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The Road to Garrison
They left at dusk, when the ash fell thickest and the world was narrowest.Silas had argued with himself about going. A voice on an intercom was a rumor, and rumors could be controlled. A man standing in a doorway was only a man. But Tomas was six years old, and Silas had learned that a plan was only as good as the person carrying it out. In the end he decided that the one thing worse than being seen was trusting the wrong hands.So there were four of them on the ridge road: Hale with his pipe and his bad leg, Corin the porter with a coil of rope over his shoulder, Silas in the sergeant's boots, and Ash padding behind his left hip like a piece of the storm that had decided to follow him.Pike had been left to hold the bunker. He had stood at the airlock with his chin trembling and said, "Yes, sir," in a voice that tried hard to be steady. Wren had said nothing at all. She had pressed the botanist's trowel into his hand as he climbed past, a ridiculous little gift, and he had put it in
Dara
The infirmary smelled of antiseptic and boiled cloth.Silas stopped outside the door and stood for a while with his hand on the frame. He had come down the corridor at an even pace and had meant to walk straight in. Instead he found his feet had stopped and would not go on.Ash lay against the wall beside him with her chin on the floor, watching. She did not push or whine. She only waited."You can come in," Voss called. "She can't hurt you.""I am not afraid of her.""I know." A pause. "That is what worries me."He pushed the door open.The woman lay on a cot under three blankets, her left arm splinted to the shoulder, her face bruised purple down one side. A strip of bandage wrapped her forehead. She looked small and old, much older than she had in the stairwell. When he stepped into the lamplight, her eyes found him at once and did not move.For a long moment neither spoke."You're alive," she whispered at last."Yes.""I thought you must be dead. Everyone did. We thought the storm
The Man With the Lantern
Garrick was not dead.They found him at dawn. Silas watched through the camera as the ash settled and the gully revealed itself, stone by stone. Nine bodies lay in the ruin of the pattern. The tenth, a young man with a rifle still clutched in his hand, sat against a boulder with his chin on his chest, and he would not lift it again.The eleventh was Garrick.He had been on the edge of the blast, thrown clear. One leg lay under him at an angle that made Pike look away. His coat was torn open and his face was streaked black, but his eyes were open, and he was dragging himself across the ash on his elbows toward the hatch, one pull at a time, as if the door were something that would eventually open if he only wanted it enough.Silas stood in the airlock with Voss and watched him come."He will not make it," Voss said."No.""You could bring him in. I could set the leg.""I could."She waited. When he did not go on, she said, "I know what you will say.""Then you know I won't say it."He
Eleven Charges
Silas waited until Garrick reached the narrowest part of the gully.The ridge funneled there, a throat of broken stone with the old footprints running down the middle. Twelve people were strung out along it in a ragged line. The camera was poor, but Silas could make out the shapes: ten men in the front, rifles slung, torches held low. Behind them, roped wrist to wrist, walked two smaller figures bent under heavy packs.He had not expected the ropes."Sir," Pike whispered. "Those two in the back.""I see them.""They're tied.""Yes."The rear pair stopped when the line stopped. One was a thin man with a blanket over his head. The other was a woman, hooded, her shoulders pulled forward by the weight on her back. She raised her face to the exhaust stack, and the torchlight caught her for half a second.Silas felt the stillness in his chest go very tight.He knew the line of that jaw. He had last seen it at the top of a staircase, looking at him through blood."Do you know her?" Voss aske
The Ground Is Listening
He did not wake the others for an hour.He sat in the dark control room with the hound at his knee, watching the twelve torches creep along the ridge, and thought. It was the thinking he had done in the shelter, clean and fast and mostly without feeling. He let it run, and let the old stillness hold him steady.Twelve. Garrick had not brought his whole settlement. A man who sat at the top of a staircase and took a share of everything would not leave his stairs unguarded. These were his best, or his most expendable. Either way, they were coming to look, and perhaps to take.At the second hour he went down and woke Hale."I need your best work," he whispered. "Quietly. Without lights."Hale propped himself up on one elbow and read his face for a long moment. "How many?""Twelve. They'll reach the hatch before dawn.""Then they'll find a locked door.""They will find a locked door, and then they'll find a way around it. Garrick is clever. He has been sitting on stolen food for months. He
What the Hound Wanted
It was Wren who named it.She had followed them out against every instruction. Silas found her at dusk crouched at the lip of the ravine with her rebar across her knees and her chin on her fist, looking down at the hound with an expression of grave consideration."Ash," she said."What?""Its name. It looks like ash. And it doesn't make any noise." She shrugged. "You don't have to use it."Silas did not tell her to go back. He had stopped telling her. He stood beside her and looked at the animal, now sleeping in the lee of the rock with its injured shoulder turned up to the cold, and he found the name settled on it as if it had always been there."Hale," he said. "Voss says she can stitch a dog?""She says she can stitch anything with a pulse." Hale had come down behind them, leaning on a length of pipe. "But I wouldn't get my hopes up. It won't let her near.""It will.""How do you know?""Because it ate the meat."Hale laughed once, a short whisper of a sound, and then looked startl
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