Prairie Song

Prairie Song is a web serial about four unlikely friends trying to outrun and outwit a crime syndicate in charge of the post-apocalyptic United States. It's also a story about found families, seeing yourself in others, and loving despite your trauma. General CWs: body horror, violence, and depiction/discussion of trauma. Updates Fridays. Start reading here. Rate/review us on Goodreads! Want to support us and get bonus content? We're on Patreon and itch.io! Table of Contents Contact Us Card Zero Press Discord

[prairiesongserial]

Welcome to Prairie Song!

Prairie Song is the joint effort of @charaznablescanontoyota and @deciduousprincess, wives creating queer fiction under the name Card Zero Press!

You can start reading with update 1.1 right here or access the table of contents here.

For more Card Zero Press projects (including Prairie Song side stories), check out our website, itch.io page, and Patreon!

Feel free to also join us on the Card Zero Press Discord!

[prairiesongserial]

epilogue 25

“Okay,” Ezra said, “let’s try it again. G chord.”

Tali grimaced, concentrating hard, and repositioned her fingers on the neck of the guitar. The instrument nearly dwarfed her–as far as the teenagers in town went, she was one of the few that looked like a strong breeze could knock her over. She strummed, and the chord sounded; her lips twitched into a small half-smile when it was clear and in tune.

“Now C,” Ezra said. “Then B minor.”

Tali repositioned her fingers and strummed again, two more times. The C was fine, but the B Minor was off–she and Ezra both made a face at the wrong note, though Ezra did a better job of hiding it than Tali did.

“Right,” he said, and got up from his seat, circling behind the kitchen chair Tali had sat on. “So, you’re not pressing hard enough with your index, and it’s muffling the strings instead of barring the fret. You have to really squeeze it.”

“It hurts, though,” Tali protested. She lifted her finger from where it had been clamped across the neck of the guitar, showing him the indents the strings had furrowed into her skin.

“Yeah, guitar strings’ll do that. You’re not practicing enough to build up your calluses.” Ezra shrugged. “If you wanted a painless instrument, you should’ve asked for piano lessons instead.”

Tali made a face, this time in derision instead of concentration. “Gey kaken afn yam.”

“Ouch,” he said, tonelessly. It was not the worst thing any of the kids in town had said to him while frustrated with an instrument. If he was being honest with himself, it probably didn’t even crack the top five.

Teaching children had not been Ezra’s choice, exactly. But upon being given the ultimatum to either quit moping around Judith’s house and get himself a job, or pack up and go to live full-time with Hamlin in New York, the former had felt vastly preferable. He’d intended to find employment with one of the fishing boats that docked down at the pier–and he had, for about six hours, until he had proved himself one of the worst hands at a rod and reel that Spruce Head had ever seen. So now he split his time between playing the organ at the local shul and giving piano, guitar, and violin lessons out of his mother’s living room.

It wasn’t all bad. He was smoking less, mostly due to being completely broke and having to drive forty minutes outside of the village to buy cigarettes. He had less time to dwell on his own thoughts, and he was getting out of the house with some frequency. He was even starting to get a tan from working with Judith in the garden. It was almost enough to make him forget that he had very probably sent John, Cody, Val, and Friday off to Europe to be killed.

He exhaled, and stepped back around to face Tali. “Okay, again. And remember, you want to really press-”

Someone in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen cleared their throat, loudly. Ezra whipped around faster than he’d really meant to, one hand straying instinctively towards his belt for a gun that wasn’t there, and then relaxed at the sight of the man standing there.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and regretted it immediately when he saw Avrom flinch. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“Sorry,” Avrom said, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. He was a neighbor, a fisherman a few years older than Ezra who Judith paid a handsome salary to do any handyman jobs she needed doing. He’d had a spare key to get inside the house long before Ezra had.

Judging from the coat and boots he had on, Avrom had just come from outside–either working in the garden, or chopping and hauling firewood for the stove. Probably the latter, though; it had been getting steadily colder for weeks now, the first proper Maine winter Ezra had experienced since he was a teenager.

“Judith sent me to tell Tali to go home,” Avrom said, casting a glance at Tali, who had rotated her guitar to let it rest upright between her legs. “She says she feels snow coming.”

“Hard to argue with that,” Ezra said. Former con artist or no, Judith’s accuracy at predicting storms was hard to beat. “Alright, Tali, you heard the man. Pack it up. Work on your bar chords at home.”

“Sure I will,” Tali muttered mutinously, standing up and slinging her guitar over one shoulder by its strap. She left by the doorway that Avrom wasn’t blocking, her footsteps fading into the front hall and out the door.

“I’ll know if you don’t!” Ezra called after her, then turned once again to Avrom, who hadn’t moved. “There’s no way she’s going straight home.”

Avrom frowned. “How do you know?”

“She’s going to see Malka up the road.” Ezra jerked his head, pointing vaguely with his chin in the direction of the cluster of houses that sat uphill from Judith’s. “Pretty sure they’re, you know. Shtupping.”

He gestured somewhat rudely, and laughed when it made Avrom turn red up to the tips of his ears.

“You don’t know that,” Avrom said.

“I hear things,” Ezra replied. He did. The town was small, and all of the teenagers in it knew each others’ business. “Don’t you have more wood to chop? Or do you want a coffee? I was thinking about making a pot.”

“Someone called for you during your lesson with Ben earlier,” Avrom said. His blush was dissipating now; clearly he was relieved to be on more formal conversational ground. “Judith told me to let you know. She said it was something about your brother.”

Ezra’s breath caught in his throat. Nothing good ever came of someone calling about his brother.

“Did she say who it was?” he asked, trying for casual and wincing as his voice cracked.

“She mentioned a Central,” Avrom said, clearly not understanding the meaning of the name. “They left instructions to call back. It’s on the kitchen table.”

“Perfect,” Ezra muttered. He could hazard a guess at who was calling from Central about his brother, and what office the number was for. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have right now, but it also wasn’t one he wanted to wait on–especially if there was snow coming that might knock out the phone lines.

He started for the kitchen, and frowned when Avrom didn’t move out of the way. “What.”

“I can make coffee,” Avrom offered, his gaze flicking away from Ezra and towards the floorboards.

“Sure,” Ezra said, elbowing past. “Fine. Make it strong.”

If Avrom replied, Ezra’s single-minded beeline for the kitchen table stopped him from registering it. He found the scrap of paper Judith had left there, took it with him to the phone hung on the wall, and dialed out to a number he unfortunately knew by heart these days.

“Hemisphere Central,” an operator chirped, as the call connected. “Where may I direct your call?”

Ezra wound the phone cord around one finger, impatient. “Director Madsen. Intelligence Office.”

“Who may I say is calling?”

“She just left me a message. She’ll know who it is.”

The operator made a noise like they were going to protest, then apparently reconsidered. Within seconds, Ezra heard the tell-tale sound of his call being connected to Iris’s private line.

“It’d be nice to go a month without hearing from you,” he said once she picked up, without waiting for the usual preamble about the call being interpreted. It gave him some small sense of satisfaction to hear the interpreter scrambling to catch up with him.

“I would come and visit if I didn’t think your mother would punch me again,” Iris said through the interpreter.

“She would,” Ezra said. “What’s this about my brother?”

“Don’t you want to know which one?”

“The one that’s still alive, I hope. Is he in trouble?”

“The opposite, actually.” There was a long pause, the interpreter waiting for Iris to finish signing. “Enis drove down to Central to book a meeting with me.”

“What?” Ezra asked sharply. This was news to him–and the fact that it was news to him was unsettling. As far as he knew, Enis hadn’t left New York before now; Ezra’s visits with him had involved driving to Hamlin’s place, rather than the other way around.

On the other hand, Enis had been listening in on Central’s phone lines for months. He hadn’t been able to explain what, exactly, he was listening for the last time Ezra had asked about it–anything interesting, he’d said, and shrugged at the idea of the project having an end goal. Maybe he’d finally heard whatever interesting piece of information he’d been waiting for. But why go and confront Iris about it?

“He could have a great career in my office, you know,” Iris said. “He’s wasted on your family.”

Ezra waved the comment off as if Iris could see him doing it, not deigning to respond, and said instead, “He’s an adult, he does what he wants. Why are you calling me about it?”

“Well,” Iris said, “I thought his next of kin should probably know that he’ll be representing me in the Hemisphere election race.”

“You’re joking.” Ezra’s grip on the phone receiver had suddenly become very tight; he only noticed this because his knuckles started to hurt.

“I wouldn’t call you just to joke. He’s staying in Central while we hash out details, but–”

Ezra slammed the phone into its cradle so forcefully that Avrom startled on the other side of the room. He didn’t apologize. A full mug of coffee had been set down on the table near him at some point–he grabbed it and took a long drink, not particularly caring how hot it was. It burnt his tongue, but he felt slightly more present afterwards.

“Are you alright?” Avrom asked.

“No,” Ezra said, feeling that he was so obviously not alright that there was no good reason to lie. “Can you tell Mame I’m going out of town for a while?”

Avrom balked. “Right now?”

“Yes, right now–I know about the snow,” Ezra snapped, seeing Avrom about to protest. “Look, I don’t have time for an argument. I need to go before the storm.”

Avrom’s brow was furrowed. He looked like he still wanted to argue, but only asked, “Where should I tell Judith you went?”

“To Maryland to yell at my farkakte brother,” Ezra said grimly, and left to find his keys.

25.18 || 26.1

[prairiesongserial]

25.18

Paloma spat on Rosaire’s corpse at the end of a long string of Catalan. Someone who Friday hadn’t met bundled him up in a tarp.

Doña Sílvia’s crew had come out to meet them as soon as they’d seen the black smoke rising from the basilica windows; they’d arrived not long after Claire had shot Rosaire. Claire handled the explanation in her halting Spanish; she claimed he had tried to escape and that she hadn’t wanted to risk him getting lost in the crowd only to sneak back inside and reactivate the drone system, something like that. 

Friday didn’t pay her too much attention. She was watching Cody pace back and forth in front of the doors. He’d fallen into a sullen silence since his argument with Claire; apparently he had nothing further to contribute.

“We thought you were dead,” Don Àngel said, giving Friday a big slap on the back followed by a kiss on both cheeks. 

Friday tried to laugh. “Yo igual,” she said. “Sorry I broke the plane.”

Don Àngel grabbed her, crushing her in a big hug.

Doña Sílvia herself climbed the stairs, and all the side conversations came to a halt. Don Àngel released Friday and stepped aside. Doña Sílvia took in the facade, her eyes roving from sculpture to sculpture, following the story of the crucifixion.

“Very well done,” she said, finally. Her gaze came to rest on Friday. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to join us permanently? That was some thrilling flying.”

Don Àngel rested a protective hand on Friday’s shoulder. “She should be dead, flying like that. Don’t keep asking for miracles.”

“Well, if that’s Àngel’s opinion,” Doña Sílvia said with a sigh, “I suppose I can let you go. But I have one more condition.”

Cody had stopped pacing. He looked at Doña Sílvia like what she said next determined whether or not he attacked her like a rabid animal. Doña Sílvia didn’t miss it–she walked right up to him and ruffled his hair.

“You have to party with us.”

-

Friday woke up the next morning both drunk and hungover, and wearing someone else’s clothes. She groaned, rolled off the cot in Doña Sílvia’s kitchen that had been her bed for the last few days, and began to feel her way along the wall to the bathroom.

She made up her face and tried to do something with her hair, then sat on the edge of the toilet seat and tried to remember what she might have done with her clothes last night. The shirt she was wearing was so large on her that the sleeves had to be rolled several times.

There were hushed voices coming from the living room. Friday was too unwell to translate in her head, but she could tell from the tone that Paloma was trying to convince Doña Sílvia of something. She heard her name–Cody’s and Claire’s, too–and with an unhappy little huff, she left the bathroom to ask what was going on. They were going to have to speak slowly.

Paloma, Doña Sílvia, and Don Àngel all stopped talking when she walked in.

Then, Don Àngel said: “It’s much too dangerous.”

“What else can we do?” said Paloma. “Bihotz says they’ve started cracking open crates and rifling through everything.”

Don Àngel didn’t have an answer to that, apparently. Instead, he hauled Friday into another one of his bone-creaking hugs.

Eventually, Doña Sílvia explained what was going on. On the crew’s most recent trip to Italy, all the imports they were bringing in had been examined by customs agents in Sardinia. Luckily, the plane had been on a mostly legitimate run. The pilot, Bihotz, had stowed all the contraband in the lining of her flight suit.

Paloma explained her plan, which sounded reasonable to Friday.

“We already have one corpse, so we put him on top and hope they don’t want to get more thorough than that. But if they do, we have these three stashed in coffins. We spin some story, make sure we telegraph ahead to our fence in Rome that he’s expecting bodies so he can hire somebody to play the mourner, and eventually the three of you wake up.”

“Al final los tres…nos despertaremos?” Friday parroted back, not sure she had understood the first time. “Vamos a dormir?”

“Yes, sleep, wake up,” said Paloma. “If they pop the lid off, you can’t be obviously breathing.”

Friday directed her questioning gaze to Don Àngel, since Paloma wasn’t helping. He had his face in one hand, massaging his temples.

“Paloma wants to poison you and hope you wake up on the other side,” he explained.

“That’s a simplification,” Paloma said, with the tone of someone who had already explained this several times over.

Friday paced the room. Yes, that was troubling. Don Àngel and Paloma restarted their argument, with Doña Sílvia barely moderating, when Cody came in from outside. Apparently Friday was the only one who’d overdone it last night, because Cody had clearly already lived a full day before noon. He was dressed and toting several bags of shopping, including ingredients for lunch.

The argument was then explained to Cody as well.

“Of course we should do it,” Cody said. He glanced around, as if looking for someone who wasn’t there. “But we need to be wrapped up so our faces aren’t visible.” He gestured, looking for the word in Spanish; that was rare for him. “En envolturas de entierro.”

“The drug is pretty convincing,” Paloma pushed back. “I don’t want you to actually suffocate.”

Friday wanted to agree with Paloma. She definitely didn’t want to suffocate, and it was pretty far-fetched that whatever lackey was popping open coffins at the Italian border would recognize her and Cody. But on the other hand, they had been taken by surprise by their wanted posters in England, and that had worked out pretty poorly.

“It’s necessary,” Cody insisted. “But the idea should come from you, not me.”

Friday gave him a look. “What are you talking about?”

“Paloma–all of you, actually, have to insist that we wear burial shrouds that cover our faces. You can make up a reason why the plan won’t work without it.”

“Make up a reason for who? The only person who isn’t here is Claire.”

Cody gave her a look. It was a look that meant I was trying to be subtle. Well, that was interesting. Before Friday could ask, he moved past her into the kitchen and started to sort through his shopping bags. His purchases included a box of bullets, new clothes for the three of them, and tomatoes. He started to make pan con tomate for lunch.

“Okay, well, fine,” Friday stammered. Doña Sílvia had a curious look on her face, but hopefully she wouldn’t ask. And hopefully Friday would have a chance to get Cody alone before they went through with this scheme. “Poison us, let’s do it.”

