Muttering, Wills sliced his fingertips and handled the bones, then he spat in the bloody mess and juggled the bones and bodily fluids in his scarred palms. He whispered words in a language Dred didn’t know and cast the augury. A primitive pursuit, but she didn’t object.
Wills drew in a sharp breath. “Bad omens. Bad.”
“What do you see?” Dred always asked. It never mattered.
The man’s head came up, clarity in his muddy, miscast eyes for an instant. “Kill him now. Chaos comes. The dead will walk. And he’ll cost you everything.”
“Thanks for your counsel,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard such fire-and-doom tidings before. “I’ll consider what you’ve said.”
Wills bowed once, twice, thrice—he did everything in threes—and hurried away to cleanse his bones. The man beside her pushed out a breath, as if he hadn’t realized he was holding it. Tension lingered in his shoulders, and she wanted to reassure him that Wills was full of shit. But she didn’t comfort convicts.
“He’s quite a character. Is it always this exciting?”
“Indeed. And sometimes we have jugglers. Want something to eat?”
“Don’t be kind,” he said, casting her words back like shards of ice.
“I’m not. You need nutrition to stay strong. You’re no use to me if you can’t fight, and I’d prefer not to cast your corpse down the chute just yet.”
He laughed at that. Here was a man who laughed at death. And he meant it; this wasn’t bravado, designed to impress her. His amusement echoed with layers, sincerity and . . . longing. Did he want to die, then? How . . . intriguing.
“I’d like a meal. There was nothing on the transport.”
She nodded. “The system managers don’t care if you starve or kill one another en route. If you do, then it’s less burden on the existing resources.”
“It’s a business like any other with profit and loss statements. I bet they don’t send much.”
“No,” she acknowledged. “We make do.”
Besides boundaries and limited space, aggression that sometimes had nowhere else to go, townships battled for limited resources. If she lost ground, it might cost her the hydroponics lab they’d built. Not all the settlements had them. Mungo’s people relied on the capricious Kitchen-mates, which had to be fed a steady influx of organic matter to create food. Dred tossed corpses into the chutes for processing, which fertilized their plants, but Mungo took a different route, and his dead became something else, something hot and delicious for the table.
She quelled a shiver. It would be impossible for her to eat a steaming roast, knowing it had been a person. Even understanding how the Kitchen-mates worked didn’t help. The meat might go in as human, but it would be broken down and processed and regenerated until the cellular structure matched the recipe that had been input. So unless a freakish cannibal did the programming, it wouldn’t be human flesh that emerged. And yet . . .
“Something wrong?” Jael asked.
“No more than usual. Let’s find you some food.”
There was always a pot of vegetable stew bubbling away, and since it was close to the third meal of the day, she found bread cooling on the table. At her nod, Cook cut a generous slab. That was both the man’s name and his job. He didn’t speak or fight much, but he had a way with produce, and he knew his way around the kitchen. She’d recruited him because he was big, but as it turned out, he’d rather use his knives for chopping. Dred had often wondered how Cook ended up here, but he wasn’t helpless. If you pissed him off, he’d slit your throat and go back to dicing veggies for the pot.
Once he got the food, Jael ate quickly, arms curled around the bowl to keep anyone from taking it. He used the bread to clean the dish, then handed it back. All told, it took less than five minutes.
“Been a while?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I can’t remember when last I ate.”
Dred didn’t pursue the subject; it was too personal. She just needed to brief him and walk away. Let him find his own path.
“This is Queensland.” Briefly, she outlined the size of her holding. “Once you have a chance to rest, I’ll put you on the roster. You’ll have shifts at various borders . . . and sometimes there will be people to kill.”
“That’s it?”
“More or less.”
“What do you do for laughs?”
She took that to mean the men, not herself personally. Dred couldn’t remember when she’d enjoyed . . . anything. Except his conversation. Which made him absolutely forbidden fruit.
Walk away. Don’t go down this road. It ends in a sheer cliff with blood all over the rocky ground.
But she couldn’t resist one last exchange. “Drink. Gamble. Copulate.”
He flashed a white, wicked smile. “Occasional murder leavened with debauchery and vice? This sounds divine.”
4
Territorial Incursion
On the second day, Jael prowled the boundaries, learning where the lines were drawn. She had guards posted on various levels to keep watch. Her top two lieutenants, Tameron and Einar, were rightfully suspicious of him; they kept an eye on him as he learned her holdings. Though it was too soon for him to factor the advantages of betrayal, he would sell her secrets in a heartbeat if it meant a more advantageous position elsewhere. But he believed her when she said it was worse elsewhere.
He breathed in deep, processing the variety of smells that carried such diverse information. Five of her men had a terminal illness; the smell of decay lingered on them, dead men walking. At least half the others wore lust like a jacket made of skins, and they watched her with covetous eyes as she strode past. Jael didn’t need to read their minds to know what they wanted—and it intrigued him that she was fierce enough to keep such vile intentions in check. For despite the desire to do her harm, fear surged even stronger in her henchmen, and they wouldn’t move against her.
It took him the better part of the day to patrol her territory fully. The boundaries contained some fascinating assets, but also definite defensive liabilities. If he had control of the zone, he would reorganize the deployment. Mentally, Jael reassigned the watches and distributed the personnel though it was possible she knew things about the inclinations and capabilities of her men that he didn’t. There must be some reason she had managed to hold the line despite apparent missteps.
Dinner was more of the same, but he was happy enough to have hot food and human companionship that he felt fairly glad to be here. Jael suspected he was the only inmate of that mind, but they had never been incarcerated on Ithiss-Tor. Compared to the Bug prison, this place was positively luxurious. And he’d find a way out, eventually. He’d been confined more times than he could count, and they’d never managed to lock him down yet.