by Stacey Berg
And she heard a click, the same sound she had heard in the alley the night of the fest.
Now she knew what it meant.
She turned back to face the Warder.
“I thought it was Loro,” she whispered, horror sending a shudder through her bones. But Loro wasn’t among the men.
Anguish creased the Warder’s face as he brought the evil little weapon to bear on her. Every man held one. “Don’t make us use them, Echo, please.”
“Saints.” It was so much worse than she had imagined. Worse even than she had tried to tell the Patri. The inevitable unfurled itself all too clearly in her mind. Wardmen, maybe Benders too with projectile weapons, hunters coming in to take the tithe . . . The hunters would ignore the skulking cityens—what threat could they be—right up until the moment when one of the fools fired and a hunter went down. Then there would be blood, and more firing, because that was what happened when a predator suddenly turned weak in the midst of a crowd of prey. Even in the frenzy the hunters would hesitate a fatal moment, as the ones in the market square nearly had, slave to that protective instinct bred into them from the very beginning. It would be a massacre. The Patri had made so little of her report, obsessed as he was with the Saint denas, he might not even think to warn the hunters before he sent them in. And after, the Church would retaliate. . . . And then it would be war, and the end of everything.
Saints.
The Patri had been right from the beginning. The Warder, the friendly, hapless Warder whose softness she had secretly despised even as he befriended her—he was the enemy. She stared at him, trying to see it, but could only see the man she knew, kind and frightened and helpless. Aiming a weapon that had the power to bring down the Church.
She could get to him across the few feet of floor between them, there was no doubt in her mind. The others would kill her then, but the Warder would be eliminated. Without their leader, the cityens might think twice before challenging the hunters. Maybe, maybe it would be enough to avert catastrophe. Hunter would have done her best.
But Lia would die on the altar.
It was a small sacrifice, one cityen for the city’s future. Her dead, Ela and Tana and the others who had given their own lives without complaint, looked at her, silent. She didn’t want to hear what they would say.
In the moment before Hunter could move, Lia opened the door.
The med took in the men, the weapons, Hunter frozen in place. The Warder. Her face went pale beneath the flush. “No. No, it can’t be.”
The Warder’s rheumy eyes lit, though his voice broke. “Lia, my child. I thought you were dead. Thank the Saint.” Outstretched arms reached to fold her close. She stood where she was, stunned. After an uncertain moment, the Warder dropped his arms.
“It’s for the best, you’ll see, child, I know you will.”
“Those are projectile weapons.”
The Warder looked at the thing in his hand as if surprised to find it there. “Just something to protect ourselves. It’s not wrong to do that, is it?”
“Put them away.” Fury laced Lia’s voice. “Put them away now. I won’t have those things in my clinic.”
The men looked uncertainly at the Warder. Hunter sensed their fighting hormones ebbing. They were starting to notice they were tired. Their breathing slowed, the tension gradually leaving their muscles as it dawned on them that they had survived and made it back to safety. She held herself very still. Let them focus on Lia, forget Hunter even stood there. They didn’t want a confrontation with their own.
The Warder said, “We have to take responsibility for ourselves, child. We just need to be prepared, I’ve always taught you that.”
Lia’s face twisted in anguish. “Prepared for when the time comes, yes, the day the Church won’t be able to help us anymore—but weapons? How will that help? Someone tried to kill Echo with one of those. And there were bodies on the edge.”
Her accusation hung in the air. The men shifted uncomfortably. One or two slipped the devices into their pockets. Keep talking, Lia. They’ll listen to you. Make them see sense. It might work. Hunter tightened her grip on the packs she still held, in case it didn’t.
Sour-faced Teller spoke for the first time. He hadn’t put his weapon away. “Benders don’t know what’s good for them. Never have.”
Lia swung on him. “Are they going to learn it from you killing them?”
The Warder answered before Teller could. “No, Lia, my child, that’s not what happened. That was an accident, a misunderstanding. Terrible, terrible, but we’ll make it up to them. You’ll see.” He waved the weapon. “That’s not what these are for.”
“What, then?”
“Only to protect ourselves from the tithe.”
Just like that, the men remembered a hunter stood in their midst. Weapons that were still out trained on her; the rest of them stood ready, in case she made the slightest move.
“I’m on your side, remember?” Hunter said. “The Church threw me out. I’m one of you.”
The Warder’s look was full of pain and confusion. “I wanted to believe you, Echo, all along. I thought you believed it yourself for a time. Your feelings for Lia . . . I can’t blame you being what you are, can I? But you killed Justan. That poor sweet boy. If you could do that, what else? I can’t have you at our backs when the hunters come.”
