Chapter 163: Night Shift

/Nora’s Third Person POV/

Nora Woodbrew woke up on the floor of Leo’s old bedroom, wedged between her sister and a shelf of county-fair ribbons. The very first thing she did, before she’d even pulled her cap on over her ponytail, was go to the window and check the sky."

It looked exactly like a sky, low and grey and full of snow, with no dome anywhere in it, which Nora found deeply suspicious.

Nikki had bought an invisible dome the night before, and the least it could have done, in Nora’s professional opinion, was be visible at least part of the time.

Nikki brought the RVs out of the Inventory after breakfast, one at a time in a row along the west side of Walter’s wall, each one dropping out of nowhere onto the snow with a thump that made June put a hand on her chest every single time.

Nia’s was a big rig, the biggest thing in the row, which she’d called dibs on back in Marlow, and by the time the third one landed she was lying flat on its roof in the cold with her arms behind her head, two cracked ribs and all.

"Morning, munchkin~" Nia called down without opening her eyes.

Nora pretended that harpy didn’t exist, which was the only legal option left to her.

Everything else went by June’s rulings, and nobody argued with June while she was still holding the pancake pan.

Nora and Kara got one together. Mr. Norton got one to himself, Walter and June took the one nearest the house, Nikki kept his Ascender, and Leo went in with his brother.

Nora lodged a formal objection to that last one with nobody in particular, because there was nobody on this farm with the authority to overrule June Hart.

Dean carried Kara’s bags into their RV without being asked. Kara let him, and Nora saw that too.

The Harts had everything they wanted to keep out of the house by mid-morning.

Most of it went into a chest Nikki pulled out of thin air and sent back into thin air, but June carried one cardboard box out to their RV herself and wouldn’t let anybody else touch it.

Nora didn’t need to ask whose things were in it. Everything in that box had been Toby’s.

Then Nikki stood in the yard, talked to the air for a few seconds, and the log house went blue.

A solid block of blue light dropped over it out of nowhere, silent and smooth and impossible to see into, and the house Leo had grown up in was gone inside it.

Out past the barns, a band of the same blue already stood ten meters high around the whole farm, where the new walls were going up.

Walter stood in front of the blue block with his hands in his coat pockets and watched it the whole morning without a word.

June brought him a mug of coffee twice. He held both mugs and didn’t drink from either one.

Nora was good at reading people, and Walter didn’t take any reading.

It was the house his boys had grown up in and the house his youngest had died in, and he was letting it go so the ones still breathing could have a bunker under their beds.

It hurt to watch, so after a while Nora stopped looking at him and went to find a job for her hands.

What she found was Kara’s ThinkPad.

She spent the rest of the day on the steps of her RV with the laptop on her knees and a hard drive full of downloaded books, while the skill Nikki had slid across Ruth’s kitchen table did exactly what its panel had promised.

Enhanced Learning, it was called, and thanks to it pages went into her head and stayed there.

She read a structural engineering textbook by lunch, foundations, load paths, retaining walls, and could tell you what was on page two hundred and twelve without looking.

She also read two Chapters of a Krav Maga manual, which was nobody’s business, least of all that harpy’s.

Leo came past at lunch with a crate of June’s jars in his arms, and Nora stopped him with one raised finger.

"I have read four hundred pages today." She kept the finger up in the air. "I would like that entered into the record."

Leo looked at the ThinkPad, then at her. "Which four hundred?"

"Structural engineering. Foundations and retaining walls." She closed the lid with enormous dignity. "The lead engineer’s girlfriend has to keep up."

"...Right." His ears went red, and he carried the jars off toward June’s RV a lot faster than he’d been carrying them before.

Mr. Norton gave her a field surgery manual after lunch, told her once that it was the good one, and went back to his RV.

She finished it by dinner, though she had to put the laptop down for a while after the Chapter on amputations before she picked it back up.

As far as Nora was concerned, being scared of a thing had never once been a good enough reason not to know it.

