**Chapter 102: "The Man With The Mustard"**
*Volume 6 – Feral*
*Log Date: April 3, 6080*
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**Interstate Coach 22 – Forty Seconds Later**
Nobody screamed, which Kevin found worse.
Screaming would have meant panic, and panic was at least honest. What the bus had instead was a slow, collective arithmetic. Forty people looking at forty phones, then at two teenagers in row twelve, then back at the phones, doing sums they were visibly ashamed of.
A woman in a green cardigan pulled her child closer. Not away from Kevin, exactly. Just closer. As if proximity to her was the only safety she could offer and she wanted to be very sure it was available.
"We're going to get off at the next stop," Wyatt said quietly. He said it to the whole bus, in the voice of a person who has decided that being calm is a form of politeness. "Nobody has to do anything. We're just going to get off."
"Sit down, kid," said a man in row nine.
He said it mildly. He was fifty or so, grey at the temples, in a windbreaker the colour of nothing. He hadn't looked at his phone once. Kevin realised that at the same moment he realised the man had been sitting in row nine since the last town, reading a paperback upside down.
"Hollis Grieve," the man said, standing, and stretched like someone who'd been waiting a long time for a legroom problem to end. "Licensed, insured, and very sorry about the timing. The board said you two were in a state park. I've been driving in circles for a week."
Kevin's chest went warm.
The Matrix woke up the way a dog wakes when it hears the car in the driveway. No fear. Just interest, and underneath it something else, something wide and white-blue that wanted the whole bus to be a very small problem.
He looked down the aisle at the woman in the cardigan and her child. At the old man by the window with the crossword. At the driver's back.
Then he did the hardest thing he had done in months, which was nothing.
"Not here," he said under his breath. He wasn't sure whether he was saying it to Wyatt or to the thing in his ribs.
Hollis Grieve raised one hand, and the air between his fingers began to *thread*. Lines of pale light, thin as fishing wire, spooled out and hung waiting. "Tether," he said, almost apologetically. "It doesn't hurt. It just stops you doing things."
"Kevin," Wyatt said.
"I know."
"If you do it in here—"
"I *know*."
The tethers moved.
Something struck the roof of the bus.
It wasn't loud. It was a single flat *thock*, like a knuckle on a door. Every head lifted. Hollis Grieve's hand stopped.
*Thock.*
The emergency hatch above row six popped open and a pair of legs came through it, followed by the rest of a man who had clearly planned to make an entrance and was now, on balance, thinking about lunch.
He dropped into the aisle.
He was about forty, broad through the shoulders, dressed in a yellow raincoat on a day with no rain. He had a hot dog in one hand. He had mustard on his thumb. He looked around the bus with the calm interest of a man who has walked into the wrong wedding and is prepared to stay for the cake.
"Ronald Mustardbang," he said, and took a bite. "Sorry. Am I early?"
"Who—" said Hollis Grieve.
"Late, actually," Ronald said, swallowing. "The traffic. There's a very long queue for the exit and I did *not* have the patience for it." He looked at Kevin, then at Wyatt, then at the threads of light hanging in the air, and something warm and slightly apologetic crossed his face. "Kevin Leister. Wyatt Freeman. Hello. Please don't do anything dramatic. We've got this."
"We?" Wyatt said.
Behind him, the bus began to drive itself.
---
**Interstate Coach 22 – Driver's Cab**
The driver had not stopped driving. What had changed was that his hands were now suggestions.
"I'm not touching it," he said, to no one, in the voice of a man reasonably sure he was having the worst shift of his career. The wheel turned in his loose grip anyway, smoothly, confidently, guided by something that was very much not him.
Behind him, sitting in the front passenger seat with one palm resting flat on the dashboard, a boy of about sixteen was concentrating with his whole face.
"Sorry," the boy said. "Sorry, sir. Sorry. Almost there. Sorry."
Ptolemy Ashgrove had been called Tolly since the age of four, and had a Glimmer that let him steer anything with wheels by touch. He'd found out at nine, when his mother's car drove itself home from a party without her. He'd been apologising to vehicles ever since.
The bus took the next exit at sixty miles an hour, took the ramp like it was an old friend, and went down a service road nobody had ever put on a map.
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**Interstate Coach 22 – Rear of the Bus**
Hollis Grieve was a professional.
He let the moment of surprise pass, recalibrated, and threw the tethers, forty threads of pale light whipping down the aisle at Kevin and Wyatt.
They didn't arrive.
The lines stopped a foot from Kevin's face. Then they went slack. Then, one by one, like candles in a draught, they went out. The little lamp in the hunter's palm flickered and died with them, and every phone on the bus, all forty of them, went dark at once.
"Sorry about the phones," said a voice from the back of the bus.
The girl sitting in the last row had a set of headphones around her neck the size of dinner plates and a tablet on her lap with a cracked screen. She was maybe eighteen. Her hair was a bright and defiant shade of teal, and she was looking at the dark phones with the frank satisfaction of someone who'd just finished a very complicated crossword.
"Odalys Brava," she said. "Static, if we're friends. The alerts are local-blocked for a ten-mile radius. That's your bounty tracker, your friends' bounty trackers, and, unfortunately, the guy's ability to check the football." She nodded at Hollis Grieve. "Sorry. I'm going to blame the football on you."
Hollis Grieve looked at his dead lamp. Then at his empty hands. Then at Ronald Mustardbang, who had walked down the aisle in the meantime and was now standing exactly one metre in front of him, finishing the last of the hot dog.
