by Lucas Bale
There’s no one here, Jor. Just you.
He tried to make himself believe that but, for a long while, he didn’t dare move. When he did, he crept like a rat. Sniffing out morsels to scavenge. A simple thief who should have been in prison.
He found another cache of blankets and allowed himself a smile. Next to them were a toolbox and an old hunting knife. He reached for the knife and examined it. It was old but in good condition. The blade needed sharpening, but there was little rust, and it would do well enough. He tucked everything into his burlap sack and headed for the ladder to climb down from the attic.
When he heard the voices outside, he froze.
Voices.
He wasn’t imagining it. They were there.
Please no.
Jordi stayed perfectly still and closed his eyes. He could hear his heart surging in his ears. He wanted to sprint down the stairs and run to the forest as quickly as he could, but he knew he’d be dead if he did that.
He had to know where they were.
‘He’s here,’ one of them said, a man from the village by the accent. ‘I saw him come in.’
‘You’re sure?’ said a second voice. Another man, but from the township.
‘Certain. We find him and he’ll lead us to them. This little one knows the forest almost as well as I do.’
In a heartbeat, Jordi recognised the first voice.
It was Vaarden.
And suddenly he understood. How they had been ambushed that night; who had told the Praetor. But Jordi couldn’t believe it. Vaarden had no reason to hand them over to the Peacekeepers. He might not have believed in everything the preacher was saying, but Jordi had seen no indication of a hatred deep enough to desire the destruction of their village and everyone in it. Yet that’s precisely what he’d brought about. Vaarden would have known the Praetor could not allow a preacher in his territory—the First Concession was inviolate. Preachers were to be hunted and imprisoned. And those who followed them…
Jordi’s mouth was dry.
Fear swelled in his chest. If Vaarden was here, so was the dog.
Jordi crept across the beams of the cottage, meticulously placing each foot with painful slowness. The soft wood ladder had creaked softly on the way up, and he knew it would do so again on the way down. So as he turned and began to descend, he aimed to miss as many rungs as possible, and placed his feet to the outside of each, where the noise would be least.
As one rung shrieked in the gloom, he stopped and listened.
For a moment, he heard nothing. Then he heard the voices again: soft muttering carried along by the wind as it whistled through the village.
But the voices had diminished. Perhaps they had moved to another part of the village.
Or perhaps they were ducked within another cottage, watching and waiting for him to come out.
Shifting his weight, Jordi twisted and placed his foot on another rung. Slowly, carefully, heart pounding. Ears like razors.
There was another gentle creak.
His heart pounded in his ears.
He slid across the floor and peered through one of the windows. He couldn’t see any movement.
Were they waiting for him? Hidden and watching?
Or at the other side of the village? Perhaps in another cottage, searching for him?
He couldn’t wait any longer. Every second increased the chance they might find him.
The dog might already have his scent.
So he ran.
He blew through the door and sprinted for the forest. He could lose them in there, he thought. If he ran quickly enough he could reach the trees before Vaarden saw him and could get his rifle up and firing. He knew he had only this one chance, and he seized it.
He tried to keep to the valley of each furrow so he wouldn’t fall and twist an ankle, but as he ran his footing shifted each time. He tried desperately to compensate, but he slid and tripped with what seemed like every footfall, only marginally managing to keep his balance.
Behind him, he heard shouts.
And the dog barking.
He didn’t look round.
The tree line approached. This time, unlike the night they first ran from the village, he knew the quickest route to cover. It was a shorter distance. He heard a single shot ring out over the field and, instantaneously, felt something small whistle past his ear. Vaarden was a good shot and wouldn’t miss with the next.
Jordi abruptly changed direction. He ducked low and began to weave between furrows, risking a turned ankle. But he needed to make himself a smaller, more difficult target.
He wanted Vaarden to work for his kill.
Another shot.
Nothing.
He was still running. Relief flooded him and then, suddenly, the trees were all around him. As roots and fallen branches reached up from the snow and grabbed for his legs, he jumped and twisted and dodged.
