Rebel Heart

"You can do that?"

"Yes."

"What else can you do?" he asked.

"What else do you need?"

"More than you'd like to know," he promised. "For now, food and water will be good. We'll take what we need and nothing more. Sending coordinates."

She reviewed the numbers that popped up on her screen.

"You're not far," she murmured, typing in lock and alarm release codes. "I'm sending the location of the nearest supply center."

"If you control all these stores, why not send people out for food?" he asked.

"It's complicated," she responded, mind on the manic commander and his equally unreasonable decisions.

"Complicated," he repeated. "I won't ask. You go shooting this evening?"

"No. In the morning. My friend Elise is on the special security team. She lets me train with them, and the general is very supportive."

"Good girl."

"The locks will open at zero four twenty-five. The facility will rearm at four forty-nine exactly. You don't want to be trapped inside when it does."

"We'll move quickly."

Lana tucked the microcomputer away, gazing at the valley again.

"How are you?" he questioned.

"I'm well. Healthy, at least. I worry we won't be enough to maintain government ops for much longer. This type of contingency was not one we planned for. I guess I'm scared, but I'm too tired to tell," she answered. "I was thinking today that I wish my dog was with me, so I don't die alone. I had hoped to be married by this point of my life."

"Married? Even with the amendment outlawing divorce? Sounds like madness to me."

"There was a time when the national marriage rate was fairly high," she reminded him. "Before the East-West War. The point of being married is not to get a divorce."

"We see how well that worked. You have to admit that seven of ten marriages ending in divorce is not a very promising statistic. It's one of the few Wartime laws I agreed with. At least companions have the same rights as spouses without the hassle of marriage. That seems like a better deal to me."

"Didn't you ever hear your grandparents tell stories about how they met and got married?" she pursued.

"Yes. And how they got divorced, my grandfather four times over."

"My grandparents had better luck," she admitted. "They met when the classes were divided after the war. My grandfather was from the elite and my grandmother from the manual labor class. He gave up everything to be with her, and they died quite old, holding hands even in the end."