"I can go quietly," Hollis said, with the resignation of a man who had priced everything in and was already thinking about retirement. "I've got a family. I've got a nice pension. I don't need this."
"You're right," Ronald agreed. "You don't."
"Ronald," said a voice from the seat beside the hatch. It was low and level and unbothered, and belonged to a very large young man who had not looked up from the paperback in his lap the entire time. "He's fine. I've got him."
"Rocky," Ronald said, without turning. "Please don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're thinking about it."
"I'm always thinking about it," said Rocky Rollin, and turned a page.
There was a pause. It stretched a beat too long. Kevin, who had been waiting for the next thing to happen, found that the next thing had already happened somewhere in the silence and that he had been looking directly at it and had missed it.
Hollis Grieve was on the floor.
He was breathing. He was not injured, so far as Kevin could see. He was simply lying in the aisle with his cheek against the rubber and an expression of enormous calm, as if something about the afternoon had finally settled.
Ronald looked at him with mild sympathy.
"Nap time," he said. He stepped over him. "Thank you all for your patience. There's a stop coming up. Please stay seated until the bus has stopped moving."
The woman in the green cardigan stared at him.
"Are you *with* them?" she said.
"Mostly," Ronald said, "I'm with the mustard."
---
**Abandoned Coach Depot – Off Route 41**
The bus rolled to a stop in a place that had once been a depot and had since become a monument to the fact that things, eventually, stop being needed.
The passengers filed out slowly. Nobody said anything to Kevin. Nobody said anything to Wyatt. The woman in the cardigan turned at the bottom of the steps and looked at them for a long moment, and Kevin braced for it.
"Thank you," she said. "For not."
She took her child's hand and walked away.
Kevin stood on the cracked tarmac and did not know what to do with that.
Behind him, a fourth person had climbed out of a van that was parked in the corner of the depot and was the exact colour of a school bus dipped in butter. She was small, brisk, and old enough to have opinions about young people, and she went straight to Wyatt and took his wrist.
"You're bleeding," she said.
"I'm not."
"You will be." Imani Boateng put two fingers against the inside of his elbow. The graze there, which Wyatt hadn't noticed, closed itself with a warmth that felt like a hand holding a hand. She frowned. "There. Everyone calls me Patch. I mend what I can. It doesn't work on tiredness." She looked at Kevin. "Or on that," she said, and pointed vaguely at his chest.
"Nothing works on that," Kevin said.
"No," said a new voice. "It really doesn't."
A young man in a green tracksuit swung down off the van's roof with the loose-limbed ease of a person who's never once had to think about stairs. He had a fringe that hadn't seen scissors in weeks and a grin that had been trained on people who didn't want to be grinned at.
"Calvin Houston," he said, and offered his hand. "Clipper. Because I never—"
"Don't," said Odalys.
"—finished a haircut in my life," Clipper said, undeterred. "Because I get *bored*, is what I'm saying. And it looks bad. So people say Clipper, and I say sure."
"That's not why they call you Clipper," Rocky said, from somewhere behind him.
"It's a good enough reason."
"It's a reason. It's not the reason."
Clipper opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at Kevin with the pained dignity of someone who'd been caught in a lie that had been going very well.
"It's a long story," he said.
Kevin, who had been running on adrenaline and cold dread for the better part of an hour, and who was a fifteen-year-old with a price on his head, laughed. It was a small startled thing that surprised him more than anybody. Wyatt looked at him. Then he laughed too.
Ronald Mustardbang, who had been watching from the shade of the bus with the patience of a man who had seen this before and expected to see it again, let them.
---
**Abandoned Coach Depot – Later**
They sat on the loading dock in the fading light with Patch's tea and a box of sandwiches that had come out of the van and that nobody questioned.
"Why?" Kevin said finally.
He'd been working up to it. He hadn't wanted to look like a person who couldn't accept help. He'd also learned, over a very long year, that people who offered help without being asked usually wanted something, and that it was better to know what.
Ronald considered the question with obvious respect.
"A million one hundred thousand Kalions," he said, "is a lot of money to leave lying around with people who would spend it badly."
"That's not an answer."
"It's *an* answer." He tore a sandwich in half. "There's another one. It's less funny."
He waited. Kevin waited. Wyatt, who had been watching Ronald's hands for the last ten minutes with a kind of scientific care, said nothing.
"We're what's left of a group that used to be a lot bigger," Ronald said. "We were... a bit like you. A few kids. A few adults. Something that started to matter and then got noticed." He didn't say by whom. He looked out across the depot. "When a bounty like yours goes up, the first people to get to it are the ones who need the money. And the second people are the ones who need the *story*." He turned the sandwich over in his hands. "I've watched what happens to kids in that second group."
Nobody said anything.
Odalys had her tablet out. The screen was dark. She wasn't looking at it.
"So you know," Ronald said, brushing crumbs off his raincoat, "Hollis Grieve was the *polite* one. He was a man with a pension who felt bad about the timing. The next one won't." He looked at Kevin, and there was nothing apologetic in it now. "Bounties don't stay polite past sundown."
Kevin looked at his hands. The Matrix pulsed once, slow and thoughtful, in the middle of his chest.
Then he looked up.
"Where's the van going?" he said.
Ronald smiled, and it was the first time it reached his eyes.
"Somewhere with a bed," he said. "And a better sandwich."
*To Be Continued.*
*End of Chapter 102.*