by Stacey Berg
By the time she reached the edge of the Ward the city had fully awakened. She bent over, fiddling unnecessarily with a bootlace to hide her face and clothes while three cityens brushed past, deep in argument. One poked a finger into the other’s chest. “Are we going to let them take our daughters?” The other slapped the hand away, and for a moment she thought there would be a scuffle as they glared at each other, breathing fast. Then the third said, “Come on, this isn’t the time for it. Let’s get home. We have to get ready.”
Her sense of urgency grew more acute. She had not lied to the Patri in one thing: she could hardly track the last few days. She calculated back quickly. A day in the desert, two nights and a day in the Church. That meant the tithe was only a day from now. Too many things, too much all coming to a crisis at once, all teetering on the edge of a cliff, like a girl whose desperate hand tore through the bushes. . . . She shook her head, trying to clear it, feeling the tension pulsing down the road, carried by the cityens the way particles carried the power down a lightstring.
Get to Lia, that was imperative. With any luck the girl would be with her, hidden in the safety of the clinic. Lia would have tried to persuade her to wait, to stay. Even a fierce child would respond to that patient, undemanding kindness. Hunter thrust down a spasm of guilt. To use the child as a decoy, while she escaped with Lia . . . The girl would hate her, but she would be safe enough in the Church. Perhaps one day she might even begin to see possibilities beyond the brute demands of survival. There was still a chance for her.
And it was Lia’s only chance. In the scant time it took the Church to discover the girl was not who they sought, Hunter would have Lia beyond their reach. The med’s face had opened in astonishment when she first stepped outside the confines of the forcewall. Despite her fear, she had seen beauty in the harsh expanse of sky, peace in the vast emptiness. She would learn to love it there, would choose, as the children had, the desert’s honest hardships over the ugliness and chaos of the city.
Another crowd of cityens passed by, moving north towards the market square. Milse might be among them, going for bread, thinking, perhaps, with a twist of grief and anger, that he would need a little less, now that Justan was gone. . . . She wondered what Lia had told them. What Lia would say when she saw her again.
Choosing her moment, Hunter slipped across the street behind the cityens. From here it was only a few blocks to the clinic. If the line snaked around the front as usual, she would use the back entrance. The risk of exposure was nothing to the need to get to Lia quickly.
But there was no line at the clinic, not even a guard at the door. No one stopped her when she slipped through the empty anteroom. Her mouth went dry as the dusty air. She felt, before she even opened the inner door, the unnatural stillness inside.
Milse slumped at the desk, head pillowed on his arms. His tear-streaked face rose at the sound of her entry. Even before he spoke, she knew what he would say.
“Lia is gone.”
The air inside the clinic pressed hot and still, depleted of oxygen. She drew the same deep breath over and over but it did nothing to slow the panicked hammering of her heart. “When was the last time anyone saw her?”
Milse seemed stunned. “We thought you were gone for good.”
“When?”
His look turned sharp, suspicious. “The night of the fest. With you. Everyone is searching, but . . .” His stare ate into her. “We found Justan’s body.”
“I wouldn’t hurt her.” Her voice thinned, perilously close to shaking. “Saints, Milse, what do you think. . . . I wouldn’t.”
Milse’s lips trembled. “I don’t know what to think. I thought you cared for her, as much as someone like you could, I even imagined that you cared for us. But you killed Justan, didn’t you? He was never anything but kind to you, Saints, he liked you, he was always standing up to Loro for you, and you murdered him. For what? What could he have done that he deserved to die? Then you and Lia disappeared . . . The Warder thought you had taken her to the Church. Maybe you thought she would be valuable to them somehow, a chit you could trade to regain their favor.” Her belly clenched. He could not know what he was saying. “I couldn’t see that, but—Saints, after Justan . . . What did you do to Lia, Echo?”
