by Stacey Berg
She worked her way to the rubble field behind. The pungent stench of the river burned her nostrils, but it was much easier to move quickly here, darting from cover to cover with the advantage of the long shadows cast by the angle of the sun. The back end of the warehouse would have opened wide to accommodate cargo hauled up from the ships. Unfortunately, as she remembered, it was completely caved in. But there had to be another opening somewhere; the movement of people during the fest had told her so, and Loro would not be so stupid as to hide himself in a trap with no back exit.
Finally she found it: a break in the regular pattern of the wall where some of the concrete blocks had been moved and replaced. The slight protrusion of the false wall was barely noticeable. It ran parallel to the real wall for perhaps ten paces at the most, creating a baffle so that the actual back entrance to the building, at the blind end of the alley the two walls created, had to be approached from the side, between the walls. Because of that, guards inside wouldn’t be able to see who was approaching until he got right to the entrance, but on the other hand, any attack would be slowed and funneled right into whatever trap the guards set up. She nodded in grudging approval. It was not so different from the strategy she had used at her camp in the desert.
A short while later she lay in a tight wedge against the wall behind the baffle. She had to assume there was a guard at the door, but the probability that he would come out and look around the corner just as she approached was low enough to discount. She rose and edged quickly forward, all her senses directed towards the opening. The dangerous part would be those first few feet into the funnel. Anyone waiting inside had all the advantage.
She listened hard but heard nothing. If there was a guard, he was very still. She was all the way to the opening now, and still no alarm had been raised. She gathered her feet under her until she was crouched into a muscular ball, and then launched herself around the wall into an all-out sprint through the funnel.
The guard who had fallen asleep at his formerly dull post wouldn’t wake up for hours now. She eased him to the ground soundlessly, catching the blade that fell from his limp fingers before it could clang against the stone. Quickly she patted his pockets, finding nothing else useful. Too bad; a projectile weapon would have helped the odds immensely. Still crouched low against the wall, she risked a look through the open doorway.
The room she saw was currently unoccupied, stacked with miscellaneous-looking boxes and a few big pots. This must be the area behind the platform where the musicians had played. That meant that Lia and the girl, and their guards, had to be in the big front room, where the door in the wall opposite her must lead.
She frowned. It would have been easier to work in a more confined space. Now she would have to scan the whole area, locate both the prisoners and the guards, and calculate a path in and out that wouldn’t put her or Lia and the girl into the way of projectiles, if the guards had them. She hoped fervently that they didn’t, hoped that Loro had focused all his resources on the upcoming battle with the hunters and left only the minimum behind. She shook her head, dismissing hope. It wouldn’t help her win.
She slipped across the floor to put an ear to the closed door. She heard voices, muted, a man’s saying something she couldn’t make out, and a remarkably vivid curse in a high snarl that could only be the fierce girl. Gruff laughter followed, and a sharp comment in a voice that pierced her chest.
Lia, alive. Until relief flooded her she didn’t realize how very frightened she had been. She leaned her head against the wood door frame for a moment, eyes closed, simply listening to that voice.
Then she turned her attention to the latch, a simple metal lever. That was a stroke of luck. It lifted soundlessly, and she was five steps into the room and running hard before the guards even looked up.
More surveillance would have been better. More preparation would have been preferable. Any plan at all would have been helpful. But she had none of those, so she settled for speed. Two more steps and she launched herself into a rolling dive to her own right, so the nearest man would have to turn across his body to hit her with whatever he had in his right hand. She curled tight as her shoulder hit the floor, preserving momentum that popped her to her feet and put stunning force into the palm that slammed up under his jaw. He was still crumpling as she turned to his partner.
This man was quick. Glinting metal scythed towards her. Instead of backing she leapt towards him, inside the arc of his arm. His forearm hit hard as a club between her neck and shoulder, the knife snagging in cloth, barely scratching the skin beneath. Before he could curve the blade back into her neck she reached up across her body to clamp his arm tighter to her, then broke his elbow with a vicious outside-in swing of her other forearm. He shrieked and dropped the blade. She dropped him with a bone-crushing fist to the face.
