“It might not matter, anyway,” Scout said. “They might not even be able to get into contact with him. Nobody might be able to get in contact with anybody outside town. NPs like the Matchmaker who can read minds? Who knows how much they’re monitoring and reporting to Big, Bad Warden Kathan? He might already have all the communications cut.”
“Doesn’t need to cut the communications,” Lonely said. “He’s got an elemental. Magnetic.”
Scout and I both snapped to attention at that.
But Clarion just nodded. “That explains a lot.”
Bullshit it does.
“What’s an elemental?” Scout asked.
“Not exactly an NP,” Clarion said. “More like a force, but with some amount of sentience. Kathan’ll have it monitoring the incoming and outgoing information. Being magnetic, it feeds off electromagnetic pulses. Certain messages will disappear, others might be altered. It’s probably explained away with some baloney about NP energies messing with wireless signals and radio waves.” He looked at Lonely. “How long has the thing been in Halo?”
Lonely cocked his head and considered the question for a while. “It’s always been in this ground, at least as long as crows have been in Halo. Probably longer.”
Clarion’s eye stared off at nothing. “I’m sending messengers out. I think I can get us some reinforcements, but it might be a day or two before we hear back. It’s a long run. In the meantime, we need to be working out the best way to acquire that sword.”
“Pretty simple, isn’t it?” Scout said. “We steal it. Just like Mikal did, just like Colt did. Send in a wave of troops to draw the foot soldiers out, then while they’re fighting, a small group slips in the back and recovers the sword.”
If I’d had a spare grenade and unbroken window, I probably would’ve pulled a repeat of earlier, but since I didn’t have either of those things handy, I slapped one of the bare rafters. The boom shook the attic.
Scout’s head snapped around to look at me.
“Easy on the lumber,” Lonely said, grinning not quite at me. “This old building’s got to last me another couple years at least.”
I held Scout’s gaze and shook my head, hard. Throwing a bunch of humans at the Dark Mansion to draw the fallen angels out wouldn’t work. For one, we were talking about a bunch of kids—collective hours of combat training: zero. Maybe the crows and coyotes had been fighting and killing each other their whole lives, but most of the human Halo lifers had never even held a pellet gun. If we used them to draw out the fallen angels and the foot soldiers didn’t slaughter everybody outright, then they would take a few prisoners, find out where the rest of us were, and wipe us off the face of the Earth.
“Tough, it’s the only way. We sacrifice this battle to win the—”
People, I snapped, emphasizing it by moving my voiceless lips. You’re talking about sacrificing people.
“Colt would’ve agreed with me. You know he would have.”
She was right. If it was the only way to get the job done, Colt would’ve accepted that, then he would’ve gone to work getting it done, because he was an asshole who didn’t care who had to die as long as the sacrifice worked in the end. Ryder might’ve been a psycho who would punch you in the back of the head as soon as look at you, but there had been times when even he had looked at Colt like, “What the hell?”
Sissy was probably the only one of us kids who had agreed with Colt every time. But at least she had never acted like it wasn’t no thang to be talking about sending somebody to their death. That first time we attacked Kathan and his group after the war—the night she died—when Colt and her had come up with the plan, Ryder had pointed out every point in their plan where one or all of us might get killed. Sissy had listened to his list of potential deaths, nodding her head. Then she’d set her jaw and said, “You’re right. But if we don’t do it, who will?”
No one. No one else would’ve done it back then and no one else would do it now. If I stopped for a second and took a step back from wanting to nuclear blast the Dark Mansion and every single angel who had ever set foot there, I could see that there was a bigger picture than revenge. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to know what that big picture was, but it had to do with keeping Willow’s daughter from growing up to be Scout and Scout from growing up to be me.
Go downstairs and pick them out, I told Scout. Pick out the ones you want dead, tell them what you’re volunteering them for, then get back to me.
“You think this is any different than what Pastor Danny did?” she snapped.
And how did that end? Oh yeah, with everybody over twenty-five decapitated.
“Freedom is worth whatever it—”
You want to know who buried your dad, Scout?
Her gray eyes narrowed. “I know what happened. You think I don’t know what happened?”
Foot soldiers. They got an excavator, dug a big hole next to the pile of headless bodies, bulldozed them into the hole, then they poured the foundation for the Dark Mansion.
“Is that supposed to scare me?”
It’s supposed to make you get your priorities straight. My dad knew it was going to happen—or, hell, at least he knew it was a possibility—and he acknowledged it. He was killing his friends and his congregation and maybe his kids, too, and he told them so. He didn’t dress the truth up with freedom and sacrifice and pretty shit.
“You’re one to talk,” Scout said. “Lonely had to drag you here! I had to drug you just to
