Chapter Two

As dedicated as Six was to rebuilding Sector Three, it couldn’t happen overnight. The most immediate damage--evidence of the recent war with the city--had been smoothed away, but there were deeper scars. Scars that might never heal, no matter how much money and manpower and sheer force of will they funneled into restoring the sector to its former glory.

The vacant lot in front of Bren was proof of those scars. It had once been an apartment building, housing for the foremen and line workers employed by the sector’s largest electronics factory, but the destruction of that factory had rendered it unstable. It had been torn down before it could collapse, its materials scavenged and the lot left to languish.

Except that it hadn’t. No one had rebuilt here, but tables and chairs dotted the busted foundation, and elderly men had gathered to laugh and complain and tell lies and play games, to reclaim this space for their community. It was the kind of stubborn living he’d only seen here in Three, people moving on, moving back in, like ants scurrying about their destroyed hill.

They could get knocked down, but as long as they had breath in their bodies, they’d get back up again.

A man with white hair and a weathered face looked up from the cards he was shuffling and caught sight of Bren. “You better not be here to evict us for your girlfriend’s next project, ‘cause I ain’t in the mood to move my tired bones. She wants me gone, she can come down here and drag me off her own damn self.”

“No evictions,” he promised. “I come bearing gifts.” Five bottles of O’Kane whiskey, to be exact. It wasn’t the best Nessa had socked away--these days, the rarer vintages were reserved for Dallas’s people, no exceptions--but the worst that she turned out was still better than the hooch most people were used to.

He passed out the bottles, which were met with eagerness and pleasure. Only old Charlie continued to eye him with mild suspicion, even as he cradled a bottle in his gnarled fingers. “So. Gifts, or bribes?”

The man beside him grunted. “If he wanted something from you, he could just take it.” Then he looked up at Bren appraisingly. “Unless what he wants is all locked away.”

Locked away inside someone’s head--like knowledge. Bren grinned. “Deal me in?”

“Art, grab him a chair.” Charlie tucked his bottle of whiskey in the large pocket of his beat-up jacket before picking up the cards again. “Buy-in’s fifty credits.”

“C’mon, Charlie.” Art unfolded a rickety metal chair that rocked on the uneven pavement and slapped the back of it in invitation. “You know he’s good for it.”

“Fine,” Charlie grumbled.

Bren ducked his head to hide a smile. “What’s the game?”

“Poker.” Charlie grinned, showing his chipped front tooth and a gold cap. “Omaha rules.”

“Man, who the hell knows Omaha rules?”

A chuckle rose around the table, and Charlie shook his head. “You young’uns need to sort out your priorities. Fine. Five card draw. Can you handle that?”

Bren met his gaze squarely, arched an eyebrow, and tossed a credit stick onto the table.

Charlie gave the deck one final shuffle and began dealing out cards. “So, I hear you got one of those fancy-ass recycling machines from Sector Eight parked over in the western factory district. Haven’t seen one of those in few decades.”

“Not since the firebombs,” Art agreed.

No one in Sector Three remembered the carnage the way these men did. They were community leaders back then, too, on the front lines of every rescue effort in the brutal hours that followed the destruction. But that experience was inextricably tangled up with the pain of what they’d seen, and that made his job tricky. “Six and I figure it’s time,” he said carefully. “People need jobs.”

Charlie continued dealing, the soft whisper and crisp snap of the cards filling the silence. “People don’t remember how to have jobs. You were just a kid when they bombed Three. Your girl probably wasn’t born yet. You don’t even know what you’re trying to do.”

“Scavenging’s a job,” Bren countered. It was part of why the recycling was so important to Six--in a very real way, collecting and selling junk had become the official industry of Sector Three, and the last thing they wanted to do was yank that out from under people.

“It’s a job,” Art agreed. “One where you make your own rules and set your own hours and tell anyone who pisses you off to go fuck themselves. Not saying it’s the best job...but I wouldn’t want to be floor supervisor over a bunch of these kids who don’t know how to take orders.”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it?” Bren arranged his cards. It was a shitty hand, but he’d play it anyway. He wasn’t after money, but another sort of prize. “How are they gonna know how to take orders when no one’s ever taught them?”