-

Paloma had given a more complete explanation later. The poison was actually a medicine used for surgery; it put the patient into a deep, death-like sleep, which was almost as risky as surgery itself. In the hands of a particularly careless country surgeon, it could have a failure rate as high as 50%. Friday liked to believe that Doña Sílvia’s crew wasn’t that careless–but they were pilots, not surgeons.

She was sitting in her pine box, holding a mirror to watch as Doña Sílvia did her makeup. Under Doña Sílvia’s skilled hands, Friday had transformed into a gray-skinned corpse. It was eerily convincing.

“You do this a lot?”

Doña Sílvia took a different makeup brush from between her teeth and chuckled. “No, but I’ve seen a few corpses.”

Friday clenched her fist around her ring–Val’s ring–and felt it dig into her finger. As this plan had come together over the last few days, Claire had been glued to Cody’s side. There hadn’t been any chance to cut in to ask him what the deal was with the shrouds. So, she supposed she had to trust him.

Doña Sílvia was almost finished. It was almost time to take the drug and hope she woke up in Rome.

“Wait,” Friday said. “Do you have a pen?”

-

Friday stared up at an unfamiliar ceiling. Her whole body felt stiff, as if her blood had taken a day off and was only now beginning to circulate again. It had gone wrong, she guessed, and Doña Sílvia was about to come and explain why she was still lying in a coffin in Barcelona. Friday tried to sit up, to see if she could find Cody, but her body didn’t want to move yet. She fought down the urge to vomit, pretty sure she’d choke on it.

Suddenly, an elderly woman in a black dress and heavy makeup filled Friday’s vision. She was a startling sight; her dark eye makeup had run down her face and dried that way. She bent over Friday’s coffin, hands sternly on her hips, then slapped the open lid a few times.

“Molto, molto offensivo,” the woman griped. She turned behind her to speak to someone Friday couldn’t see. Friday heard the sound of paper bills being counted. She tried to piece together what was being said, but it wasn’t Spanish or Catalan. She started to dare to hope it was Italian.

Cody appeared above her now, still made up to look like a corpse. It was disturbing to watch him move around, but still comforting when he reached into the box and held her hand.

“We made it,” he said, almost ferociously.

Friday looked past him, up at the words she’d written on the lid of her coffin: O vere beata nox, in qua terrenis caelestia, humanis divina iunguntur.

It was a part of the Easter service. Val would have gotten it. She had written it for him, some part of her hoping that he would be here to find it. But just because she and Cody had finally made it to Italy, that didn’t mean they would run into Val right away. Rome was only a guess. He could be anywhere.

As she got the feeling back in her arms and legs, Cody helped her to sit up. Claire was awake as well, and she was already washed and dressed in the new clothes Cody had picked out for her. Slowly, mostly by listening to Cody chat with Doña Sílvia’s fence, Friday caught up with what was going on. 

The seaplane’s cargo had indeed been searched by the Italian customs agents. The fence had come to claim the coffins with the help of an old con artist who had thrown herself all over the “dead” bodies, sobbing and loudly telling the long story of her family’s deaths overseas to anyone who would listen, starting over from the beginning whenever a new agent arrived to the curious scene. It had worked; faced with a hysterical grandmother, the agents had processed them as quickly as possible. Now they were in the fence’s office in Rome–Vatican City, actually. Apparently Doña Sílvia’s maps were outdated.

“Try not to be too shocked when you go out,” the fence told the rest of them in halting Spanish. “We aren’t as backwards here as the rest of the continent.”

Washed up and dressed, Friday was drawn to the door. Cody was still putting his boots on, talking to the fence, trying to get as much information out of him as possible before walking into whatever waited for them outside. Friday didn’t feel as afraid as she should have. The sun was setting, and a glow settled on the windows of the office–not moonlight, but pinks and yellows and blues.

“Friday–” Cody protested, as she opened the front door.

She stepped outside, standing in the doorway. There was plenty of traffic on the street, motorbikes and cars in a steady stream of yellow and red lights. Friday’s eyes were dragged up to gigantic advertisements the size of the buildings they were mounted on, each of them glowing, some of them moving. She had never seen moving pictures at this scale, let alone in color. Drones criss-crossed through the air in front of them, apparently not interested in anything going on in the street below.

A man walked down the sidewalk, lighting a cigarette under the red glow from one of the advertisements down at street level. Friday let the door close behind her, cutting off whatever Cody was saying.

The man gruffly greeted her as he passed, and Friday mumbled her reply, barely seeing him as her feet carried her to the sign the man had just walked under.

The image of Val–her Val–was twenty feet tall. He was wearing red vestments of some kind, not familiar, but still priestly. His purple eyes looked down at her from under heavy lids, a soft smile on his face. The image almost looked like a painting, every color brighter than real life.

Friday put her hand against the smooth surface. It was a little warm to the touch. She jumped back as a tinny voice spoke in Italian, then stumbled further back as the image of Val began to move. He knelt on one knee in front of her, still smiling.

Friday didn’t trust what she was seeing until Cody came to an abrupt stop next to her. His little intake of breath was the proof she needed that she wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there.

“I don’t think I like this,” Cody said, unnerved.

Friday bit her lip hard. She held her left hand up over her head, in Val’s line of sight.

“I brought it back!” she shouted. “I have it!”

“Jesus, Friday,” Cody said. “We’re on the street.”

Friday’s arm shook, a side effect of the drug, but she kept it up, showing Val the ring. She knew he couldn’t see it; she knew this was only a projection. She just couldn’t help it.

A second later, the moving picture raised a hand and pressed his open palm against hers.

25.17 || epilogue 25

[prairiesongserial]

25.17

Friday waved the black smoke away, not that it did a lick of good. There was a handkerchief stuffed somewhere in the pockets of her flight suit, and she felt around for it through a fit of coughing, thinking that it might help if she tied it over her nose and mouth.

She had just found the end of the handkerchief when she saw a figure in the smoke with her. It took all her self-control not to scream; she swallowed it back, feeling dizzy as a fresh wave of adrenaline crashed over her.

“Is that you, um, Jesse?” the figure said, coughing. “Have you taken down the whole basilica?”

That name sounded familiar, but Friday didn’t remember where she’d heard it before. Friday coughed, which seemed to satisfy the stranger.

“Shall we go before we suffocate? I imagine the pirates won’t be far behind once they realize we’re unguarded, and I’d like to get the hell out of dodge before then.”

Friday tugged the handkerchief from her pocket. She let her voice settle into a lower register.

“Where’s the door? I can’t see shit.”

“Oh, follow me–stay close.”

The figure was walking away from her now, meaning Friday could be sure which direction he was facing. She ran the handkerchief through her hands, tested the strength of it. The smoke was beginning to dissipate, rising up into the eaves and even beginning to creep up the spiral staircases. Friday could see the man she’d been speaking to clearly, down to the color of his jacket.

Well, it was now or never.

The man slowed his steps.

“Is that a plane?” he asked. He reached out to touch the fuselage and recoiled when his hand brushed hot metal. “How’d you get a plane in here?” He started to turn around. “The local pirates use these. It’s why we had to give the city up in the first place, they’re too damn annoying. How did you…”

He startled badly as he saw that it wasn’t Cody behind him at all.

Friday had a knee in his back before he could complain about it. He wiggled and tried to buck her off, but eventually Friday managed to get his hands bound with the handkerchief.

“Jesse!” the man hollered. “Help!” He fell into a fit of coughing, then finally went limp face-down on the marble. “He was sent to clean me up, wasn’t he?” the man groaned. “I should have thought of that. It didn’t occur to me that it might be an international job; an American, that really threw me.”

Friday gave him a couple of firm pats on the shoulder, then hauled him up. She sort of pitied him. Doña Sílvia was probably not going to have mercy; it was too personal. But that was the price of passage, and Friday was going to Italy. She sighed as she started to walk the man to the door.

“Oh, God,” he moaned. “Do you speak English? Can we work something out?”

Friday turned at the sound of footsteps behind her. That had to be Cody on the stairs; his pace slowed as he neared the bottom.

“What did you do?” he asked, his voice barely containing a smile. “How did the wings come off?”

“Didn’t expect you to be climbing around on the outside like that, so I had to improvise.” Friday gave the man a little shake. “Got our guy. Let’s go, I’m choking to death.”

Cody appeared through the haze a moment later, Claire a few steps behind him.

“Where’d you get a gun, anyway?” Friday asked her. “You couldn’t get one for me?”

Claire shrugged. “I asked Doña Sílvia if she’d lend me one.”

“Could have asked for two,” Friday pouted. She let go of the man as they came to the door, not particularly worried about him, and eager to get to fresh air.

She thrust the door open onto a bare stone patio. The columns above them were set at an angle, giving Friday the feeling that she was about to be scooped up by a massive bony hand. She was disoriented for a second; this wasn’t the entrance they had passed before. Unlike the sculptures that had seemed to flower unnaturally out of the stone, these ones were staged like dolls. Friday took a few more steps forward, distracted by the familiar biblical scenes.

She met eyes with a grim-looking Roman centurion until her attention was drawn away by the sound of a gun firing.

Cody stumbled backward, colliding with the door as it closed. Friday looked for the fresh wound, waiting for it to show itself. She watched his chest rise and fall, mistrustful of her own eyes, until Cody shook his head and pointed behind her.

Behind her, Claire still had her gun. She had it aimed, barrel smoking, at the man with his hands tied behind his back. Big globs of blood dripped from him, splattering the clean stone. He tottered a few steps, then fainted.

His head cracked as he hit the ground hard.

“Okay!” Claire said. She put on a chipper face as she tucked her gun in the back of her pants.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” Cody said. He peeled himself from the door and came to squat by the man. He tugged the handkerchief from his wrists and used it to staunch the blood seeping from the man’s stomach.

“Oh, did I misunderstand? We’re trading this guy to Doña Sílvia, right?”

“Yes,” Cody said through gritted teeth.

“You didn’t make any special deal to bring him alive, did you?”

“No,” Cody barked, “but–”

“So you were gonna hand him over to be tortured?”

Cody breathed hard through his nose. The handkerchief was soaked, blood bubbling up through it. With a yell, he threw it as hard as he could.

Friday had a sinking feeling. She didn’t want to think that of Doña Sílvia, but also, Doña Sílvia and her crew had been at war for over a year, and they had lost people. There was no guarantee Hemisphere wouldn’t try to take their city again, and if that happened, they would want to be prepared.

“It’s done, okay? And you didn’t have to do it,” Claire said snippily.

Cody shot her a withering glare. He got to his feet, leaving a red handprint behind. He hadn’t wanted to do any of this in the first place, Friday remembered. In fact, he had begged her not to.

“Fine,” he growled. “If that's what it takes.”

25.16 || 25.18

[prairiesongserial]

25.16

Cody’s ears rang from the sound of gunfire as he hauled himself through the window of the tower. He wasn’t quite at the top yet; he landed hard on the stone staircase, probably bruising the entire left side of his body, but forced himself to get up and walk. Friday was doing something stupidly dangerous–Cody didn’t know what, but her plane had nearly decapitated him–to attract the attention of all the drones outside, and there was no sense in wasting the time she’d bought.

He ascended to the room at the top of the tower, rolling his sore shoulders in their sockets as he went. The climb up the scaffolding had been less harrowing than he’d assumed–it had only gotten dicey towards the end, when the plane had circled back around to the basilica. Mostly it had just been physically grueling. It helped that he had a few months of physical labor with Señor Hugo under his belt and had regained a lot of the muscle he’d lost after washing up on the shore of Spain. Still, he was going to hurt when the adrenaline wore off.

The gunfire outside had become more distant, occasionally punctuated by the crash of metal on metal. Maybe Friday had been successful in drawing the drones away. Cody didn’t want to waste time looking to see if that was true; instead, he reached the small tower room, burst into it, and immediately began scouring for a place to input the codes that Rosaire had given him.

It wasn’t hard. The room looked much like the basement did, the floor covered in haphazardly placed wires that ran out the windows and snaked down the stairs. Most of them led back to a screen propped against the wall. The screen was, in turn, connected to a sort of typewriter mechanism with letters and numbers laid out in rows–Cody didn’t need to be a genius to figure out that this was what he’d been looking for.

He fished the paper with the codes from his pocket and sat on the floor. Then, carefully, he tapped one of the letter keys before him.

The screen came to life with a soft, green glow, presenting Cody with a menu of options written in bold, blocky letters. Rosaire had instructed him on this part; he fumbled with the keys until he figured out how to properly select words, then navigated through to the SECURITY OVERRIDE option.

A blank box popped up. Carefully, Cody typed out the codes he had been given, hitting the Enter button after each one. Finally, the screen flickered as though considering the prompts it had been given, and spat out a new box that read SIEGE DEFENSES SHUT DOWN.

There was no other way to know it had worked. Even straining his ears, Cody could no longer hear any sounds of the drone chase from outside. He decided to take the system’s word for it.

The screen had returned to its original menu. A rotating Hemisphere logo took up the blank space in one corner; Cody stared at it for a long moment, watching the lowercase H turn in slow circles. He didn’t completely understand how Rosaire’s system worked, but he did know this was the first chance he’d had in months to know what Hemisphere was really up to. It would have been stupid not to take it.

Above SECURITY OVERRIDE sat an option called PERSONS OF INTEREST. It seemed like the obvious place to start. Selecting it pulled up a new list–a long one–of names, which Cody paged through until he found an entry titled, simply, “JOHN”. His heart rose into his throat. He swallowed it back down, and pushed Enter.

The file began with photos, which was unexpected. They were grainy, clearly captured from a distance, and given a green cast by the monitor, but the main subjects were identifiably John and Val. Their hair was longer, their clothes completely unfamiliar, and they both looked pissed off–John scowling, Val gesticulating with his hands. Neither of them looked injured.

Cody felt suddenly lightheaded, overcome by a new wave of adrenaline stronger than anything he’d felt while climbing the scaffolding outside. John and Val were still out there. All this time he had stubbornly believed that they were still alive, but now he had proof.

PoIs “John” and Valerie Lecter pictured at northern Italian border, the caption of the photograph read. Both were taken into Vatican custody. It is suspected they remain there at present.

So they were in Italy. This entire mission to cross the border hadn’t been for nothing. Cody wished he could bring the screen to Friday to show her. He knew she would believe him sight unseen–she always wanted to believe Val was okay, even when the evidence pointed otherwise–but it would have been good to have the evidence.

The bottom of the file listed those of John’s known associates–Cody, Friday, Val, Johannes, and (bafflingly) someone named Cassidy. Cody selected his own file. This one began not with a photo, but with a note that read: PoIs Cody Allison and Friday Wilmot are still traveling through Spain. Barring any significant change, their intent remains to cross from the Barcelona port into Italy by sea.

A chill ran through Cody. There was no reason Hemisphere should have known that. The only agents of theirs he and Friday had spoken to since leaving England were Rosaire, who had no way to communicate long-range, and–

“Cody?” Claire’s voice echoed up the staircase. Her bootfalls thudded rhythmically against the stone–Cody hadn’t noticed them until now, mistaking them for his own pounding heartbeat. “You okay up there?”