She whirled, breathing hard, but no one else appeared.
Just Lia and the girl, roped back to back and sitting atop a barrel, the girl grinning fiercely, Lia’s features pale but calm. “Echo,” she breathed, twisting against the ropes. “You came back.”
“How many more?” Hunter asked, retrieving the fallen knife.
“There was another one, but I think he left. I haven’t seen him in a while.” That might be the one Hunter had left by the door, or a fourth who could be anywhere. Either way, it wouldn’t do to stay here. She sawed at the thick ropes.
Lia threw herself at Hunter as the ropes fell away, careless of the blade. Hunter jerked it safely aside as the med buried her face in her chest, shoulders shaking. She dropped her face against the med’s hair, feeling the slight roughness against her lips, tasting the chemical scent of Lia’s fear. She closed her eyes in naked relief.
The girl dropped down off the barrel and squatted by the man whose knife it had been, turning his face up to the light. After a moment’s study of the congealing blood, she nodded in satisfaction.
“All right?” Hunter asked, straightening Lia gently. The med nodded, wiping tears. “Did they hurt you?”
“No.” She drew a shaky breath. “Echo, it was Loro. He found us just when we came back inside the wall. He said the Ward wasn’t safe, he brought us here instead. He said these men would take care of us, but after he left—they wouldn’t have dared hurt me, but the way they started talking about her—” Lia swallowed, then glanced at the girl, who was peering through the window with a baleful look that boded ill for any enemy her eye fell on. “She almost got away. That’s when they tied us up. Did you teach her to fight like that?”
Hunter shook her head. “We have to go now. Quickly.” She helped Lia up, then caught her as she stumbled. “Are you sure you aren’t hurt?”
“The ropes were tight, is all.” Lia steadied herself, wincing.
“Let me see your hands.”
Lia held them out, confused, as Hunter pulled out the tiny scanner the Patri had given her. She took the med’s right hand in her left, turning it palm up. Her mouth was dry as the desert. Misunderstanding, Lia tightened her fingers in reassurance. “I’m okay, Echo, really.”
Hunter pushed the button, then opened her eyes. The med’s slim fingers still grasped hers. They were slender, fragile in a hunter’s grasp. And pale, just a dim human whiteness in the probing blue light.
Hunter snapped the light off. The Saint in the desert had glowed the telltale green, the giveaway that had let Hunter track her down from the aircar. Maybe the Patri was wrong about Lia. She closed her eyes, afraid to hope. She had been wrong about so many things before.
“Echo, what’s the matter? What’s happening out there? I was so worried about you—the way you—you went off, and the boy—” Her eyes widened as she remembered. “Is he—”
“The Saint healed him.”
The girl’s head snapped around. “Where?”
“I left him in the Church. No, it’s all right. He’s safe there.”
&nbs
p; The girl hopped from one foot to the other in agitation. “Take me!”
“I can’t take you. But you can go. You should.” It was true, yet the sour taste of betrayal rose in her throat as she spoke. As if she sensed it, the girl’s face darkened with suspicion. Hunter ignored it to continue, “You’ll be safe too. They’ll help you. They don’t hurt children there.” Hunter knelt in front of her, grasping the bony shoulders. “Listen to me. Listen. I told them something about you. It was a lie, a distraction, but it will take them a little while to figure that out. They’ll be angry when they do.”
“Echo,” Lia began, but Hunter shook her head.
“They won’t hurt you,” she said to the girl. “It’s me they’ll be angry with. Just don’t provoke them. Understand?” The girl nodded, still uncertain. “There’s one more thing: they’re going to ask you questions. Where to find me and Lia. Don’t try to lie to them; they’ll know.”
“Find you then,” the girl muttered, scowling.
