The arrogant young man thinks to resist. The impulse is a brief one as he recognizes her face in the fire-sparked darkness and stiffens to rigid attention. “Ma’am! Yes, Ma’am!”

“Go. Now.”

He runs off as his cohorts, dressed in fire gear, slip from the now parked truck and drag hoses to the waiting hydrant. Within moments, powerful sprays of water begin to douse the fires and Koda breathes a little easier.

She senses her lover a split-second before she feels the soft weight of a woolen blanket drape over her shoulders. Smiling, she clutches the blanket to her and watches as Kirsten appears to her left, the dwindling flames reflecting off the lenses of the glasses she’s forgotten to remove. “Our little power surprise do this?” she hazards, watching as the airmen beat back the flames of one partially gutted house.

“I’m guessing so,” Koda replies, snuggling further into the blanket as the cool, smoky evening air chills her more than it should. Kirsten looks up at her, concerned, only slightly mollified by the grin and small shrug she receives in return.

Before she can pry further, Tacoma steps up, his face smudged with dirt and soot, his hair hanging in lanky strings. His expression is half-chagrinned, half-pissed.

“Way to make a statement there, goober,” Koda kids him, pressing against the side of his sodden workboot with her bare foot. “Couldn’t you have gone with something a little less…dramatic?”

“Ha. Ha,” he replies, looking her over carefully. “Good to see you’re not looking like death warmed over anymore.” In fact, he muses, she looks much better than he’d even dared hope. She has a sort of…glow…about her that-he shifts his eyes just slightly-Kirsten seems to share. He feels the heat of a blush warm his skin and hopes, prays, that the darkness is enough to hide it from his eagle-eyed sister. The knowing grin she gives him when he dares to look tells him he’s wrong on that score too.

“Anyway,” he drawls after clearing his throat and willing the blush away, “it’s pretty obvious we screwed up. I can’t believe none of us thought about the danger of just flipping those breakers on from outta nowhere like that.” He gives Kirsten a pleading look. “I know you’ve got a lot of stuff on your mind, but I’m gonna have to make my pitch for a Town Hall or something along those lines again. Relying on the bush telegraph like we’ve been doing just isn’t going to cut it anymore. We need more efficient communication or things like this are just gonna keep happening.”

Kirsten nods, embarrassed that she hadn’t the foresight to push Tacoma’s pleas through weeks ago.

“You’ve had other things on your mind,” Koda murmurs, cutting Kirsten’s self deprecation off at the knees. She looks over at her brother. “When you can, get Maggie, Horace, Ate, and whoever else you think might be needed and have them meet at the house tomorrow night, after dinner. We’ll talk about this then, ok?”

Wiping the sweat from his brow, Tacoma grunts his assent.

Koda smiles. “Good.” She looks around at the fires which are slowly, but surely, being tamed. “Could have been worse,” she comments. “Did the equipment sustain a lot of damage?”

“Nah,” Tacoma replies, shrugging. “It tripped off pretty quick. Just a few yards of soldered wires we’ll have to rewrap. Maybe another week and we can try it again.”

“Sounds good.”

“Yeah, well….” He gives his sister and her lover a tired grin. “I’ll let you guys get back to…whatever it was you were doing. See you tomorrow, k?”

“See you then.”

As they watch him trudge tiredly off, Kirsten wraps an arm around Dakota’s lean waist. “Your brother had a good idea,” she murmurs.

Koda turns wide eyes to her. “What, more Spengler and code busting? Joy.”

Kirsten grins. “I was thinking rather more along the lines of earlier this evening.”

“Mm. I could definitely get into that.”

“I’m sure that’s not all you’ll be ‘getting into’,” Kirsten jokes, then trots off, leaving her sputtering lover to catch up as best she can.

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

“SO THIS IS somebody’s idea of the presidential limo, is it?

Kirsten eyes the APC pulled into the driveway with disfavor. Andrews sits behind the wheel, his red hair blazing even through the thick glass, even under the shadow of his uniform cap. Manny, similarly decked out in his blues, grins and shrugs. “Hey, we tried for a Rolls, but we couldn’t find any with armor plating. South Dakota isn’t exactly prime mob country, y’know.”

“Obviously you just didn’t look hard enough.” Kirsten keeps her voice flat and stern, her face set in her who-failed-to-clear-the-lab-bench expression. Manny almost buys it; she sees the fleeting alarm cross his face, leaving behind a grin.