Cody tried to call back, and found his throat too dry for more than a whisper. He swallowed, and tried again. “Yeah. Did it work?”

“Sure did. The drones are down.” Claire sounded closer, though with the tower’s acoustics it was impossible to know how close she was. “Did they hit you at all?”

“I’m fine.” 

Cody paged down his file, scanning it for any other scraps of information that stuck out, anything else only Claire could have reported. Sure enough, there were details of the underground train incident, his and Friday’s escape from England, and even a few lines about the disaster they’d suffered on the way into Spain. So Claire had been reporting back to the Queen this entire time, while smiling and playing nice to their faces. Cody wondered how she’d done it.

The rush of relief Cody had felt upon seeing the photo of John and Val was rapidly warming over into white-hot anger. His hands shook on the keys as he reached the end of the file–and froze. Like John, the files of his known associates were listed. But at the top of the list, even before John’s name, was a file titled ALLISON, MIRIAM.

“Cody?” Claire called. She was very close now, probably coming up the last bend before she’d be in the doorway.

Cody clenched his teeth. He wanted, badly, to open Miriam’s file and see what it said. Probably it was nothing. She lived in Canada now, after all, so it would make sense that Hemisphere Canada had a record of her, and had linked her to Cody. But he wanted to be sure.

On the other hand, if Claire caught him in the file system…

Her footsteps were so loud now, drowning out even the sound of Cody’s heart pounding in his ears. He slammed the keyboard a few times at random, unsure of how to return to the main screen but desperately not to be seen sitting in front of his own file. 

Eventually, some button worked–a box popped onto the screen asking if he wanted to shut the system down. Hands still shaking, Cody slammed Enter. The screen flickered off.

“What are you doing?” Claire asked, from over his shoulder.

Cody jumped, and turned to see her standing behind him in the doorway. The small tower room meant they were barely three feet apart. She looked haggard, and was breathing heavily, as though she had run all the way up the stairs. A gun dangled from one of her hands.

“Shutting down the whole system,” Cody said, honestly. “Rosaire–the Hemisphere guy downstairs–told me to do it once the override codes were in. To make sure the drones can’t just get back up and start shooting or anything.”

Claire made a face at this; it was clear she didn’t completely believe him.

“He’s been trapped here for months,” Cody added. “I think he’s a little. You know. Paranoid.”

That seemed to win her over. She smiled, a little wanly, and gestured with her free hand for him to get up.

“You really scared the shit out of us, you know,” she said.

“Sorry,” Cody replied, giving her his best attempt at a grin in return. “But it was worth it. How’s Friday?”

25.15 || 25.17

[prairiesongserial]

25.15

“You have fog coming in from the sea,” said the crackling voice in Friday’s ear.

She jerked her head to look east and accidentally took the plane in the same direction. Claire yelped from the backseat as Friday hastily adjusted the ailerons and throttle. The swarm of drones trailed behind her mindlessly through the course correction, neither gaining nor falling farther behind.

There was a very narrow range Friday needed to maintain between the plane and the drones to keep them on her tail without getting the plane shot out of the air. The drones would only shoot when they were within a certain distance, but would still dog after her as long as she stayed just barely out of firing range.

Friday hadn’t exactly had the luxury of a trial run, so the drones had gotten a few hits in while she’d been looking for that sweet spot; there were several more holes in the hull of the plane than there had been before. A stream of black smoke was coming from the engine, and she was pretty sure the landing gear had been shot to pieces, but it was more important to keep the drones behind her, even if the plane wasn’t doing so great–if she lost the attention of even one or two, Cody could die.

The voice in her ear–Don Àngel, looking out through a pair of binoculars from Doña Sílvia’s roof–repeated the warning.

“I heard you…just not sure what I can do about it without getting shot out of the air.”

There was a beat of radio silence, shortly interrupted by a hail of bullets. Subconsciously, Friday had let up on the throttle as the fog from the east now overtook the plane–as if she could buy herself more time by slowing down.

“No, wait, it’s okay,” Claire said. “They won’t shoot in the fog. If their cameras can’t get a visual confirmation, they hold fire. This is good.”

Before Claire had finished talking, the fog consumed them. All Friday could see was white. In her ear, Don Àngel was swearing on one of the saints.

“Pull up, get above it,” he said. “I can’t tell where you are, and you’re flying too low to keep going blind.”

Friday adjusted the throttle. She felt the force of the ascent, even though in the white field of fog there was no sign she was moving at all. Then abruptly, they burst through the top of the fog.

They were at a higher altitude than Friday had ever flown before. It was fucking freezing.

“Don Àngel?” she questioned. She could barely see Barcelona below. The fog had swept in fast, and half the city was invisible. She’d managed to lead the drones nearly to the beach, well away from the Sagrada Família, but as she oriented herself again she realized the swarm was no longer behind her.

Without a visual, the drones had given up.

“Oh, fuck,” she swore.

Claire shrieked as Friday put them into a dive. Condensation clung to the plane’s windshield and wingtips as the plane emerged on the other side of the fog. Friday came out of the dive low enough to scrape the shingles off a rooftop.

“You’re on a collision course,” Don Àngel warned her. “The drones are directly ahead, also heading northwest. You’re about to overtake them.”

“Thanks, I see them,” Friday said. A half second later she was met with the sound and force of dozens of drones colliding with her windshield as she plowed through the mass of them. The plane wobbled in the air, momentarily out of control. Friday pulled up in a vertical ascent, just in time to run parallel up one of the towers of the Sagrada Familia. If her landing gear had been out, it would have skimmed the surface of the cathedral.

The drones that were still in the air fired on her, chasing her straight up.

“Cody!” Claire yelled, leaning way out and twisting around. Like she could see him.

“What?” Friday yelled back.

“He’s on the–he’s outside. He’s climbing up the outside of the tower, where the scaffolding is. You nearly plowed over him.”

“Madre de dios,” Friday said. “Can you still see him?”

“We’re too high up.”

That was a problem. If she’d passed right over Cody, Friday couldn’t be sure she still had all the drones in tow. She wanted to circle down to check, but if she did that, she’d lose speed, and she’d re-enter their firing range.

“Hey, Don Àngel,” she said. “How do I put this thing in reverse?”

Over the radio, Don Àngel only paused for a beat. “Put the nose down and cut power. Claire, be ready to take controls.”

“Why?” Claire shrieked into the radio.

“In case she blacks out. For the record, Friday, this is a bad idea.”

“Thanks, Don Àngel,” said Friday. 

She cut power and put the nose down. The plane fell out of the air, colliding again with the swarm of drones. Those that could still fly took time to reorient themselves. Friday felt an unfamiliar sensation as they continued to drop straight down, almost giddy.

“What’s the plan, Friday?” said the radio in her ear. The sound was completely hilarious for some reason.

“My controls,” said Claire. She was so serious. That was also funny. “Ah, fuck.”

Friday opened her eyes and they were flying–falling, actually–inside a tunnel. She could feel the throttle in her hand, but Claire had transferred controls to herself in the backseat.

Claire was breathing strangely; over the radio, Don Àngel was telling both of them how to breathe to keep themselves awake through the dive. Friday tried to follow along, although she was already pretty far gone. She couldn’t make sense of where they were. A spiral of lights around the tunnel seemed to draw them down.

The tunnel was about to end in a wall. A floor. Oh, they were inside one of the cathedral towers.

Claire pitched the nose up; Friday felt the change in her whole body as the plane gave everything it had against the overpowering force of free-fall. The dim tunnel opened into a giant, multi-colored cavern of light. Friday plucked out a few details as she passed out. She was surrounded by stained glass windows in a stone forest. The wings had ripped off the plane with the force of the ninety degree turn. It was skittering across the floor with an agonizing screech of metal on stone.

When Friday came too, the plane wasn’t moving anymore. It had smashed nose-first into a pillar. The windshield was shattered; there was glass all over her.

“Claire,” she groaned.

From the sound of things, there was a firefight going on behind her. Then the plane caught on fire.

“Claire!” Friday coughed. She fought her way out of her harness as the cabin filled with black smoke.

The gunfire slowed. 

“Oh, that’ll help. They’ll let up once we have the smoke as cover. Do you need a hand?”

Friday shook bits of glass out of her hair as she climbed shakily out of the plane. Claire had a gun, which she was using to shoot drones out of the air pretty competently from behind the pillar they’d crashed into. Friday didn’t know where she would have gotten a gun.

“Cody,” Friday protested. If the drones eased up in the haze of smoke, that left Cody unprotected on the scaffolding outside one of the towers.

Claire gave Friday an exaggerated shrug, then coughed. The burning plane smelled truly vile.

“We have to do something,” Friday said. The gunfire stopped entirely. “Fuck. They’re going to kill him.”

She ran out from behind the pillar, not that she knew what she was going to do, and nearly tripped over a drone on the floor. One that Claire had shot, she guessed.

“Where did you get a gun, anyway?” Friday yelled, looking for a way up to Cody. There were a lot of different towers. She took a deep, noxious breath of smoke. She could figure this out. If the entrance was behind her, and the tower Cody had been on was the one with the scaffolding, then relative to the door, he should be–

She kicked another drone, and it went flying across the floor. There was a whole pile of them. Hundreds. Killed, deactivated.

“Oh. He did it.”

Claire came up to join her.

“Oh, shit. I’m going to go see if he’s okay.” Claire ran past, choosing a set of stairs without a second thought.

Friday laughed, and the sound bounced ghoulishly back to her across the stone forest of pillars. In her peripheral vision, she saw a person-like shape emerge tentatively from the haze.

25.14 || 25.16

[prairiesongserial]

25.14

Cody wasn’t sure if the mechanical dogs could shoot faster than a human, but it sure seemed like it by the hail of bullets that erupted out of them. More than one whizzed past just close enough to graze him, leaving a searing trail of blood behind in its wake, but his mad sprint towards the stairs helped avoid the worst of it. Soon, it was all behind him–however good they were at shooting, the dogs were ill-equipped to pivot quickly in place. Cody could hear the sound of their feet clicking and clacking against the floor again, trying to find leverage with which to turn around.

“OPEN UP,” he hollered, jumping the stairs two at a time, and hit the door into the crypt shoulder-first.

It had more give than he’d expected. The leftover momentum sent him tumbling into the room, nearly tripping over a pew that had clearly just been dragged hastily away from the entrance.

“Hurry, hurry,” a voice from behind the pew said; the man in the crypt was crouched there, already moving to shove the barricade back into place.

Cody stepped around to the other side of the pew and helped scoot it across the floor, until its back was more or less flush with the door. A glance over his shoulder when he was done confirmed that the door to the other set of stairs had been blocked more or less the same way. Both also seemed to have extraneous pews dragged closer to them–in case the barricade needed to be reinforced, Cody guessed.

The rest of the crypt was just as much of a mess as its entryways. Furniture, garbage, and electronics were strewn about the room–it smelled less of the corpses upstairs, and more of food waste. A stockpile of unopened cans against one wall dwindled in comparison to the heap of empty cans against the other. Wires and cables criss-crossed the floor, snaking across most available inches of space and winding in and out of complicated-looking machines with lights that blinked on and off. Amidst these was a nest of blankets that must have been the man’s bed.

“You’ve really been living here all this time,” Cody said, not sure if he was disgusted or impressed.

“You think I’d be sending out distress calls if that wasn’t the case?” the man asked. He was roughly Friday’s height, his clothes decent aside from the odd stain, with dark hair too greasy to be anything but straight and in his face. He had shaved at some point recently, though from the visible nicks and scabs on his face, it had evidently been with a knife not suited for the task.

“I guess not.” Cody half-extended his hand, froze momentarily at the realization that he had better give out the name of a real Hemisphere agent, then completed the gesture as though he’d never stuttered. “Jesse Nash.”

The man shook his hand once, heartily, then let go. “Rosaire Renaud. If you have any funny remarks about someone named after the rosary being left to die in a church, I promise you’re better off keeping them to yourself.”

Cody hadn’t had any remarks about that particular thing, but now he was tempted to think of one. Instead, he stepped across the room, studying the paths of the wires on the floor.

“I thought you said you can’t control the drones or those dogs from here,” he said, nudging one of the bulky machines with the toe of his boot.

“I did,” Rosaire said. Cody had expected to be reprimanded for kicking the machinery, but the other man was still hanging back near the door. “Because it’s true.”

“It looks like you have all the stuff to do it with, though,” Cody said. He still didn’t really understand the drones, but from what Claire had explained, it should have been possible for Rosaire to tell them what to do with at least one of these machines. “What’s the holdup?”

“What I have down here is a load of auxiliary controls and broadcasting equipment. It’s a life support system, and not much else.” Rosaire folded his arms over his chest, looking vaguely impatient with having to explain. “Once the internal and external siege defenses–the drones and turrets–were tripped, there’s only one way to turn them off, and it’s putting override codes into the main terminal.”

Cody was beginning to wrap his head around the problem. He could tell, because of the steadily growing pit of dread in his stomach.

“The main terminal,” he repeated, “which is…let me guess. Not in the crypt?”

“Again,” Rosaire said, “if it were, do you think I would have put out a distress call?”

“Okay,” Cody said, through his teeth. He hadn’t liked where this conversation was going even before he’d entered the crypt, and now he hated where it was going. “But you have the codes, don’t you? You at least know what they are?”

Rosaire blinked, looking vaguely offended. “Of course. I’d be a terrible operator if I didn’t.”

“So give them to me. I’ll go put them in.” He didn’t want to offer, but it was clearly the only way it would get done. May as well add one more stupid step to this errand.

Rosaire barked out a laugh. It wasn’t particularly cruel, but there was no humor in it, either. It was sharp; the laugh of someone who knew Cody was not yet seeing the extent of the shit he was in.

“Sure, I’ll give you the codes,” he said. “But I’d rather you get me out of here than kill yourself trying to be a hero.”

“Where do the codes have to go?” Cody asked.

Rosaire pointed upwards.

“Can you,” Cody said, with barely-leashed frustration, “be a little more specific.”

“It’s all the way up,” Rosaire said, still pointing.

“In one of the towers?”

“The second from the left.” Rosaire brought his hand back down to hang by his side. “The higher it is, the better the signal to the drones. There are stairs, but you’re not getting up there without tripping every internal defense. You’ll be shot to ribbons.”

Unfortunately, he was right. There had to be a better way up than letting those mechanical dogs chase him the whole length of the tower–and running into God knew what other defenses along the way. As Rosaire had so kindly pointed out, that was suicide. Cody squeezed his eyes shut briefly, picturing the whole Sagrada Familia as though he was still seeing it from a faraway rooftop with Doña Sílvia.

Then, he had it.

“I’ll do it,” he said flatly, opening his eyes. “Write me the codes.”

Rosaire looked skeptical. “You’ll die.”

“I’ll be fine,” Cody said. “As long as I can get back out the front. The drones are still chasing my friends–I just need you to make a bunch of noise and distract those dogs for a minute.”

“You’re not taking me with you?” Rosaire asked, his face crumpling into dismay.