Dread settled heavy in the hollow of her gut. She should have seen Lia back to the forcewall herself. Saints, she should have done that at very least; what had she been thinking? Lia, in the desert, with only a child for protection, not even a hunter child, no matter what Hunter’s fantasies of her had been . . . Dead lips pressed into the sand where the tiny predators would be eager to begin their work, blind eyes not even seeing the sky that had so astonished her. . . .
Hunter shoved back the fear, forced herself to focus. “She should have been back here the same day.”
“The same day as what?”
“A child in the desert was sick. Lia went with me. She couldn’t do anything, so I decided to take the boy to the Saint.”
“And you left Lia alone out there?”
“Not alone, I—” With a child. Saints. Two days. Helpless in the desert. What had she done?
Hunter struggled to think. Why would they not have made it back? The girl was clever, skilled. Even burdened with Lia, it would take bad luck for her not to manage a few hours’ walk back to the forcewall. An accident, a predator . . . Or maybe there was another reason. Only the girl’s fear for the boy had driven her to enter the city in search of Hunter the first time; maybe asking her to do it again, even to bring Lia back where she belonged, had been too much. What, then, would she have done?
Hope sparked. Hunter had to get back to the camp. No one would have thought to search for Lia there, not yet.
“I’ll find her.”
The camp was deserted. There was no sign of disturbance, no indication that predators had made a kill. No recent footprints either, except her own coming to search, and she had made sure not to obscure any other signs as she moved. The scene nagged at her, something just slightly wrong. She quartered the camp again, not finding whatever it was. She stood back, surveying the whole area again. Then, despite everything, she almost smiled. The girl had done well. It was all so undisturbed that it could only have been made to look that way on purpose.
After that it was only a few minutes’ work to find the brushed-over trail that made its way southeast, back towards the city. The girl had even thought to take them on a false foray north, in case someone had picked up the tracks despite her efforts to conceal them. Had she done all this out of caution, or had someone come searching after them? Hunter had been so nearly out of her mind that day that anyone could have followed them here from the city without her noticing. Another sin to lay to her account.
The non-trail became harder to follow as the ground changed from dust to rock to broken slab, but Hunter had a good idea where it was headed. She could see the jumbled pile of rock from here, the sheltered vantage point the girl would have sought before she led Lia across the last few lengths of open ground to the forcewall. That crossing was the most dangerous point. Hunter scoured the ground closely, dread thrumming in her ears, but found nothing. The predators had not gotten to them.
Not the predators of the desert, at least.
She slipped back inside the barrier, feeling the familiar tingle. Here the trail became clear again, doubling back towards the west. That made sense; the girl only knew one way to the Ward, and she would need to find it again to return Lia to the clinic. Easy enough to make their way along the inside perimeter until they intersected with a landmark the girl, or Lia, knew.
Hunter lost the trail for good as it began to mingle with normal city foot traffic coming north. She stopped in the shadow of a pile of rubble, wiping sweat on her sleeve. From here she could hear voices, the squeak of cartwheels, only a few hundred steps ahead, around the curve. What could have befallen them here? Even given some delay for
the diversionary trail, they would have arrived long before nightfall. The girl’s instincts would have urged caution, but Lia would be taking the lead now that they were in territory more familiar to her than to the girl. She would have been anxious to make it home, but she was too smart to be reckless. A few days ago she might have thought herself safe anywhere in the city, but since then she had been with Hunter when someone had tried to kill her, then the shock of Justan’s death, the sick boy in the desert—even that steady heart would have been shaken. She would have stayed careful, avoided strangers, tried to find a familiar face to get her home safe to the Ward. One of the guards, maybe, as he made his rounds. And the guards would have brought her to—
Loro, of course.
Of course. Loro.
An hour later Hunter was back to the edge between the Ward and the Bend. A few minutes after that she had a stranger’s loose shirt mostly disguising her new tunic, and a man left thoughtfully in the shade who would wake up with an aching head and no explanation for finding himself half naked on the way home from market, his basket missing but all his goods laid out neatly beside him. By the time he told his story, Hunter wouldn’t be needing the disguise anymore.
