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“And if we refuse?” Kimmy asked, raising an eyebrow. “On the grounds that what you want is impossible?”

Cade shrugged. “I can’t stop you. But it seems like there’d be a lot of people who’d hear about a place like that—with all its long-gone amenities—and see an opportunity.”

John’s jaw clenched, and my hands tightened into fists, my nails leaving indented half-moons on my palms.

“Now, if you help us out, they’ll never hear about it from me, or anyone else at Ashburn. But if you don’t…” Cade shrugged. “I can’t be responsible for what I’d say at the Post after a couple of beers.”

John’s laugh was bitter and cold. “Knew that ‘new leaf’ stuff was bullshit the second you said it.”

Cade chuckled darkly in return. “What can I say? I need to make a better life for my people—for Asha, most of all. And you know what they say about old habits.”

With that, he turned and left the three of us in stunned silence.

Chapter 37

Claire

Cade’s demands meant that we didn’t leave the next day. Instead, Kimmy and John split all of their time between taking care of me and trying to figure out a way to pay our apparent debt.

“Is it even logistically possible?” I asked John that evening as he changed my bandages. My incision was clean, free of infection, and healing nicely, according to Leo. There’d be a scar, but it’d be small and would fade with time thanks to my implant.

I wondered how much of my survival I owed to the implant Julius had invented…and then decided I didn’t want to owe that man anything, even in death.

John frowned as he pinned the new bandages in place. “Maybe, if we had unlimited resources and manpower. We can build a basic water system—that’s not too bad, we install irrigation all the time—but there’s no way to hook it up to the cabins. They’re not built for it. We’d basically have to rebuild entire sections of the village.”

I winced. “That’s no good, then.”

“That’s also assuming we can get anyone to help us,” he continued. “I’ll ask Danny, but he might be the only one who’d want to help. We’d need to get the materials and transport them here, which is just one of many things about this that won’t be easy.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, pained. “I wish—”

John clasped my good hand in his and kissed it. “Nothing to be sorry for. I would’ve given them anything, Claire. I’d have given them the clothes off my back if it saved you.”

His eyes were soft and sad. I pulled his lips to mine and kissed him gently, tenderly, ignoring the pain in my side. He’d done all this for me. He was a gift that I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve.

When we broke apart, he added, “Besides, there are worse things they could’ve demanded.”

I considered that while he changed the bandages around my broken wrist. I winced as he bound them tightly to hold the joint still, and he shot me an apologetic glance. Kimmy had promised to make me a proper cast when we got home.

“I suppose that’s true. They didn’t ask us to do anything nefarious, which I admit I was a bit surprised by.”

He snorted as he finished his work and carefully worked my arm back into its sling. “Nothing would’ve surprised me from these guys. Knowing they’d been in a gang, I expected them to ask me to kill for them or something.”

“Then maybe that ‘new leaf’ thing was true,” I mused, and John gave a disapproving grunt. “Threatening us was bad, but from his perspective, what else is stopping us from riding away and never coming back? Maybe he is trying to make things better for the people here.”

John rolled his eyes. “Cade is doing what every two-bit gangster does: gives favours so he can shake us down later. It’s how they work.”

I lay back against my pillows as John finished his work on my bandages. Then he bullied me into eating some roast duck that he’d caught earlier. Now that my chest tube was out, he was intent on getting me to eat solid food again. He fussed over me, saying that I looked thin, that I needed to regain the weight I’d lost over the last week from illness. It was sweet, if a bit wearing after a while.

“Go to the spare cabin with Kimmy and get some proper sleep tonight,” I told him, tucking his hair behind his ear.

“I’ll be fine,” he replied—his constant refrain whenever I told him he needed to take a break from caring for me. He’d been sleeping on the floor beside my bed for the last week, waking up a few times a night to check on me, and he looked dead on his feet all the time. Kimmy was better, but she wasn’t getting the rest she needed, either.

I was still in constant pain, and now that my chest tube was out, I wasn’t being given morphine anymore. Instead, I had to satisfy myself with chewing cannabis leaves, which were Leo’s alternative painkiller when he didn’t want to use his precious store of modern medicine—he saved that for emergencies. The plant took the edge off, but didn’t eliminate the pain from my broken ribs and wrist.

“Leo can be the one to check on me tonight,” I said firmly. “I already asked him, and he doesn’t mind.”

John had that stubborn look that managed to make me feel affectionate and exasperated at the same time. He’d been especially protective of me lately, and I couldn’t blame him, but it couldn’t go on forever.