“Lawyer. We’ve got a Classics wonk in the band, though. She’s our history-keeper.”

Warriors. A bard. How much of the social structure she is beginning to sense in this group of women is deliberate reconstruction based on texts? How much is instinct, repeating itself across the millennia? Koda sits again to pull on her boots, watching the other woman from beneath her eyelashes. Morgan, though not much taller than Kirsten, seems to fit the scale of the forest. Part of it is sheer personal presence, the kind of thing that would sway a jury in a courtroom. Part of it is the rippling muscle under her tanned skin, shown to advantage by her leather vest and wrist-guards. The left one covers her forearm almost to the elbow, marking her as an archer even though she carries no bow. And part of it is the series of diagonal hatch lines scored into each cheek, tattoos done the old fashioned way, with pigment rubbed into a bleeding cut. It takes no imagination to divine what they represent, no more a mystery than the crescent moon between her pale brows. Madame President, meet the Queen of the Amazons, with four, five, six, seven kills to her credit. Let’s keep it friendly if we can.

Morgan raises an eyebrow at her covert study. “Ready?” she asks.

“The others?” Kirsten indicates the surrounding trees.

“On patrol. We guard our borders.”

“Against androids?”

“And men,” Morgan says coolly. “We’re a tribe of women. No men. No man-gods. No man-laws.”

Which makes sense. Ari Kriegesmann and his bachelor-babboon coterie can hardly be the only ones of their kind. It comes to Koda that Tanya and Elaine would fit into Morgan’s world as if born to it, and she wonders again how the fight at Elk Mountain ended. Not, for certain, with Ari in charge. “Ready,” she says. “How far are we going?”

“The camp’s by Pyramid, across the dry lake.” Koda’s face must show her dismay, because Morgan adds, “Not to worry. We have horses tethered at the foot of the trail. We’ll be there by full dark. You do ride?”

Kirsten snickers, and Koda says, “Yeah. I’m a vet. My family breeds horses.”

The mounts tethered at the foot of the slope scarcely look up at the three women and one dog when they emerge onto the meadow. The grass grows thick here, interspersed with dandelion and columbine, salvia and mallow, good eating that makes for sleek hides and bright eyes. All the horses are mustangs, in various combinations of white with chestnut, white with buckskin, dapple grey and black. They are the classic mounts of the Plains Nations, the breed that made the Lakota and Nez Perce in their time the finest light cavalry in the world. None is equipped with more than a bridle and saddle blanket, some of those no more than a sheepskin. Koda’s respect for Morgan and her band takes a quantum leap, and she asks, “Wild caught?”

Morgan bends to loose a young grey from her ground tether, glancing back over her shoulder at Koda. The filly whickers softly and nudges at the woman’s pocket, obviously looking for a treat. Morgan pushes her nose away gently and says, “More or less. They were running loose, and none were broken. They’d had some handling, though. Take your pick; two of the patrol can double up on the way home.”

“They’re good stock.” Koda strokes the withers of a tall white and chestnut mare who sports a wide white blaze from ears to muzzle. “Annie?”

“I’ll take the black.” Before Koda can offer a hand up, she springs up easily onto the horse’s back, sliding only a little on the loose buckskin that is its only saddle. It is an impressive performance, meant to impress. Alpha female, meet alpha female.

Suppressing a smile, Koda says only, “Good choice,” and mounts the paint. The horse snuffles and turns twice widdershins at the feel of an unaccustomed rider on her back, but settles quickly with a pat and a word or two of assurance. “All right,” she says to Morgan. “Lead the way.”

The way takes them down the mountainside and onto the miles-long expanse of the dry lakebed. The dark gathers around them, rose and gold along the line of the western hills gradually giving way to deep blue that blends into black at the zenith and stretches behind them to become indistinguishable from the last slopes of the Nightingale range. The moon, one night off full, rises bright enough to cast shadows along the alkali-pale flats. Heat, absorbed during the summer day, radiates upward now, mingling with the already-cooling air of the evening. The breeze, slipping over the line of hills from the west, smells of water, and more faintly, dark earth and salt. Moving at an easy pace, the horses’ hooves clatter against the hard surface. Morgan leads, the weight of her pale braid bouncing between her shoulders to the rhythm of her mare’s gait. She chants as she rides, something Koda cannot quite make out, though she thinks she hears the words “Isis” and “Demeter.” Kirsten follows, her hair a pale halo in the moonlight. Koda rides rearguard, her rifle slung over the saddlecloth in front of her. Asi trots along beside them, breathing easily. The wolf is an endurance runner, and for all his faithful breeding, the wild has begun to surface in the big dog, as if the genes of his ancestors have only been lulled by ten thousand years of domestication, lying dormant until the turn of an age in which humans no longer rule the earth. The dog, the horse, even the comfort-loving cat, may once again become something no living member of her own species has ever encountered in the flesh.