She set her pace just slower than the three women walking ahead of her, bending over a little as if the basket, empty except for a flattened metal bar she had pulled from some rubble as she passed, dragged at her arm. A handful of dust lightened her hair, and she kept her face low under hunched shoulders. No one would look twice at an old woman shuffling down the street. When she got to the right alley she hesitated as if confused, then meandered until she was sure that no one was paying any attention. Once between the buildings she straightened, tossing the basket off to the side, the bar now secure in a pocket, and headed at barely less than a trot straight to the door she remembered.
Hard not to think of that first small journey to the Bend with Lia. Hunter had been disoriented, uncertain what to believe, hardly able to hold to a path. Lia, walking quietly with her skirts trailing in the dust, had been a beacon already, a signal Hunter could follow to safety from any far distance, even though she hadn’t known it then. That day, the cityen’s messy childbirth had seemed no more than an example to be compared, unfavorably, to the orderly reproduction of hunters; yet the med’s patient competence, the calm that radiated out from her to settle the mother, the anxious father, even Hunter herself—that had felt, Hunter realized now, like sanctuary.
Hunter would get her back, safe. All planning, all thought sharpened to that narrowest focus. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.
The shop door didn’t budge when she tried the handle. A few cityens wandered by, eyes passing over her incuriously. She waited until they were a dozen paces past, then, using her body to shield the view from the street, she wedged the metal bar between the door and the jam, and made a sudden hard push. The lock broke with only a small cry of protest. She glanced quickly down the street, but the cityens paid no attention. She slipped inside, closing the door softly behind her.
There were no guards up here, but someone was moving in the shop below, normal working noises, footsteps, a plastic squeak, the clank of a tool being set down on a bench. Her eyes adjusted quickly to the dimness, lit only by a glow at the turn of the stairs. Four steps down from here, she remembered, then four more after the turn.
“That’s quite an interesting device.”
Exey jumped comically at the sound of her voice. “Saints! How long have you been there?” Belatedly, he made a grab for a small rectangular box with what had to be an antenna sticking out the top. Too late: her hand clamped across his wrist with bruising force. He shouldn’t have left the thing quite so far out of reach.
“Please don’t break my arm, I won’t be able to work.” She picked up the box with her free hand before releasing him. With just one button and the antenna, it must be a crude signaling device of some kind. A wire ran to the flex his lights were strung on. She snapped it with a sharp tug. Exey sighed. “I suppose you broke my lock too. Oh, well. I can fix them both when I get the time. Which I don’t suppose you’re going to give me?”
“I was thinking about your news,” Hunter said, as if nothing had happened since they’d shared a ferm at the fest. “I decided I’d like to help your friends.”
Exey stared. Then a smile spread slowly across his face. “Really? That’s wonderful. My friends are going to be very happy.” Rubbing his wrist, he straightened like a man who had just set down a heavy load. “And I can’t even tell you how happy that makes me.” He pointed, carefully, to the small device. “If I could signal them after all?”
“Not yet. I need some information first. The tithe is tomorrow?”
“Yes.” He squinted at her, puzzled, surely wondering how she could not be certain of such a basic fact. Wondering, perhaps, if she might be a good deal less competent in other ways than he and his friends might have guessed. For once, though, he didn’t say anything more.
“What else have you learned about Loro’s plans to stop it?”
“Nothing. No,” he added hastily when she reached for his bruised wrist again. “That won’t make me any better informed. What I told you at the fest was true: what I don’t know can’t hurt others. And everyone knows I’m a talker, even when people aren’t threatening to tear my hands off. No offense. My friends might have learned more since then, you can ask them—whenever you want to see them, I mean. There is one thing, though. . . .”
“Go on.”
“There was a rumor. Word of trouble after the fest. Then no one saw you the last few days, and everyone thought . . . But you’re here, so that part can’t be true, can it?”
