Page 27 of Aftermarket Afterlife

This wasn’t necessarily the group of people I would have chosen for a field operation, mostly because I had some valid concerns about Jane, her mother, and so-called “friendly fire,” but I had to admit it was reasonably balanced. Alice was ridiculously lucky and an excellent shot; Jane was familiar with the modern makeup of the carnival and reasonably skilled in hand-to-hand combat; Antimony could start fires with her mind, and Sam was Sam. They might kill each other, but they would do a lot of damage to the Covenant first.

The routewitch behind the wheel leaned out the driver’s-side window, frowning at the group. She was a Caucasian woman in her mid-forties, hair dyed black and streaked with bands of lilac, making her look like a particularly over-dramatic orchid. “Hoy,” she called, Irish accent thickly coating her voice. “You lot coming, or nah? I need to get back on the road if I want to make Chicago by nightfall.”

“We’re coming,” called Antimony. She hugged her mother quickly, kissed her father on the cheek, and then jogged toward the van, Sam close on her heels.

“Shotgun,” said Alice, turning to stroll more languidly toward the van.

I was tempted to claim seniority, but doing so would have meant putting Alice and Jane in the backseat together, as both the van’s rows of seats had space for two, and Annie and Sam were already settling in the far back. Better to give Alice the front and give Jane a little distance.

I slid into the middle seat, smiling at Jane as she buckled in beside me. She scowled back.

“Thanks, Bon,” said Alice, as she got into the front and turned her attention to the routewitch. “You hear I finally found Thomas?”

“I see him, and the whole damn network knows you went and found him,” said the routewitch, cranking her engine back to full. It came to life, smooth and easy, a rumble like a purring tiger. It sounded like more power than belonged in a minivan. “We’re pretty well impressed. Pretty well horrified, too, but the impressed takes priority. Your lot does like to break the laws of nature, no?”

“Says the woman who’s about to break the laws of time and space getting us to Boise,” said Alice.

Bon laughed and hit the gas.

Six

“Mothers and daughters...oh, they always fight, and they don’t always make up. People will tell you they do, but those are always the people who had easy relationships with their mothers. Sometimes the schisms go too deep. Sometimes nothing heals.”

—Eloise Dunlavy

Packed into a minivan being driven unreasonably fast by an Irish routewitch, heading for Boise, Idaho

SOMEHOW, BON’S RADIO PICKEDup local stations from Dublin, Ireland, something which sent Alice into gales of laughter when she realized what was happening, and which caused Jane to roll her eyes and sink deeper into the sulk she’d been cultivating since we left the compound. I frowned, leaning over to pat her knee in what I hoped would be a reassuring manner.

“You didn’t have to come, you know,” I said.

“They’re my family more than anyone’s,” she replied. “Andshe”—she jerked her head toward Alice to illustrate who she was referring to—“is never going to respect me if I don’t do more fieldwork.”

“Honey...” Alice twisted around in her seat, frowning as she peered into the back seat. “You don’t need me to respect you. Iloveyou. Isn’t that enough?”

“I see the way you look at me, and the way you look at Kevin,” snapped Jane. “Or the way you treat Arthur as compared to Alex. You only respect us if we live our lives the wayyouwould want us to live them. If you’re actually planning to stick around this time, which I frankly doubt, you’regoingto respect me, and that means I’m going to show you that I stay out of the field because Ichooseto, not because Ihaveto.”

“Jane...” Alice visibly wilted, shooting me a pleading look before she sank back into her seat, facing forward once more.

Bon patted her reassuringly on the shoulder and kept on driving. The minivan was chewing up road faster than would have been possible with anyone else behind the wheel. Routewitches are sort of the base form of whatever it was Sarah was becoming, although from what I could tell, they had a slightly better understanding of what it was they were doing when they traveled. For them, distance translated directly into power, and they could somehow borrow potential power from their planned routes to bend the map, shortening the distance they actually had to travel.

Think of it as someone saying they could hand you twenty dollars to use in buying lunch, or they could just hand you lunch. The end result is the same—you get fed either way—but one way takes longer. By bending the map willy-nilly, Bon was sacrificing the power shewouldhave acquired for covering that distance, but her reward was the distance already covered, with no need for the boring travel parts.

It should have taken more than six hours to get to Boise, without accounting for bathroom breaks and snack stops. At our current rate, we were going to be there within the hour, which was great, since it meant Jane wouldn’t have a chance to murder her mother. I loved them both, but at the end of the day, Alice was the one I’d actually been hired to care for. If it came to blows, I knew where I would have to intercede.

“See?” hissed Jane, leaning closer to me. “She doesn’t respect me. She’s never going to respect me. She couldn’t stick around to raise me, and now she blames me for not growing up to be a tiny clone of herself.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Jane, you know that’s not true.”

“Andyouknow she thinks the only real work happens in the field.” Jane folded her arms and flopped backward, sulking like the teenager she hadn’t been in years.

I looked farther back, into the rear bank of seats. Sam and Antimony were both asleep, two non-drivers with plenty of experience at getting their rest where they could find it. She had slumped over until her cheek was resting against his forearm, looking half-melted as she lolled there. Sam, who had the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up to keep passing motorists from seeing his nonhuman features, had his tail wrapped around her leg and one of his hands folded over hers. At least they weren’t witnessing this latest iteration of an old, familiar fight.

“That’s not so,” I said firmly, looking back to Jane. “Everyone contributes to this family. Thomas didn’t do any fieldwork for years, and she still married him.”

“He was trapped in his house because of a careless bargain he’d madein the field,” said Jane.

Alice twisted around in her seat again, unable to let that one slide. “That ‘careless bargain’ is the reason you exist, Jane,” she said. “We weren’t together yet when he bartered with the crossroads for my life. If he’d decided not to be ‘careless,’ you would never have been born.”

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