that meant. She’d spent her life in TTT’s concrete compound, living like a princess, waited on not only by a doting father but also by every dried-up craven old suit or ambitious young brownnose in her father’s employ; and she was innocent enough still to think it quite normal.
And waited on also by Creedmoor, who entered the household as a tutor in writing and elocution, under the name John Cadden.
That had always been one of Creedmoor’s talents: the ability to insinuate himself into the company of the good, and the decent, and the respectable. It was a rare talent among the outlaw cohorts of the Gun. It came easy to him, he liked to think, because he was himself only indifferently evil, only halfheartedly a monster.
And he was good with children. Though he, like all the Gun’s Agents, was infertile, would father no children himself, he had a natural rapport with them, little half-formed creatures that they were. Rose soon adored him. He was a lax tutor, and he amused her.
Rose had put up no struggle when Creedmoor took her, in the middle of the night, and carried her out past the guards, who he’d dispatched in a bloodless manner to spare her innocent eyes, and out over the roofs and the fence and into the wild scrub and woods outside. She’d thought it was an adventure—perhaps even a dream. She’d giggled.
The Gun had ordered her kidnapped because of her father, of course, who had been thinking—so the intercepted correspondence said—of throwing his fortunes in with the Line. Father Alfred had been thinking in dollars and cents, shortsightedly, thinking that if the Line ran across his territory, he might lease space on the Engines, might save himself money on each cattle run, might be free to pay a stingy severance to his teams of horse back drovers and simply hand the stock over to the machines, which would run cheap and reliable—but that would only be the start of things, would only be the first intrusion of the Line on that unspoiled territory, would be the first tremor of a quake that would flatten and swallow all of father Alfred’s world, and reduce him ultimately to less than nothing. . . .
Or so Creedmoor’s masters had briefed him; admittedly, in all his weeks bowing and scraping and charming his way into the household’s inner circle and the child’s innocent affections, Creedmoor had seen no sign of any such intention on father Alfred’s part, and he had come to wonder if the Guns were not running some deeper and darker scheme than they were letting on to him—offense was more in their nature than defense. But grand strategy wasn’t Creedmoor’s business.
Creedmoor took the girl from her bed at night. And he would have gotten clean away had there not been men of the Line spying on the compound from the hills with their telescopes, and had those men of the Line not wired up the woods with tripwires and alarms and bombs, and had they not had troops waiting. As it all shook out, he ended up cut off at the bridge, fled north into the mountains instead of south toward the waiting haven, and fled up and up into the snows, where the Linesmen, fat slow-moving earthbound black-lunged creatures that they were, fell behind; and then he’d have been free and clear had he not blundered across the caves the Mountainfolk called home.
“Keep them away,” Rose cried into his chest. “Don’t let them get me.” That was when she was still strong enough to speak. He promised her he’d keep her safe, he’d always keep her safe. . . .
—You cannot keep that promise, Creedmoor.
—I can and I will.
—Do not forget what you are, Creedmoor. You are not a good man.
The Mountainfolk chased Creedmoor for days. Howling and drumming, bashing their long, long arms on the ice in outrage and loathing. Night came and went; the girl slept from time to time in his arms. He wasn’t sure when she slept or when she was awake—the trembling was the same, and after the first few days, she was always silent. He broke from the shadows of the rocks and out across a vast glacial plain, a sea of ice that shone in the cold white sun so that he might have been running on air. The Mountainfolk followed behind him. The cold was so terrible as to numb all but the finest and purest feelings, of love and joy and