Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3) Read online

  Only the context had changed. The stakes they worked under were higher now. The costs for failure were far worse. Beck loved her team, an admission she had taken far too long to make even to herself, and she feared for what might happen to them if something terrible happened on their watch. It made her more strict than before society had begun bucking against the revelations thrown at them.

  They approached the cliff leading down to Canaan and slowed to a stop. The thin wooden rods with bright green pennants marking the farthest the transport should travel loomed in the distance. Jeremy brought them to a stop and everyone, even Parker in his borrowed set of armor, took up their assigned packages and gear. Every trip was used to supply Canaan with materials they couldn’t easily get out in the badlands if they could acquire them at all. This had the deliberate effect of making the place a more powerful hub of trade. The Protectorate asked for nothing in return but goodwill. So far this only meant sending an emissary to Manhattan so Stein could try to work out some sort of diplomatic framework between the two nations.

  Beck set an enormous box of polymer fabric on her armored shoulder and picked up a bag stuffed with weaponized darts full of the Fade cure with her free hand, then made her way down the switchbacks to Canaan itself. The path leading down the cliff had been reinforced and widened where possible in recent months, which she was grateful for.

  When she reached the bottom, she saw Eshton first and the man being held captive in a cage second.

  *

  He was dirty and clothed in rags. Scars crisscrossed his body nearly everywhere skin was visible. Some were obviously cuts, but the rest Beck couldn’t identify. They were too regular for burns but had that same shining quality.

  The cage was new, not shoddily built but clearly not professional work. It was eight feet on a side and contained a sleeping pallet, a small table with the remains of a bowl of food sitting on it, and a pitcher of water. The man himself sat with knees drawn up to his chest, eyes scanning around constantly as if looking for danger.

  Eshton stood nearby, not wearing his armor. He stayed in Canaan irregularly but fairly often, serving as a diplomat for the Protectorate but in practical terms he was more of a guard dog for the people here. During the months Beck and Eshton were exiled here, he’d developed a love for the place. And, as it turned out, a love for her. She suspected the seeds of that were planted long before they came here.

  “Want to tell me why you’re keeping this guy in a cage with a roof on it out in the open?” Beck asked as she approached. “And why you’re out here alone? We have a lot of cargo to hand off, and we’re not allowed to take our suits inside. I’m not planning to spend all day playing runner.”

  “Hey,” Eshton said, looking up at her. “I missed you too. How have you been?”

  Beck released the seals on her helmet and pulled it off. “Yeah, yeah, I missed you. What’s with the prisoner?”

  “Complicated,” Eshton said. “As for why people aren’t out here to meet you, they thought it would be better for me to explain this first just in case you and the team got…upset.”

  Beck shook her head ruefully. “They really don’t understand us at all, do they? No Watchman would get violent without cause. Unless they were planning to attack us…”

  “Not at all,” Eshton confirmed. “They weren’t sure how you’d react to this.” He waved a hand at the caged man. “He’s not a prisoner, exactly. He’s a Pale. Or was one.”

  Beck heard gasps all across the team channel, though only because she hadn’t removed the earpiece connected to her suit’s comm system. A glance back showed the rest of them in loose formation behind her. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m really not,” Eshton said. “He showed up about a week ago, apparently. Can’t speak, at least not in a language we know, though we’ve suspected for a while now the Pales have been developing their own. He’s not violent any more than the average person, but no one wants him inside the walls.”

  “And they don’t want him out there alone, so they put him in a cage?” Jeremy asked, the speaker in his suit flattening his voice into the standard Deathwatch monotone.

  “He wouldn’t leave,” Eshton said. People tried to give him food, but he’d run off. They had the cage for criminals, so they put a roof on it and left it out here for him. He leaves sometimes and they give him something to eat while he’s gone.”

  Beck could see the cage door wasn’t locked, which made her wonder just how much human intelligence was left in the man. The scars made more sense now; the stony skin caused by the intense genetic alterations in Pales must have healed over and sloughed off.

  “Holy mother of god,” Parker said. “I haven’t seen it actually happen yet. He really was one of them.”

  The scientist had stepped out of his armor and walked past Beck to stop between them. He watched the former Pale for a long time as the rest of them waited. Parker was a resource of incredible value. He was born before the Collapse began, a man out of time and with knowledge long lost by the end of civilization. Everyone stepped lightly around him.

  Well, almost.

  “I need to study him,” Parker finally said.

  “Not happening,” Eshton replied at once. “The people here still aren’t fully sold on us, and I guarantee taking him to be your lab rat won’t make them fall in love with the Protectorate. They might not like having him here, but even suggesting that will make them defensive. It’s a reflex.”

  Parker grew frustrated. “Okay. Then I need samples to take back with me. Blood if we can get it. I need to know how he survived the process. The cure undoes the genetic alterations the Fade puts people through, and that’s what kills them. I knew some would make it through the reversion, that it’d take a long time for them to return to fully human, but I need specifics.”