Nikki found her on the steps after dinner with Tikki on his shoulder and a black case under his arm.

He looked better than he had any right to these days.

The Enhancers had put weight on him, the healthy kind, and his skin had cleared up as though he slept eight hours a night and had been using top of the line skin care for years, which Nora knew for a fact he didn’t.

Only his eyes had changed in a way she didn’t like, and only sometimes.

He opened the case on her knees. Inside, in black foam, sat a drone no bigger than a dinner plate, matte black all over, with its four rotors folded flat against its body and a camera bulb of dark glass slung underneath.

Tikki jumped down onto the step, sniffed it from one end to the other, and sat back on his haunches.

"Mea."

"Quality control says it’s fine." Nikki closed her hands around the case. "It’s yours, kid... Don’t crash it into a priest."

Nora’s whole face lit up before she could stop it, and she put it away again as fast as it came and frowned at the drone with all the professional indifference she had.

Nobody on the steps was fooled, least of all the cat.

"You can’t hear it from five meters, and it’ll stay up longer than you will..." Nikki scratched Tikki under the chin. "Oh, and the System can pass me the feed whenever I want."

"That is a violation of my privacy."

"Yep."

Then he looked east, toward the glow over the willows, and his eyes went flat and far away.

It was the look Nora had first seen on him in the penthouse, the one that wasn’t any Nikki she’d known, and she had decided, after a lot of thinking, to stop being scared of it.

As long as it was pointed at people who’d hurt the Harts, it could look however it liked.

"Whatever they’ve got going on over there, I want to know."

He set a watch on the church in shifts, himself, Nia, Nora, Kara and Leo, all of it through the drone, because nobody on the farm could see the church from the ground.

"As the drone’s registered owner..." Nora raised her hand as high as it would go. "I am taking the first night."

She put it up at nine, straight up out of the dome, and it climbed without making any sound she could hear from the steps.

The first thing she did was take it out to the road and turn the camera back on the farm.

On her screen, the farm wasn’t there.

The old log house sat in the snow right where the blue block was, shabby and dark, with a cold chimney and black windows.

Walter’s grey wall still ran round it like before, but there were no RVs, no ten-meter band of blue, and not one light anywhere.

From the road, the Harts had packed up and left.

Then she took it east, over the willows along the brook and the thirty dark houses of Coldwater, and found the church.

It was a stone church with a square bell tower at its western end, inside a stone wall, and the little helicopter from last night sat on a raised pad in the corner of the churchyard with its blades tied down.

Outside the wall was the camp, tents and campers in crooked rows between the stone and a chest-high fence, lanterns on poles, washing lines, a hundred people going to bed.

The drone’s microphone picked up an old man reading by the big fire on the west side, with a Bible held up to the flames and a dozen people sitting round him in blankets.

"...Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night..."

Five hundred meters out from that fence, on every side, the Infected stood in a ring like a wall nobody built.

Kara went to bed at eleven, after one last look at the screen over Nora’s shoulder.

Nora stayed up at the RV’s little table with June’s cocoa and the blanket off her bunk, with her cap pulled down hard over her ears, because her beanie was hanging on a cross in the yard and she didn’t regret that for a second.

At three in the morning, the side door of the church opened.

Two men came out carrying a long shape between them under a tarp, with a third man walking ahead of them holding a lantern low.

They went along the outside of the church to the bell tower at the far end and in through its door.

The lantern showed in each slit window of the tower as they climbed, one window after another, higher every time, until it went out one window short of the top.

For an hour, nothing came out of the tower, and nothing moved at the top of it.

At ten past four they carried it back down the same way, along the wall and in through the side door, and the door shut behind them.

Nora rewound the footage and switched to the thermal recording.

All three men came up white against the black, and so did the tarp between the two carrying it, warm right through, the length of a person from one end to the other.

She watched the clip three times over.

On the third pass, frame by frame, as they carried it past the corner of the church, the warm shape under the tarp turned its head toward the farm.

"Th-that’s a person..." Nora whispered.