by Stacey Berg
The next evening as she got her gear together she said as casually as she could, “Hunting’s good right now. I can show you, if you want to come.”
The boy and girl looked at each other, while the toddler made sucking noises on its hand, then back to her. Suspicion darkened the little faces. “What d’you want?” the boy asked, as he had the first time she captured him.
“Nothing. I told you before.”
“People says things th’ don’t mean.”
“I don’t.”
He shrugged with weary disdain. “Why’s you any different?”
Because I’m made to be, she almost answered, the calm certainty as much a part of her as blood and bone and sinew, before she remembered who she was and why she was here, and that nothing was certain anymore. Instead she said, “I mean this: I don’t need anything from you. The hunting is good. I can show you. Teach you to hunt for yourself.” She threw her pack over her shoulder abruptly. “Come or not. It doesn’t matter to me.”
She took a random heading out, all her attention directed back. There was a brief whispered argument, then silence; they were not coming. The sharp twist of disappointment caught her by surprise. Then she heard tiny sighs, and the scuff of feet—a hesitant, worried sound, but they followed nonetheless.
They turned out to be quick students, not surprisingly; after all, they had survived this long. There were limits to what she could teach them; they simply didn’t have a hunter’s enhanced senses to track prey or follow the scent of moisture. But their eyes were sharp, even if they couldn’t see in the dark; she could teach them the telltales of animals following the same path to water night after night, and how to lie still and wait, and how to fashion a few strips of cloth from the rags that barely covered them anyway into deadly nooses. The girl had a particular aptitude for the stealthy wait followed by the quick snatch and shake that severed vertebrae. Even the toddler seemed to understand the importance of keeping still and quiet during the hunt, and made sure to suck his fingers silently, as if he knew already that liabilities got left behind. They studied the marks her boots made, and each other’s bare footprints, and learned to tell them apart, and how to hide themselves invisibly among the rocks. The only thing they would not learn was to scavenge along the edge of the forcewall for the bodies of small creatures that had not learned to avoid the charge. They simply refused to go so close to the city, no matter what resources they might find there. Otherwise, considering what they were, she could not criticize their progress.
Days passed, turning into tens. One evening as they prepared to go out she said, “I’ll stay here. You check the traps.”
Instantly those suspicious looks again, that she hadn’t seen in recent days. “We can’t go alone in the dark,” the boy objected. “S’dangerous.”
“You know what to do. The past few nights I haven’t done a thing except watch.”
“You was there.”
“I won’t be here forever.”
Even as she said it she was sorry. Not for the words, which were most likely true, but that she had taught them to depend on her, even for this short time; to trust her. The glances they exchanged, weary and unsurprised, told her they had known all along that she would abandon them, and been foolish to hope otherwise. The boy’s face twisted up into a little scarlet ball, though he made no sound. The toddler, hand crushed in the girl’s suddenly too-tight grip, uncharacteristically spat out his fingers and began to wail before the girl cuffed him into silence with an accusing glare at Hunter. “I don’t need to eat tonight,” Hunter said harshly. “If you want something, go get it.”
They went without her, in the end, desolate. She stared all night at the roof of her shelter, unable to rest. She shouldn’t have sent them. The boy was right; it was dangerous. They had been doing well enough before she got there, staying to their hideys and taking only what came to them, sufficient to survive, marginal as it was. Now she had taught them to ignore those traits that had kept them safe, encouraged them to try to become something they were not. They would fail, and it would be her fault. Her ears kept straining for the smallest sound to tell her they were coming back. None came. Towards dawn she sat up irritably, drawing on her boots, preparing for a rescue mission, or worse.
The laughter came ahead of them. The boy tossed the bag proudly on the ground at her feet. It made a heavy thumping sound. She let go a huge exhalation, then nodded. “Good. Now I’ll teach you how to dry the extra, so you have something saved for when times are bad.”
They spoke no more of her leaving, though the fact of it sat in their shelter like the fallen stone Hunter fingered in an idle moment. On close inspection she could see that it wasn’t a natural rock; in fact, it wasn’t stone at all, but some kind of heavy cast resin, too irregular to have been structural, unbroken and shiny as new beneath the thick layer of dust. It was pretty enough, though what its use had been she couldn’t imagine; its purpose had died along with the men who had made this dead place live before the Fall. The ruins were full of such artifacts.
She kept on teaching the children, stubbornly rejecting any consideration of how it was justified, that effort spent on three abandoned juveniles of no particular value to the Church. She told herself that it was sufficient for now to protect them, give them what chance of survival, however vanishingly small, she could. And it helped keep her mind from the stray images that tried, stubbornly as a stalking predator, to hunt her down in those careless moments when her attention wandered.
Ela, broken at the bottom of the cliff. Tana, face up in the dirt. She had not protected them.