“You knew Loro was planning something, didn’t you? That was the proof you told me to wait for. You let me walk into a trap.”
“No! I didn’t know anything about that. I told you, I was just a messenger. And anyway, I don’t think that was what my friends meant by proof. They were very . . . agitated . . . when they heard you were missing.”
He could be telling the truth. The ambush had happened so close to the Benders’ offer, or warning, that it almost didn’t make sense. She would worry about that later; it didn’t matter now, not to what she had to do.
“All right, never mind. Projectile weapons, Exey. Someone attacked me with one. I want to know all about them now. What they are, what they can do. Who has them.”
“Projectile weapons?” The horror in his voice sounded genuine. “You don’t think—” He flinched as she smashed his signaler to pieces on the benchtop. “That I can’t fix. I can’t make weapons either.”
“You’re the best fabricator in the city. You’ve said so yourself. Often. You can’t expect me to believe there’s something you can’t make that anyone else can.”
He chewed his lip, caught between pride and a sensible regard for his life. “All right then, I won’t. Here’s the truth for you: I could make them, but I won’t.”
“But you know who can.”
“I—”
“Saints, Exey. Lia was with me. They could have killed us both.”
He sagged against the bench, looking suddenly much older. It was the look of a man who thought things that interfered with his sleep. She knew it from her own reflection. “Anyone can make them. Anyone. It’s so simple.” He wiped his face. “A metal ball, some powder, a little chamber to control combustion. The only trick is to seal the joint so it doesn’t blow your hand off. A child could do it. Well, maybe not a child. A hunter child, perhaps.” He straightened, eyes brightening. “Do you even come from children?”
Fear for Lia shivered through her veins, goading her towards violence. She locked her hands safely together behind her back. “Just tell me who has these weapons.”
“Loro,” he said promptly.
“Yes, I know.” Her arm ached. If only he had told her at the fest, when it might have helped. “Who else? Your
friends?”
He nodded reluctantly. “At least a few. We thought . . . If Loro had them, we’d better get them too, in case . . . well, just in case. But I didn’t make them,” he burst out. “I used one on a piece of bovine once, to see—I couldn’t even eat it, after. I kept thinking, that’s what it can do to a person. . . . I tried to talk them out of it. Let the Church protect us, I said. Go to the hunters, tell them, they’ll take care of us. No, they said, what if the Church won’t believe us? We have to take care of ourselves. But then, when I saw how you felt about Lia, I convinced them. You wouldn’t let anything happen to her. You would help us.” He stared at her, pleading. “You said you needed proof, and now you have it. You’ll help now, won’t you? Now that you know?”
“Lia is gone.”
His face went gray as the dust in her hair. “What do you mean, gone?”
“Someone has taken her.” Her fingers clamped over the edge of the bench behind her. She felt the metal give. “Someone I’m going to kill. If you know who it is, tell me now.”
“I swear I don’t,” he whispered, shaking. “I swear.”
“Good. You get to live. Now tell me Loro’s hiding places.”
CHAPTER 23
She should have thought of the warehouse herself. It was a warning: she was injured, had barely eaten or slept in the past two days—her next mistake might be the one that killed Lia. Perhaps in some twisted way Loro meant to protect the med, but he had no idea of the true danger. Only Hunter could save her. Pressed flat in the dust in a mere depression where the ground had subsided off to the side of the old road, Hunter studied the building for more than an hour, stifling the urgent temptation to storm the doors and find Lia now. That was weakness talking, weakness and fear. She was a hunter; she would control them.
She remembered the layout from the fest, of course: the blocky stone front with its double door, shut now and no doubt barred from the inside; two smallish openings on either side that had been windows, now glassless to let air inside; the back, behind the stage area, fallen in, old rubble scattered down to the riverbed’s edge. Loro would certainly have posted lookouts at those windows, either one for each opening or at very least a man to move between them, constantly checking the broad, flat approach to the door so that no one could come near undetected. Better to find another way in.