Free Reapers by Edward W. Robertson

get the dang blade to stick and now this pretty little thing was watching her fail. "This tree's too tough. Think you'd make a better target?"
    The girl laughed and pinched the skin of her tan, spindly arm. "I hardly got any bark at all."
    Lucy drew back the knife. "Why don't we find out?"
    "Can I try?" The girl entwined her fingers in front of her stomach and tried out a small smile. "Maybe we can figure it out together."
    Bugs droned from the grass. Water trickled in the ditch. It smelled like wet green leaves and the girl seemed oblivious to the heaviness of the air between them. Lucy lowered her elbow and walked over and held out the knife point-first so the girl had to take the blade without cutting herself.
    "You got to throw it hard," Lucy said. "Otherwise it won't stick."
    The girl pursed her mouth and glared at the tree. She wound back her arm and flung the knife. It fluttered wide of the tree and plopped straight into the ditch.
    The girl burst out laughing. "Did you see that?"
    "You lost my knife!"
    "I throw just like a girl!" She laughed some more, folding in on herself, hands on her knees. Lucy could only stare. The girl composed herself and managed to look sheepish. "I'm sorry about your knife. Let me fetch it out for you."
    Lucy had seen water moccasins down in the ditch, but the girl strolled down the bank and squatted by the stream and plunged her arm into the water, groping carefully. Her eyes lit up and she brought out the gleaming steel blade.
    "Your turn." She used both hands to present Lucy with the knife. "Can you show me how you throw so good?"
    Lucy was so disarmed that all she could do was nod. "When you throw, it's like watching a busted spring. You got to use your whole arm like a whip."
    That was Tilly. She seemed to float along in a world of her own, one completely free from bicycle boys and pit vipers and little girls who might decide you make a more tempting target than a tree. For the first time in her life, Lucy had a friend. Someone to share time with beside her mom, whose wicked eyes and sour words told Lucy she was born to die, and that mothers weren't there to care for their daughters, but to scorn and resent them.
    Wind gusted against the window. Lucy lay in bed and listened for the breathing of the man with the scythe, but he was elsewhere that night. She slept.
    Her window faced west and the dawn was slow to come. For whatever airs the Feds put on, there was no water in the faucet or the toilet. She went down to the courtyard meaning to use a planter and found that someone had dug an outhouse.
    Her mother had been a bitch but her taunts had taught Lucy to be free with her money. She wasn't one to sit on her riches like a suspicious old dragon. Dragons lived forever. When it came to people, you were lucky if you got a blink; if you had it, spend it.
    So she biked to the coffee house, which was manned this bright yellow morning by a right ogre of an old woman, and parted with a bit of her stash in exchange for eggs, biscuits, gravy made from bacon grease, and all the coffee she could drink. Feeling good, she saddled up her bike and rode toward the Chelsea Piers.
    Leaves tumbled down the streets. To get a feel for the place, she zigzagged northwest through the city's grid. A tall white clock tower watched over 14th Street. As if it were keeping out the shabby apartments south of it, the digs improved notably from there, twenty-story towers with proper balconies and snazzy stone corners. Glass-fronted clothing stores took up the bottom two or three floors.
    She coasted down 21st. The green-gray river winked a couple blocks ahead. Shouted orders and the clatter of labor drifted on the chilly marine air. To her right, a horse whickered from somewhere behind a building.
    A horse. Lucy braked hard and leaned her bike against a brownstone. She jogged through its front door and tried the rear apartments until she found an open door. The back windows overlooked a courtyard shaded by thick trees