The delay, she told herself, was for a purpose. An excommunicated hunter would not immediately seek shelter in the city. No one would believe that. Much more in character that she should linger in the desert, pitifully trying to find meaning in teaching cityen children as if they were young hunters being prepared to take their place in the Church. As if she struggled to find her own place in a world that had changed and left her behind. Yes, this was the behavior anyone would expect of her in this situation. That was always the best disguise. Only with cover well established could she make her way into the city, find the man, the Warder, who so troubled the Patri, and eliminate the threat. Then the Patri would welcome her back, praising her for a mission so well performed, for understanding what had been his plan all along, and being true.
It could be so.
She told herself, in the nights when she attributed her sleeplessness to the need to guard the young, that she would make it so.
Meanwhile she could not manufacture an excuse to leave her exile and go inside. The devastated hunter of her story would not seek the company of cityens. A different opportunity would have to present itself, one arising on its own. If it took a very long time, that was not her fault.
And when it finally did, she refused to name the sinking in her gut as anything close to regret.
“Som’un brought another baby,” the fierce girl said between bites, picking a stringy bit of tendon out of her teeth. The hunting had been good.
“Where?” Hunter tried to keep the sharpness out of her voice. It was not the girl’s fault.
“By th’ rockslide.” That was what the children called the tumbled-down pile that had once been a span of the ancient road, just outside the forcewall. “Saw ’em lurking at the edge when we was out. Waiting for dark. They don’t like no one to see.”
Hunter stared up into the deep violet of the sky. If the girl had waited a few more minutes to speak, it would have been too late. In the dark the canids would already have gotten to the defenseless infant, making short work of it as they hissed and snapped and fought each other over the rare bounty of such high-yield prey. She would have shaken her head at how near the chance to move forward had come, and been disappointed to miss it.
She would have stayed.
But the girl hadn’t waited, and Hunter would
do none of those things. “You stay here,” she ordered no one in particular. She changed out of her hunter shirt and trousers into the scavenged city garb that had waited at the bottom of her pack for this moment, then gathered her few belongings quickly, the static wand, the sun charger. The hunter clothes she left rolled in a corner of the shelter; the children might be able to use them, and she couldn’t risk having them found on her in the city. She hesitated over the weapons, then handed her knife to the boy. The composite blade was still as sharp as the day it had been cast. Of all her belongings it was the most valuable out here. “Keep this for me.”
He looked from it to her, not taking it. “You going after th’ baby?’
“Yes.”
“Coming back any time soon?”
A deep breath that hurt. “I don’t know.” He deserved better. They all did. “Probably not.”
He nodded, looking away, and took the knife, tucking it carefully inside his rags. “ ’Kay.”
The words flew out of her mouth before she could stop them. “You could come.” She was appalled by her weakness. The city had already rejected them once; she wouldn’t be able to protect them if they followed. She had no right to interfere. But: “Come with me,” she urged, against all common sense.
“Not goin’ back there,” the girl spat. She threw down the last bit of her meat and stomped into the shelter, dragging the toddler after her. The boy stayed where he was, rocking a little, arms around his knees. He didn’t follow when Hunter turned away at last.
She didn’t look back, walking away casually the way she would on any brief excursion, ignoring the thing inside her throat that was trying to strangle her breath as mercilessly as she had tried to strangle Gem that awful night. At first she headed into the desert, not towards the rockslide where the baby would be left. No sense drawing attention to her departure; the children might be protected for a while yet by the predators’ wariness of her, though that would wear off eventually as the impression of her presence faded from the place. The desert had a short memory for the unimportant. The children would be gone one day too, either grown enough to move on, or more likely, taken by a canid or an illness or a fall over the edge of a cliff. . . . At least, being gone herself, she wouldn’t have to know.
Enough. She wrestled her thoughts around to her current task. A few hundred paces into the desert and she ducked behind a pile of debris, waiting. She had been half hoping the children would follow her, but there was no sound of pursuit; even the small animals, sensing a hunter in their midst, had frozen in their hiding places among the ruins. Still, she waited a long time. When she was finally convinced that she was really alone, she slipped out from her hiding place and doubled back towards the city. This time she used every hunter skill to hide her progress. Just before full dark, she settled into a lookout by the rockslide.
She was lucky, today; the breeze blew away from the city. Most of time the forcewall kept the city inside as much as it kept the desert outside. Today the wind must have been skipping up and over the wall, for she could smell and hear the foreign world inside. There were the plain animal scents of people, of course, especially the ones who didn’t wash often. Other odors were distinctly human-made: cooking fires, smoke, the sharper smell of metal, machine oil. Above the hum of the forcewall, which cityens could not hear, she caught sounds alien to the desert quiet: wheels rumbling along stone, the occasional slam of a door, voices, all far away.