Behind him, the barking had grown furious.
The dog wanted to be released.
Vaarden wouldn’t have risked it while he was shooting, but now, with Jordi under the cover of the trees, he’d have no choice.
The dog would have his scent. It could run through the woodland faster and for far longer than Jordi could. He had to lose it. His mind raced, trying feverishly to think of something. If he climbed a tree, the dog would track him to it, and Vaarden would relish the easy kill. If he simply ran, it would eventually catch him. And he couldn’t lead them to the camp.
He had nothing to distract the dog with—no meat or anything that might smell strong enough to confuse it. Rubbing mud on his body wouldn’t work either. And it would take too long.
He turned sharply and ran in a different direction, this time jumping onto fallen logs and over branches so the ground wouldn’t be able to soak up his scent. It might buy him some time.
A sweater! Maybe if he dropped a sweater, the dog might be drawn to it. It would certainly find the sweater before it did him, which would buy him precious seconds, even a minute.
He stopped, glanced around, and hauled off the sack and jacket all at once. Then he pulled off one of the sweaters. He dropped it onto the ground and ran again, replacing his jacket and sack as he did. He took a different direction this time, zigzagging through the forest to try to the throw the dog off.
He was warm from the running. He wouldn’t freeze so long as he kept going, and if he did lose the dog, he’d be able to get back to camp easily enough.
He hoped.
As he ran, he tried to take in the forest so he didn’t get lost. He recognised much of it, but if he ran blindly, he’d soon lose his way. But it was difficult, running full tilt and concentrating on navigation at the same time.
He knew it wouldn’t be long before he made a mistake.
Then he remembered the river.
It struck him as madness. As if he’d gone beyond the Wall and come back with a mind ravaged by whatever lay out there. Crossing a river in winter. If it wasn’t frozen, it would be raging, and would drag him down with it. Even if he made it across, he’d be drenched and would freeze in minutes.
Unless he kept his clothes dry somehow.
The closest river was an hour’s walk from the camp. And he was tiring. But it was not far from where he was right then. He stopped and listened for a moment. He could hear the dog in the distance. He couldn’t estimate how far it was, but he knew that if he could hear it, it was close enough.
He ran for the river.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Different Path
SHEPHERD FOLLOWED the boy as he traipsed up the ramp and into Soteria. The ramp led directly into the loading bay and the hold beyond. As a whole, the area occupied fully a third of Soteria’s interior. She was long, forty-four metres in all, with short, angled wings from which two of her smaller drives hung. Each had its own aeronautics and avionics circuitry. Above the loading bay and stretching to the back was engineering and the seat of the two huge, combined sublight and ion drives. All the nav circuitr
y was in the nose. To find the problem, the boy might conceivably need to climb through all of it—a fact that made Shepherd uneasy as hell.
In one corner of the hold stood dozens of oil drums, ratcheted down to prevent them from shifting or, worse, rolling mid-flight. Underneath them were two concealed compartments, each sizeable enough to accommodate several people seated. There was no way the boy would be able to see the compartments unless he knew to look for them. They’d been installed by a metalsmith Shepherd had found in the Bazaar through a contact he trusted—as much as he trusted anyone skulking in the shadows of the dark spider’s web which sprawled across every system outside the Core.
The Magistratus allowed the Bazaar to exist, Shepherd guessed, because it fulfilled a need the Magistratus itself was unwilling to meet. Commoners could be left to stumble through the iniquitous shadows, while the Magistratus controlled those who were willing to concede their freedom in return for the ‘protection’ the Core imposed on them.
Shepherd grudgingly admired the system. The further from the Core humanity settled, the more elastic the Concessions became. In the early days, the Black Bazaar, as the marketplace had been nicknamed by some drunken smuggler—or so the story went—had been a precarious place. Deals frequently ended in bloodshed. But in time, the Bazaar’s free market developed, ensuring customers could get almost anything for the right price—and a little risk. It meant the Magistratus could conserve its resources, keep the extent of its technology a closely guarded secret, and command the loyalty of those it protected. What was the alternative to the Core? The border systems and whatever interpretation of the Concessions the regional Praetors wished to adhere to. Or going beyond the Wall and risk the madness that might bring? Shepherd considered that no option at all.