“I’ll come back and get you after I put in the codes. Or you can walk out yourself. I don’t care.” Maybe Rosaire would even get himself shot while distracting the dogs. Which wasn’t exactly a fair thought, but Cody was beginning to detest this errand even more than he had before.

“And,” he added, “you don’t want to come with me.”

“Why not?” Rosaire asked.

Cody sighed. “Because I’m going up the fucking scaffolding. Now write me those codes, before I change my mind.”

25.13 || 25.15

[prairiesongserial]

25.13

The shadow of Friday and Claire’s plane passed over the street. Cody looked up in time to see it shoot over the spires of the Sagrada Familia, so close that the scaffolding nearly grazed its underside. The drones that had been lazily circling the basilica seemed to snap to attention, gathering together in a swarm that buzzed off after the plane like flies after roadkill. Whatever orders controlled them left no stragglers behind: within a few minutes, the entire structure was unguarded.

Cody had to admit that the plan suddenly felt easier said than done. Then again, that was his experience with most stupid plans up to this point. You could plot points out on a map and talk through hypotheticals all you liked, but you couldn’t stop the universe from throwing it all back in your face and making you scramble to pick up the pieces.

The thought of Ethan no longer made his stomach clench with anxiety, but Cody was reminded unpleasantly of his meeting with the DeadEyes in Old Problem. If anything went sideways here–like in Texas–he’d be stranded and possibly shot, with no way of communicating that to Friday. He’d be completely alone, once he passed through the Sagrada Familia’s doors.

That had been what he’d wanted in the first place, hadn’t it? To do this alone, so no one else would have to deal with the consequences. Cody ground his teeth together, reaching down compulsively to touch the gun holstered at his side, and forced himself into a sprint towards the basilica.

The four doors in the front of the Sagrada Familia–two directly in front, two off to the sides–looked overgrown. Creeping ivy and other greenery covered them bottom to top, making them splashes of unexpected color against the carved stone wall they were set into. It perplexed Cody that the leaves hadn’t taken root anywhere else until he was up the front steps, and realized the illusion: the doors were solid, wrought iron that had been sculpted to resemble plants. There was nothing truly alive about the building’s facade, a fact that disquieted Cody deep in the pit of his stomach. It was damned unnatural.

The side door to the left was propped slightly open, maybe still ajar from whoever had been the one to discover the Hemisphere officer in the crypt. There was no blood anywhere in the entryway, at least. The unlucky sons of bitches who had died here had at least made it farther than that. Cody stepped over the threshold, once again brushing his fingers superstitiously over the butt of his gun.

Inside, the basilica was ethereal. The room he’d stepped into felt like it had more in common with the Good Guys’ cave system than any church he’d ever been in–towering, stone columns holding up an impossibly high ceiling, intricate carvings set into every wall, natural light warped and tinted by stained glass windows in vivid shades of green. It was like being in a forest and underground at the same time. Cody was intensely aware of how his every footstep echoed through the whole place; anyone in here had surely already heard him.

There was another strange sound bouncing off the walls, beneath the sound of his footfalls. Cody almost missed it at first. He stilled in place, completely frozen, to confirm what he’d heard–and it was there, a rhythmic clicking like someone slowly spinning the barrel of a revolver. It had no discernible source, though it seemed to float up from the depths into which the stairs down to the crypt spiralled.

Cody swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, and called, “Hello?”

No one answered. The clicking sound continued, uninterrupted.

There was a smell inside the Sagrada, like rotting meat left in the sun too long. The longer Cody stood in one place, breathing, the more he noticed it. It only grew stronger as he approached the stairs to the crypt. The source was much more evident on this side of the room–bloodstains streaked the floor, so long-dried they had turned nearly black, pointing the way to two corpses piled by the altar. They were riddled with bullet holes, and had definitely been there for some time.

Cody pressed his lips together and swallowed again, this time to push down the bile rising in his throat. Alright. So there were the unlucky sons of bitches. They really hadn’t made it too much farther, after all. 

Had the drones flown inside to shoot them, or sniped them from outside? None of the windows looked shattered. Maybe the man in the crypt had done it–Doña Sílvia hadn’t mentioned him being armed, but it seemed within the realm of possibility.

“Hello?” he repeated, louder, once he could trust his voice. He was still standing a cautious distance away from the stairs, but assumed the acoustics would carry the sound.

There was a long silence, only broken by that weird, continuous clicking. Then, a man’s voice from below said, “My God. Are you real?”

“Uh,” Cody said, and cleared his throat. “Yeah. I came to get you out.”

“You’re Hemisphere?” the man asked. “Not another fucking pirate?” It was technically the right question to be asking–and one that he could handle bluffing his way through, but still annoying to have to do it at all.

“Yeah,” he said. He had no problem saying whatever it took to get this man out of the crypt, and obviously had no moral quandaries about lying to agents of Hemisphere. “Come on, let’s go.”

“What’s your code designate?”

Cody blinked, then frowned. He could only recall bits and pieces from the Hemisphere codebook, but there was one code he certainly knew.

“Delta Echo Oh-Four,” he said.

“American?” the man asked, sounding surprised. “You’re a long way from home.”

Cody decided to emulate John, letting the silence stretch on for as long as he thought he could get away with before saying, “I’m on other business.”

“I heard on the airwaves there was some sort of fiasco in Basel. That was you, I guess.”

This was the first Cody had heard of it. “Yeah.”

“Well, I’m glad you took the time to stop by,” the man said, sounding both dismissive and immensely relieved. “I’ve been broadcasting locally for months, on the off chance anyone friendly came through. How did you get past the drones?”

Cody paused, glancing around the empty basilica. A second, off-beat set of clicking had joined the first; he still had no idea what to make of that, but his hand was firmly at rest on his own gun now.

“I have some friends distracting them,” he said. “Why don’t you come up so we can leave before they come back?”

“I…can’t,” the man said, and didn’t elaborate further.

“What?” Cody snapped instinctively, then reigned himself in, lowering his voice. “Why not?”

“Didn’t you hear my broadcast? It’s not just the drones I lost control of.”

“Not just…” Cody’s blood turned to ice. He didn’t completely understand the implications, but he was sure they were bad for everyone involved. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t control the internal siege defenses, either,” the man said. He sounded deeply embarrassed. “Actually, I think they’re on their way up. You’d better move.”

Cody opened his mouth to ask what the fuck the man meant by that, and found the words stuck fast in his throat. The clicking had gotten gradually louder over the course of the conversation–he now realized, seeing two shapes begin to emerge on either side of him, that the sources of the noise had been climbing the stairs.

They were machines the size of a dog, boxy metal bodies held upright by spindly legs that put them at roughly the height of Cody’s knees. As one stepped forward, its pointed foot struck the marble. A click reverberated through the room, off the vaulted ceilings.

The advice the man had just given him seemed solid, but Cody found himself rooted in place. One of the dog-machine’s belly dropped open as it advanced on Cody, a cylinder emerging that looked very much like the business end of a machine gun. The other machine followed suit.

Doña Sílvia hadn’t said anything about drones with legs in the crypt. She couldn’t have known about them if no one who got this far had ever come back. Cody forced himself to breathe, bending his knees as he prepared to break into a sprint.

“I’m coming down,” he announced to the man in the crypt. “Left side stairs. Open up, or you’re never getting out of here.”

The drones opened fire just as he pushed off the floor and began to run.

25.12 || 25.14

[prairiesongserial]

25.12

The Sagrada Familia was just as visible from Doña Sílvia’s roof as it was from anywhere else in the city. The small, black dots of far-off drones circled its spires like flocks of birds looking for somewhere to perch. Cody watched them, his hair whipping around his face in the wind, hands shoved in his pockets to prevent himself from fidgeting.

“What’s it look like inside?” he asked.

Next to him, Doña Sílvia cracked a smile.

“A mess, now,” she said. “It used to be nicer. But the architecture is still there, mostly, and some would say that’s the important part.”

Cody’s eyes grazed the scaffolding that jutted out of the basilica’s stonework like a mutated growth. “It’s still being built?”

“If you believe the stories, it’s been under construction for hundreds of years.”

“Why can’t they finish it?”

“Things seem to keep happening to kick the can down the road.” Doña Sílvia shrugged. “The drones are just the latest thing. Paloma’s brother was on the construction crew and says they learned the hard way not to get close.”

Cody grimaced and tensed his bad shoulder; he could imagine very vividly what the hard way entailed.

“Where’s the guy inside?” he asked. He was eyeing the towers again, wondering if he would have to scale them–or have Friday drop him there somehow. Maybe that was too big an ask–so far, he had only seen her get one of the planes in the air and fly off to God-knew-where.

Doña Sílvia’s mouth twisted into an expression that sat somewhere between disgust and dismay. “We’re pretty sure he’s closed himself off in the crypt.”

“There’s a crypt?” Cody asked, with dull surprise.

“Underneath.” Doña Sílvia pointed to a spot on the building, just to the left of the enormous arches that framed its front entryway, and lowered her finger a number of inches. “It’s built below the altar. There are two sets of stairs on the ground floor that lead down there, and the fucker managed to block off both of them.”

Cody studied the enormous facade of the Sagrada and tried to visualize how large and complex a room beneath it might be. Did it run the whole length of the building? Were there other, unintended entryways and escape routes, thanks to the ongoing construction?

“How do you know he’s still down there?” he asked, turning to fix his gaze on Doña Sílvia instead. “If–when–I get in, I want to be sure I’m going right to him.”

Doña Sílvia gave him another smile. Grimmer, this time. “We’ve had eyes on the place for months. If he was up in one of the spires or scuttling around the ground floor, believe me, we would know.”

“And?” Cody pressed. There was something she wasn’t saying.

“The last person to get in confirmed that the crypt was still barricaded from the inside.” Doña Sílvia’s voice didn’t falter, but her gaze slid to one side, away from the basilica. “They weren’t able to make it back out, they never do, no matter what fresh plan we come up with, but they got that out over the radio.”

Cody chewed the inside of his cheek. Loss of life had been mentioned when this plan had originally been floated, so he couldn’t say he wasn’t expecting to hear something like this. On the other hand, it didn’t exactly feel good to hear so plainly that he was embarking on a suicide mission.

“How do you know he’s alive?” he asked, plowing past the thought. “If he’s been down there for–how long? Years?”

“About a year and a half,” Doña Sílvia said, “since we chased him down there.”

“Right, well, how much food do you think he had? And fresh water? What are the odds he died down there at some point, when nobody was looking?”

“Common sense says someone must be controlling the drones,” Doña Sílvia said.

“Why?” Cody asked. He still couldn’t completely wrap his head around how the drones operated, but… “Couldn’t they just be acting on the last orders they got? Protecting the place? Keeping people from getting into the Sagrada, and the city?”

Doña Sílvia sighed. “I don’t disagree with you. But if that’s the case–we don’t really need him. We only need the drones to be turned off, and we believe the controls will be on his person. If he is dead, your friend can operate the controls. Can’t she?”

“My–oh,” Cody cut himself off, realizing belatedly that she’d meant Claire, not Friday. “I think so. She knows some things about the drones that Friday and I don’t.” 

He hadn’t considered that the drones were anything other than self contained, and struggled to picture what ‘controls’ would look like. How did they communicate with the drones over long distances? Radio waves?

“Do you trust her?” Doña Sílvia asked.

“Yeah,” Cody said. He and Friday hadn’t been traveling with Claire that long, but she had a remarkable ability to keep them from getting killed. And she’d seemed to know exactly what she was talking about, when she’d mentioned Hemisphere terminals and passwords at lunch.

“Good,” Doña Sílvia said, with a small nod. “Then she’ll do, if it comes down to it.”

Cody’s eyes flicked back towards the Sagrada Familia. He once again began to turn over the question of his entry point; if he was going straight down into the crypt, there was no reason to be dropped off at one of the towers. In fact, the easiest way–

“Do you have a map of the city?” he asked.

Doña Sílvia looked startled, but said without hesitation, “Yes.”

“Okay. I want Friday to do some circles around the towers, get the drones’ attention, and then go as far up the coast as she can before coming back.” It was Cody’s turn to point towards the basilica, stretching a finger out to indicate open air past it, where the coastline crawled into the horizon. “I want to see how far away she can lead the drones before they hit the border and turn around. When she’s back, we’ll get Claire and plot it out.”

“What are you thinking?” Doña Sílvia asked, her eyebrows knitting together.

“That the easiest way in and out of a place is the one it was designed with,” Cody said. Mimicking Doña Sílvia’s action from earlier, he lowered his finger slowly, until it was just level with the Sagrada Familia’s entrance. “You use the front door.”

25.11 || 25.13

[prairiesongserial]

25.11

Paloma led Friday and Claire on a tour through the garage that held Doña Sílvia’s planes. Paloma spoke very quickly and didn’t concern herself with how much special lingo she used; until Don Àngel wandered over to join the tour, half of what she said flew right over Friday’s head. Things went more smoothly from there. Don Àngel would notice whenever Friday and Claire got stuck on a new word and interject as needed.

“Los alerones se usa si quieras virar...o girar en barrena.” Don Àngel made a gesture with his hand that seemed to imply a barrel roll.

He winked at the sudden lack of enthusiasm that clearly must have been coming through on Friday’s face. Paloma had already moved on to another topic, and Friday struggled to catch up. Paloma was climbing half into the cockpit of a yellow seaplane, pointing at the various instruments while she explained what each of them did. Don Àngel had suddenly disappeared, so Friday found herself truly lost.

“Pero, cómo…volarse?”

“Eh? How does it fly?” Paloma reworded her question back to her with grammatical corrections. Friday nodded. “Well…there are four forces of flight: lift, gravity, thrust, and drag…”

By the end of the explanation, Friday still didn’t quite understand how something this size could cut through the air without dropping out of the sky. The drones were bird-sized, so even if she didn’t understand how they worked, she could figure that they had to work more or less how birds did. The seaplanes couldn’t possibly work like that. There were no joints for the wings to flap up and down. Friday had seen them in action. They glided on the air like they weighed nothing.

“Ah, there’s Don Àngel. Oye, Friday wants to see it in action, will you take her up?”

“Was always planning to,” Don Àngel said. He held up a red jumpsuit with blue piping and raised his eyebrows, grinning. He flipped it around to show the back, where someone had embroidered “BARÇA” in big gold letters.

“Get changed, the wind is perfect right now,” said Paloma. “Go, go.”

#

There would be a flight suit for Claire also; Don Àngel just hadn’t found the other spare yet. Claire continued to argue that she didn’t see why she had to fly at all since Friday had volunteered.

“In case Friday falls unconscious or is killed, you can take control from the backseat,” Paloma explained. “You’ll have better chances with two sets of hands.”

Don Àngel had taken over the lesson, though Paloma hovered in the background to give commentary. She opened the garage door, revealing a short runway that ended in the beach.

“Alright, let’s get started,” Don Àngel said. “I’m going to show you how to hand prop. Very good way to lose your hand, so pay attention.”