Longing for the Church exploded in her chest with a physical pain that she had not experienced in weeks. If she were there now, she would be sitting down to the evening meal in the refectory, watching the weanlings fuss, listening to the juveniles describe their day to each other, what skills they had learned; or maybe she’d be walking, half annoyed and half amused, with the Materna as the old woman took her arm and said—
Enough. Hunter concentrated on breathing, in, out, in, out, in, until her thoughts were quiet and her senses were available to scan the area. If the fierce girl were right, and if Hunter’s need for subterfuge hadn’t delayed her too long, she should find some sign soon. She sniffed the breeze; nothing. She should be able to hear something, but maybe the city noise was obscuring it. She half turned her head, one ear tuning back into the desert frequencies. Still nothing. She refused to hope that the girl had been wrong, or that the baby was already dead.
In a moment when the breeze stilled between inhale and exhale, she heard it, a thin, dry wail. That was all she needed. Two minutes later she had the baby in her arms. It was a boy, fat and dirty, and too hungry and exhausted to do more than squeak a faint protest as she lifted it from the cradle of debris it had been left in. Its umbilical cord was still attached, knotted to stop the blood, and it was carefully swaddled in a scrap of now-soiled blanket as if whoever had left it out had not wanted it to be cold while it waited to starve to death.
She wrinkled her nose. Baby smell would draw canids and anything else circling for easy prey. She spent a moment and some of her water to clean the excrement from the baby’s buttocks and discard the old blanket, exchanging it for a soft cloth from her pack. Reinvigorated, the baby began to cry. She gave up on stealth and dipped a finger in the water. The baby sucked eagerly. It was strong, and like all young animals it wanted to survive.
She would not let it go to waste.
CHAPTER 11
Hunter stood so close to the forcewall that the hairs on her arm lifted gently towards the current. Even to her, the forcewall was nearly invisible, marked only by an occasional scintillation that cityens wouldn’t be able to see at all. There was nothing else to show a transition, the same sun-bleached white gravel gleaming on either side of the border. Then again, no other demarcation was necessary: the goal, after all, was not to trap cityens inside, but only to keep the outside out, and there was nothing outside that could heed a sign had there been one. The forebears must have felt a dizzying pain, amputating the limbs of their city at the farthest inhabited edge they thought they could defend. It must have been hard too to condemn those left on the wrong side to be consumed by the chaos of the Fall. A hunter-cold decision, that, to sacrifice so many to ensure the survival of the rest. Not coincidentally, the first hunters had been made around that time, an implacably superior weapon against the desperate abandoned men whose bones a shift of wind or rain still occasionally unearthed at the foot of the forcewall.
Hunter felt a foolish reluctance to test that boundary. She chided herself for her weakness. The forcewall carried no danger for her; since those desperate early days, it had been modified again to let men cross when the need arose. The wall wouldn’t care that she had changed from her hunter garb to a cityen’s woven shirt and trousers and loosened her hair, grown ragged in her time in the desert, to fall forward over her face. Anyone who looked closely would still know her for a hunter, but in her experience cityens did not often look closely. And even if they did, they were no threat to her. No, her hesitation had nothing to do with physical danger. She stood still another wasted moment, as if that could change anything.
The baby stirred restlessly; it had remembered that it was hungry and the water hadn’t satisfied it. Lips rooted against her shirt. “That won’t help you,” she told it. “But we’ll find something.”
She set her shoulders and strode through the barrier unimpeded.
The path that ended here had once been a wide road, but after centuries of neglect was now no more than an impression of direction through the rubble. She followed it nonetheless, the sounds and smells of men gradually coming closer. After a short while by the standards of the desert, she came around a turn to the edge of the inhabited part of the city. She did not bother to stop. Contracted as it was, the city still had a fringe, the ragged margin of existence. The lights here, wired to a distant transmission tower, were far apart and dim, giving scarcely more illumination than a full moon on a clear night. The few people she saw were almost as thin and dirty as
the children she had left outside, and probably less likely to survive. Their shelters were certainly less sturdy than the one she had left in the desert, most of them little more than a roof of salvaged polymer laid across rough walls of hand-stacked stone, and scarcely differentiated from the untouched piles of rubble surrounding them. Around one corner she crossed paths with a man arguing with no one, gesticulating wildly at the air. Bones showed through his skin as if he had forgotten to eat for many days. She slowed, wondering if she could spare the time to do something. By the Church’s calculation enough grain was harvested every year to sustain the whole population of the city and still make the tithe; but the Church could not set the food in front of every individual anymore. Every population had a proportion that failed, no matter what.
She thought of Tana, Ela. The Saint.
The baby squalled, and she moved on.
The hovels gradually gave way to sturdier shelters. This was the far edge of North, well beyond the part she had showed the 378s on their training exercise in some other life. Thin sheets of polymer covered a surprising number of the windows, and most of the individual dwellings even had lights, for behind the translucent panes she saw figures moving, scowling out, she imagined, at the stranger pausing to scrutinize their possessions. She wondered what the cityens living here had traded or stolen to earn such luxury, and whether they were fitter than the unfortunates she had seen earlier, or merely luckier. In the desert it would have been some of both. The roads had been rebuilt too, smooth enough to accommodate the wheeled carts pulled by the last few people scurrying to safety as true night grew close.