Page 5 of Gunslinger Girl

“Who said he was smart?” There were many words she might have used to describe her father—cunning, obstinate, righteous—but not smart. “I called him a heartless, godforsaken son of a bitch.”

Finn let out a snort of laughter.

“It’s not funny! He said things about my mother…” Fresh anger crested, white-hot. “He called her an insurgent and a drunk.”

“Aw, Pity—”

“And Lord knows it’s true—she was! But he always… he always has to…”

Finn scowled. “And how many others in the commune were on the losing side of the war? Plenty. Your mother was a good woman, Pity. She could have made a run for the dissident camps out west—they’d never have caught her—but she didn’t. She made a deal and she kept it.”

“I know,” said Pity. Because of Henry and Billy.

And me.

The guilt tinged every memory of her mother. But it had served as a catalyst, too, stoking her resolve to avoid a similar fate.

Six months.

A few hours ago the thought had been a promising breeze, a hint of spring after a long winter. The Ranger would be complete, she and Finn would have enough currency and supplies squirreled away to keep them comfortable for a while. No one telling them what they could and could not do with their lives, and the entirety of the east open for them to explore. They could visit the cities, see the ocean—anything they wanted.

Now that dream was gone, set behind an unreachable horizon. Six months on an unfamiliar commune with no friends or allies—Pity had little doubt of her father’s and the stranger’s intentions. Whatever situation she ended up forced into, there would be only one way to escape it entirely.

She stared down at the flask.

On the day her mother died, the clouds had been a black line rushing toward the commune, the afternoon going from sweltering hot to shivering cold in the space of minutes. Rain pummeled the ground like bullets; lightning split the oldest tree in the orchards. After it passed, they found her mother beneath the wall, lying at the base of the ladder from which she had fallen, blank eyes staring at the clearing skies. They blamed the fury of the storm, of course, but even the torrent of rain hadn’t washed the scent of home-still from her lips. What no one had said out loud was that it was a small miracle she hadn’t fallen long before.

“I don’t care,” said Pity. On the opposite wall of the workshop, a faded CONA poster depicted happy, smiling families before the soaring skyline of Columbia, CONA’s capital city. Nothing like the family her mother had bartered her life for. Nothing like what awaited Pity. “I don’t care what’s been arranged, I’m not going.”

“Of course you’re not.” Finn’s mouth was a hard line, her face shadowed by the canvas tarp that served as the Ranger’s roof. “We planned to run, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

“How? We’ve got nothing ready. The Ranger isn’t even done.”

“Oh?” Finn reached for the steering column and pressed the ignition switch. The vehicle rumbled to life.

Pity straightened. “Did you—”

“Yup. Purrs like a barn cat, right?”

“But we don’t have supplies yet, and my father—”

“Will be gone for a couple days.” Finn ran a hand over the steering wheel. “I have enough currency to get us on the Trans-Rail, so long as we don’t mind riding freight. After that, well, we’ll figure it out.”

Pity shook her head. “No. This isn’t fair. You don’t need to do this. You’ve got some promise of a future here.”

Finn scoffed. “Like what? Fixing engines and swapping solar cells until the day I die? I want to do more, see more—Columbia, Savannah, New Boston. Like we always talked about. Might be sooner than we expected, but you’re not leaving me behind. If you go, I go.”

Pity searched for an argument, some reason to spare Finn from troubles not her own. But a crack had already formed in her doubt, letting a trickle of hope leak in.

And, fueled by that hope, came the beginning of a plan.

Pity took a deep breath. “It’s now or never, isn’t it?”

“Yup,” Finn said. “We’ve got our reason, and we’ve got our ride. So where are we going?”

Tears filled Pity’s eyes again. She blinked them back.

“Anywhere but here.”