Shepherd punched the button to close the loading ramp and shut out the weather. As it closed, he scrutinised the boy warily. He was no threat of course. Fifteen or sixteen years old, unarmed unless you counted wrenches and hammers, looked as if he’d eaten at most a single meal a week for years—he was an unlikely physical threat. But Shepherd was still cautious. Stranger things had happened.
The boy turned and looked at him.
‘What are these?’ he asked, indicating the oil drums.
‘Don’t ask questions you don’t need answers to.’
‘Not much here, is there?’ he said. ‘I mean, to come all the way out here with a few barrels of, what, is that oil?’
Shepherd said nothing.
Bright kid.
‘I need to get up to the main drive,’ the boy said.
‘The problem is the avionics,’ Shepherd responded.
The boy stared at him a little longer than Shepherd liked, before he replied, ‘I need to know how the whole propulsion system works before I can tell you if it’s the avionics. You might think it’s the avionics, but I need to see if the problem has a root cause somewhere else. ’Course, you want to do it all yourself, I got no problem with that either…’
The boy indicated the door to the loading ramp, as if to leave.
Shepherd grunted his agreement and walked over to where a ladder was bolted onto the wall. At the top, where it reached the ceiling of the loading bay, was a circular access hatch. He pointed to it and said, ‘It’s in there. Turn the handle a quarter-turn right and wait. It’ll pop, and then you turn it all the way round. Then push.’
‘Where will you be?’
‘I need to check a few things in the cockpit.’
The boy nodded and walked over to the ladder. Shepherd headed to the airlock door to the crew quarters and galley, and tapped in the key code. He opened the door and headed inside. It felt good to be back inside Soteria. Whatever he did with the medicine, he needed breach co-ordinates, and that meant getting a departure licence. He would set Jieshou as his final destination; perhaps he could get some more work there.
As his footsteps rang on the steel-grid floor, he wondered if hiring the boy was a mistake. But the loading bay ramp was closed and there was nothing in there worth stealing anyway, unless he stumbled across the concealed compartments—unlikely, as they were next to invisible—or could lift a few dozen barrels of oil. And from the look of him, he wouldn’t be able to lift even one. It was possible for the boy to open and close the ramp from down there, and even seal it completely and fast-vent the air inside in the event of a fire. Yet it didn’t matter. The moment he opened the loading bay ramp, a klaxon would sound and Shepherd would know. Sure, maybe it was a risk, but Shepherd couldn’t see where the danger could come from. What could the boy possibly want from him besides some coin for mechanical work?
Paranoia. It’ll get you every time.
After a short while, Shepherd heard the bell ring from the loading bay. It was a device he’d had installed so that anyone stuck in the loading bay by mistake could let the cockpit know. It was located next to the keypad for the door to the living quarters, and the boy had obviously found it. Shepherd left the cockpit and walked down and opened the door.
‘That was quick,’ he said.
‘Not finished yet,’ the boy replied. His jumper was off and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. There was grease on his face, and his hands gripped a torque wrench. ‘I need to get out to the avionics in the nacelles outside.’
Shepherd nodded. He walked over to the loading bay ramp and hit the button to drop it. It wheezed as it opened, and wind swept inside with swirling spindrift.
‘Need you to come out,’ the boy said. ‘Gotta ask you some stuff.’
Shepherd looked at him. ‘What stuff?’
‘You got a problem with the avionics sure enough, but it’s linked to another problem with the drive on the port nacelle. I need you to ask you about the way you fly and, for that, I need to show you the aeronautics pod.’
Shepherd waited and watched the boy. The boy’s face was deadpan. Didn’t even flicker.
There was no getting around it. Soteria needed fixing, and he needed off Herse.
‘Okay,’ he said, and placed his hand on the pistol for effect.
