sheathed it, put it in his belt, and held his hands up in surrender.

“Don’t shoot,” he said. “Friendly. Syndicate.”

Searchlights lit up Mothy and Mote on the hillside higher up. Mote beamed back just as bright. “Papaw! You waited!”

“Shut it, girl!” Pawpaw slapped Mote upside the head in passing. “How’sit you girls know better and better but do worse and worse?! I swear to gawd you two couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions was written on the heel!”

Mote trembled; her head still smarted from the smack. Mothy stood drooped and silent. Trip, now cuffed and led by convoy roughnecks, winced at Mote’s rough treatment. But he knew the SynCon stance on Moto Tribe affairs was non-interference and cultural sensitivity.

Papaw lit his cigar, the ember the same color as the sliver of sun now setting over Anjelly valley. He puffed it to life and snorted snot down the back of his throat, rattled it clear, and spat into the dirt. He turned his back to all of them and walked toward the convoy. He spoke to the roughnecks, not his twins or the Syndicate spook in their midst.

“Git ‘em loaded up in two minutes. Brig rig.”

“Even the twins, boss?”

“Naw. Just Mote.”

“PAPAW NO!” Mote screamed. “PLEASE!”

“You are off this convoy, lil’ scooter. We’ll pick you up in The Iguana when this job’s done, you can stay with yer aunties on the coast.” Papaw had a crack of pain in his voice. “You done gone and broke papaw’s heart too many times, you done wandered off and brought evil on us, on your sister… you gotta sit tight for a while. They’ll keep you busy down South till we come back.”

“Papaw,” Mote blubbered and sniffed, pawed at his overalls. “Please, I’ll listen…”

Pawpaw softened and patted her hair. “You got that FOMO so bad you’re always borrowing trouble from the world. You gotta learn when to sit one out, lil’ scooter.”

Mote threw her head back and sobbed like a chastised toddler.

Papaw pointed at Trip. “You tell them – you tell ‘em right now! We’re deliverin’ the package to Great Tahoe like we agreed, then we’re DONE with Synner spook bullshit for a good, long while!”

Trip couldn’t comply, given his disconnection from Syndicate, but Papaw didn’t need to know that. “I’ll tell them. My apologies for the mess.”

Mote got louder. She sobbed and screamed, and to Trip, the display was borderline psychotic. Papaw gently pushed the girl toward the brig guards, who handled her with care. It seemed they all had experience dealing with Mote’s extreme temperament.

The roughnecks were as gentle as they could be and had plenty of apologies as they followed orders and restrained her on her way to the brig.

As Mote and Trip were escorted toward the brightly-lit convoy of rumbling steel and diesel fumes, Mote tried to complain and make excuses and call out to her papaw, but he didn’t have a word to say. He wouldn’t even look at her.

“You did it now,” Mothy whimpered. “He’s red-aced. He’s real red-aced.”

“Mothy! MOTHY!”

Mothy, too, couldn’t bear to look at her sister in that frothing, wide-eyed state of hers. To Trip it seemed Mothy was in grief, but it was complex – part relief, part sorrow.

Trip said nothing. He and Mote were led into the back of a ventilated truck trailer, through separate trapdoors, to fall into separate cells in the brig rig.

Outside, Papaw took command of his leader buggy and stared at the ash falling from the sky from the vaporized flock of murder birds.

“Tch,” he tutted. “What a gomm this mess is.”

Mothy sat in the back, lonesome and quiet, hugging her bag to her chest as if it could soothe the ache in her heart. Papaw looked at her through the rear view with soft eyes.

“Road don’t forgive tempters o’ fate,” he said. “We both know she’ll be safer in the city.”

“I know, papaw. I’m just sad.”

“Me too, sugar puff.”

The convoy rolled out, winding up through old trailways into the northern mountain pass. But the brig rig separated from the convoy, turned around, and headed south toward the great coastal trading hub of The Iguana, where Trip, Mote, and other incapables and captives could be processed by the local tribal authorities and then expatriated (in the case of Trip) to their respective cultural representatives.