Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4), Aaron Ritchey [best beach reads txt] 📗

I stoked up the boiler with the last of the coal, added several gallons of water to each of the Stanleys, and then climbed into the Marilyn’s driver’s seat. I followed the Audrey Hepburn down the road.

Two hours later, the Audrey stopped in the middle of the road.

“Marisol wants us to take her home,” I said.

Wren said exactly what I was thinking. “Poor girl. We can’t. No time.”

But she hadn’t seen Marisol’s tears. I tried to engineer a solution. “What if we put up a guard, maybe Rachel. We can set up a signaling system. If Rachel sees Edger’s convoy coming, she fires three shots, and we come back quick.”

Sharlotte had heard us through the communication tube. “That sounds reasonable. Come on, Wren, she’s still so little.”

“Twelve isn’t little,” Wren grumbled. “But I won’t be the bad guy in this. Just ’cause I didn’t really have a mother don’t mean we should take Marisol’s away from her.”

We both heard Sharlotte sigh, long and hard. She hated talking about Mama, even still.

“Okay,” I said, “we do this quick. Maybe we can get Marisol’s people to give us some supplies. Or maybe they saw Edger come past. And we can ask about Aspen.”

Finally, both Wren and Sharlotte agreed.

(iv)

I walked Rachel to the line of trees about two hundred meters from the road. My pants-shoes worked fairly well, but my feet hurt a little from my wounds.

Ha. I didn’t know then just how much of a problem my feet would become.

Under the canopy of pines, I stopped. “Okay, Rachel. If you see anything, fire three times, and we’ll come storming back in. Don’t engage them, not without our full force.”

Rachel nodded. Pain showed on her face.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“What if I never see Pilate again?” she asked. “What if I can’t get more of my medication? What if we can’t complete our imperatives?”

“We just can’t let ourselves lose hope is all,” I answered. “We have to use hope as a weapon.”

“Before I had emotions, I had no concept of hope or doubt. I lived in a certainty that my logic could solve any problem I faced. You would call it faith, perhaps, faith in my own abilities and the superiority of the American Reproduction Knowledge Initiative.”

“Sounds like you drank the ARK’s purple Kool-Aid. Propaganda and unquestioning faith are amazing things, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Rachel answered quickly. “It’s better than this self-doubt and terror. Why did evolution give you humans emotions?”

“So, you don’t think you’re human?” I asked.

“I’m not.” She looked me full in the face. “I have a human shape, but I’m different. Everything about me is different.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Maybe I’m not human either.”

She touched my arm. “Don’t tease. You had a mother, a father, sisters. You grew up. I was engineered. Even my DNA isn’t fully human.”

Her words made me shiver. “But you must have human chromosomes, Rachel. How else would you have your shape, your speech, your emotions? No, you’re human.”

“I’m not.” She paused. “It’s critical you understand what the ARK is creating. Part of their research and development into organic weaponry is to transcend the bipedal model to look for the perfect soldier. Other animals might be more efficient soldiers.”

What could I say to that? What kind of monsters was the ARK creating?

I thought of the hogs. On our travels, we’d heard scary stories about huge creatures in the Colorado territory. People called them hogs, and they weren’t like any kind of Outlaw Warlord the Juniper had ever seen. No, these things, if they existed, were psychotic killing machines, beyond all reason. Part of me believed it was only Juniper gossip; part of me was terrified we’d meet them face to face.

Rachel took my hand. “I’m comfortable being a non-human entity. I enjoy the emotions I have, and every day I am feeling more ... feeling more of the stillness at the center of my being. I find great serenity in the silence. But then the fear and doubt create this turmoil in me. Again, why did evolution give humans such feelings?”

I took in a deep breath and answered, “Feelings, love especially, make humans stronger. Love for our families, love for our tribe, it makes us fight harder to survive. Hence, natural selection made sure we had emotions. Fear included. Fear keeps us honest, or it should.”

“Cavvy!” Wren called to me from the Marilyn. She was right to be impatient. This was the wrong time for a long talk about the intricacies of human emotions and evolution.

“We’ll make it through,” I said to Rachel, and squeezed her hand for emphasis.

She finally coaxed a grin onto her face. “Thank you, Cavatica. I am using my imagination to picture Pilate holding me again and kissing me. My first kiss. It fills me with a dreamy kind of hope.”

“And you say you aren’t human.” I laughed a little.

Rachel laughed along. “And I’m curious about the powerful neurochemical reactions of sexual intercourse.”

“Uh, yeah, awkward,” I muttered. Pilate was my daddy, and the idea of Rachel fantasizing about him made me completely uncomfortable.

Before I could stop her, Rachel pulled me into a hug. She’d forgotten she’d been engineered to be stronger than us simple humans, and I swear my bones cracked. I couldn’t help but let out a strangled little cry.

“Oops, sorry,” Rachel said.

“Don’t engage Edger and her troops,” I said, reminding her. “That would be an oops you can’t take back.”

“I understand.” Rachel’s eyes went distant. “I don’t think I can fight again. The first of your imperatives I embraced was to be kind. Being kind and violent do not go together. Be kind, become a Weller, protect the family if it comes to that. There is an internal paradox to the imperatives.”

“Welcome to humanity,” I said. “We are walking, talking internal paradoxes.”

I left her in the trees and returned to the Marilyn. Ironic, we had this cloned killing machine who couldn’t fight anymore. Talk about a paradox.

And if Rachel’s DNA wasn’t human, what else