“So the rumors are true.” Charlie’s grin had faded into something almost like a grimace, and he glared at Bren over his hand. “You two are gonna rebuild the factories.”

“We’re gonna build whatever works for the sector. Right now, that’s recycling.”

Art tapped his cards on the table. “Makes sense. Even with all the work you O’Kanes have done, rubble’s the one thing we got too much of. But if you’ve got a couple of recycling centers online, then pure resources sell a lot better than scrap.”

“Still need people to run them.” Charlie lifted one bushy eyebrow. “That’s where we’re headed with all this dancing around, isn’t it? You sure as shit didn’t come over here to play cards with some useless old men.”

“If I thought you were useless, I wouldn’t come to you for jack shit, Chuck.” Bren paused. “Not even your sparkling conversation.”

Even with arthritis-swollen joints, Charlie had no trouble extending his middle finger. “Fuck off, Donnelly.”

The third man shifted in his chair. He had snow-white hair, dark skin, and intelligent brown eyes that regarded Bren with renewed interest. “How many recycling machines can you get your hands on? To set up a real center, you’d need four or five, at least. Ten, if you can get them.”

Art tilted his head toward the third man. “Gilmer used to be a foreman at the Northside recycling depot.”

“You don’t say.” Of course the information was carefully inked in the plans Six had painstakingly drawn up over the past few months. But simply knowing that Gilmer could help them wouldn’t make it happen. “We have two more machines on the way, but we have to make those three pay before we can afford more.”

Gilmer tapped his fingers on his chin. “The margin on raw materials is better than it is on scrap, but if you really want to start making them pay, you need a couple 3D printers. Not even the big ones, maybe. Just the right ones. Make something everyone needs right now.”

“Six figures construction supplies could be big, with all the building going on.” Bren tossed in two cards and waited for Charlie to deal his fresh ones. “You should come by and talk to her about it.”

Silence fell again as Art discarded one card and Gilmer got rid of three. Some of the older men side-stepped the reality of Six’s leadership by trying to deal only with Bren. Most of them weren’t fool enough to say it out loud--at least not to Bren’s face--but forcing them to confront that truth was always a gamble.

Gilmer shot Charlie a look as he picked up his new cards, then nodded. “I can do that.”

“Good.” His new cards were just as useless as the old ones, but he kicked in to call Art’s raise, and happily lost his shirt over the next four hands.

They grumbled when he rose, just like they’d grumbled when he sat down, but Bren shrugged. “Got a lunch date, fellas. Can’t be late.”

“Tell your girl I’ll be over in the next couple days,” Gilmer told him with a short wave. “Might have a few more ideas for her.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks, Gil.”

The warehouse where Six had set up her school was one that Wilson Trent had favored because of its central location. When he wasn’t using it to store grain that he’d bought for cheap to resell at exorbitant prices, he’d staged his own version of fight night in it. It was the first way he’d tried to copy Dallas, and the first way he’d screwed up. There had never been anything clean or fair about Trent’s fights. He set up rigged bouts with lopsided odds to fill his pockets, and more than one fight had ended with a dead man being dragged out of the cage and dumped in the alley behind the warehouse.

Glad didn’t begin to cover how Bren felt about that motherfucker being gone.

Six was standing just inside the bay, the wide loading door rolled up to let in the late morning sun. She glanced around, as if she sensed his presence, and smiled as she tilted her head in invitation. “Marian’s putting the youngest group through grapples.”

The older kids were working in pairs, taking turns wrestling one another to the floor or breaking holds, while the younger children watched from the edge of the cavernous room. “Next week, I want to start on weapons.”

“Laurel’s been upgrading the shooting alley behind the warehouse. She’ll have new targets set up when you’re ready.” Six leaned into his side. “Marian wants to outfit one of the upstairs rooms for academic lessons. I wasn’t really planning to turn this into an actual school, but...”

“But it’s important,” he finished. Six understood that better than just about anyone. She’d worked so hard to overcome her lack of education, and the last thing she wanted was for the kids in their care to be burdened like that. “It’s almost lunchtime.”

