Scavenger Alliance Read online

  “Phoenix doesn’t look that pretty to me,” she muttered. “I always thought that Donnell was too busy being in love with a planet to really care for a woman, but if he wants to marry again, then he should choose one of the Resistance rather than an outsider.”

  “Forget Phoenix.” I caught Hannah’s arm, tugging her far enough away from Tad that we could have a whispered exchange in private. “Something is obviously worrying you. What’s going on?”

  She gave a startled laugh. “I should be the one asking you that. Everyone’s gossiping about how Donnell’s been calling you into meetings and putting you in charge of the off-worlders.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize anyone had noticed.”

  “Of course they’ve noticed! There are dozens of rumours flying around. Most are about the female leech, but there are some about you as well, and why Donnell is stopping you from fishing with me.”

  She looked at me expectantly. I hesitated, unsure what to say. Donnell had made it clear that I mustn’t repeat anything I’d been told in confidence. That meant I couldn’t tell Hannah about what had happened in the meeting with the off-worlders, or how Donnell had ordered me to try to get information out of Tad, or the situation with Cage.

  “Oh,” I repeated, and glanced across at where Tad was waiting, an anxious expression on his face.

  “So are the rumours true?” demanded Hannah. “Has Donnell decided to recognize you as his daughter again?”

  “Things do seem to have changed, but I daren’t count on Donnell going as far as publicly calling me his daughter.”

  Hannah’s face hardened. “I think Donnell has already said something to the Resistance inner circle. Yesterday, Natsumi was ignoring both of us, but today she was fawning over you and worried about your welfare. She’s still ignoring me though. Does that mean the other rumour is true as well? Is Donnell sending you fishing with an off-worlder to stop you being friends with me?”

  I blinked. “Why the chaos would people think that?”

  “Because Donnell has never liked me,” said Hannah bitterly. “That’s why he’s never made me a full member of the Resistance. It doesn’t help that my knife belt is still tagged with the thief’s hand. Even the leech boy noticed it.”

  She gave a frustrated shake of her head. “I made one perfectly innocent mistake when I was twelve years old. How much longer do I have to keep paying for it?”

  “I know that tag is unfair.” I glanced over my shoulder, saw the men had already headed off down the path, and the women were forming a ragtag line and moving after them. “We have to go with the others now, but don’t worry. I promise to talk to Donnell and sort this out.”

  “You could ask him to make me a full member of the Resistance as well,” said Hannah eagerly.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  I sprinted back over to Tad, and we both hurried to join the end of the line of people. I saw Hannah running ahead of us to join Natsumi’s sister, Himeko, and frowned. Hannah was right that Natsumi’s change of behaviour was deeply significant. The older Resistance members were fiercely loyal to Donnell, modelling their attitude to me on his. Donnell had been ignoring me since my brother’s betrayal, so the Resistance had ignored me too.

  If Natsumi was being friendly to me now, then it must mean that either Luther had spread the news about Donnell calling me his daughter in that meeting, or Donnell had used that word again in front of others of the Resistance. That was good news, because it meant the whole of the Resistance would be eager to make me feel welcome among them again. The problem was that if the Resistance believed Donnell wanted to split me up from Hannah, they’d be equally eager to make her feel unwelcome.

  I’d promised Hannah I’d sort this out, and I’d have to do it quickly.

  Chapter Ten

  Tad and I followed the line of people walking along the river path. The nearby buildings had looked uniformly neat when coated with snow. Now that was melting, revealing the stark differences between buildings still in good repair and the ones with disintegrating roofs, those covered in ivy and the ones still with clean glass, concraz, concrete or stone facades. I was still worrying about Hannah’s situation, and Tad was unnaturally quiet. We’d reached the riverbank before he finally spoke.

  “I’ve been stupidly arrogant. I thought I knew about everything, but I’m totally ignorant of your life and your world, and that ignorance could get you killed. Please tell me when I’m doing anything especially foolish.”

  I couldn’t see his face, because he was taller than me and currently staring up at the sky, but his voice was shaking.

  “For a start,” I said, “you’d better watch your feet, not the sky. There’s a big hole in the path ahead and you don’t want to break your ankle.”

  Tad hastily looked down, saw the hole that was half filled with slushy snow, and walked round it. “Sorry. I was watching for falling stars.”

  I laughed. “There’s no need to do that while we’re with a huge group of people. If any falling star made the mistake of attacking us, it would be dead in seconds.”

  Tad shook his head. “I’m useless.”

  Women gradually dropped out of line as we passed the fishing spots, and I gave Hannah a wave as I saw her leaving with Himeko. I stopped walking when Tad and I reached the familiar grey building.

  “Our fishing spot is on the other side of this building,” I said. “It’s the furthest from home, and we have to climb over the building to reach it, but it’s worth the effort because there’s a pier jutting out into the river. Once we’re on that, we’re safe from falling stars. They don’t risk attacking anyone close to water because they can’t swim.”

  As Tad and I headed for where the ladder was leaning against the wall, I heard a mocking male yell from behind us. “Good fishing, ladies!”

