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

for a minute, but the clouds promised more, a lot more. Night was coming down, bringing a curtain of mute cold. And our main modes of transportation lay trapped in a pit.

Edger watched me approach with hate on her face. The Regios had the neurochemicals that gave them emotions. I loved that she could hate me ’cause it made our victory all that much sweeter.

Only it wasn’t a victory. We’d escaped with our lives, but lost Pilate and Micaiah in the process.

Wren paced, cursed, threw her fists at heaven.

Sharlotte held Marisol, who cried into her belly—releasing tension after the fight, no doubt. My big sister had wiped her face clean of the blood from the gash in her scalp. She spoke in a calm voice. “We managed to pin Edger down, stun her with a 40mm grenade. It should’ve killed her.”

We knew why it didn’t. Edger had been dosed with the Gulo Delta, like Wren.

I walked up to Edger and studied her face. Her nose was bigger, her lips bigger, and her cheek bones stretched her skin. A thin beard covered her huge jawbones. Micaiah had warned us the Gulo Gamma had brought on mutations. The ARK’s tests on the Gulo Delta hadn’t shown those results, but then there hadn’t been any long-term studies.

Edger was changing, as was Wren. But how much time did we have with my sister before she turned completely? And what would she turn into?

Praetor Gianna Edger glared at me.

Wren took to yelling. “Killed the rest of those skanks but had to blow up their Humvee and troop carrier to do it. And Edger here, we got her tied her up. At first, we thought she might be lying about Pilate and Micaiah, but she’s not. She was sent to look for us. Dammit. Goddammit.”

I asked Edger, “So do you have any idea where Pilate and Micaiah are?”

“No,” she said, gritting her teeth.

I continued my questioning. “And that killdeer trap, with the zeppelin. You caught our scent, chasing us, and led us into a trap. Only we beat you, destroyed your tank, put you on the run.”

“Yes.”

I smiled, then grew pensive. “And Aspen? The ARK did this, didn’t they?”

Edger started breathing hard, pulling at her ropes. “We will do anything to retrieve the chalkdrive. We will burn the Juniper until it is a true wasteland. We will level cities. We will murder children. We will follow our imperatives.”

“They fought back, didn’t they?” I asked. “The people in Aspen fought back.”

I didn’t expect an answer.

I could put the pieces together. The ARK would’ve started rounding up folks, to question them, and when these hard Juniper women fought back, the ARK brought the wrath of Satan down. Burned out their town. Murdered their children. Like what Edger had said.

“Do you have the cure?” Edger asked. “If you tell me you have the chalkdrive, I will tell you what happened to Aspen.”

“Micaiah and Pilate have the chalkdrive,” I lied. “Looks like our plan worked. We were the decoy, and you followed us. Poor, pitiful you.”

Edger went white. She believed me. Ha.

Then she fell into a caterwauling rant, spit flecking her thick lips. “You will lose, Cavatica Weller. You will die. When we do not report back, the ARK will know you are planning to cross Independence Pass. You will be found. You will be killed.”

Unhinged, full of a violence I’d not seen before, Edger threw her weight against the ropes. The nylon cord holding her was old. It snapped.

She took two steps toward me, reaching for my throat.

Gunfire.

Two holes opened in her skull—twin holes right between her eyes.

She made a gurgling noise and fell flat on her face.

“Nice shooting, Tex,” Dutch muttered.

“Well,” Wren answered, “she was so interested in my bullets back at the Scheutz ranch, I figured she needed a Winchester 9mm as a keepsake.”

Wren and Dutch slapped hands and said in unison, “Always, always, always, get ’em right between the eyes.”

At the sound of the pistols, Marisol yelped, and now she cried harder as Sharlotte held her. Poor girl, to witness such bloodshed, to be thrust into our war, now an orphan. Another orphan girl in the Juniper. Throw a rock. You’re bound to hit one.

I bent down and felt for a pulse. No, Gianna Edger was dead and going cold. I thought once we’d finished her off, I’d feel a sense of accomplishment. But I didn’t. It felt like nothing much at all.

’Cause she was just one piece of a vast machinery of treachery and murder. Tibbs Hoyt would replace her as easily as I could replace a bad hose on a steam engine.

It was a blow, not finding our boys, but the snow slacked off, and we were left in silence even as the last bit of light faded into night.

(ii)

There was no help for it. We couldn’t wrestle our Stanleys out of the tiger pit in the darkness, and I could hardly think. We’d been running hard to get our boys, and we still had more running to do. I’d gotten what I wanted: we were the hunted again, not the hunters, and like Edger had said, the ARK was coming.

We retreated into the mall-turned-apartments and made a camp inside the pink baby’s room. No dead babies there; I’d stepped on a doll. Not sure why, but I gently lifted the ragged cloth and chipped plastic baby and held it close to my chest while Sharlotte built a fire in a little julie-rigged fireplace. The Aspen women had built a chimney, so we were warm at least. Around us was bare concrete where there wasn’t baby gear: a bassinet, a changing table, cloth diapers strewn about, more dolls, stuffed animals, and pink quilts.

Our spirits were low. Rachel wasn’t crying, but she looked like someone had struck her hard. Every so often, Marisol would collapse into sobbing. Sharlotte held her. Wren’s jaws were so tight she might turn one of her teeth into a diamond from the pressure. We were all sitting. My gunslinger sister