Page 31 of Night in a Waste Land

“You don’t like it when I’m kind to you,” he observed, and it was her turn to be surprised. “Why?”

Her belly shriveled up around the food she’d eaten. She felt caught-out, arrested in the act of doing something wrong.

She could only be honest. “Because the only person who was ever kind to me went to hell.” She stood, before she could see whatever his face did in response, and left the locker room, flip-flops slapping over the tiles.

“Rose,” he said, once, quietly, behind her, but didn’t offer any greater protest.

SEVEN

The Present

The airfield was outside the city, in the middle of a barren field, surrounded by razor wire fence, and an assortment of ditches, manned bridges, and booby traps. They’d learned that silver and blessed objects could hold off the hell beasts, at least. The angel conduits were harder to keep out, but some of the ditches were lined with Wraith claymores and obsidian spike strips.

The rain was only a mist, and as the plane descended, the scattered, yellow and blue lights of the city lay like sick fireflies in the distance, beneath the press of stacked, black clouds. Rose was tired, hungry, sore from the five-hour flight, and felt a sick lurch when she saw those lights, and thought about going back into the city.

It would be different this time, though; she was going back with Beck in tow.

Or, rather, Beck was towing her.

He’d stood most of the flight. The moment the plane taxied to a halt on the runway, he offered his hand to her, lifted her elegantly and effortlessly to her feet, and they were the first ones down the ramp. She heard Gavin muttering about the fact, but he didn’t dare protest too loudly.

With a soft sound like leather gloves sliding against one another, Beck lifted a wing and cupped it over her head in an umbrella of sorts. She bit her lip against a giddy smile, and when she glanced at him, she got one of his old, small, close-lipped grins, the kind that lit up his eyes – even brighter, now.

She heard a gasp, ahead of them. She squeezed Beck’s hand and turned her attention to the young officer who’d come out to greet them.

He was, in truth, Rose’s age, if not a few years older, but he looked boy-green and unsteady, mouth hanging open, as they approached. He didn’t have wings pinned to his fatigue jacket – not a Knight, then. If he’d seen action, it hadn’t been anything like that of the Gold Company, and he’d certainly never seen a horned, winged man walking toward him.

“Sir Greer,” Rose introduced herself, when they reached him. “From Gold Company. They’re expecting us?”

The boy blinked, shook his head, and refocused. “Yes, ma’am. Sergeant du Lac’s company?”

“Yes,” Lance said, stepping up beside them. “Has Captain Bedlam arrived?”

“She’s with my captain, sir. If you’ll follow me?”

The airport had once – pre-Rift – been the sort of sprawling, mini-metropolis that saw hundreds of thousands of travelers every day. Its main structure was a wedge of gridded glass, an open atrium from which terminals extended like the spokes of a wheel. Newsstands, shops, and restaurants had existed here, before. All of them dark, now, empty. Paint had flaked off, and bits of molding and decoration sagged like limp arms. The newsstand they passed offered a view of tipped-over shelves, and a few scattered, waterlogged paperbacks.

“Hm,” Beck hummed, and she knew he was lamenting the waste of perfectly good books.

Another young officer stood at the entrance of what had once been, according to its damaged signage, a Pizza Hut. He saluted them, for some reason, and Rose watched him quail in the face of Beck’s…everything.

“Sir. Sirs.” He quivered head-to-toe. “Sir du Lac and his company?” he asked, gaze pinned on Beck.

“Yes,” Lance said, stiffly.

Beck’s wings rustled.

“This way.”

They went through the Pizza Hut, past old ovens and shelves dripping moss and algae, and through a heavy steel door into a concrete and metal corridor like those in all the other bases she’d seen since joining the Knights.

A young Army sergeant waited there; snapped a salute without ogling Beck too badly, and led them farther down the hall, through several open pneumatic doors and back into the old airport proper, into a room with one glass wall that overlooked the tarmac, and an old parking lot: its pavement cracked and weed-choked, its spaces filled now with armored military vehicles rather than passenger cars.

Rose noted young officers floating at the edges of the room; she smelled coffee and bad donuts. And in the room’s center, a long table, at which sat Captain Bedlam, an unfamiliar woman wearing captain’s bars on her fatigue jacket, and a man who was unmistakably a general. Army, going by his jacket, with a single star stitched on each epaulette.

“Du Lac, good,” Captain Bedlam greeted. Her gaze shifted to Beck, and her usual stern mask flickered, just a moment, as she took in the sight of him. Wings, horns, and all. For Beck’s par, his own mask cloaked his thoughts, Rose noted, with a glance. That perfect, skin-tight marble that clung to ever feature, clothing him in bland interest, and inoffensive pleasantness. His eyes were hooded, low-lidded, that withdrawn look she’d seen so often in the first few weeks they’d known one another – but there was no disguising the way they glowed like backlit gems.

“This is Arthur Becket?” Bedlam asked, looking toward Rose.

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