The boy smiled. ‘I just wanna get paid, mister. Got no need to cause you trouble, okay?’
‘Sure. Lead on.’
The boy nodded and sauntered down the ramp.
Shepherd followed.
The boy went over to the port nacelle, pulled a screwdriver from his pocket and began to unscrew the cowling. Shepherd glanced around. He could see the soft glow from inside the hangar struggling to reach them through the blizzard.
He turned and walked towards the boy.
The boy shouted something to him.
The wind howled so loud that he couldn’t hear anything at all. He concentrated on trying to hear what the boy was saying, was about to shout something back at him when—he felt a pinch in his neck.
And then searing pain, like getting shot, began in his neck and surged down his spine. His brain was screaming at his muscles to move. To turn and react.
Fight.
You’re not taking my ship.
But nothing happened.
And everything went black.
The dog’s bark echoed in the mist. Jordi picked his way between the trees, his panting breaths billowing from his mouth as he ran. He tried not to look over his shoulder, but the panic persuaded him. He could see nothing through the mist, but that didn’t stop him from searching for the dog behind him. At first the river came to him as a whisper as he sprinted among the pine and spruce and leapt over the exposed roots of old trees. Beneath the snow, roots and rock threatened to send him tumbling.
The dog’s bark was louder now. Somewhere above the trees, the hawk continued its hunt.
The whisper of the river grew in intensity as he ran towards it—a crescendo that reached a vociferous roar as he came suddenly onto the high bank beside the seething torrent of blue and white. Overhanging trees perched precariously on the cusp of the bank, their knotted roots exposed all the way down to the water’s edge. Stone and rock had washed down the river from the
mountain steppes, eventually coming to rest on the bank, to which green moss now clung. There was only one place to cross, he knew—where it was shallow enough that the submerged rock would take his feet and he could feel his way across. He’d be exposed for a while—Vaarden would easily see him if the dog could track him to that point—but there was nothing he could do about that. All he could do was clamber down the levee, without falling in, and wade into the shallower water. Then he had to move downstream without losing his footing.
Jordi searched the ground until he found a long branch that reached to his ribs, which he could use to steady himself as he crossed the river. After another useless glance over his shoulder, he eased himself up and over the cusp of the muddy bank and dug in his feet on the other side. He touched the branch down at the edge of the flowing water to steady himself.
Despite the savage cold, the edge of the river was still boggy. Jordi tried to get a solid foothold, but the ground was too slick; his feet slid from underneath him and despite the stability of the branch he skidded down the bank towards the furious water. His heart flared in his throat as he scrambled to slow his descent, his body twisting and his hands flailing in the mud, grasping for purchase, but he was unable to stall his uncontrolled slide. Mud pushed into his mouth and smeared his chest and face. At last his hand found a root, and he seized it.
Slowly, he lowered himself down the bank. He crept over rock and mud, each threatening to pull his feet from under him, clutching at roots and branches and whatever else he could find. As he proceeded, he listened for the dog, but the river was too loud; they would be on him long before he heard them. He had to just trust in his strategy and make it work. And hope.
Eventually, he reached the stony, rock-strewn shallows of the river, the water surging past him. The noise was deafening now, so intense as to almost overwhelm him. The raw power of the river —its potential to sweep him away, drag him under and tear away his breath—dizzied him.
He stepped into the edge of the water, feeling the cold surge over his boots, soak into his woollen socks, chill his skin. He shuddered. Picking his way downriver, measuring every step, he moved slowly, cautiously. The fear inside him fused with the cold, and wracked him with violent shivers. His hands ached now, wet and frozen stiff. His fingers could hardly hold onto anything. All around him, the river was bathed in an eerie half-light—the snow clung to branches above, but almost everything else was dark and in shadow. The only brightness came from the white of his skin and the snow. Realising this, he reached down and smeared mud over the exposed skin on his hands and face, closing his eyes as he did so. His hands trembled and, just for a moment, he laid them against his cheeks to try to find some warmth.