Last Pour at the Refuge

Piper Benton was forty-three years old and she was wiping the same glass for the second time, which was a habit she'd picked up in the bad years and never managed to shake. A glass got washed, got dried, got wiped again while her eyes did the real work, moving over the room. That was the trade she'd actually learned back then. Not the pouring. The reading.

She'd learned it in a soup tent, of all places, four years after the Collapse, when the valley still flooded every spring and half the people through the doors were carrying something sharper than a knife. The man who ran the tent's little bar, a rail-thin ex-machinist named Doc Ibarra who was nobody's doctor, had shown her the trick once and only once. You watch the hands, he said. Feet lie, faces lie, hands tell you what a person intends to do about eight seconds before they do it. She was twenty-six then, twenty-two when the lights first went out for good, and she'd kept her hands busy and her eyes moving ever since.

The Refuge sat where the old highway junction used to be, built out of four cargo containers welded together and roofed with scavenged solar panel frames that mostly kept the rain off. The floor was pallet wood, sanded smooth by years of boots. The bar itself had come out of a demolished hotel two towns over, hauled down the dry riverbed on a flatbed Piper had traded two years of cooking labor to get. Everybody in Graybanks knew the story. She told it often enough.

Graybanks itself had grown up along that same dry riverbed, a patchwork town of shipping containers and hand-mudded brick, windmills on the ridge, a market street that ran loud from dawn until the lamplighters came through. Twenty years after everything fell apart, the town had a water board, a school with a real roof, and a Council representative who came around asking questions nobody liked answering. It had Piper's bar too, the only one inside a two-day walk, and the only place in the valley where a salvage crew boss and a Council clerk could drink three feet apart without it turning into a thing.

The rule was painted on a board above the door, in letters Piper had personally traced out with a brush at two in the morning: CHECK YOUR GRUDGES AT THE DOOR. PEOPLE WHO BREAK THE RULE BUY THE NEXT ROUND FOR EVERYONE. It worked, mostly, because everyone understood the arithmetic. A round for forty people was cheaper than a feud, and cheaper than getting banned, and getting banned from the Refuge in a dry county with no other bar was its own kind of exile.

So Piper wiped the glass, watching the room the way she always did at the start of a shift. Timmy Johnstone was on his usual stool at the far end, working his way through a beer he'd been nursing for an hour and waiting for somebody to buy him the next one. Timmy was thirty-five, a salvage runner with a good eye for pre-Collapse wiring and a bad one for his own limits, and he'd never once started trouble in her place. He just collected it, sorted it, and passed it along, like the gossip equivalent of a scrap dealer. He raised two fingers at her. She shook her head. He hadn't settled last week's tab yet.

The door hinge squeaked, the way it always did, and a man came in that Piper hadn't seen before.

She had him sized up before he crossed the threshold's shadow. Big through the shoulders, walked like the floor owed him money, a knife scar on the left side of his jaw that somebody had stitched rough. Council coat, the gray one with the silver pin, which meant New Frontier Council and meant trouble wearing a uniform. He was maybe forty-one. His eyes went around the room once, fast, the way a man counts exits, and then he came to the bar.

Piper set the glass down and didn't pick it up again. First lesson from the Doc's book. Give a man a clean place to put his hands and he behaves better.

"Whiskey," the man said. "Whatever passes for it out here."

"We've got real whiskey, aged in a barrel and everything, and we've got the cheap stuff that'll take the paint off your truck. Which one?"

He sat down on a stool, slow, like he was doing her a courtesy. "The real one. What's it cost?"

"Four scrip, or six in trade goods, and don't try to hand me batteries again, the last guy did that and half of them were dead."

The man counted out four scrip coins from a Council issue pouch and lined them up on the bar like he was presenting evidence. Piper poured him two fingers of the good stuff, the bottle Doc Ibarra had gotten off a caravan trader years back, and slid it over.

He drank a third of it, made a face, and looked around the room like he was inspecting it for the Council, which maybe he was. "Dusty in here," he said. "You know there's standing dust regulations for public premises. Section twelve."

"That so." Piper picked the glass back up and started wiping it again, mostly so she'd have something to do with her hands while she enjoyed herself. "I'll notify the dust."

Timmy made a sound into his beer that he disguised as a cough.

The man turned back to her. Up close he had gray coming in at his temples and eyes that stayed put when he talked to you, which was rarer out here than it should have been. "You're the owner? Benton?"

"I'm the owner, the cook, the bouncer on Fridays, and the janitor. Which department are you from, so I know which complaint to enjoy most?"

"Enforcement. Terence Hyde." He didn't put out a hand. He held up his glass instead, turning it so the label faced her, like she hadn't been the one to pour it. "This is old world stock. Pre-Collapse bottling, if my eye's any good, and my eye is. You got a license to sell unregistered liquor from before the Collapse? Because the Council's been clear. Anything of the old world that gets sold has to get registered, taxed, and logged. Or it gets confiscated."

Piper looked at him for a second, then she laughed. Not a polite laugh. A real one, from the belly, the kind she almost never let out at the bar because it encouraged people.

