Worked very hard to keep this meeting from being three thousand words.
“But not west,” Rex echoed, the smile now gone. “Can’t go west, dumb to go east, and we won’t go north to freeze. So we go south. What’s stopping us? Dally?”
“That base, even half-built,” Dallin immediately replied. “It’ll see everything and everybody, for miles around. Even if it’s looking west, it’ll have an eye for anything south.”
Desert Joe stirred. “Before, the southern towns would have let us pass, maybe,” he rumbled. “They will not patrol widely, because to see is to know, and they do not want to know. They have plenty of troubles, which only grow more every year. But with the Dominion watching from the skies? They would see our people as a treat to be traded for a few more weeks or months of peace.”
“The damned scum,” Dallin muttered. “Ah, pardon me, Miz Tabetha. I know some of your folks still live down south.”
“I ain’t mad, Dally.” Tabetha tried to smile, despite the sudden sour taste in her mouth and throat. “Not at you, not at them. Ever since the Temple fell, people ‘round here got stuck ‘tween nothing but rocks. You don’t get good choices when that happens. We gotta just keep on with it.”