She watched the kids finish their next grapple before nodding to herself. “Marian’s got this,” she murmured, turning. “Sally was making empanadas when I stopped by the kitchen earlier. Hiring one of Hawk’s stepmothers to whip that place into shape might be the smartest thing we’ve ever done.”

The woman had spent most of her life on a farm in Sector Six, where feeding multitudes of hungry laborers--not to mention children--was serious business. “Did you tell her we might have a few extra folks joining us?”

Six hesitated. “I did, but just so there’d be enough...” She bit her lower lip in a telling show of nerves. “I didn’t want to make any concrete plans. Or get anyone’s hopes up.”

He wrapped his hand around hers and squeezed. “I know.”

She clung to his hand as they walked through the loading door and around the side of the warehouse. The empty lot abutting it had been a mess of rubble, broken bottles, and discarded trash when they’d moved in. Now it was swept clean and filled with a dozen long wooden tables and matching benches. Sally’s kitchen helpers were already busy against the wall, laying out stacks of dishes and trays of food.

They didn’t have to eat outside. There was plenty of room in the network of buildings that surrounded the warehouse Six had reclaimed from Trent. But it was nice to be out in the courtyard, under a cloudless blue sky.

It was a statement, of sorts. Have a seat, it said boldly. No one has to worry about bombs falling today.

Six took a tray and stacked it with food--a plate overflowing with empanadas, a bowl of freshly chopped pico de gallo, and a basket of crisp tortilla slices still warm from the fryer. She went heavy on the glazed donuts, too, not looking at him as she rearranged it carefully so everything fit. It was more food than they could eat in a day, much less a quick lunch before getting back to work. “Wanna just grab a pitcher and some cups, or something?”

He’d thought her nerves might be contagious, but instead he felt calm, sure. Not that the kid would come back, necessarily, but that they were doing the right thing. Eventually, it would work.

It had to.

Six sat with her leg pressed against his beneath the table as she picked at the crisp edge of one empanada. Bren was halfway through his third when she looked up, her eyes widening.

The kid was back, and he’d brought his friends. A girl about his age--somewhere between twelve and fourteen--and three smaller children. The youngest couldn’t have been more than six or seven, regarding Bren and Six through serious brown eyes set in a painfully thin face.

Six tilted her chin toward the empty bench across from them. “You guys wanna sit?”

The youngest boy was staring at the donuts with naked yearning. The leader bumped him in the arm with his elbow before giving Six a challenging look. “He said I could have my gun back.”

Bren didn’t stop eating. “I don’t have it on me, but I’ll get it after lunch.”

The little girl inched her knee onto the bench, lifting herself up so she could see the tray. “You have a lot of food.”

“Dee!” The leader grabbed the back of her threadbare shirt, ready to pull her back.

“It’s okay.” Six picked up the plate of donuts and set it on the other side of the table. “No strings attached, I promise. Just sit and talk while you eat.”

Dee craned her head up. “Please, Daniel?”

The conflict was clear on his face. The little girl had the same hint of curl in her hair and the same pointed chin--his sister, most likely. Her pleading eyes did battle with his wariness--and won. “Fine,” he said, picking her up and settling her on the bench across from Six.

Then he claimed the spot directly across from Bren, challenge in his eyes.

Bren slid the plate of empanadas across the table and returned the kid’s stare. “I cleaned your gun for you. The thing was a mess.”

“Told you,” the older girl muttered. She finished helping the younger boy onto the bench before sliding into the seat next to Daniel. The look she pinned on Bren was a subtler kind of challenge--an open, narrow-eyed assessment that ended in a tight nod. “I’m Tasha. This is Daniel.”

“I’m Bren.” The hesitation was enough to make a grown-ass person cry, so he nudged the plate again. “Food’s getting cold.”

Dee grabbed a donut and shoved a quarter of it into her mouth. The two younger boys were only a tiny bit slower, each grabbing an empanada in one hand and a donut in the other, as if afraid they’d disappear if they didn’t claim their portion.

Daniel accepted an empanada, but he only broke off a tiny corner, nibbling on it as Tasha did the same to one of the chips. Both kept glancing at the plates, and then at the younger kids as they devoured their food with intense focus.

“It’s okay,” Six said after a tense silence. “You two can eat. We’ll get another tray if they’re still hungry.”