Don Àngel chocked the wheels with large bricks so the plane wouldn’t roll. Then he explained what he was doing as he set certain switches in the cockpit. “Mags to ‘both,’ then we close the throttle almost all the way–it should be a little bit open.”

Friday followed him closely right up until he told her to take three big steps back.

“When you do this, you must always redirect the momentum of pulling down on the propeller into moving your whole body back and away. Watch.”

Don Àngel placed his hand near the propeller hub, not the tip of the blade, and pulled sharply down. In one fluid motion, he spun the propeller and fell back several steps, well clear of the now spinning propeller blade and the roar of the engine.

“I have to do that?” Friday yelled over the noise.

“Let’s get you in the air, first,” Don Àngel said, laughing. “Come up, come up, you go in the back seat.”

He showed her how to buckle in, took the chocks away from the wheels, then climbed in himself. They each put on a headset walkie-talkie so they’d be able to hear each other over the engine.

Don Àngel talked through what he was doing as the plane picked up speed. Friday clutched her seat as she felt the wheels just barely slip off the ground. The beach rushed up in front of them, the wheels grazing over sand as the pavement ran out.

“Nose up, and…here we go,” said Don Àngel over the radio. The plane lifted up above the crashing waves. The little plane didn’t have doors on the sides, and instantly, Friday was soaked by the spray of the sea. She gasped and laughed in shock. Already, the plane soared high above the water, buoyed up by the air under the wings. Friday began to understand Paloma’s explanations now that she could feel the force of the air buffeting her on either side like a hard, physical thing.

“Alright back there?” Don Àngel laughed.

“It’s incredible,” Friday said. “I love it.”

She could see across miles of water. She expected the Italian coastline to pop into view at any second, but there was nothing but blue.

“Want to try?” Don Àngel asked.

“Yes!”

Don Àngel talked through each maneuver before having her try it herself. Something as simple as turning left wasn’t really simple at all.

“It’s not like driving on land. It’s more like sailing–while balancing on a ball,” Don Àngel explained. “We use the ailerons to raise one wing and lower the other–”

“Alerones–barrel roll,” Friday said. “I remember.”

“Not while I’m up here with you, if it’s all the same to you,” Don Àngel said. “But it’s the same mechanic for a turn or a spiral descent.”

He let Friday experiment with turning. Out over the sea, without any way to orient herself, it was hard to say that she’d turned in any particular direction at all. But the compass in the cabin told her she was now pointed north-west.

“Can we go somewhere?” Friday asked. “How far is Italy?” 

“Sorry, kid, if we go that far, we’d have to refuel in Sardinia. We can land in Mallorca, though, get you some practice.”

He let Friday fly, giving directions. Frequently, other voices came in over the radio, speaking in an abbreviated code.

“Those are other pilots telling us where they are, where they’re going, and how not to collide with them. Not too many people in the air right now, but there will be some buzz the closer we get to Mallorca. We’ll probably see some Italian planes.” Don Àngel spoke into the radio using the same code, announcing their position and intention to land at the Palma seaport.

“We’re going to land on the water, but I don’t want to pay for a place to dock, so we’ll stay in a taxi and take off again.”

Don Àngel talked Friday through a spiral descent, and then how to land on the water.

“Keep your stick back, we’re going to hit the water with the back of the floats. Level your wing tips…”

Friday watched the water get closer. The backs of the floats grazed the water, and the sudden resistance wanted to pitch the plane’s nose forward.

“I’m gonna kill us,” Friday complained. “Are you sure–”

“--and here you are in step taxi. You’re floating on top of the water like a motorboat. Go to half power.”

The seaport was full of boats and planes, most of them docked. But the seaport ended eventually in the city of Palma. She couldn’t keep powering ahead like this for long.

“Put your rudder down, and now we can steer like a boat. Let’s go to plow. Lose some stick pressure, there we go.” They were moving at a more leisurely rate through the water, which Friday thought was good for those around them. “Now let’s turn you around. Boats have right of way, so stay clear, don’t put anybody in hazard. Turn here–with the rudder, you’re not in the air anymore.”

Friday was sweating by the time they negotiated their way out of the seaport. Don Àngel talked her through taking off, and they were on their way back to Barcelona.

“What do you think?” Don Àngel asked.

“I think it’s amazing,” said Friday. “I don’t believe it’s possible, honestly.”

“You weren’t paying attention when Paloma explained the four forces of flight?” Don Àngel said teasingly. He hadn’t been there for that part, but judging by his tone, Paloma explained the four forces of flight a lot.

“I don’t understand how air can hold this thing up but only if it’s moving, and why the drones are different–they can just sit on the air.”

Don Àngel launched into his own explanation. The drones had spinning blades that generated lift, whereas the planes needed forward momentum. Friday understood what he was saying, but it was so counter to her understanding of how the world worked, how air worked, that it was hard not to feel that the planes operated on magic. She wished John were here. He’d spent some time tinkering with Enis; he’d probably love flying.

“Wait,” Friday said, as the city came into view. “Can we go to the mountains?”

“There’s nowhere to land,” said Don Àngel. “Why?”

“Then, can we just fly over?”

“Alright, but my controls.”

“Your controls,” Friday echoed, as she’d been taught. Don Àngel flew the plane over the city, keeping a high enough altitude that the drones didn’t notice.

“You can come and go however you like,” Friday realized. “Are you the only ones in the city who can leave?”

“Pretty much,” said Don Àngel. “The fishermen can only get as far as the Palma seaport before Italy’s drones become an issue. So it falls on us to communicate with the rest of the world. We did a lot of that anyway, before Canada tried to install itself here. I used to deliver mail–made some good money for us–but I stopped that after I was shot down over Algeria. Though Doña Sílvia still makes the occasional run to Zaragoza.”

“You were shot down? By drones?”

“I don’t really know what it was. I say ‘shot down’, but really my engine failed out of nowhere as soon as I entered their airspace. If not for good flying conditions, I would have just fallen out of the sky. As it was, I barely managed to glide down. Scared the hell out of me.”

“Where is that? How’d you get back?”

“Algeria? That’s south of here–I shouldn’t have been that far, but back in those days, we still thought it was possible to get around Italy by dipping into Africa. It can’t be done–you have to go through France, and nobody’s doing that. But that’s a whole other story.

“There was no getting the plane back in the air, even though there shouldn’t have been anything wrong with it. The electrical system just wouldn’t work anymore. Took me months to get back–and the people there were weird. Artificial. They all spoke Spanish, which was weird enough, but it was a kind of Spanish I’d never heard before. I couldn’t have told you where in Spain they’d come from–they had the words, but no regional accent.”

“So they’d taught themselves from a book?”

“Could have been–but all of them, every one I met on the coast, spoke just the same. You’d think some people would have had a worse grasp on it than others. Except they avoided saying names, too,” Don Àngel added, as though he’d just remembered. “Even names of towns.

“The second night there, while I was still arguing that I couldn’t just leave, you know, I had to stay until I fixed my plane–they didn’t like that–I started speaking Catalan, just to see what would happen. And they started speaking Catalan, too, without seeming to notice we’d switched.

“Anyway, it’s a weird place,” Don Àngel finished. “By the time I finally gave up on the plane, I was just happy to get out of there.”

They were approaching the mountains now, and Friday tried to figure out which one held the monastery. Everything looked so different from the air.  Don Àngel flew low, lazy circles.

Suddenly, the picture came together.

“There, that’s the mountain where my friends live,” Friday said. “Can we fly over?”

“To scare the hell out of your friends?” Don Àngel questioned. All the same, he flew even lower. “I didn’t realize people were living on Montserrat. They must be going a long way for supplies.”

The plane flew low enough to send the fallen leaves scattering into the air as they zoomed over the fields. Don Àngel circled over the monastery itself.

“That roof looks pretty good from up here,” Friday said. Then, as Marcos came limping out of the door on a crutch, squinting at the sky, Friday waved madly at him. Don Àngel circled again to give her another chance to catch his attention.

This time, he saw her. He dropped his crutch and gaped at her as she waved.

“We made it!” she yelled, though there was no way Marcos would be able to hear her over the engine. She had occasionally made an enemy of Marcos, and then Cody had gotten him shot, and she realized that waving down at him from a seaplane might come off as rude. On the next pass over, the children had spilled out of the monastery to gawk, and this time, Friday blew Marcos a kiss. He nearly fell over, and had to grab onto a child to save himself.

Friday cackled as Don Àngel gained altitude again.

“Want to show them something cool?”

“Yes!” Friday said, still laughing. The children were running after the plane, clamoring over each other.

The horizon switched places. The sky was below, and the land hanging above. Then it switched back just as fast. Friday was too disoriented to scream, but she certainly wasn’t laughing anymore.

“That was a barrel roll,” Don Àngel said.

25.10 || 25.12

[prairiesongserial]

25.10

Doña Sílvia opened the door to a modest apartment, where two large dogs were eagerly waiting for her. They surged out the door to accost Friday, Cody, and Claire in the hall, eagerly circling their feet, tails wagging. Friday fought her way forward and nearly tripped over one of the dogs as it cut between her legs.

A whistle from Doña Sílvia and the dogs galloped into the apartment, leaving the three of them free to follow suit. Cody gave Friday an annoyed look, which Friday pretended not to notice. She’d given him a lot of grace today, but she was tired, and she’d pretty much had it with him.

“Have a seat,” Doña Sílvia ordered. 

The apartment’s living room was tidy but overfilled with couches and chairs. Friday let herself fall into the most comfortable looking armchair. Claire took the opposite couch. Cody also clearly felt the pull of the furniture, but resisted. Instead, he circled around the windows to get his bearings. Meanwhile, Doña Sílvia had gone to the kitchen, followed by the sound of dog claws clattering over tile.

“You can see the beach from here,” Cody said. Then: “I bet that’s where they’re keeping the planes.”

Friday really didn’t want to get up to see what Cody was talking about, but she had just decided to haul herself out of the chair when the door to Doña Sílvia’s apartment opened and the dogs rushed over to mob the newcomer; it was the very tall woman from the pier. She got down on her knees and tussled the dogs for a minute, until Doña Sílvia called out to her.

“Paloma, come help me carry this over.”

Paloma got to her feet despite the dogs jumping all over her. She shot Friday a friendly smile before ambling toward the kitchen.

Friday wasn’t surprised when, despite it being early afternoon, the lot of them were summoned to the dinner table. In their three months in Spain they had gotten accustomed to the pattern of mealtimes, even though traveling buskers weren’t always invited to share them. The late lunch spread out over the dining room table was the main meal of the day. Friday hadn’t been expecting this much variety, though. Some of that came of being in a coastal city–the fish, shellfish, that all made sense. But there was also meat on the table, and fresh vegetables, even though Barcelona was supposedly isolated.

Doña Sílvia and Paloma sat down last.

“Eat first,” Doña Sílvia said, gesturing impatiently at the feast on the table. She waited until the three of them had sluggishly begun to fill their plates before doing the same, chatting with Paloma at full-speed in Catalán. Not even Cody would be able to understand them.

Friday grew increasingly uncomfortable the longer the three of them were ignored. Cody similarly had his hackles up, but he couldn’t resist a meal, even if he didn’t trust it. Even Señor Hugo’s hospitality couldn’t put the weight they’d all lost back on–with so many kids to feed, they’d had to be careful with portions. This was the first time in months that the three of them could eat until they were full.

Doña Sílvia finished eating first. She set her knife and fork down without a sound and waited for the rest of them to finish. Under the weight of her stare, it was too uncomfortable to continue. Friday was full anyway–at this point, she was just eating because she missed food. Paloma and Claire kept eating, but Doña Sílvia didn’t wait for them.

“Now that we are not cranky, let’s finish our conversation,” Doña Sílvia said. “We need you to get around the drones, and you need to get past the Italian border, so let’s bargain.”

“What do you need us to do?” Cody asked.

“Get that fucker out of the Sagrada Família,” said Paloma, chewing on a chicken bone.

“Hemisphere tried to set up shop here several years ago,” Doña Sílvia explained. “I don’t imagine Barcelona was the only city affected…but while I can’t speak for the others, we at least won our war.” A crooked smile formed on her face at what was apparently a fond memory. “We beat their imported bureaucrats out and killed the ones that didn’t leave fast enough.”

“What’s the Sagrada Família?” Cody asked.

“The basilica,” said Paloma. “We’re pretty sure it’s just one Hemisphere bureaucrat left inside, but he won’t quit. We’ve tried to force him out, but–”

She cut off.

“--But,” Doña Sílvia picked up, “The loss of life wasn’t worth it.”

“No,” said Friday. She felt a thrill of terror in her spine as she finally understood what Doña Sílvia wanted from them. The basilica they were referring to–Sagrada Família–that could be nothing else but the giant cathedral patrolled by hundreds of drones. And Doña Sílvia wanted them to fight their way past all those drones in order to get to the Hemisphere stooge holed up inside. “No, we’re not doing it.”

“We’ll take our chances with the Italians,” Cody said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Since the loss of life isn’t worth it.”

Doña Sílvia smiled, her eyes crinkling in the corners. “Whatever you’re imagining the Italian border to be like, not only are you very misguided, but you’ll also never make it that far. Their drones are very effective at isolating boats at sea. There’s no cover to duck behind, just you and a big, flat blue expanse. If the drone determines you have the intent to trespass, it sinks you.”

“So we need you to take us across in a seaplane,” said Claire, finally finished eating. “How does that circumvent the drone problem? They can shoot you out of the air.”

“Our planes have permission to come and go from the Italian government. We do some trade with Sardinia, but we’ve tested it, and the permission extends to the mainland too.”

“If you have Hemisphere transponders, then why can’t we just–” Claire cut herself short. “Because Canada wouldn’t use the same codes as Italy. God, that’s annoying. So we really do have to get in the church, shake down the guy inside, then disarm the drones with his password, from his terminal. It would be so much easier if we could just talk to them with the plane. From a few miles away.”

The idea of talking to the drones had pretty much lost Friday. Cody sat up a little straighter.

“You know how to turn the drones off?” he asked.

“I don’t know that much,” Claire said. “I just know that the guy who locked himself up in there will have a way to do it. If you can get me inside, I think I could convince him.”

“Are you actually considering this?” Friday hissed at Cody.

“Not you,” Cody said over Friday’s head. “Me.”

“But, uh, you don’t know anything,” Claire said.

“According to you, neither do you,” Cody shot back. “So it should be me.”

Friday rolled her eyes in a great exaggerated roll of her neck. “Cody, you got shot this morning. We’re not sending you scurrying past a few hundred drones when you couldn’t even make it past one.”

“But we have totally different tools at our disposal now,” Claire argued. “We have a plane. Or, I mean, we should negotiate with these guys for a plane. We draw fire toward the bigger target…”

“I made it past one,” Cody said, gesturing to himself as clarification that he was still present and alive.

“So you’re saying that the person who goes into the church is actually way safer than the person who’s distracting the drones from the air,” Friday said. She raised her eyebrows at Claire, who turned pink.

“It should be me, but that’s not why,” Claire said.

“We’ll do it,” Cody said to Doña Sílvia, since he was being a dick today. “But you have to give us everything we ask for, any supplies Claire says we need. And we want a plane.”

