Zloty was a Pole who’d lived in Germany most of his life. Duvalier liked his big, sad eyes. There was something of the tragic clown in him. He was a roofer by profession and had a permanent cough from the chemicals they used, though Duvalier also noticed that he smoked frequently, dreadful hand-rolled cigarettes that had only a hint of tobacco amid all the noxious chaff. How he was involved with the Resistance he did not say and no one asked. His English was quite good.
“I am to drop you off on a stretch of road. You will be picked up before dawn. A single man must stand with this torch,” he said, handing them a flashlight. “Shine it on the old sign like you are trying to read it.”
“Who is picking us up?”
“I do not know. Better that way. They try to have it so we are at most three people, and one outside our cell. Better if we are taken, you know?”
It was cool at night this close to the sea.
He led them, by dark, through cow pastures fragrant with what you expect to find in a cow pasture.
It was slow and tiresome, skirting fields and climbing fences in single file, but apparently it was safe. A few dogs barked, but no one investigated.
“The Reapers don’t prowl around at night?” Valentine asked.
“Them? No, there are not that many, and it would be a waste of time. They wait for their blood at the hospitals and police stations. It is bad to be a vagrant in Germany. It is worse to be convicted of a crime of violence. Those sorts of troublemakers are never heard from again.”
“That’s not sufficient in the United States to keep a Kurian going. They need hundreds of lives every year.”
Their guide shrugged. “We probably have more things against the law here. Just to live fully in these times is to be a criminal.”
A mass of forest stood west of them. An old road simply disappeared into the woods—trees had broken up the pavement and grown up through the cracks; what was left of the asphalt was hidden by shadow.
Zloty inspected it closely before they moved on.
“Why the caution, then?”
“This can be a bad area. Few live here, many abandoned farms. The ones that remain are more watchful but less talkative, you know?”
“Will we be resting anytime tonight?” Sime asked, looking at the mud and cow filth on his hiking shoes.
Zloty replied, “We cannot stay at a hotel. The registrations, you know? There is a farmhouse; the farmer is friendly. We can stay above the cows and be cozy. Sorry to take you across the cow paths, but we are sure to be questioned if police see us on the road.”
Later, when reflecting on it, Duvalier thought the ambush was like something out of Robin Hood. Dozens of young men dropped out of the trees in front of them, and a few behind. Some hopped over the wall they had been paralleling as they crossed the field.
They were mostly lanky teenage boys with a few young men. Duvalier thought she spotted a flash of hair and earring that might indicate a female, but you never knew.
It was a good-sized gang, certainly more than twenty. They wore a mix of cast-off military gear, fancy dress (one character sporting a monocle wore a battered silk hat with erotic postcards shoved into the band, making him look like a cross between the Mad Hatter and a doorman for a classier strip joint), peacoats and wool knit hats, and trench coats. One thing all had in common was scarves, mostly long, wound several times around the neck, giving their heads a turtlelike appearance. Their hair was either messily hanging all about the face or tied back in a rough braid. Nobody went for the skinhead look. Maybe it was out of style.
They formed two small bands, one in front on the cow path and one behind. Now that she was alerted, Duvalier’s ears picked up what were probably a few more of them creeping along the wall and moving through that deeply black forest to the east.
She’d been right about the girls. There were a few too-young-to-be-travelling-with-this-crowd girls with them. Duvalier thought they should have been at the dinner table doing their math homework at this time, not casting about the overgrown countryside looking for trouble.
“Is this the neighborhood watch?” Sime asked.
“We call them ‘the Black Youth,’” their guide said in a low voice, talking toward the ground and spitting out the words quickly. “They live rough, hiding from the labor conscription and civic indoctrination. Just ignore them. If they want something, let them have it. A jacket or a timepiece is not worth your life, you know?”
Top Hat gabbled something, and Zloty nodded and responded, holding out his hands as they talked as if to caution him against coming any closer.
“Stay still,” Zloty said. “He says we came too close to his forest. They wish an accommodation.”
They look thin, Duvalier thought. Of course, they were mostly teenagers. Teenagers could thrive on about anything, and tended to be lean.
She hoped it wouldn’t come to fighting. It would be like killing the Lost Boys from Peter Pan.
Top Hat walked up and down the line of “prisoners.” He was careful to stay out of Ahn-Kha’s reach—not knowing, of course, that she’d seen Ahn-Kha leap eight feet from a relaxed crouch like the one he was currently maintaining. Top Hat would have his head messily popped off like a shaken soda bottle being opened.
He paused in front of her and openly looked her body up and down.