Wild Country

CHAPTER 7

Windsday, Messis 1

Jana Paniccia opened the bottle of wine and filled a water glass. Getting drunk wasn’t the answer. Wasting money on wine instead of buying food wasn’t the answer.

But what was the . . . frigging . . . answer?

“Insufferable bastards.” She swallowed too much wine and choked a little. “‘Too much turmoil in the world right now, Ms. Paniccia.’” She perfectly mimicked the prissy voice and smug attitude of the administrator who ran the Hubb NE police academy. “‘Can’t be rocking the boat now and upsetting the status quo.’ Status quo, my butt.” Jana waved the glass in a sweeping gesture. “You should be grateful to have anyone want to be a cop right now. Uphold law and order? You and my great-aunt Fanny.” That had been one of Martha’s sayings. Jana had never known what it meant, but it fit the occasion.

The academy had taken the tuition and fees quick enough. The instructors had let her take the classes—and take the bruises, both physical and emotional, that the other cadets dished out because she had dared to want to work in a field that was exclusively male.

Smaller didn’t mean incompetent. Not as muscular? So what? She had brains, and she wanted this. Hadn’t wanted to be anything else but a cop for as long as she could remember.

“You’re romanticizing the job, honey,” Pops had told her. “You’ve read too many stories about the frontier and a kind of law that didn’t exist even then.”

“So I should be a waitress or a secretary?”

“I didn’t say that. You’re choosing a hard road, and there’s no certainty that you’ll succeed. But if that’s what you want, you give it everything you’ve got. If spunk and attitude can make up for you being a girl in a male-dominated field, then, by gosh, you’ll make it and you’ll wear that badge with honor.”

She had survived the loss of people she loved. She had survived the academy. But she’d used up her savings, and there was almost nothing left. No hope of a job as a police officer, despite her qualifications. And with everyone in Thaisia reeling from the terra indigene’s slaughter of humans across the continent, she wasn’t sure there was much hope for anything.

She was feeling a little light-headed from the wine and lack of food when her mobile phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but it was a Northeast Region area code. Had to be since calls couldn’t cross regional boundaries anymore.

“Hello?”

“I have a message for the person at this phone number.” A male voice.

“You found her.”

“Do you have something to do with law enforcement?” he asked.

“Is this a joke?”

“No. This is . . . The message was cryptic, but I believe an opportunity to work in law enforcement will be coming up soon. A badge. A six-gun. Hills. If this means something to you, get to Lakeside as soon as you can.”

“And do what? Go to every police station asking if I can have a job?” Jana’s hand tightened around the phone. “Who put you up to this?”

“Not the police stations. Go to the Courtyard. That was the message.”

“Who gave you this message?”

“That’s confidential and, as I said, cryptic. But the last piece of information was this phone number. That’s all I can tell you, except . . . If you’re going, go tomorrow. By bus. If you take the train, you won’t get there in time.”

In time for what? “Wait. Wait. Who are you?”

He’d already hung up.

Jana’s hand shook as she ended the call. Had to be a prank, someone setting her up. Her classmates most likely. The gods only knew, she didn’t have much to take with her. A bus ticket to Lakeside, with the extra charge for baggage, would leave her with barely enough money to rent a room for a week, and she’d be able to do that only if she scrimped on food. If she went, she’d be stranded in an unfamiliar city, and her classmates, who should have been her colleagues, would be laughing their butts off at gullible Jana.

But what if it wasn’t a prank?

She checked the recent call log on her phone, wrote down the number of that last call, then tried calling it. No answer. That didn’t surprise her.

Jana put the phone on the tiny table in the kitchenette of her rented room, then went to one of the boxes that held the books she didn’t want to part with, the ones that were her favorites, her comfort reads. She looked at the covers of the frontier stories that had belonged to Pops or that Martha and Pops had given her over the years. She lifted a few out of the box, then stared at the cover of the next one—the frontier story that Pops had returned to over and over.

The background was a landscape of rugged hills unlike anything she knew. The main focus of the cover was a sheriff’s badge and a six-gun.

Jana shivered.

After the compounds where the blood prophets lived were exposed as being little more than prisons where the girls were trained and then exploited for their ability to speak prophecy when their skin was cut, officials in government and law enforcement had scrambled to find out more about these girls. That wasn’t an easy task because the terra indigene had scooped up the girls who had survived being thrown out of the compounds in order to hide the worst of what was being done to them. So the instructor who had talked to her class about the cassandra sangue hadn’t been able to tell them all that much except to say that prophecy could be cryptic, often revealed in images that didn’t make sense.

The caller said he’d been given a cryptic message that had included her phone number.

What if the phone call wasn’t a prank?

She had spunk, and she had enough attitude to hold her own and be a cop. And she didn’t have anything to lose.

Jana poured the rest of the wine down the sink, washed the glass, then hauled out her two suitcases and packed so that she could get to the bus station at first light.

To: Tolya Sanguinati, Urgent

Received your request for workers who are willing to migrate to Bennett. The Lakeside Courtyard will hold a job fair and will interview Simple Life folk and Intuits for the positions you indicated were the most urgent to fill. There may be some terra indigene who will also travel to Bennett. The fair will be held from Messis 6 through Messis 8. We will send you the list of potential employees so you will know what humans to expect and what jobs they can do.

—Vlad