Doña Sílvia looked a little annoyed; most of the previous exchange had been in English. Paloma had a more complicated look on her face.

“Those drones can take down a plane,” Paloma said. “I’ve seen them do it.”

“Claire thinks it can be done,” said Cody. “I trust her.”

Doña Sílvia turned to Paloma, ceding the decision to her, which Friday thought was interesting. After a long moment studying the three of them, she seemed to make up her mind.

“Okay, but she has to fly,” Paloma said, pointing at Friday. “The rest of you are too tall. It’s her life you’re bargaining with, understand?”

Cody took a deep breath, nostrils flaring in anger that was sure to explode very shortly.

“What do you mean, too tall?” he said. “What about you?”

“What about me?” Paloma shot back. “Nobody said I fly. I’m just the mechanic. And you’re an inch too tall for the cockpit.”

“Fine, then we’ll find another way,” Cody growled.

“You already decided this is what we’re doing, so let’s do it.” Friday said. She felt her last thread of patience slip away from her.

“Not if you have to do the most dangerous part,” Cody said.

“So your life is disposable, but mine isn’t? You are such a mess, Cody, it’s not even funny.” Friday turned her attention away from him as he sputtered an argument. “I’ll fly. Sounds like fun.”

Doña Sílvia gave the three of them a toothy smile. “Paloma, do we have a flight suit that will fit the lady?”

25.9 || 25.11

[prairiesongserial]

25.9

Claire still hadn’t returned from the errand Friday had sent her on. Cody stood in the fishing boat, feet planted firmly as the waves rocked it from side to side, and seriously considered leaving her in Barcelona. Maybe that was just the pain talking, though; his shoulder felt like it was on fire. It wasn’t fair for a graze wound to hurt this much. He’d been grazed before, and didn’t remember it hurting like this.

On the other hand, he didn’t remember much at all from the few days after leaving Maine. Maybe he’d just blocked it out.

“Hey,” Claire called. She was back, running towards the boat, her boot soles heavy and loud on the wooden pier. She had a wooden crate in both arms. “There’s a bunch of tinned fish in here.”

“That’s it?” Friday asked, lightly disappointed.

“It’s food, and it’ll keep,” Claire said. The entire boat shook as she hopped aboard. “There are some canteens of water, too. I don’t know how full they are–I kind of, uh, just took them.”

Friday’s further inventory of the boat they’d taken revealed nothing useful except a couple fishing poles, which would only be handy as a last resort or an improvised weapon.

“Okay,” Cody said. “Okay, let’s go.”

He didn’t like that the pier had emptied out where they had just been talking to people before. It was like seeing the ocean retreat before a large wave came in, like another shoe was going to drop at any moment. The farther out on the water they got before that shoe dropped, he figured, the longer it would take Don Àngel–or Doña Sílvia, or whoever–to catch up.

Friday was trying to get the engine started, but seemed almost afraid of it. She would pull the cord, the engine would begin to sputter, and she’d back off. After two of those aborted attempts, Claire stepped in front of her and gave the cord one hard, decisive yank, sending the engine roaring to life.

“Third time’s the charm,” she said to Friday, shrugging.

Friday frowned. Cody wondered, somewhat traitorously, if she had been trying to buy time for someone to return and talk him out of this. Or stop him by force. But that seemed silly–she wanted to go to Italy, too. Why wouldn’t she want to get there as fast as they could, now that it was practically close enough to see?

“Who’s driving?” Claire asked. “Cody, are you driving? I can take first shift if no one wants it.”

Cody didn’t answer. Neither did Friday. Claire shuffled past both of them to the helm, picking her way from one end of the boat to the other in frosty silence.

“We probably should have asked why none of the locals want to sail all the way across,” Friday said, quietly, as the fishing boat made a wide, gradual turn and began its journey away from the pier.

Cody set his jaw, hands braced on his hips. “I’d rather find out on the way.”

“What if it’s more drones?” Friday turned her head to look at him.

“Then we’ll figure it out.” It wasn’t the right answer, and he knew that even before he said it. But he was tired of sitting around asking questions, tired of walking aimlessly, tired of making bad deals with strangers that only ended in people getting hurt or separated. “We’re too close to stop. If we were on the other side, and Val and John were here, and we were the ones waiting–”

He didn’t have to finish the sentence. He could tell by Friday’s eyes that she understood, even if she didn’t completely agree.

He also couldn’t finish the sentence, because a thunderous noise from above ruined any chance of Friday hearing the rest. A large shadow passed over the fishing boat; Cody looked up to find himself staring at the bright yellow hull of one of the flying machines he had first seen from Señor Hugo’s monastery.

The flying machine was moving fast and very low–any lower and it might have toppled the boat. It jetted forward, headed towards the horizon, then turned back in a sweeping U so that it faced the fishing boat. Claire yelled something that was completely lost to the wind, her hair whipping around her face, and Cody had a jolt of fear that the machine was coming around to ram them.

It wasn’t. It dipped down into the water, the two strangely oblong feet that hung from its bottom skimming the surface as the machine slowed, then landed in the water in front of their boat. The way it blocked the boat’s path was a clear message, one that became even clearer when the pilot leaned out of a side window and Cody saw that it was Doña Sílvia, cheerfully waving the same handkerchief she’d used to wipe Friday’s shirt clean.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” she called. “Shall we go back to port and talk it over?”

“No,” Cody said under his breath.

“Cody,” Friday said, warningly.

“Well,” Claire said, already turning the boat around, “I’ll break the tie.”

*

When they returned to port and moored the boat, the massive woman in the red jumpsuit was waiting for them.

“That was a good try,” she said cheerfully, extending a hand to help Cody out onto the pier. “Didn’t expect the seaplane, though, did you?”

Cody glared at her, feeling patronized, and disembarked the boat without help. The woman laughed, clapping him on the back so roughly that it stung.

“Ay,” she said, “what’s so interesting about Italy? Usually people try to leave there and come here.”

Cody scowled. “None of your business.”

“Are you thinking of dedicating your life to Christ?”

“We just need to get across,” Cody snapped. Friday, climbing out of the boat, gave him a chastising look that he ignored. “We’re meeting people. It’s important. Please.”

The woman leaned against a stack of crates, folding her arms over her chest. “People? What people?”

“Good friends.” Friday had been helping Claire out of the boat, but now joined the conversation. She stepped up next to Cody, arms crossed, mirroring the woman in the jumpsuit’s posture. “Cody’s right–it’s important. How do we get across?”

“You don’t,” the woman said. “I told you. You won’t make it farther than Palma.”

“But why not?” Cody asked. “You all keep telling us no, but not why.”

“Border control,” she said, with a shrug. “Nobody gets in or out without a passport, and they’ll shoot you for trying. The Vatican’s very careful about who has access.”

“I think we can handle a couple of guys with guns,” Cody said, freshly irritated by the explanation. That was why no one would take them across? A passport check was nothing.

“You’ve seen the drones,” the woman said, nodding back in the direction of the massive church. “They have those, too.”

“Yeah, and we already got past them once.”

“And I am interested in how you did that,” Doña Sílvia said, striding down the pier with weighty, confident bootfalls. It was hard to say where she’d arrived from or where she had landed her flying machine; probably somewhere it was hard for any stranger visiting the docks to steal.

By way of answer, Cody and Friday both looked to Claire. She sheepishly raised a hand.

“We have the same drones in England, so I know a few things about them,” she said. Cody noticed she was careful not to mention how she’d come to know these things, which might have been for the best. “Not a lot, but…enough to know that they need to be able to see. The three of us blinded them to get across the city border.”

Cody hadn’t felt until now that the various other people going about their business on the pier were listening in to the conversation; now, he got the distinct feeling of being openly stared at and eavesdropped on. The woman in the red jumpsuit looked impressed, Doña Sílvia looked thoughtful.

“I told you they were interesting,” the woman in the jumpsuit said.

Doña Sílvia nodded slightly at her, then looked to Claire. “Do you think you could do it again?”

“I-I don’t know,” Claire said. “At the border, probably. We needed a lot of open space, and a tree.”

“And bait,” Friday added.

“Let me rephrase,” Doña Sílvia said. “We have a problem in this city that requires getting past a number of those drones. If you find a way to solve our problem, I will personally see that you are smuggled across the border to Italy.”

Cody opened his mouth to protest, but Friday put a hand on his arm, gripping it. He knew what she meant–this was probably their only way across–but he still hated it. His body felt pulled as taut as a guitar string, hands balled into fists at his sides, and he couldn’t force himself to relax.

“Okay,” Friday said. “Tell us your problem, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Doña Sílvia smiled thinly. “You and your friend are American, no? Have you heard of a group calling themselves Hemisphere?”

25.8 || 25.10

[prairiesongserial]

25.8

“Hemisphere is taking over the world,” Friday mused out loud–not for the first time this afternoon. “Taking over the world–have taken over the world?”

She mostly did it because it bothered Claire, and because Cody was walking far enough ahead of them that he couldn’t hear.

“It’s really not like that,” Claire muttered. “Canada–”

“Are they calling the shots in the States, too?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Claire said. She’d worn a perpetual grimace ever since they’d turned south to circumvent the massive cathedral and its patrol of drones.

“I kind of like the idea of somebody ordering Lady around,” Friday said, but her amusement was short-lived. The last time she’d seen Lady, she’d been lying prone, leg broken, staring down the barrel of Friday’s gun. “So Canada is trying to get one-over by infiltrating other countries. Nobody can stop them because they have flying machines that can shoot you from the air. England, Spain…where else, Claire? Not France–how about Italy?”

“I really don’t know!” Claire said. “It’s above me. None of these countries are advertising it, obviously. I didn’t know they would be here. So sure, there might be more, I don’t know.”

Friday supposed she had to accept that. After all, that’s how it was in the States, too. Ordinary people didn’t know much about Hemisphere, if they even knew the word. They knew their local gang and to stay clear of them.

Up ahead, Cody was stopped at an intersection, waiting for them to catch up. He was pacing. With a sigh, Friday walked a little faster.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“This is a good place to turn east again,” Cody said. “Can you guys walk any slower?”

Friday raised her eyebrows at him. He set his jaw and tilted his chin up, averting his eyes while Claire caught up to them.

“You’re that cranky that you don’t get to fight your way into the Hemisphere cathedral?” Friday asked. “Do you really want to? We got to do my thing with Señor Hugo’s roof, so we can if you want, but if you think I’m going to drag your bullet-ridden corpse to Italy…”

Cody groaned. He rubbed his temples with both hands. “No–I’m just hungry and tired. Let’s go.”

Claire finally caught up to them. “Are we eating?” she asked.

Cody ignored her and turned left.

*

When they reached the shore, they found themselves fighting through a fish market in the middle of packing up for the day. No matter where Friday dodged, she was in somebody’s way. At one point, a man picked her up by the shoulders and moved her one step to the left so he could push a handcart through.

“Excuse me?” Friday said. She’d been good about practicing Spanish, but this slipped out in English.

“Guillem!” yelled a woman. She jumped down from a stack of crates, landing on thick-soled boots with a thud that drew the attention of everyone around. No one got in her way as she cut through the crowd.

“She was in the way,” Guillem argued.

“Idiot,” the woman said. She came to a stop in front of Guillem, blocking his handcart. “A lady is never in the way. Your way should yield.”

The woman squared up to Guillem with a mean smirk on her face. Friday crossed her arms. The woman was probably twenty years her senior, her hair in gray ringlets tied back in a ponytail. She wasn’t dressed like the others. The fishermen wore light garments that were easy to move in, but this woman was wearing a canvas one-piece that almost reminded Friday of Clark’s Aviator costume. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, and with a firm grip, wiped down the shoulders of Friday’s shirt.

“Hostia!” Guillem snapped. “Doña Sílvia, my hands aren’t dirty.”

Doña Sílvia carefully folded her handkerchief and returned it to her pocket. The gaze she leveled on Guillem was ice cold.

“Guillem, you have still forgotten to apologize,” she said.

“Like hell–” Guillem yelled. “Doña Sílvia, this is ridiculous.”

Doña Sílvia snatched the front of his shirt and gave it a threatening tug.

“Hey!” Cody called. He and Claire were fighting back through the crowd now that they’d realized they’d lost Friday. “Qué chingados… Friday–!”

“What? It’s my fault?” she yelled back in English. Then, to Doña Sílvia and Guillem, with a big fake smile: “Lo siento a vosotros. Todo bien. Adiós.”

Doña Sílvia’s full attention snapped to Friday. She released Guillem’s shirt.

“You aren’t Spanish?” she asked. “Where’d you come from?”

Friday winced. It wasn’t speaking English that had given her away, but her shit accent in Spanish.

“Uh, somos viajeros,” she said. “Gracias, adiós.”

“Travelers from where, pray tell?” Doña Sílvia asked, dogging her as Friday tried to meet Cody and Claire halfway. “When did you arrive?”

Friday smiled and nodded, pretending not to understand the question. “Adiós,” she said cheerily, just as she finally reached Cody and Claire. Cody wore a dark expression. Friday tugged him around by his shirt collar before he could open his mouth. “Leave it, let’s go.”

They wove their way out of the fish market, which was easier now that they were the dead center of attention. Apparently Doña Sílvia was not someone to offend. She trailed a few paces behind them until they passed outside the perimeter of the market. Friday looked over her shoulder and saw Doña Sílvia still watching them as they hurried down to the water.

Cody had his sights on a line of jostling fishing boats tied to the pier. There weren’t many people down there at this time of day, but there was a woman in a red jumpsuit twirling a wrench while she chatted with a man with a bushy gray beard, also in a jumpsuit like Doña Sílvia’s.

“A week, maybe two, ay, I don’t know…I have to recycle everything, you know. No new parts that don’t come all the way from Sardinia.”

Cody walked quickly down the planks, Friday and Claire trailing along. The woman with the wrench and the man with the beard moved into his path, blocking his access to the rest of the pier.

Up close, the two of them were more intimidating. Wrench aside, the woman was probably nearly seven feet tall, and even through the jumpsuit, Friday could tell she carried a lot of muscle. The man wasn’t as large, but he didn’t look like the accommodating type.

Cody grimaced. For a second, Friday wondered if he’d been planning on stealing a boat.

“Hola,” Friday said with a bright smile. “¿Qué es el costo uh, viajar al otro lado? ¿Con quién debo hablar?”

The pair looked at each other.

“With Doña Sílvia…but you can’t cross,” said the woman.

“What?” Cody snapped. “Why not?”

“You won’t find anyone willing to ferry you farther than Palma, and you’d just be stranded there,” said the woman. “You won’t find a boat for sale, either. Where are you trying to go?”

“Italy,” Cody said.

The woman looked to the man with the beard, but he was looking at Cody. He slowly reached a hand forward, until he was almost touching Cody’s shoulder. Then he firmly jabbed the bullet hole in Cody’s shoulder.

Cody hissed and backpedaled right into Claire.

“You’ve bled through,” the man said.

A hint of red stained Cody’s shirt. The spot where he’d been grazed by the drone had opened up again.

