Mated to the Beast of the Wasteland novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: He Came Back

Brand had gone very still under my hand.

"Say it again," he said to the boy. "What she said. Exactly."

The boy said it again.

Brand looked at me over the boy's head.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't.

Eleven years. A core-room accident. Two engineers on the night shift.

I dealt with him.

"Truck," Brand said quietly. "We'll talk at home. Not here."

The two collared wolves were still sitting at the canal when we drove past them.

The boy watched them through the back window until the steam swallowed them.

"They're from the south row," he said. "Both of them."

"We'll get them," Brand said. "Not tonight. But we'll get them."

We got home at noon.

The gate bell rang three times, then didn't stop.

The whole town was in the yard.

Sable must have radioed ahead from the flats, because Gran was standing on an oil drum by the inner gate in her blanket.

She wasn't crying.

She was shouting at Brand for being stupid, at the top of her cracked voice, in front of everyone.

He stood there and took it with his head down and a grin he couldn't get off his face.

Then she got down off the drum and hit him with her spoon.

Then she held his face in both her old scaled hands for a long time.

The boy got down off the truck by himself, slowly, holding the side.

The yard went quiet.

A woman came out of the crowd from the east row.

She was gray-haired and thin. She stopped in front of him and looked at the scales on his face.

"I knew your mother," she said. "Before the fever."

The boy didn't say anything.

She said his name. The one his mother had given him.

He hadn't heard it in five years. You could see it on him.

His knees went, and the old salvage man caught him.

They gave him the bunk in the back of Sable's workshop.

Sable cleared it out herself, swearing, and put her own blanket on it.

"You snore, I'll throw a wrench at you," she told him.

He nearly smiled.

That night the town ate in the square round the pump.

Everybody brought something. Stew. Flatbread off car hoods. A whole goat somebody had been saving.

The crystal sat in the middle of the table on Brand's leather jacket, glowing gold.

Kids kept sneaking up to touch it.

"Don't," I said, every time. "It's warm. It's supposed to be warm."

The old salvage man made a speech nobody could hear over the laughing.

Sable stood on a bench and told the story of the shock net four times, and it got better each time.

The handler and his two shooters sat in a locked salt container at the end of the south row, eating our stew.

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