After a moment, Tasha nodded and reached for the food.

Six gestured to Sally, carefully out of sight of the children, and the woman brought over another tray anyway, this one laden with meat pies and vegetables, but no donuts. Bren stifled a smile, but the urge vanished completely when the youngest boy surreptitiously slipped an empanada into his pocket.

Six ignored it and poured glasses of juice, setting one in front of each child. “Do you guys know who I am?”

“You’re Six,” Dee said around a mouthful of food. “You’re in charge.”

“I am now. But not all that many years ago, I was just like you guys. I lived in an abandoned warehouse with some other kids. We sold scrap, and sometimes we stole shit. A lot of nights I went to sleep hungry. Sometimes people would offer me food, but I was too smart to take it. You know why?”

“Because nothing’s free,” Daniel said, still watching Bren.

“Nothing’s free,” Six agreed. “So go ahead. Ask what’s in this for us. No bullshit.”

“What’s in it for you?” Tasha asked without hesitation.

“The future.” Six leaned forward on her elbows. “You know what the older kids are like. Hungry and mean. Bullies. No one ever helped them get strong and smart. Shit’s going to change around here. We’re going to rebuild. I want you guys to be strong, and I want you smart. There’ll be good jobs for people. I want you to grow up and take them.”

Daniel swung his gaze back to Bren. “Is that the story you were gonna tell me?”

Bren considered that. He was willing to bribe the kids, whatever it took to get them in the door, but he drew the line at lying. If he couldn’t forge bonds of trust with honesty, then it couldn’t be done.

“No,” he said finally. “When I was your age, there was no future. Coop--the guy who picked me up off the streets? He was recruiting me for something besides a job.”

Tasha tensed. “For what?”

“To fight a war,” Bren answered simply. “To make that future.”

Dee licked sugar off her fingers and stared at Six. “Is that why you kidnap girls and make them fight in the warehouse?”

Six went rigid next to him, but she kept her expression bland. “Is that what they’re saying? All the girls in this school are here because they want to be. They want to learn how to fight. How to kick the bullies hard enough to make them stay down. But that’s why Bren and I fought that war. So you can pick what you want to be.”

“It’s a nice story.” The only thing more heartbreaking than the fragile hope in Daniel’s eyes was the speed with which he snuffed it out. “C’mon, guys. We need to get back.”

“But--” one of the boys started, only to snap his teeth together when Daniel pinned him with a look. He still snuck out a hand and snatched another empanada as he rose.

Six started to lift her hand, but Sally was already on her way over with a stack of brown paper sacks. “Here, don’t let that go to waste,” she said sternly, setting the stack down in front of Daniel. “You pack that food up.”

In that moment, she reminded him of Tammy--stern but nurturing, the perfect foil to Coop’s gruff demeanor.

No one said no to Tammy, and Daniel reacted the same way to Sally. “Yes, ma’am,” he muttered, snatching up the precious sacks.

Six squeezed Bren’s leg under the table before rising. “I’ve got to get back to work. You guys think about what I said.”

Daniel watched her and Sally head back to the door before turning to face Bren. “I’m coming back tonight for the gun.”

“I’ll be out.” He rose. “Tomorrow morning at the bar. I’ll show you how to break it down and put it back together. Then you’ll be able to clean it yourself.”

He received a grudging nod in return as Daniel lifted Dee off the bench. Tasha did the same with the younger boy, then gathered up the last two sacks. They herded their charges toward the opposite side of the courtyard, vanishing around the corner with their treasures clutched close.

Six returned with a fresh plate of food and sat down next to him. “I asked Kay to shadow them back to wherever they hole up. Just to make sure no older kids jump them for the food.”

Kay was probably the only one who could do it without being noticed. “Good.” His hand found hers under the table. “They have enough to last until tomorrow, but not so much they’ll make themselves sick. Couldn’t have gone better.”

“Now we just need a permanent solution.” She leaned into him, twining her fingers with his. “Tell me we’re going to figure this out.”

“Not all at once.” Reality was too messy and complicated for quick fixes. It had a way of taking even the best intentions and twisting them--but the only way was forward. “Day by day, huh? How does that sound?”

“It sounds like a plan.”