“No, because we won’t be here. No one will be able to find us.” She waited another precious moment for the girl to comprehend. When she did, her face screwed up, the beginning of a howl of protest. “Shh. This is better. You’ll be safer with them than with me.” That Lia would be safer with her she could not force herself to say aloud, even when the girl’s frown turned towards the med, asking with eloquent silence. “Just follow along the straight road to the Church. Go the sunset way from here, then you’ll see the steeple. Stay off to the side; there are plenty of places to hide if you need to. Be careful. It’s a long walk and there are predators.” The girl knew the kind she meant. “Do you have questions?” The girl’s stare was hard and angry. Then she shook her head. “Good. Then go.”
One more moment Hunter endured that stare. Then the girl punched her right in the gut, hard enough to drive the breath from her in an astonished grunt. When she could focus again the child was gone, only the slightest scrape of light running feet betraying her flight. Hunter straightened painfully, rubbing her belly.
“Echo,” Lia whispered.
“She’ll be fine,” Hunter said harshly. “We have to run.”
“Run where?” Confusion in Lia’s voice, as she remembered how Hunter had been the last time they were together. What she had done. “Echo, what happened at the Church?”
“They’re going to be looking for us. We have to get away from here.”
“Hunters? We’ll go to the Ward. We’ll hide you there. There are secret places, even hunters wouldn’t find them, at least not right away, and meanwhile we’ll think of something. . . . The Warder will help. Saints, the Warder! He must be so worried about me.”
“We can’t hide in the Ward, Lia. It’s not just me. They’re looking for you.”
“For me?” Confusion gave way to fear. “Why?”
Hunter looked into her golden eyes. If Lia knew what the Church wanted, what the Patri, in his desperation, would do—that fear would always be there. The dread of what might wait around every corner, no matter how far they ran, no matter how safe they seemed. The heavy knot of apprehension, that any minute she would be exposed, betrayed, would sit in her gut as it had in Hunter’s ever since the Saint . . . She could not lay that burden on Lia.
“They didn’t tell me why,” Hunter said.
Lia kept her face still, but Hunter saw her pupils dilate, her breathing quicken. Not all her fear was of the hunters. “Where are we going to go?”
Nowhere was safe. “To the desert. I know it best of all of them. We have a chance there.”
“All right. But I need to go back to the clinic first, gather my things.” Lia was speaking carefully, slowly, the way she did to her patients when their minds weren’t functioning properly and she didn’t want to frighten them. “Then I’ll go with you.” She reached for Hunter’s hand, as she might for a child’s.
Lia’s things—of course. The prints. Hunter saw all at once the faintest hint of a way forward, like a scuff mark in the dust that might be the first track leading home. She could not see the way, not yet. But she saw in memory the prints in the clinic, in the Warder’s office—stacks and stacks of them. The treasures of this world.
And the Patri was searching for answers.
Hunter took Lia’s hand and started running.
They were on the outskirts of the Bend when they stumbled over the first body. Hunter had had to slow the pace for Lia, and it was nearly full dark by now. Despite the desperate need for haste, Hunter had kept them on the edges, avoiding the streets and alleys honest cityens would use, dodging and weaving past any place that might attract a hunter’s slightest notice. She had begun to feel the sense of wrongness early on. Even these abandoned ways were more desolate than they should be; and the hot evening breeze carried snatches of sounds that didn’t belong: a gathered crowd, shouting; and far in the distance, something large and heavy crashing to the ground. She glanced at Lia, who hadn’t noticed anything amiss, other than being dragged through the city by a hunter whose mental state she had every reason to doubt.
Or maybe the med was just too breathless to question. Hunter slowed again, to a fast walk that felt like a crawl. Lia managed a half smile of gratitude and squeezed the hand she’d been holding all this time. Hunter forced herself to smile back. Another half hour, she estimated, should take them to the Ward. They would encounter cityens there, of course; it couldn’t be avoided. There was no way to predict what would happen. Milse would long since have gone to the Warder, telling him Hunter had returned. They knew she had killed Justan. But she had Lia with her, unharmed, safe. The med would be proof of her good intentions. She only needed a few minutes in the clinic, then she and Lia could be gone again, before the others realized what had happened.