  Beck felt sympathy for all of them. For Parker, who was a good man with a good heart that was sometimes eclipsed by the fast-turning engine between his ears and the science it ran on. Eshton, who stood between two worlds and was trying to be the bridge uniting them.

  And for the caged man, whose intelligent eyes never stopped that incessant darting around. The Fade granted incredibly long lifespans. That was its original purpose. What must it have been like for this poor soul? To have the disease slowly strip away his sanity, his memories, leaving him a being with the capabilities of a human mind but without the checks and balances of identity? His body would have slowly hardened, swelling painfully as the Fade calcified his skin and made his muscles and bones several times more dense. Parker’s stasis chamber had come with detailed recordings and reports showing the process in gruesome detail. It was not a fate she would wish on anyone.

  The caged man had lived that life for a century and more even though he looked about fifty. What did ten decades of being driven by an endless hunger for protein and drive to kill other humans do to you? The Fade rewrote how the brain functioned. As bad as she felt for him, Beck was inclined to do as Parker requested. How many others like the prisoner were out there, who might be helped by what they could learn from this pitiful being?

  Beck put her helmet on and keyed the team’s channel. “Our next mission is to find another one of these and bring it back to Parker. Start thinking about how we can make that happen.” A round of clicks filled her helmet, the others acknowledging without letting those without suits know. Eshton would be told after they left. He would find out anyway, and hopefully see the worth in the idea.

  But that was later.

  Out loud, she put an end to the discussion. “For now we do what Canaan wants. He’s on their land. It’s their call. Eshton, grab your armor. You’re coming home with us, so you can help haul all this stuff to the main gate.”

  Beck gave the caged man one more look before getting back to work.

  His return stare was framed by human features, but to her felt as alien as any Pale.

  3

  It took Eshton almost two hours to convince the Canaan council to allow Parker to
take samples from the former Pale. Having argued the case himself, Eshton had to help get them. This turned out to be much easier than expected. Parker used gentle tones while standing outside the cage and demonstrated everything he was going to do on himself first. He even drew a vial of his own blood.

  The Pale was afraid but pain seemed unimportant to it. The prick of the needle barely evinced a twitch. All Eshton had to do was stand back and be ready if things got dangerous.

  By the time all the gear was unloaded and the samples retrieved, it was late in the evening. Beck and her team were allowed to stay the night—though technically Beck retained Canaan citizenship and could stay here whenever she liked.

  Karen and Andres opened their home to the motley group on the condition that they get to check out their suits of Deathwatch armor. Eshton watched with amusement as the pair carefully inspected the custom suits, from Jen and Beck’s relatively tiny sets to Wojcik’s enormous one. They paid special attention to the last, poring over the brand new left arm replacing the one that had taken fire months back.

  What they were looking for, he had no idea. Stein had stopped short of offering to let the Canaanites have sets of their own. Three or four wouldn’t have been a problem in ideal circumstances—it wasn’t like a fire team of Remnants in armor constituted a threat. Practicality was the issue. Keene and his band of traitors had cleaned all of the emergency armor reserve and no small number of newer models. Manufacturing the things was a major industry in several Rezzes, but it took time and resources. The Protectorate had to rebound from the loss before they could even think about giving suits away.

  Which was a damn shame. The good they could do out here was enormous. Eshton made sure to help in every way he could when he made these trips, though he was careful to leave his own armor waiting outside the wall just as Beck’s and those of her team were now.

  “Why are you so interested in them?” he asked after a solid fifteen minutes. “You’ve seen our armor a bunch of times. There’s no magic to it.”

  Karen shot him a grin. “We have a bet with Beck’s apprentices. Er, former apprentices, I guess. Abbad and Naji think it’s really just for show, that the machinery running these things can’t actually support the weight of steel this thick. They think it’s a trick. And they haven’t been able to get a good look like we have. They’re still not allowed outside the walls without an adult, and their mother won’t let them come out here and look at any of the suits, even yours.”

  His brows knitted together. “What? Why? They’re just machines. Those kids bring in a good living for their family. I’d think their parents would encourage them to check it out.”

  Andres, who was still bent over at the waist as he ran his fingers beneath the kneecap plate of Wojcik’s suit, shook his head. “It’s a little bit superstition, a little bit rational fear. Some people think the armor will kill them if they get too close, or that one of you will order it to defend itself if you see people snooping.”

  Eshton’s mouth fell open. “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s more like a lifetime of being afraid and hearing stories,” Karen said. She turned her head and let out a piercing whistle. In the distance, the galloping forms of her giant dogs could be seen racing across the field of crops surrounding Canaan. She like to let them roam when she was outside the wall, an increasingly rare thing. “We grow up hearing stories about the Watch. How brutal you can be. The lengths you’ll go to for your Tenets. Some of it’s just gossip or campfire stories, but there’s enough truth mixed in to make the worst stuff believable. It leaves an impression.”

  Before he could say anything else about how ridiculous an idea that was, a realization washed over him. The way people viewed the Watch here wasn’t far off the mark from how citizens in the Protectorate did. Or had, before the revelation. Wasn’t part of the point to create an aura of invincibility? The Watch was anonymous, with few agents choosing to live with their identities public, for a reason. The mystique and fear were meant to be a tool to maintain order.