"Oh, that's good," she said, wiping at her eye with the bar rag. "That's genuinely good. Your Highness of the Council comes into my bar, orders the top shelf, drinks a third of it, complains about my dust, and then threatens me with a licensing law for a bottle I've been pouring since before Graybanks had a name." She set the glass down and leaned her knuckles on the bar, which was something she did when she wanted the room to know a conversation had changed weather. "Let me save you some shoe leather, Mr. Hyde. Every bottle in this room was dug out of a cellar or traded off a caravan, and every coin in that register is logged, dated, and taxed to the water board like every other business in this town. You want to report me, you go right ahead. Walk your gray coat up to the Council hall and tell them the woman who feeds half the clerk staff on credit is running contraband whiskey. See how long it takes before somebody laughs in your face instead of mine."

Timmy had given up disguising it. He was grinning into his mug like a man at a show.

Hyde didn't laugh. He also didn't get angry, which Piper noted and filed away, because men who didn't get angry right away were usually the ones you had to watch. He finished the rest of the whiskey in one swallow and set the glass down with a click.

"The dust regs are real," he said. "Section twelve. Look it up."

"I'll get right on that, between fixing the hinge and sweeping."

"And the whiskey's decent," he said it like he was conceding a point under duress. He lined up two more scrip coins. "Same again, and one for the loud one down there, since he's about to strain something laughing."

"Now you're learning how this place works," Piper said, and reached for the bottle.

Timmy raised his mug toward the Council man with the shameless delight of a thirty-five-year-old being bought a drink by a stranger's taxpayer money. "Welcome to Graybanks, sir. You're going to fit in fine."

"I doubt that," Hyde said, and drank.

* * *

Irina Metcalf came in two days later, which Piper had been expecting, because Irina always showed up when there was weather coming and word of a Council man in a gray coat drinking whiskey at The Refuge was weather.

She was forty-five that year and had been Piper's closest friend since the second winter, back when Irina was patching people in a tent and Piper was feeding them. She came in with her Council liaison coat unbuttoned, which was her way of announcing this was a friendly visit, and took the stool Piper kept mostly for her at the near end of the bar. Then she looked at the stool at the far end where Timmy sat, then at the empty stool between them where the gray coat had been, and did the arithmetic.

"So," she said. "Terence."

"So," Piper said. "You know him."

"I know him. He was my pick for the Enforcement post when the town charter got signed, him and two others, and he was the only one who didn't grin at the board like a dog wanting a scrap. He just asked what the pay was and where he slept." Irina turned her cup a quarter turn on the bar, a habit she had when she was picking her words. "He's a good man, Piper. He's also the kind of good man who thinks the rules are the only thing between this town and everybody in it killing each other, and he isn't entirely wrong about that."

"Rules are fine. Rules are wonderful. I've got one bolted over my own door." Piper pointed her rag at the sign. "What I've got a problem with is a man who walks into a bar armed, drinks the good stuff, and starts quoting regulations at the owner like it's his living room. That's not rules. That's territory."

"It is territory," Irina agreed. "That's part of the problem. The Council representative wants a drink on a Friday and half the room watches what you do about it. If you bounce him, you've bounced the Council. If you serve him like a regular, then whatever he does in your bar is more or less sanctioned, and he knows that, and so does the room."

Piper put the glass down. She'd been wiping it twice, which she caught herself doing and stopped, because Irina could read her too and there was no use making it easy.

"So what are you here for, then. To tell me how it's going to be."

"I'm here to broker something," Irina said. "Because you're both going to be reasonable about it once it's spelled out, and because I'd rather get this settled now than after somebody's jaw is wired shut."

They worked it out over an hour and one cup of cider that Piper charged her full price for, on principle. The terms were simple. Terence Hyde could drink at The Refuge like anybody else. He left the holster at the door, same as everybody, because the rule at The Refuge wasn't about grudges only, it was about everything a man carried in with him that he might use on another human being. And in exchange, the Council man didn't quote section numbers in the bar, and the bar didn't make sport of him, or anyway not to his face, which Piper felt was a fair concession since it cost her the best entertainment she'd had all month.

"I'll pass it along," Irina said, standing. "He'll grind his teeth. He'll do it anyway. Watch."

He did. Piper heard about it secondhand from Timmy, who had sources, and who reported that Council Enforcement had stood in the Council hall doorway for a full minute with a face like a storm before saying one word and walking off. That word, according to Timmy's source, was "fine."

"He's coming, though," Timmy said, picking at the label on his bottle. "I'd put money on it. Man took two whiskeys on his own tab and asked how the tip system works. That's a man planning a return trip."

"He asked about the tip system?"

"He did. I told him it goes in the jar shaped like a grenade by the register and that you've never once seen the money in it, on account of my tab situation."

"Get out of here," Piper said, meaning the jar, not Timmy, and Timmy grinned and stayed where he was, because that was Timmy all over.

* * *

He came back on a Tuesday, which was the slow night, floor swept, hinge on the cellar door finally fixed with a scavenged bolt, only four stools occupied at the far end of the room. Piper saw him in the doorway glass before she saw him plain, and she watched, because she wanted to see whether he'd do it.

He did. Terence Hyde unbuckled his holster, worked the pistol out of it, wrapped the whole thing in his gray