“These guys are pretty interesting, huh?” the woman chirped. “What do you think, Don Àngel?”

The man, Don Àngel, slowly nodded.

“Doña Sílvia will want to talk to them.”

Cody growled and pushed past Don Àngel, down the pier. Friday and Claire watched him jump into a medium-sized fishing boat and begin to wrestle with the rope fixing the boat to its mooring.

“Ah…” Claire said.

Friday muttered something completely gibberish to excuse herself, and Claire trailed after her. For whatever reason, neither Don Àngel nor the woman seemed particularly interested in stopping them from stealing a boat.

“Cody…”

“What?” Cody jerked his head up. His arms were tangled up in rope, a fight he was losing, judging by his attitude.

“We’re stealing a boat?” Friday asked. “Do we have the food and water to make it across?”

Their last attempted journey by sea was a barely-scabbed memory. The only reason they weren’t three sun-bleached skeletons bobbing somewhere off the coast of England right now was dumb luck. Even looking at the rise and fall of the fishing boats with the tide twisted Friday’s stomach. She’d known that to get to Italy, they would need to go by boat, but she hadn’t imagined them leaving today. She’d been counting on the price of passage adding another week or two of delay.

Cody had nearly succeeded in unmooring the boat, but he stopped long enough to shoot her with a long glare. Friday didn’t budge. Finally, Cody broke first.

“We’re so close,” he said. “Please. Don’t make me go through a dozen hoops when we’re this close.”

Friday looked back over her shoulder. Don Àngel and the woman were gone, which wasn’t good.

“Claire, you check the other boats for supplies,” she said. “I’ll see what we have on this one. Cody, fix your shoulder, you look pitiful.”

He’d bled well through his shirt. Swearing, he wrestled his arm out of the sleeve and started the process of re-bandaging it. Friday joined him on the deck of the boat, but she didn’t waste time fussing over him. If they were doing this, they only had a narrow window before somebody came to stop them.

25.7 || 25.9

[prairiesongserial]

25.7

Claire had promised that there was nothing to worry about now that they were inside Barcelona’s city limits, but Friday still didn’t feel comfortable walking down the street in the open. Every time she heard a mechanical whir overhead, she had the urge to duck for cover.

Friday didn’t see how Claire could be so confident about how the drones worked; she had said herself that she’d never actually gone toe-to-toe with one until today. And while Claire’s plan to get them past the drones guarding the city limits had worked, it had also gotten Cody shot.

Claire looped her arm through Friday’s just as Friday was about to scurry into an open shop door.

“I don’t think we need ham,” she said, pulling Friday away. Friday glanced regretfully back toward shelter as the shadow of a drone passed over the cobblestones. “Relax, okay? You’re acting like a criminal.”

Claire held Friday firmly by her side as the drone lazily mapped its way down the street. Friday’s hair stood up on her arms the whole time, but–as promised–the drone didn’t shoot.

Cody strolled up on Claire’s other side, and stuck his arm through hers to match.

“Ow,” he said, clearly having forgotten about his grazed shoulder. “What are we talking about? Do we have enough money for lunch?”

Friday gave a wobbly hand gesture. They needed to see how much passage to Italy would cost them before they got any bright ideas about buying bread. Then, petulantly, she added: “Claire thinks we look like criminals. I guess she would know.”

“The drones won’t hurt you,” Claire said. “Not unless you’re trying to go somewhere you shouldn’t. They’re not smart, I told you.”

Friday rolled her eyes, and saw Cody do the same.

*

Crossing the city took longer than expected. Claire was sure they were going in circles, but it turned out Barcelona was just that big. Each time Cody asked for directions, he was reassured he was headed in the right direction–although he did get funny looks. It figured that in a city that patrolled its border with drones that shot on sight, newcomers would be a mystery.

They were probably halfway across the city when Friday heard the sound of a swarm of drones–not just one or two on a neighboring street, but what sounded like hundreds of them. She felt the buzzing in her teeth. Even Claire hesitated.

They were in the shadow of an enormous building. Friday had caught a peek of it here and there as they made their way across the city, but could only ever see one spindly tower at a time, the rest obscured by trees or other buildings. She was sure it was the same building she had seen from Señor Hugo’s mountain; it dwarfed everything around it. Now that she had an unobstructed view, it was clear that it was a giant cathedral.

“So that’s why she told us to cut south before we went east,” Cody said–referring back, Friday guessed, to the elderly nun he’d asked for directions on the streetcar. He scratched the prickle of stubble on his chin. “Hm.”

Friday didn’t see how he could be so calm. Just looking at the cathedral, Friday’s heart hammed at the audacity of it. From this distance, the intricately carved facade looked like the natural chaos of barnacles on a cliffside, or a system of caves hollowed out by the tide. It didn’t look like something people should be able to make. She couldn’t help but wish Val was here to see it with her. She wanted to see the awe on his face, though she honestly wasn’t sure whether he would have hated it or loved it. Someone had decided they could build a church–really, a sculpture–the size of a city block, and they’d gone ahead and done it. 

Well, they’d mostly done it. There was a crane perched on top, where apparently there was still work to be done.

All around the enormous church, drones flew in orderly fleets. There must have been hundreds of them. The formation was mesmerizing. They left no gaps. Compared to this, the drones guarding the city had been basically just fucking around.

Friday tugged on Claire’s arm, trying to get her to move out of the middle of the street. None of the drones had peeled off to investigate the three interlopers, but Friday didn’t like how utterly deserted the surrounding area had suddenly become. Apparently locals didn’t dare get this close.

Claire was totally hypnotized by the sight. She stood rooted in place, head tilted upwards to watch the drones. Her eyebrows were furrowed, but she looked more baffled than worried.

“Claire,” Friday hissed. She shook Claire by the arm when she still wouldn’t budge. Cody was slow to move, too, but he at least wasn’t completely frozen. He pulled Claire back by her other arm, and between the two of them, they managed to drag her back down the street.

“I really don’t get it,” Claire said. “Why is Hemisphere here?”

“What do you mean?” asked Cody, though Friday saw understanding catch up with him seconds after he asked. The drones they’d encountered at the Canadian border had made their way to England, and now they were here in Spain. There would have to be a single source, and from what Claire had just said, it sounded like that source was Hemisphere. That wouldn’t have been surprising–Friday had been pretty sure the Queen was connected to Hemisphere–except Lady hadn’t had anything nearly as advanced at her disposal.

“Where did you say the Queen got her drones from?” Friday asked.

“An overseas supplier,” Claire said breezily. “Hemisphere. Is that strange?”

“You mean Canada, right?” Friday asked, studying Claire’s face. “They’re the ones who put the Queen on the throne and sent her a bunch of drones to try out.”

She wasn’t sure she was right until she saw Claire’s relaxed smile freeze on her face. Friday could only see Cody in her peripheral vision, but he didn’t look happy.

“Jeez, Friday, that’s kind of need-to-know,” Claire said, wincing. “I shouldn’t have even said the H-word. It just slipped out.”

“We need to know,” Cody said.

“Why is it so weird to see Hemisphere drones here?” Friday asked.

Claire gave an overly dramatic performance of a sigh of attrition. “It’s not like I know anything. It’s an open secret in the Palace Guard that the Queen talks to Hemisphere Canada a lot. And they supported her reign from the beginning. But if Canada were going to do the same thing here, they’re kind of…fucking it up? That’s all I was saying.”

“Why would Canada want Barcelona?” Cody asked.

“Right? My point exactly. Look at this castle-looking thing. The drones are going nuts, as if it’s under siege. That’s a huge waste of resources. If Hemisphere is operating here–and I don’t know of any other way to get ahold of this many drones–what the hell are they doing? You know? Why Barcelona, and why this one building?”

“Guess there’s something inside that Hemisphere wants protected,” Cody said. He had a tone to him that Friday didn’t like.

“Maybe!” Claire chirped. “I, for one, feel grateful that there’s no reason to check.”

Cody gave her a look out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m with Claire,” Friday said. “I don’t like that Hemisphere is so much bigger than we thought. I really don’t like it, and I want to get out of here.”

Cody stared at the cathedral like a dog with its hackles up. Friday watched the parade of drones move across the sky. One slip of the tongue from Claire, and the whole world had tilted. Friday had really thought she’d left Hemisphere behind in the States–how provincial. Hemisphere was everywhere.

Abruptly, Cody turned his back on the whole thing. 

“Next time someone gives me directions, remind me to listen,” he said. “Let’s go south.”

25.6 || 25.8

[prairiesongserial]

25.6

Cody stood at the border of Barcelona and waited impatiently to be shot.

It had been an additional week and a half on the mountain, mostly finishing the roof and giving Marcos time to heal. Now that he was no longer bound to a bed and could begin to help Señor Hugo around the house again, it was harder to feel guilty about packing up and heading for the coast.

Claire’s plan to deal with the drones was still the only one they had. Even the extra time to plan hadn’t helped; Friday had no idea how the drones worked, and Cody could only make semi-educated guesses. Claire, on the other hand, claimed that the Queen had gotten a shipment of the things in from overseas at some point, and the guards had been given rudimentary training on how they operated.

“They can’t shoot if they can’t see,” she’d explained, that night on the patio. “If their cameras–the eyes they’ve got in front, if those are covered or broken, they’re programmed not to fire. I think it’s to stop them from hitting each other by accident.”

“Or their pilots,” Friday muttered thoughtfully.

“They don’t really…have pilots,” Claire said. “Or at least, not how you’re thinking. Nobody’s telling them where to go or what to shoot in real time.”

“Then how do they know?” Cody asked, curious.

“You set them up with directions ahead of time.” Claire shrugged; apparently this was the best she could do to describe it. “I don’t know how it works exactly. Lots to do with electronics. Command told us they’re pretty stupid, even with oversight.”

“So the ones at the border have directions to shoot anyone who tries to come into the city?”

Claire nodded. “Something like that, I’d guess.”

“Okay,” Friday said, “if you blind one, it stops being a problem. How do we blind a whole flock of ‘em?”

Claire pointed upwards. It took Cody a moment to realize she wasn’t indicating Señor Hugo’s roof itself, but the thick, canvas tarp she and Friday had left up there with the rest of their construction tools.

“Ever been net fishing?” she asked.

True to the question, the plan required bait. Cody had volunteered immediately. He was the only one who had already outrun the drones–he knew approximately where they’d come from, what to look for, and when they would open fire. Neither Friday nor Claire protested this decision; Cody got the sense that it relieved them, if anything.

He watched the skyline and fidgeted with the belt loop of his jeans, rubbing the rough denim between thumb and forefinger. The drones hadn’t shown up immediately this time–maybe they were occupied somewhere else. Or maybe he wasn’t close enough. Cody took a few more steps forward, and was rewarded with the sight of a swarm of small discs on the horizon, their metal chassis reflecting the afternoon sun.

He hoped Friday and Claire were ready. They’d given him the signal to go ahead and cross the border, so he had to assume they were.

He also hoped, in the last second before the drones reached him, that they weren’t actually controlled by a human being who would see the trap coming a mile away.

True to the way they had acted the first time around, the drones didn’t stop or offer a warning before opening fire. Cody had already taken off running by the time they did so. He’d pivoted to his right and pushed off the ground hard, careful to skirt what the drones seemed to consider the outermost border of their jurisdiction without crossing back over to the other side. His heart hammered in his chest–he could hear bullets striking the ground around him, ricocheting off trees, but couldn’t risk the split second it would take to look back and see how fast the drones were gaining on him.

Cody sped up. His leg muscles complained, but not as hard as they might have a few months ago–the farm work on the mountain had been good for him. He could see Friday and Claire ahead, probably ten yards away, and knew he would have to time his arrival perfectly.

It had taken a day of surveying the area from a distance, but they had found the perfect spot for the trap: two trees roughly aligned with each other, with high, sturdy branches that Friday and Claire could perch in. They did so now, the tarp stretched taut between them, a deep green field hanging in the air. Claire had posited that the color might work to their advantage–the drones would probably consider it part of the tree canopy and try to fly through.

Cody reached the tree line. It was uphill from here, but not far. A bullet whizzed past his ear, close enough that he could feel it disturb the air in its wake. Another grazed his shoulder. It felt like being touched, however briefly, with the edge of a hot pan. He pushed himself harder, locking eyes with the tarp until it was the only thing that filled his field of vision. The drones buzzed behind him, a horde of insects looking for a corpse to pick over.

At the last moment, he threw his body downwards. He slid beneath the tarp feet-first, grass rubbing stains into his jeans, and instinctively sprang back to his feet once he was safely on the other side. There was a dull, thudding sound that he mistook for his pulse in his ears. He saw quickly that it was actually the noise of the drones colliding with the tarp and each other in a pile-up, the canvas bulging towards him as they attempted to keep flying.

“Now,” Claire yelled, from atop her tree, and let go of her corner of the tarp.

Friday did as well. The canvas was naturally heavy, but they’d weighed the corners down with stones just to ensure it would envelop the drones and trap them inside, taking them to the ground with it. Once they were caught and felled, they weren’t strong enough to budge the tarp, even as a unit.

Cody caught his breath as Friday and Claire shimmied down from their trees and secured the tarp over the drones, using larger stones they’d taken from Señor Hugo’s patio to hold down the edges. He reached up to brush his fingers against his injured shoulder; they came away unsurprisingly sticky with blood.

“Did they get you?” Friday asked.

He startled. He didn’t think she’d been looking. “Just a graze. It could be worse.”

“I threw some bandages in my bag before we left,” she said, and gestured to where they’d piled their travel packs on the ground nearby.

Cody almost insisted he didn’t need a bandage, but thought better of it. He wasn’t going to stand here and bicker with Friday when she had just inarguably saved his life.

“You think that’s all of ‘em?” he asked, as he rifled through her bag.

“Seems like a small number to patrol a whole city,” Claire said. She had a brick in her hand and was methodically smashing the drones through the tarp. The aim, she’d explained, was to damage them so badly they couldn’t get back up and fly, even if someone discovered them in distress and removed the tarp.

Cody watched her go at it for a moment, then asked, “So what, you’re saying there’s more?”

“I don’t know,” she said grimly, brushing her hair from her face with her free hand. “Let’s head into town and find out.”

25.5 || 25.7

[prairiesongserial]

25.5

Cody saw Friday’s eyes widen as she took in the blood on his hands and clothes. He waved her off before her mouth was even halfway open.

“I’m fine.”

“The hell you are,” she snapped.

“Worry about Marcos,” he said urgently–then found that someone was already relieving him of the other man’s weight. Claire. One of the kids must have gone and gotten her.

“Let’s sit you down,” she told Marcos, who groaned in response as she carried him off to the kitchen. A trail of children followed behind her like ducklings; Cody could hear Claire issuing orders to find a needle, thread, bandages, and silently thanked God that someone with a soldier’s temperament had taken charge. He’d almost forgotten that there was more to Claire than a smiling face shaking an overturned hat for coins.

“Is there liquor around?” Claire asked Señor Hugo, urgently. “He needs that.”