  A person with a face you can see and react to is someone with whom you can form a connection. They are a human being with compassion. A blank helmet shows a reflection of yourself at best, and that only darkly.

  “I thought I understood how you people felt when I came out here,” Eshton said after a few moments. “How arrogant was that?”

  Andres surprised him by putting a hand on Eshton’s shoulder. The beefy man was clever as anyone with an extensive knowledge of the law and its arguments would be, but not normally prone to displays of compassion. “You’ve been in the Watch a long time. Almost half your life. It has to change the way you see things.”

  Karen nodded as she knelt to scratch behind the ears of the dogs, who had just arrived on the scene. “You get to know the people behind the masks first. You get to see them as people. We don’t.”

  Eshton glanced toward the house where even now, Parker and Beck’s team were surely doing a great deal of damage to the food supply before dropping like flies for the night. “Makes me glad we’re doing this. We’re not monsters.”

  Andres shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. You’re exactly the monsters you need to be, when you need to be them. Unless what you’ve told me is wrong, isn’t it your job to do what other people can’t. For the good of everyone?”

  Eshton fought the urge to argue mostly because Andres was exactly right. He might not have put it in those terms, but the spirit was true. “Yeah. Just…that’s not who we are. Not all the time.”

  Andres raised an upturned palm in a half-shrug. “I know that. It’s a subtle distinction. The trick is making the rest of them see it, too.”

  *

  The ride back to Brighton was actually just a short stopover. Parker was shipped off with a trio of Movement operatives who were to escort him back to headquarters. Eshton was glad the scientist was getting out of the underground fortress now and then, but worried every second he wasn’t surrounded by layers of defenses and loyal protectors.

  Beck led the team, Eshton now included, to the Brighton chapterhouse for a refit. Their Bricks still held most of a charge, but the hunting trip for a cured Pale could take a while. They grabbed spares and mobile charging cables they could use to siphon energy from the transport in a pinch, as well as restraints.

  While the rest of the team chattered on the way to and from the chapterhouse, Eshton remained silent. Perhaps he spent too much time in Canaan, but he could no longer erect the mental partitions needed to justify things he once wouldn’t have thought twice about.

  It was twenty minutes into the ride west before Eshton finally plucked up the courage to say what he thought. He opened a private channel to Beck.

  “Are we sure Parker is going to treat whatever Pale humanely, if we find one?”

  The line was silent for a few seconds that felt far longer. Beck sat across from him on the flatbed, but betrayed no sign that she heard until she finally replied. “Why wouldn’t he? He’s a microbiologist. It’s not like he’s going to dissect a Pale or anything. He wants samples to study so he can figure out how this all works.”

  Eshton frowned inside his helmet. “He has samples. I get why a live subject would be better, I really do. I just don’t want to…” He trailed off, unable to fully articulate the strange tightness in his chest and the jumble of ominous emotions swirling in his head at the thought.

  Beck spoke in a softer voice than she used on the other team members. “You don’t want to cage anyone. Especially not a person who has no idea what’s going on. It feels cruel, right?”

  “Yeah,” Eshton said. “Is that weird?”

  She let out a small laugh. “No, not at all. Canaan has been good for you. Softened you up some. I think everyone in the Watch should have to take a month off every year so we can get our heads out of the job and remember how real people live. You get to see freedom when you’re there. It was bound to change the way you look at things.”

  Eshton was taken aback.
Beck spent so much time running from fire to fire trying to maintain order that it was easy to forget she didn’t have a decade of being shaped by the Watch behind her. She still had the capacity to fall back into the person she was before joining up. “If there’s a chance these cured Pales can become people again, I’d rather not see them mistreated.”

  “I don’t think Parker would do that,” Beck said, “but I’ll talk to him about it. Not that it’s guaranteed we’ll find one. The dispensers we left running out this direction are the only ones, and no patrols have reported—”

  The channel went dead, and for a wild few moments Eshton felt a surge of panic that something had happened to Beck. It was ridiculous—he was looking right at her. He saw her straighten up. Just as she did, the override hit his comm system as well.

  “This is Commander Stein,” said a crackling voice over the radio. “I’m issuing a recall order for all Deathwatch agents currently outside the confines of any Rez. We have multiple incidents across seven Rezzes. The Traditionalist and Diasporan factions staged protests half an hour ago. We do not know how they managed to coordinate this without our knowledge, but five minutes ago the demonstrations turned violent. We believe this is a coordinated effort by one side to discredit the other. Return to the nearest Rez on the incoming list and render assistance as needed. Field excursions into the badlands are halted until further notice.”

  The transport slewed sideways somewhat as Jeremy turned them around, then whined as it gained speed. Stein’s broadcast ended as abruptly as it began, but the normal back and forth among the team did not resume. That if nothing else was a sign of how seriously they took this development. In the wake of the revelation about the Cabal, the Watch had taken a light hand in dealing with the new political factions. There was no other choice—too much friction between any of them could be the spark which set of an explosion.