War Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 5) by Aaron Ritchey (find a book to read TXT) 📗

Wren’s hardness went deep, as did mine. It was easier to punch than talk, easier to shoot than feel.

A knock on the hatch above me made me jump.

“Who’s there?” I asked, hand on a Colt Terminator.

“This is your wake-up call, Cavatica Weller.”

Pilate. It was Pilate. He’d made it on board. I spun the turret and pushed open the trapdoor a crack. He grabbed the handle and opened it all the way.

He smiled through a mask of blood.

“You look like crapperjack,” I said.

“Those American soldiers didn’t appreciate my wonderfulness. They fired at me, and you know what Cavatica?” He reached out a hand.

I took it and he pulled me out. “Tell me, Pilate.”

He seemed to grow dizzy and he weaved before sitting down heavily in the hallway. Coughing rattled his worthless lungs. I sat down next to him but kept space between us. I didn’t want to be touched.

“You going to talk or cough?” I asked.

“A little bit of both, I reckon.” He swallowed hard. “I couldn’t fire on those soldiers. I’d served with women like them, and they aren’t outlaws and they aren’t the enemy. They’re soldiers following orders. They didn’t deserve my bullets.”

The gash on his forehead oozed more blood down his nose to drip onto his chest.

He caught me looking. “Shrapnel. From one of your missiles. The friendliest of fire.”

In the fighting, I’d hurt everyone, including Pilate. “Sorry.” Said it. Didn’t mean it.

He reached for my jeans, the blood turned black from my own shrapnel wound. I caught his hand and threw it from me. “No. Don’t touch me.”

He didn’t say anything sarcastic. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He coughed weakly, but the air had grown too thin for his lungs to do much.

“I can’t feel anything Pilate,” I whispered. “I nearly got Peeperz killed. I didn’t wait for him, and he could’ve died. You could’ve died. And I can’t feel bad about any of it. Micaiah would talk about going blank, and I used to get jealous, but now, I want to cry. I want to feel awful, but I can’t.”

Then a tear snuck out of my eye, just one, and it dribbled down my cheek. I was so cut off from my insides that I hadn’t known I was so near tears. It was a good start though. Zero felt close, but I knew it was prolly some ways away.

Pilate let out a long sigh and closed his eyes.

“Can you help me?” I asked.

“I don’t know” was his answer. “Maybe you’re better this way until we finish your war.”

(ii)

Above the cockpit, on the second level, the Heartbreaker had a huge conference room with a wall of windows on one side of the room showing the shifting vapors of wispy clouds. Starlight turned the clouds white, but the night turned them back to gray.

The size of the Heartbreaker truly was a wonder to behold—two of the Moby Dicks could’ve fit inside her with room for tortilla chips and queso dip.

We all met in the big conference room. Except for Peeperz. He had to pilot the massive beast. Tech had stoked the engines with Old Growth coal, so we had a full engine. On the conference table, she set canisters of oxygen. Every once in a while, we’d all take a hit.

Pilate had his own. He struggled to breathe through the scar tissue of his damaged lung.

Someone had tied up Baptista to a chair but had the decency to face her toward the windows, so she had a view of the cloud soup.

Tech stood near a wall, tattooed arms folded across her chest. Her face was bruised. A peacekeeper doctor had stitched up a gash across her neck also dark with tattoos. Tech was gorgeous, dark-haired and fine-featured.

Sketchy hunched over the table, head resting on her folded arms. Like always, she wore a huge dress to cover her wide hips and belly. Fingerless gloves on her hands and flying goggles around her neck. She had wide eyes and a wider mouth, froggy, with acres of gums and not a lot of teeth. She was homely, but she could fly better than anyone I’d ever met.

She dropped her face back to rest on her arms. Didn’t say a word, and Sketchy was famous for talking as fast as she flew her beloved Jonesy.

Pilate sucked in oxygen through the plastic mask on the oxygen tank, then set it on the table. “So, I guess we need to talk about the Moby Dick.”

I figured Sketchy would scream at me, and I was ready to fight, to defend my decision on abandoning the Moby Dick.

She began to weep.

And to my surprise, I felt myself moved. I wasn’t ready for tears.

“Peeperz is the bigger problem,” Tech muttered. “You left him, Cavatica. He’s just a little boy.”

Here was a fight I could take on.

I lashed out. “I was younger than him when I reloaded my mama’s clips. I know about battle. If I had waited for him to slide across the zeppelins, we wouldn’t be here. I’m sorry he feels bad, but you weren’t there. You don’t know how it was.”

And Tech had always liked me. There I was, screaming at her.

She took a step forward. “It’s jackercrap, Cavvy, and you know it. You shouldn’t have left him.”

“I’m Cavatica now. You’ll call me Cavatica or I’ll leave.” Forgot about Baptista. Oh well. We’d have to kill her anyway.

“Real mature,” Tech sneered. “Fine, Ms. Cavatica. I want you to apologize to him. And I want you to swear that you won’t involve him any more in any of your plans.”

“She’s crazy,” Sketchy muttered into her arms. “Whole Weller family is crazy, but Cavatica is the worst. ’Cause she don’t know it, and her ideas, dang me to heck, but they are peculiar.”

Again, I felt a lump of emotion rise. Part of me loved that I was inching out of the negative towards zero. Another part howled that if I started feeling now, I wouldn’t be able to finish the horrid tasks