And we’re losing our domestication, too. Warriors and shamen. Tribes of women. Warlords. We are being drawn into our own past, dragging the remains of our technology behind us.

The alkali lakebottom gives way to loose scree, and Morgan picks their way carefully through it, setting them on a path that winds through low hills and then rises, climbing the mountain slope. Columbine and Indian paintbrush grow close along its margins, leaving space for two horses to pass abreast; pine branches, low enough to sweep an unwary rider from the saddle, obscure it from above. Barely visible in the shadows, Kirsten slows to lean down and rub covertly at her left calf, shifting slightly on the horse’s back to ease what seems to be a stiffening back muscle. Koda knees her mare and pulls even with her lover. Careful to keep amusement out of her voice, she whispers, “Sprain something there did ya, Annie Oakley?”

Even in the dark, Koda can see the frown that knits Kirsten’s forehead, then the rueful smile. “That obvious, was it?”

“’Fraid so. I’m flattered, though.”

The smile breaks into a grin. “You damned well better be. I wouldn’t bust my butt like that for just anybody.”

“Such a nice little butt, too. Is it sprained?”

“My butt?”

“Your knee.”

“Nah, just pulled. I’m fine.”

Asi, doubling back from where he has been ranging ahead of Morgan, weaves between their horses’ legs, whining. The Amazai herself has halted. “You okay back there?”

“Cramp,” Koda says, tactfully omitting whose. Morgan touches her heel to her mare’s flank, then, and turns her head to lead them up a branching pathway, narrower yet, that leads upward at a steeper angle. Twice along the way, she gives the low, rolling call of a screech owl, and is answered. The second time, when it seems to Koda that they must be about halfway to the crest, Morgan says, “This used to be a park campground, but we’ve blocked the main access on the other side. Nothing gets up here we don’t know about, and nothing at all with wheels.”

Which may or may not mean that they have no vehicles. They could always be stashed lower down. Most state and national park had motor pools and the gas to fuel them. Unlike Ari Kriegesmann, Morgan and her sisters do not seem to be the kind to waste resources unnecessarily. They might, though, be persuaded to part with one in an excellent cause. A nice Jeep could put Koda and Kirsten on the Mendo coast in—three hours? Four?

Pipe dream. They’d be gunned down, by droids or hostile humans or both, before they got halfway there.

The path takes a final hairpin turn, then opens up to lead under a gate carved from knotty pine. Two torches flank it, and its sign, just visible in the dancing shadows, reads, ‘Welcome to Free Sierra.” The letters are rough, cut into the arch over the original name of the park. And the red light shows something else; Kirsten, who must see it, too, jerks hard on her horse’s reins, then knees her again as she pulls up. She is, perhaps, not certain what she is looking at. Koda is not certain, either. Not entirely.

A round shape hangs from each gatepost. The red light strikes a steely gleam from the one on the left, outlining its bare metal dome. On the other side, the torch draws the shape in dark hollows; two that might be eyes, another that might be a gaping mouth above a caked and matted beard. With the sweet night air comes the smell of rotting meat. So much for ambiguity. No lilacs blooming in the dooryard here.

“Hell of a No Trespassing sign you got there,” Koda says quietly.

Morgan shows her teeth in something that is not quite a smile. “Yeah. Got ‘em both on our last raid. Reno.”

Which means that these women either do have vehicles, or whoever they took down in Reno did not. Kirsten, who has quietly nursed her sore muscles on the ascent, says, “On who?”

“A clinic. You know about that?”

Koda answers, carefully, “We know that women have been kidnapped for breeding in jails, sometimes in birthing centers, women’s clinics. Stuff like that.”

They pass a couple of low signs, illegible in the dark except for their white arrows pointing directions to the various park facilities. Morgan leads them to the right where the path forks, and says, “Yeah. Stuff like that. They had another place in Reno, where they took the kids they didn’t kill. Right off, anyway.”