“My unworthiness bows before Your Excellency.” He opens the passenger door for her, offering a steadying hand as she scrambles unpresidentially into the back seat. It is not just that these vehicles are not built for dignity. A message from Fenton Harcourt, delivered just before the Inipi ceremony and left unopened until Koda was once again safely in the daylight world, informed her that he expected final arguments this morning. Jury deliberations should begin after the noon break. She is, therefore, attending in her official capacity as the person who will sign the condemned’s death warrants if the jury invokes capital punishment. Also therefore, she is wearing the closest thing the Base can offer to a power suit: a pair of blue uniform trousers half an inch too long and an officer’s jacket stripped of its insignia, complete with mid-heel pumps. The last she had accepted only at Koda’s urging. Unlike the pants, they are almost her size, and will prevent her tripping on her own cuffs. The rest is bearable, mostly, but the shoes have already begun to pinch.

“I’m going to pass a law against these damned things. I swear I am,” she says as she twists around in the confined space and is finally able to sit down.

“What, APC’s?” Manny says as he settles into the front passenger seat with an M-16 across his lap.

“Shoes with heels higher than half an inch. Tell me some man didn’t invent these things.”

For answer, Manny gives a short laugh, then speaks into the wireless microphone clipped to his tie. “Armadillo Two, this is ‘Dillo One. Come in.”

The speaker he wears just behind his ear crackles to life, barely audible to Kirsten in the back. “’Dillo Two in position. Over.”

“We have the supplies, ’Dillo Two. Rendezvous as planned.”

“Roger. Out.”

“The supplies,” Kirsten knows, consist of herself. Armadillo Two is a second APC, waiting now at the Base gate, that will run escort for her own vehicle. Maggie’s new security arrangements had been waiting for her along with the Judge’s note when she had emerged from the bedroom to take a look at Jimenez’ findings. She is not yet sure how she feels about them, even though she knows she would have acknowledged the practical necessity had they been set up for anyone else. Still, a neat five-shot automatic nestles in its holster at the small of her back. She is too accustomed to relying only on herself to take easily to trusting others, much less depending on them.

She has begun to make exceptions, of course. The memory of the last few days runs sweet in her blood. Kirsten has never given herself over to anyone as she has to Dakota, and that trust extends beyond her lover to Koda’s family, who have made a place for her within their bond as confidently as she had been born to them. It is not just that they honor Dakota’s choice; it is as herself that she feels welcome.

And that is something entirely new.

The MP on duty at the gate waves their small convoy out with a salute. The countryside streaks past Kirsten’s window in a blur. Fallow fields, still marked by the furrows of the last winter plowing, before the uprising lie green under the clear sky, overtaken by grass and early wildflowers that show as patches of yellow and lavender and rose. Trees, newly leafed out, march along the lines of windbreaks; here and there a hawk circles lazily, and Kirsten wonders if one of them is Wiyo. Once she is almost sure she sees a pair of mule deer drifting behind the screen of saplings that top a rise; another time, Manny points out a humping black shape too large to be anything but a bear. Wolves she fears no more than other dogs, bobcats and pumas no more than other cats. She is not, however, sure how she feels about having a three- or four-hundred pound carnivore with bad eyesight and a worse temper for a neighbor. At least, she reflects, they are too far south and east for grizzlies. So far.

The road into town stretches empty for the first two miles, save for a squad of soldiers in an M-60 equipped humvee whose job it is to keep it that way. Since the near-riot before the gates and the incident of the drunks pot-shotting at the she-wolf, access to the Base has been strictly controlled. Closer to town, they pass a wagon loaded with rolls of hay that tower over the driver and his two mules; close still, a woman on a bicycle pauses at a farm-road intersection to check her tires. In her panier baskets are a dozen small parcels, some in plastic bags, others wrapped in paper. The market square Kirsten has observed the half dozen times she has gone into Grand Rapids has firmly established itself as a thriving commercial and social institution.

As they pass the former Wal-Mart lot, Manny points out his window. “Hey, there’s Leksi.”

Peering, Kirsten locates Wanblee Wapka’s buckskin jacket and long ponytail moving awy from her down one of the aisles. He is pushing a battered Vespa borrowed from the inventory of surplus vehicles belonging to Base personnel lost in the uprising or since; a new pickup might be too much of a temptation to thieves. While Rapid City has settled into an approximation civil order, there is still no real law enforcement, and scavengers from outlying ranches and farms have periodically staged snatch-and-run raids on both townspeople and travelers. It is a problem that will have to be addressed sooner rather than later; Rapid City needs a mayor and a police force of its own. The MP’s do what they can, but their primary duty restricts them to Ellsworth.