Hunter smelled the blood at the same time the grip on her hand tightened as Lia saved herself from a fall. “What—” The med, in the dark, couldn’t see what she had tripped on, but Hunter could. She knelt by the still form, feeling for a pulse; her hand came away sticky. The body was cool. Now Lia saw it too. She shot a questioning look at Hunter.
“He’s dead,” Hunter said. “We have to keep going.”
A hundred paces on, Lia said in a whisper taut with frustration, “One day we’ll get this city to where people don’t leave each other dead in the streets, even out here. One day.”
“I hope so,” Hunter said. To her surprise, she meant it.
But the second body was inside the Bend. Wiping her hand as clean as she could on the corpse’s clothes, Hunter finally understood what the noises she’d been hearing meant. “Some kind of fight,” she whispered to Lia.
“Hunters?” Lia’s voice was barely audible.
“I don’t think so.” The sound of static wands carried a long way, and she hadn’t heard it. “Stay close.”
The Ward too was oddly quiet. Hunter saw lights on in living spaces, and people moving inside; but the street was as empty as she’d ever seen it. Whatever was happening, the innocent didn’t want to be caught out. There was no sign of damage here, though, or anything else out of place. The fight was somewhere else then, and word had gotten back. Lia felt it too. She looked a question at Hunter. “I don’t know,” Hunter said. She smelled smoke, but it was far away.
They slipped into the clinic through the rear entrance. It was deserted. Thank the Saint. Even Milse was gone. “Where is everyone?” Lia wondered.
“I don’t know,” Hunter said again.
Lia frowned. “If there had been a fight, they’d bring the injured here.”
The only ones we saw were dead, Hunter thought, but she did not say it aloud.
Lia said, “Echo, I can’t go with you until we know what’s happening. If people are hurt, if they need me—I have to stay.”
“If hunters find us you won’t be able to help anyone,” Hunter said, more harshly than she intended. She burned to get Lia away. I
t had been a mistake to come back. But she had to get the prints; they might be the Saint’s last hope. . . .
Hunter barred the door, then sent Lia to gather her supplies from the back room while Hunter stuffed prints into the largest packs she could find. She wracked her memory, trying to recall any reference to the Saint in the prints she had studied with Lia all those long evenings. . . . She took the ones that looked oldest. The priests could come back later for the others, and the ones in the Warder’s office. She dared not delay for those, not with whatever was happening in the city adding to Lia’s danger. Hunter would get her to safety in the desert, set up a camp as she had for the children, with shelter and enough food to last until Hunter could deliver the prints to the Church and return. . . .
A sharp crack split the air. Hunter only had time to slam the door to the back room, blocking the way to Lia, before the anteroom door came off its hinges. Run, she thought at Lia. Then she turned to face the hunters.
Only it wasn’t hunters.
A half-dozen men, all with blue stripes down the front of their shirts, faced her in a loose half circle. Teller, Rander, the others she didn’t know. Their cheeks were flushed, hair plastered wet with sweat, and they were breathing hard. It took Hunter a moment to place their expressions, then she did: stunned triumph, and not a little fear. She had seen that look on juveniles’ faces, when a plan worked too well and began to get away from them.
The Warder burst through the door. Hope and anger warred in his face. “Milse said you had returned. Did you find her?”
Hunter calculated rapidly. The Warder would never let her take Lia. But Lia couldn’t stay here. It would be the first place the hunters looked. If Hunter could draw the Warder and his men away . . . “No,” she answered, putting all the fear and grief of the last few days into that one word. “But I’m still looking. I need your help. You men, come with me, I’ll show you where—” She strode right past the Warder, headed for the outer door.