  I expected Tad to turn his head to look behind us, but he didn’t. Perhaps even he had the sense to realize that any reaction would invite more trouble.

  “You go up the ladder first,” I said, “then wait on the roof while I come up to join you. Keep an eye out for falling stars while you’re up there. They won’t be on the burned out building, none of them are a dark enough colour to hide on that, and they find it hard to climb ivy-covered buildings like the ones further along from here. That means they’ll be coming from the undamaged apartment block.”

  Tad glanced at the blackened building. “When did that catch fire?”

  “Last summer. It was very hot, and a lot of buildings caught fire.”

  Tad started climbing the ladder. “The remaining shell of the walls doesn’t look very safe.”

  I laughed. “Nothing in New York is very safe.”

  Once Tad reached the top of the ladder, I tossed him the bags, and climbed up to join him. I felt nervous pulling myself onto the roof without Hannah standing by to help me, but my left arm didn’t complain about taking my weight, and a minute later we were safely on the pier. I fetched the fishing gear from the building, showed Tad how to set out the array of fishing lines near the far end of the pier, and then put up the tent.

  Once we were sitting inside that, I started feeling intensely uncomfortable. It was only a small tent. That had never worried me and Hannah, but now I was wedged in a tight space with a male, invading, off-world leech.

  I inched as far away as possible from Tad, waited nervously to see if he’d spread himself out to take up more room, and reluctantly had to give him some credit when he left the gap between us. It was still a relief when the first fish took the bait. I left the tent to show Tad how to reel it in and use the long-poled landing net to bring it up to the pier level.

  “Is it low tide at the moment?” Tad peered over the wooden rail. “It’s a long way down to the water.”

  “Don’t lean on that rail!” I said sharply. “The wood has gone rotten in places, and falling in the river in midwinter is a really bad idea.”

  Tad hastily straightened up.

  Once we’d caught three more small
fish that we could just pull up on the end of the line, and one surprisingly large, striped bass that was a real struggle to get into the landing net, I decided Tad was competent enough to be left in charge of the fishing lines. I went round to the other side of the pier to try throwing the cast net into the river.

  I loved the moment of excitement as you pulled the cast net back up with the rope, never knowing if it would be limply empty, contain a single squirming fish, or you’d been lucky enough to sweep up a passing shoal that could feed a dozen hungry people for a day. This time there was just a single small fish. At a different time of year, I’d have tossed it back into the river, but we needed every mouthful of food.

  Tad had turned to watch me. “Can I try throwing the net?”

  “No, there are far too many jagged bits of wreckage at the bottom of the river. If you throw the net in the wrong place, or let it get swept away by the current, then it will be ripped to shreds.”

  There was the sound of a distant whistle. One long, one short, one long. A pause and then the same pattern was repeated. I took out my own whistle to reply. One long blast, one short, one long. I waited a moment, and blew the same pattern again.

  Tad frowned. “What was the whistling about?”

  “It’s just the regular roll call. Every couple of hours, the letter K gets echoed down the riverbank to check that everyone’s all right. If you don’t hear from anyone at the next fishing spot in the line, then you whistle Q and go over to see if they’ve got a problem, but we’re the end of the line so …”

  I broke off, because there was another burst of whistling, far longer and more complicated this time. Natsumi was asking if the off-world leech was giving me any trouble. I replied that he was working hard.

  “I’m not a leech,” said Tad, in a deeply offended voice.

  I laughed, and made a mental note of the fact Tad hadn’t just heard about Morse code, he knew the signals for all the letters well enough to understand a complex message.

  After the mid-morning roll call, the day settled down into something almost like a routine day fishing with Hannah, except that I had to do most of the work of two people as well as answering a string of questions from Tad. Just after the big thrill of the mid-afternoon roll call, there was a sudden chorus of bird alarm calls, and a flock of geese flew up into the air from somewhere just downriver of us. They formed up into trailing v-shaped skeins before flying away.

  “Did a hunting party disturb those Canada geese?” asked Tad.

  I blinked. “How do you know those are Canada geese when you’ve never been to Earth before?”

  “There’s a zoo on Adonis with animals and birds from Earth.” Tad hastily changed the subject. “I suppose we don’t get a midday meal because of the food rationing.”

  I added the geese comment to my mental list of strange things about him. “We don’t have a midday meal on short winter days anyway. If it wasn’t for the food rationing, we’d have had a much bigger breakfast though.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tad. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sure you’re even more cold and hungry than I am.”

  There was a weary edge to his voice. Tad had never gone hungry before, never known cold like this, never even seen snow until he came to Earth, but he’d been working as hard as he could today and this was the first hint of complaint.

  “You can go in the tent for a while,” I said. “It’s always much warmer out of the wind.”

  Tad went to sit inside the tent, but peered out at me. “You need to take a break too.”

  I hesitated, but Tad had left as much space as possible for me, there was no action on the fishing lines, and I was frozen. I went to sit next to him, and he instantly started asking yet more questions.

  “Why do the men hunt with bows instead of guns? There must be some guns in New York.”

