Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) by Aaron Ritchey (best books to read for teens .txt) 📗

onto a branch, knocked snow off which fell in a muffled thump, and then the bird flittered on away.

“Do you hear that?” Sharlotte asked me over Marisol’s head.

I nodded and grinned a little. It was Pilate’s sermon from Green River all over again. “I hear the silence. I hear you, Sharlotte. You spoke, and we all listened. We are the voices in the silence.”

“That’s God enough, I reckon,” Sharlotte said. Then she turned to me and drew me in to hug along with Marisol. “We missed your birthday back in Glenwood Springs. Happy Birthday, Cavvy. I don’t have much to give you, but Eryn Lopez did. God bless her, and God bless you.”

No cake. No birthday song, but all in all, the gifts I received from Eryn Lopez were by far the best I ever got.

“Now,” Sharlotte said, “let’s get the wood loaded up in the Stanleys and get our boys back.”

(iii)

Still no sound of gunshots from Rachel. Felt like a good omen.

We found wood in the little shack leaning against a toolshed. Inside there was a treasure trove, including old cross-country ski equipment, complete with a pair of boots. And they fit! I’d skied before, with Anju in Wisconsin. Her family had taken pity on me and paid for the whole trip. I thanked God when I slipped on the boots and walked around, trying to convince myself the shoes made my feet hurt less. Regardless, it was another birthday present for me.

Being the daughter of Abigail Weller, we took the skis though I had no real plans on using them. I’d grown up under two framed needlepoint pictures: Waste Not, Want Not and One Woman’s Junk is Another Lady’s Treasure. We were children of the junk trash business, the offspring of salvage monkeys, so we’d leave nothing behind.

Almost as good as the boots, I found rolls and rolls of duct tape. A lot of people might say the microprocessor computer chip was the pinnacle of 20th century technology, but if you ask a Juniper engineer, the obvious answer would be duct tape. And what the 20th century geniuses invented, the 21st improved on. In the toolshed, we found all-weather duct tape with special hyper-adhesives that were water resistant and locked down tight even when damp. Even before the Sino, the oil industry used it on their deep-water science instruments. Good down to six thousand meters and months in the water.

Along with the tape were lots of different shovels, pickaxes, splitting axes, and digging tools. Even a few posthole diggers. I had an idea, a crazy idea, and I knew I’d be taking every last one of those shovels with me. Just in case.

But first, footwear for Sharlotte. Cutting out the toes of one of the hiking boots and slitting up the sides, I julie-rigged a boot for Sharlotte. We had wool socks from Eryn Lopez, and now both of us had warm toes. We ate while we worked: cans of tuna, hash, green chili. We washed it down with water from our jugs. I kept some aside for Rachel, waiting on us and keeping watch.

Wren had disappeared but came back transformed. She’d lost enough weight in Aces’s dungeon that she fit in Eryn’s clothes. She’d found another cowgirl shirt, a leather vest, and a fresh set of jeans. And apparently, Eryn’s make-up kit, which she used to make herself look gorgeous. Leave it to Wren to find a way to look better than she had before we started out. I knew how fast she was with makeup firsthand, so it only took a second for her to become gorgeous. It was clear she wanted to get back to our chase.

Watching my sister come marching through the destruction, a Venus in cowgirl boots, Dutch’s mouth fell open.

Sharlotte sighed. I did, too. My sister and her snake of a boyfriend, both so pretty, and so full of the Devil’s fire.

We walked our Stanleys over to the wood shed, where we loaded up their coal bins with split wood. Ironic, the condo had burned but not the firewood.

We didn’t have much room, but I took an ax with us, a toolbox which held screwdrivers with Home Depot-orange handles, a set of Craftsman socket wrenches, and various other tools. The tools made me feel better. Wren needed guns to feel secure, since she was a gunfighter, but for me? I was an engineer; I needed tools.

After moving stuff around, I loaded up the trunk of the Marilyn. Sharlotte came over to appraise our food situation. We had six cans of fruit, six cans of green beans, and some hunks of beef jerky, along with a box of ancient saltine crackers.

“It ain’t enough,” Sharlotte said. “If things go bad, we’ll run out of food. Are we really that desperate?”

“All depends. We don’t know what Edger has or what’s in Aspen. Maybe we’ll find some nice mountain folk to help us out. Hopefully by then it won’t matter if normal folks know about us. If the ARK questions them, we’ll be long gone. Besides, we’ve done desperate before.”

My sister put an arm around my shoulder. Sharlotte wasn’t a hugger, but we’d gone through a lot together, and I felt her love. “How long do you think our luck is going to hold out? How long can we rely on yours and Pilate’s magic to keep us out of the grave?”

“Maybe it’s not luck,” I said. “Maybe it’s God’s majestic right hand holding us up and guiding us.”

“Until His left hand smacks the crap out of us. Like what Pilate is always talking about.” A sad smile covered her features. “I like to cuss. I really do. But I suppose that doesn’t help our cause.”

I glanced over to make sure no one could hear us, then I whispered, “What do you make of Dutch?”

The sad grin grew mischievous. “Never thought I’d meet someone I hated more than Pilate. Still, what he said to Marisol, how he held her, he might not be as bad we