Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4) Aaron Ritchey (read a book .txt) 📖

marching off, she waited, and then made a gesture at herself, and then pointed to the ruins to see if I needed her. She wanted to scout, to make sure whoever had killed everyone wasn’t still around.

Such a change in Wren. A huge change. What she was doing, trying to be nice, trying to change, well, that took more courage than any kind of battle in any kind of war. In a gunfight, it all happens quick, and you ain’t got time to think, so you go on instinct, and before long it’s over and done, for good or for bad.

Real life was slow, and each minute we had a million decisions to make, and while we might think it all doesn’t mean much, one gesture, one pause, a check-in, well, it defines not just who we are, but the world we live in.

I nodded that I was okay, and Wren took off.

Dutch stayed. He bent down on one knee. He touched Marisol’s hair. I resisted the urge to knock his hand away.

He spoke in a quiet, gentle voice. “Marisol, I lost my family. Only I was there when Queenie and her outlaws attacked us on our farm outside of Lamar, where we were homesteading. My mom hid me in the root cellar while she and my dad and my sisters fought her, fought and lost. Killed. Queenie found me. I was eventually sold into an odd kind of slavery in St. Louis. But I lived. My whole family died so I could live. Like you’re alive right now with us.”

The girl drew herself away from me. She gazed into Dutch’s eyes ... looking for what? For a lie? For an explanation of why life had to be so cruel? For hope and support? Prolly all those things.

She found that and a whole lotta truth.

Dutch could lie well, sure, you don’t go around preaching the gospel to get sex if you can’t lie. But right then I knew he was telling the truth.

I was freezing, and the snow was falling harder, but I wasn’t going to move, not a muscle, ’cause right then Marisol needed me there, next to her, just like she needed Dutch’s eyes and the strength they offered.

I’m not sure how long we sat there, but it was Wren who finally broke up the moment. She talked in a hushed voice, respectful of Marisol’s sorrow.

“I did some scouting,” Wren said. “I found a room near the back that isn’t quite burned as bad as the others. We should salvage it out. Hopefully we’ll find the supplies we need, clothes, winter gear, stuff like that. But then we have to go and go quick. If there’s a road through these woods, Edger might use it to skirt us. Can’t let that happen. And we still don’t know what we’re going to find in Aspen.”

If Aspen was a normal Juniper town and we marched in there with our Stanleys, we’d be a spectacle people would be talking about for months on end. With the ARK soldiers spreading out, trying to find us, we needed to travel in complete secrecy.

And we still had to find Edger and rescue our boys.

Sharlotte and Wren went around the back to pick through the burned wreckage for anything we could use: clothes, blankets, winter gear. For the Stanleys, we needed wood, or preferably Old Growth, which was synthesized coal taken from old-growth trees—which made it a hot-button political issue outside of the Juniper. In the Juniper, it was our fuel of choice.

There was only one person we could ask about supplies. “Marisol,” I said gently, “where did you keep your wood? Or did you have a coal bin outside of the complex? We need to stock up the Stanleys. We need supplies, and we need to get going. You understand, don’t you?”

Marisol nodded and pointed to the other side of her house where a little shack stood next to two trees. Prolly dry wood inside.

“What about neighbors outside of your complex you trusted? Would anyone around here take you in?”

She shook her head, then closed her eyes.

Dutch took her from me and held her to his chest. “I’ll stay with her, Cavvy.”

In his face, I saw the memories of his own hurt. He’d been orphaned. He knew.

We both did. Both of my parents were dead, but at least I had Pilate. At least I hoped I did.

Right then, I saw Dutch in a different light, and I realized why Wren liked him so much. He was handsome, but more than that, he had this secret piece of him that was vulnerable, and he was strong enough to show it.

“Okay, Dutch,” I whispered. “Okay. Hold her close.”

He nodded.

I left to see what we could scratch together, all the while listening for a signal from Rachel. If we heard three gunshots, we’d have to drop everything and run quick.

Again, I thought I’d rather be chased than do the chasing, which might not have made sense, but I’d just watched a girl count the bodies of her dead family. Nothing much made sense in a world like that.

(ii)

Dutch stayed with Marisol while I found Sharlotte and Wren behind the only wall left standing—near the back, under blackened pines—with the snow swirling around them.

Most of the structure had burned flat, but one room had been spared like Wren had said, a teenager’s bedroom by the look of it. On the wall hung the tattered remnants of a boy band from long ago—the James-Young Gang, shiny-toothed grins and perfectly cropped haircuts—singed. JYG had a ton of hits, and my best friend, Anjushri Rawat, knew them all by heart. I had never much cared for pop.

A bed, burned to the springs, lay next to a dresser blackened into charcoal, full of clothes that had somehow managed to survive. The girl’s candles had melted into the floor.

Sharlotte held up two coats, both soot-stained and ashed to gray. One was a pink down coat, the other a long wool coat. She had on