Rebel Heart

They shoot them at the same time. Husband and wife. A bolt through the forehead and their bodies crumple to the ground. Nessa screams. And this time, Jack does hear. Run, Robbie! she screams. Run!

The little boy kicks and wriggles in the Tonton’s arms. He bites his hand. The man cries out and drops him. Robbie’s free. He runs through the fields, as fast as he can, while his sister yells to go faster. But it’s summer and the crops are high and he’s only four years old.

The commander shouts orders. One man starts after the little boy. Too late. The eager new settler is out of the wagon. Aiming his firestick. He shoots. Robbie drops in his tracks. The wheatgrass folds around him.

The commander’s lost control of the situation. It should have gone smoothly. But it’s chaos. As he and the settler yell blame at each other, Nessa begins to scream. Her high-pitched wail of grief and rage shivers Jack’s skin.

Her shirt has been torn. The men laugh as she tries to cover herself, weeping, screaming, lashing out. They pin her hands behind her. One of them touches her roughly.

The commander sees it. He moves fast. He shoots his man through the head.

Somehow, in all the confusion, Nessa gets hold of a bolt shooter. She shoves it in her mouth and pulls the trigger.

Jack turns away. He leans his head against the white horse’s neck, drawing in deep breaths. Atlas shifts uneasily.

What a mess. A botched job. They were obviously supposed to take Nessa and Robbie, young and healthy, and kill the sickly parents. Instead, all dead.

The Tonton have changed their game all right. He’d heard rumours of land grabs and resettlement months ago. But not this far west, never this far west. They’re rolling over the land like the plague.

If this is Tonton territory, then so is the storm belt. And that means Molly’s in danger.

Now he’s more than worried. He’s afraid.

Jack leaves the trail. It isn’t safe.

He and Atlas travel east along unknown roads. The going’s hard and unfriendly. Dark, stony ways, never warmed by the sun and seldom used. He spots the odd traveller in the distance – a moving dot in the landscape – but they must be as keen-eyed and eager as he to pass without notice because that’s as close as anybody ever gets. He hurries, resting for an hour here, two hours there. He has plenty of time to think about what he saw.

The Tonton. Most recently, the private army of Vicar Pinch: madman, drug lord and self-styled King of the World. Now dead.

They defeated the Tonton at Pine Top Hill. He and Saba and Ike, with the help of Maev, her Free Hawk girl warriors and their road raider allies. And Saba killed Vicar Pinch. But they didn’t wipe out the Tonton. They didn’t kill every last one. Even if they had, he’s lived long enough, he’s seen enough to know that you can’t kill all the badness in the world. You cut it down in front of you only to find that it’s standing right behind you.

The Tonton are most definitely still standing. But different now. They’ve always been scruffy, grubby even, with long hair and full beards. These were clean-shaven, with short, cropped hair. Their robes were clean. Their boots, too, and all their gear. Their horses were groomed, with shining coats. A new clean-look Tonton.

Not quite clean enough. The operation back at the valley went badly wrong. The commander didn’t have control of his men. They were slow to obey him. And the way that one roughed up Nessa showed that some of them still want to play by the old rules. But the commander shot him. Fast. Without hesitation. Message delivered loud and clear to anybody else who might be thinking that way. New game. New rules. No second chances.

So.

The little green valley. A good patch of land. Shelter. Clean water. The Tonton kill the sick wife and the worn-out husband. And if it had gone according to plan, they would have taken Robbie and his sister. Both young and healthy. But where would they have taken them to? Where did the boy and girl in the cart, the resettlers, come from? Maybe they’d been snatched from their families too. But they certainly seemed willing enough. More than willing. The boy joined in with the clearance, took matters into his own hands.

The quartered circle brand on their foreheads means something. In Hopetown, the Tonton branded the whores with a W, but he’s never heard of anything else like that. Branding marks you out permanently. Shows what group you belong to.

Healthy young people, branded. Territory expansion. Grabbing the good land and the clean water. Control of resources. A new, more disciplined Tonton carrying out orders. But whose orders? Somebody higher up. Somebody working to a larger plan. A man with a plan.

Such a man would have to be powerful. He’d have to be determined, disciplined, persuasive and very, very smart.

Jack knows of only one such man. A Tonton. He was Vicar Pinch’s second in command. The power behind the throne. He rode away from Pine Top Hill before the battle even started. He abandoned his mad master, leaving him to his fate without a backwards glance. And he took a number of men with him.

DeMalo.

All of this must been rolling out for some time. To get to this point, it has to have been well under way while Vicar Pinch was still alive. Alive but toothless. DeMalo must have been building up his operation on the side. That would explain the rumours Jack started to hear a couple of years ago. From the little he knows of the man, that he’s seen for himself, he can tell that DeMalo isn’t the type to go for a bloody overthrow.

He’s much more subtle. He’s the stiletto in the dark. The poison in the drink. He’ll have been biding his time, waiting for the right moment. Jack can imagine the tiny inward smile DeMalo must have allowed himself when he realized they were about to do his dirty work for him at Pine Top Hill.

The main thing is, he got his plan rolling out of sight and earshot of Pinch. He couldn’t have done that without somehow winning the continued loyalty and silence of his Tonton followers.

Unheard of. Very interesting. Very worrying.

Jack would give a great deal to know exactly what DeMalo’s up to. Where. How. And why.

The sooner he gets to the Lost Cause, the better.

The tavern stands at the crossroads ahead. It crouches low, hugging the ground. A shabby heap of a place, alone on the dry, wide plain, ringed in by black, brooding peaks.

The Lost Cause. At last.

Thanks to the route he took to avoid any chance of meeting the Tonton, it’s taken him a week of hard travel to get here. Much longer than he’d expected.

It’s just before dawn. Dawn and dusk, show time here in the storm belt. He checks the sky above. Right on time, ugly brown clouds are piling up over the plain. They scud in from all directions, tumbling and tripping in their haste. There’s a mighty blast brewing. A sulphate storm.

Atlas tosses his head, dances a bit. Jack heels him on. Once they reach the tavern, he jumps down and settles him in the stables. The only other horse there is Prue, Molly’s reddish longcoat mare. There’s fresh fodder in the bin and water in the trough. That’s a relief at least. All this time, he’s been worried that he’d find the place had been torched by the Tonton. Still, the stable’s usually full of customers’ mounts: mules, horses, and the odd camel.

As he walks towards the door, the tavern sign creaks in the rising wind. The paint’s flaking and faded, but he can just make out the tiny boat foundering on an angry sea, about to be swamped by a huge wave. Every time he’s been here, he’s half-expected to find that boat gone. Sunk to the bottom of the sea.