  “There are, but they’re all useless without their activation codes. The gun control laws of the last two centuries insisted on all guns being security locked to their owners.”

  “Modern weapons are highly sophisticated,” said Tad, “but it should be possible to make a basic gun like the ones used centuries ago.”

  “It is possible, but there’s the risk of a homemade gun exploding in your face, and the problem of finding or making ammunition for it. Why bother when we’ve plenty of modern hunting bows? They’re far more effective than homemade guns, and you can endlessly reuse the arrows.”

  “That’s true,” said Tad. “There seems to be a strict rule here, that the men hunt with bows and the women go fishing. Donnell doesn’t seem to have any female officers either. Neither of those things make sense to me. Women have been on equal terms with men for centuries.”

  “Sometimes it only takes one or two people in a position of power to reverse centuries of progress,” I said gloomily. “When the New York alliance was first set up, there were nine divisions including the Resistance. The other divisions had been fighting each other for years. They didn’t trust each other to run things, so they put Donnell in charge of the alliance, but he had to follow rules decided by a majority vote of all the division leaders. When someone proposed a rule that women couldn’t use bows, the leaders of four divisions voted in favour and five against.”

  Tad asked the obvious question. “If the majority of the division leaders voted against that rule, why do you have it now?”

  “Because four of the divisions were a lot bigger than the others back then, so the Resistance, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens got a double vote. The Resistance voted against the rule, but the other three double votes were in favour.”

  “So the end result was that the rule was passed by seven votes to six,” said Tad. “I assume they also voted to prevent women from becoming officers.”

  “They didn’t openly exclude women from becoming officers. In theory, Donnell can choose any Resistance member to be an alliance officer, but two of the other division leaders have to vote in favour for the appointment to be confirmed.”

  “And they won’t vote to confirm any female officers.”

  “Exactly. They always use the same argument to justify that. Donnell’s officers have to lead hunting groups. Women can’t lead hunting groups because they can’t use bows. Therefore women can’t be officers.”

  I shrugged. “During the first year of the alliance, the smaller divisions gradually merged with Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Two of those smaller divisions had female leaders, but one lost her leadership position when her division merged with Brooklyn, while Marsha was excluded entirely when Staten Island merged with Queens. After that, there were only a handful of women among the alliance representatives, and since fishing was regarded as lower status than hunting with bows they were gradually replaced by men.”

  “So that’s how you ended up in the current situation,” said Tad. “Excluding women from using bows was also a way of excluding them from holding positions of power. This all happened over eighteen years ago. Hasn’t Donnell tried to change the rules on bows?”

  “He’s tried twice. Once after the last of the New York division mergers. Those left the alliance with four divisions of roughly the same size, so each leader had just one vote. Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens Island all voted against women using bows.”

  “And the second time?”

  “The second vote was soon after London division arrived. Ghost had just taken over the leadership of Brooklyn, and had a totally different attitude to their old leader. The Resistance and Brooklyn voted in favour of women using bows, but London’s leader voted with Manhattan and Queens Island against it. I think that was partly because London division were refugees, their position was horribly weak, and Ice was worried that voting to change existing laws could trigger a backlash against them.”

  I paused. “Once one of the division leaders takes a position on something, he sticks to it. The leadership of Queens Island has changed since then, but their new leader, Major, is even more fervently opposed to women using bows.”


  “I expect he’s scared the women would be better archers than him.”

  I laughed. “That’s probably true. Major boasts about the draw weight of his bow, and can fire arrows a very long distance, but he’s barely mediocre when it comes to hitting his target. The finest hunter in the alliance is Ghost. He hasn’t got the muscles of the other division leaders, but he’s a fast and accurate archer, and he got his nickname from his incredible ability to sneak up on his prey unnoticed.”

  “You said that you spent the first eleven years of your life with your mother in London division. Was that very bad?”

  “What life is like within a division is almost totally dependent on the division leader,” I said. “Ice got his nickname because he never shows emotion. That makes some people nervous around him, but Ice keeps strict order in his division. Bullying, disobedience, or troublemaking are dealt with instantly and harshly, no matter who is involved. People who follow his rules and work hard get protection and good treatment.”

  “A total dictatorship, but a fair one,” said Tad.

  “Yes. You can tell Ice is a good leader, because London division arrived here empty-handed, but they’re on equal terms with the other divisions now. You can tell he’s well liked, because he’s led London division for three decades. It’s possible to seize the leadership of a division with only a handful of key men helping you, but you can’t hold onto it for more than a couple of years without widespread support.”

  Tad was silent for a minute or two as if he was thinking something over. “So when Donnell went to London, he married your mother, but she stayed in London when he returned to New York. You escaped the firestorm and came to New York when you were eleven years old, but your mother died.”

  He paused. “My father died when I was only six, so I can understand how you felt back then, and why you hate privileged off-worlders like me.”

  I felt strangely guilty that I couldn’t tell Tad he was wrong about me hating him. In between the maddening arrogance, and the annoying questions, there were moments like this when the boy was quite human and likeable.