It was unclear if she meant to drink or to clean the wound with. If there was any follow-up, Cody missed it–his attention was snapped back to Friday, who had grabbed one of his hands in hers.

“The blood is mostly Marcos’s,” he told her. It wasn’t as reassuring as he’d meant it to be. He saw the fear in Friday’s eyes spark and catch like the flame of a lighter as her gaze roved over him, searching desperately for where he’d been injured.

“Mostly?” she hissed.

Cody gestured for her to follow him out to the patio, and sat on one of the long benches. Below them, Barcelona hummed with activity, the colorful bird-machines flying in long figure-eights over the coast.

“Cody–” Friday began.

He held up a hand, then pushed up the right leg of his jeans to show her the scratch along the side of his calf. It was no longer bleeding and, in fact, had barely bled at all. It had barely stung on his way back up the mountain–probably because he’d been focusing everything he had on dragging Marcos along with him–but it was starting to throb with pain now.

He heard Friday’s sharp intake of breath, and said, “It’s just a graze. Not even as bad as last time.”

“Someone shot at you?” she asked. “Bandits?”

“Yes–no, what?” Cody asked, frowning at her. “There are bandits around here? Right now?”

She shrugged. “Señor Hugo was telling me that he used to run with them, before he settled down.”

“He did? That’s crazy. Are you sure you heard him right?”

“I swear,” Friday said. She finally sat down next to him, straddling the bench and leaning forward to get a closer look at his leg. “Can we stick to the subject? Do we need to be worried about anyone following you up here with a gun?”

“No,” Cody said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. It was slick with sweat. He was still breathing hard; his body didn’t know he was out of danger yet, but Friday forcing him to hold up his end of the conversation was keeping him present. “It wasn’t like that.”

Friday gave him a look that bordered on exasperated. “Then what was it like?”

Cody forced himself to take a deep breath in, and exhaled heavily. Adrenaline was rapidly flooding out of his body, leaving behind the ache of overworked muscles and–worst of all–the panic he’d been shoving down the whole way up the mountain. He balled his hands into fists in his lap, like that would convince them to stop shaking.

“I asked Marcos to take me down to get a closer look at Barcelona,” he said. “Just to see what I could see, you know. Maybe start figuring out a way to get across the water.”

“And someone shot at you?”

Cody waved her off, though he sensed he couldn’t do much more of that today before Friday blew up at him. “I’m getting there. Marcos said he hadn’t been down that way in years, but he showed me the best way for us to go when we head out. Took me all the way up to the city limits, I think.”

He was dancing around the point, and Friday knew it. He could tell by the way she was looking at him.

“That’s where you got shot,” she said.

“Yeah.” He took another breath. “Look–what I’m gonna say next is gonna sound crazy.”

“Can’t be as crazy as anything else that’s happened lately,” Friday muttered.

Cody laughed through his teeth. “Fair. You remember when we got to the Canadian border, how we couldn’t cross it? Ezra showed us those eyeball things that would shoot us, if we tried.”

“Drones,” Friday said. She could probably picture it with more clarity than Cody. He’d still been recovering from standing next to the explosion that had killed Johannes. “I remember.”

“Well,” he said, “Barcelona has ‘em too.”

Friday had been staring down at his scabbed-over wound, eyebrows furrowed, but now she glanced up sharply. Cody expected her to interject, to ask something, but she just waited for him to explain. At least she seemed to believe him.

“They didn’t talk to us, or warn us, or anything,” he went on. He and Marcos had barely even seen them coming. The strange discs had zipped over the horizon and been above them in seconds, vultures honing in on carrion. “Just came right over and opened fire. Same kind of…I don’t know, invisible bullets? That the ones from Canada had. Not the best aim, but I guess you don’t have to aim when you can just spray like that.”

Months ago, Cody had watched Ezra use one of the Canadian drones to light a cigarette. He hadn’t had the capacity to wonder, back then, what that sort of white-hot energy would feel like going through flesh and blood. And now he never needed to wonder, because he knew. It was the kind of heat that half-cauterized a wound as it was still causing it; the reason Cody’s leg had barely bled at all.

“I tried to shoot back at them,” he added. “I know it wasn’t–smart, but it was all I could think to do. I knocked one, I think I got it out of the air, but there were still a bunch firing on us. So we had to run. That was when Marcos…got hit.”

Marcos had been shoving Cody ahead of him, trying to drag Cody out of a shootout he’d never win, and one had gotten off a lucky shot. It had punched a hole through his side. Cody had felt sick with guilt the whole way back up the mountain. He’d apologized to Marcos for asking to see Barcelona, for firing on the drones, for Marcos feeling the need to protect him, but it wasn’t enough to make it right. He still felt sick now, with no sign of what was happening inside the kitchen. 

“Shit,” Friday said, grimly. “How’d you get away?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Cody said. He took another breath to steady himself, and finished the story. “I dragged Marcos into a bush and we just laid flat on the ground ‘til I poked my head up and saw the drones were gone. Maybe they thought we were dead, or they can’t go past a certain point.”

“Or someone’s controlling them, and turned them around,” Friday said. It was a good guess; Cody hadn’t considered that there could be a human touch directly guiding the drones’ malice. He’d assumed they had minds of their own, that they acted like pack animals or birds of prey circling in on anyone they perceived as an intruder. But anything was possible.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe what?” Claire asked, stepping out onto the patio and shutting the door behind her. Her eyes dropped to Cody’s leg, but she tossed him a wadded-up, soaking wet scrap of cloth rather than comment. “Should we be worried about anyone chasing you? Marcos said no, but–”

“No,” Cody said, catching the cloth one-handed. The scent of alcohol made his eyes water. “I was just telling Friday, it was machines that fired on us. At the Barcelona border. How is Marcos?”

“He needs to rest, but I think he’ll live. Nothing vital got hit, as far as I can tell, and he was shot clean through.” Claire turned to look at Friday. “Machines?”

Cody tuned Friday out as she began relaying his story to Claire. He bent over his injured leg and used the cloth to clean the tacky, drying blood from his skin. A part of him that had been rigid with tension the whole way up the mountain finally uncoiled as he focused on the sting. Marcos was going to be fine. Maybe not all the way fine, but he would live.

Cody wrung out the blood-soaked cloth onto the stones of the patio, and slowly tuned back into the conversation. His hands weren’t shaking as much as they had before.

“Can’t we go around, find another port city?” Friday was asking. “If Barcelona’s too dangerous to get into, then–”

“No,” Cody said. Both Friday and Claire looked startled to hear him speak up again; he brushed off their reactions and kept going. “We can’t waste any more time going around. We go through Barcelona.”

“How?” Friday asked.

“Actually,” Claire said. “I think I have an idea.”

25.4 || 25.6

[prairiesongserial]

25.4

Claire grimaced as the cold scissors slid across her forehead. Friday held the comb with her other hand, pulling the hair down against the blade as she cut.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Claire whined, squeezing her eyes closed as the lock of hair fell away.

Friday winked at her–not that she saw it. “Yes, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been cutting my own hair forever.”

“Sure, but you have that windswept beachy look that you don’t have to be too careful with. My hair is thick. It’s straight. It feels like you’re giving me a bowl cut.”

“Relax, Claire,” Friday sing-songed. She pulled the comb through Claire’s hair and slid her scissors into place. “Let the master work.”

She and Claire had run out of shingles, but the roof was looking much better. All they had to do now was wait on supplies. The last few days, they’d found plenty to do with themselves. Marcos had recruited them for a major laundry undertaking–all the bedding needed to be washed before winter. There were also regular house chores to do: cooking, cleaning, and splitting firewood. He kept them busy.

But today Marcos was going into town with Cody, and Señor Hugo refused to give them anything to do.

“You girls work too hard,” he’d said. “Rest today.”

Friday was getting better with Spanish. They’d been staying with Señor Hugo for a few weeks now, and having people to talk to all day really pushed her along. She could have simple conversations without Cody’s help.

Señor Hugo watched Friday and Claire’s conversation curiously. Since Marcos had gone to town this time, Señor Hugo was making lunch today. He worked around the two of them in the kitchen.

“Quieres que yo…corto tu pelo?” Friday asked him. She showed him her scissors and pointed them at him, eyebrows raised.

Señor Hugo grimaced and waved away the offer, returning quickly to the vegetables he’d been chopping. Every so often he turned to check on Friday’s progress with Claire. She was not in any danger of a bowl cut. Friday was giving Claire a pixie cut since she’d been complaining of her hair getting in her way up on the roof. Even tied back, little strands escaped and blew in her face. Friday had plans to pounce on Cody when he came back as well. He’d hacked his hair off himself a while ago, and now that it had grown back, the man was scraggly.

“Puedo hacerte una estrella,” Friday teased, waggling her eyebrows at Señor Hugo.

Señor Hugo laughed and shook his head.

Friday finished up with Claire, who scurried away to find a mirror.

“No trust,” Friday clicked her tongue. By the time she turned back around, there was a little girl in the chair Claire had just been sitting in. This one was Monserrat.

“Oh,” said Friday. “Bienvenido el salón.”

Monserrat giggled. “És la cuina,” she said.

“¿No la perruqueria?” asked Señor Hugo playfully.

Monserrat spoke too fast for Friday, but Señor Hugo jumped in. Everyone in the orphanage also spoke a language called Catalán, which they used interchangably with Spanish. Though genuinely Friday couldn’t hear the difference–fast was fast.

Eventually Señor Hugo looped Friday back in. Monserrat wanted a haircut. She was already taking out her braid as Señor Hugo carefully explained how Monserrat wanted it to look.

“No tan corto,” he added with emphasis as Friday began to comb water through Monserrat’s hair.

“No tan corto,” Monserrat agreed.

Friday got to work. She decided to play an over the top character, despite her difficulty with Spanish. A flamboyant hairdresser apparently transcended language, because Monserrat giggled through the whole thing.

“Mwa! Excelente, tan bella,” Friday exclaimed. She gestured dramatically with the comb for emphasis. She was having a great time; it was like doing a burlesque performance for an audience of two.

When she finished, she asked for Señor Hugo’s input. She spun Monserrat around to face him.

“Que adorable,” Señor Hugo said.

“Es tu turno,” Monserrat said as she dropped down from the chair. She gave a vain flick of her hair, enjoying how much lighter it felt. She smiled brightly and was about to leave when Friday blocked her way.

“Where’s my money?” Friday said, still in character. “For a haircut that good, I need…a thousand gold pesetas.”

“¡Un mil!” Monserrat yelled. “¿De oro?”

She began to appeal to the saints with a tone that suggested she was cursing Friday out. Señor Hugo pulled the dismayed Monserrat aside and stage-whispered something in her ear. Monserrat nodded.

Señor Hugo sat down in the kitchen chair and called for Friday’s services. Friday acted like she didn’t see Monserrat start to tip-toe away as Señor Hugo pointed out how short he wanted various parts of his hair. When Friday started to turn around, about to catch Monserrat in the act of slipping out on the bill, Señor Hugo called her back around with a frantic “Mira aquí, aquí, aquí–Mira qué largo tiene esta sección de cabello.”

Once Monserrat had successfully fled the scene, Friday dropped the character. She grinned at Señor Hugo.

“It’s your turn,” she said, repeating what Monserrat had declared earlier. “How about it?”

Señor Hugo acquiesced. He didn’t give her any direction, so Friday let her own taste lead her.

He closed his eyes as she worked on him, and the kitchen fell silent except for the clean snick of the scissors.

“Your Val is a priest, is that right?” he asked her.

“Oh,” Friday said. “That’s right. I guess Cody told you about him.”

“Mm. It’s not an easy road,” said Señor Hugo. “To be with someone whose heart is divided.”

Friday was slow to understand, and slow to respond.

“I wouldn’t say I’m with him,” she said. “I just would be. If he wanted that.” Friday let the scissors rest heavily against Señor Hugo’s head. “Pretty stupid, huh?”

“Love is never stupid,” Señor Hugo said.

Friday continued to cut his hair. She tried to stop thinking about Val. When she met him again, she was going to do something crazy, but she didn’t know if she was going to kiss him or hit him. She wanted to hear it from his mouth that there had been no other choice, that splitting up had been the only way. She didn’t like knowing that Val and John had run into an obstacle so much larger than them that the only way around was apart. It scared her. 

“So how did the two of you meet?” Friday asked. She closed the scissors on the hair behind Señor Hugo’s ear. “You and your priest.”

“Ah…en aquel entonces, yo era bandolero. Vivía en las montañas al oeste como miembro de una banda.” Señor Hugo looked sheepish, but all Friday really caught was that it had been in the mountains.

“Banda?” she asked, and mimed strumming a guitar.

“Ah–no,” Señor Hugo said. “Una banda que robar a los viajeros. ¿Entiendes? Son muy malos, los bandoleros.” He looked very sheepish now. “Mi vida había fundado este orfanato después de un desastre. Y nuestra banda decidió robarle a ella. Conocerla cambió todo.”

Friday nodded along, but there was smoke coming out of her ears. She was pretty sure she couldn’t be interpreting him correctly, because if she was, Señor Hugo was saying that back in the old days, he used to be a mountain bandit.

“You…you robbed the orphanage?” Friday asked in halting Spanish. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Señor Hugo confirmed it and continued his story. He spoke slowly and chose his words carefully, rephrasing each idea until he landed on words that Friday recognized. “I was impressed by her fearlessness when we arrived,” he said. “She was a beanpole with glasses, very weak. But she didn’t cower or beg. She told the leader of our group that she would give him all the money she had, but she wanted him to see the children that would be dead before winter even arrived.” Señor Hugo had a fond smile on his face as he continued. “She beckoned all of us inside, and we saw the sick and injured children. She told us to wait with them while she fetched the money.”

Friday had long since finished giving Señor Hugo his haircut. She leaned against the kitchen counter, scissors forgotten in her hands.

“She made us wait for a long time. Some of the children were crying. Marcos was there, just a baby. He was held by one of the older children, who was barely strong enough to carry him.

“Before the priest came back down, I told my companions, ‘If you rob this priest, I’ll kill you.’ For years, these men were my brothers. I knew them; I knew none of them wanted those children to starve now that they had looked them in the eyes. They made a show of spitting on me and beating me, but when they were finished, they left–without the money.

“After that, I needed a new job,” Señor Hugo laughed. “I told the priest I would work for her. If she kept me around, she wouldn’t need to worry about that kind of trouble anymore. But my life, she raised her chin and told me: ‘I need a gardener. I can’t pay you much.’ And that was that. I had no choice but to devote myself to this place.”

Friday hummed and nodded. In the nave, there was some sort of commotion. One of the older girls, Genoveva, if Friday wasn’t mixing her up, rushed into the kitchen. She spoke quickly and breathlessly. It was something to do with Marcos.

Señor Hugo was still rising from his chair when Cody and Marcos arrived in a flock of hovering children. Only Marcos was calm in the sea of panic. Cody looked almost gray with the effort it must have taken to drag Marcos up the mountain. Marcos had been shot in the side; red bloomed from under the hand he had pressed to the wound.

In all the commotion, Friday almost didn’t notice that Cody’s hands were red, too.

25.3 || 25.5