Hunter’s heart rate spiked. She gathered the energy, forced it into a stillness from which she could explode faster than these cityens could even imagine. She said, “If you kill hunters, the Church will destroy you.”
The Warder’s voice was heavy with sorrow. “The Church is dying from the inside. You feel it, Echo, I know you do. But we’re beginning to live, finally, to grow and thrive and push back the darkness in our own way. What does your Patri expect us to do? Keep lying still while you steal our children? You know how we feel about them; even you, twisted as you are, you loved those children in the desert. I know you did. Would you give them up to the Church? Would you?”
Hunter didn’t answer. She focused on Lia’s face. The med’s eyes were wide with shock and sorrow. A protest was forming on her lips, too late.
The Warder raised his weapon. “I’m sorry, Echo. Truly.”
Hunter flung the packs with all her strength. The first one caught the Warder square in the face. He stumbled into a clinic bed and fell. The weapon swung wide, barking harmlessly, sending up a puff of blue smoke.
The second pack tangled in the lightstring and pulled the whole thing down. The wire arced through the air in a sizzling shower of sparks. The room went dark except for the fire dancing at the broken wire’s end. There was a sharp snap of power, and someone screamed, and the smell of burning filled the air.
Before the second pack even hit the floor Hunter launched herself at Lia. The momentum carried them crashing through the back door. Hunter slammed it behind them, hauled the med up with no thought for her gasp of pain, and dragged her running down the alley behind the clinic. She pushed Lia to the inside and a little ahead. No way to know the penetrating power of the projectiles, but they would have to pass through her body to hit Lia. All Hunter’s senses strained back for the sound of pursuit, but it didn’t come. A hundred paces further on she risked a quick glance behind.
Flames licked from a window. Oh, Saint, the prints. Cityens burst into the street, shouting for help, for water. Lia saw it too. A cry of pain burst from her, and she struggled to turn back, but Hunter forced her forward, away. She tried to make her run, but Lia stumbled once, and again, and they had to stop. Hunter cast about, and found them shelter behind the corpse of some dead building that had rotted to a mound of stone.
“We can’t let this happen,” Lia wept as she sank down. Her whole body shook with sobs. “We can’t.”
“Stay here.” Hunter worked her way up the pile of rubble, testing every step and handhold to make sure sh
e wouldn’t send a cascade of rock down on top of the weeping med. By the time she got to the top her arm ached like fire. She raised her head just enough to see around the side of a fallen stone. The clinic came into view. They were still much too close. Close enough to see the buckets the cityens were passing down a line, almost to hear the steam hiss as water sloshed into the flames. Close enough to see the rising smoke snuffing out the stars, and smell hope burning as black flecks of ash drifted on the hot wind.
And when the hunters came running towards the fire she had started, she was close enough to hear the shots that brought them down.
CHAPTER 24
Hunter was almost down the other side of the rock pile and running towards the burning building before she realized what she was doing. She pulled herself back with an effort that made her bite her cheek to keep from shouting. The sharp pain helped clear her head. The hunters were dead, or they were not. Either way she couldn’t help them by running mindlessly into a one-sided battle. Even if she could, she would not leave Lia alone in a burning city, not for anything.
She snaked her head around the stone again. She couldn’t see where the hunters had fallen. They might still be lying in the street. Or maybe they weren’t dead. They could have dragged themselves away, or been taken prisoner. The only thing she knew for sure was that they weren’t fighting the cityens outside: the bucket line was still working; the flames were dying down.
She rested her forehead on her arms for a moment. The irony churned in her belly. The cityens had done her a favor: if the hunters had been coming for her and Lia, she would have killed them herself. How could she have become so desperate? It seemed annuals ago that she had asked the Patri whether he wanted her to kill the Warder for him. It would all have been so simple had he just said yes.
She made her way back down the rocks. “Lia,” she said, lifting the med to her feet as gently as she could. “I’m sorry. We have to get away from here. I’m sorry.” Lia just looked at her, face blank with shock, but she didn’t argue as Hunter began to drag her along again.
Their progress was achingly slow, marked by detours and retraced steps as they crept towards the edge of the city, darting from shelter to shelter, shadow to shadow. Their erratic track might not hide them from a dogged pursuer, but it was the best they could do. And they might not be the focus of anyone’s attention at this point: the violence had spread beyond the Ward, if it had even started there. In the distance, a heavy black column of smoke marked where another fire burned in the Bend. Groups of cityens roved everywhere, some apparently unarmed, most carrying sticks and knives. Some of the men laughed or shouted, and some of those sounded drunk on too much ferm; but most moved with what for cityens was silence, intense and focused on whatever it was they hunted. Hunter saw no one with projectile weapons, but she might not; they could be hidden anywhere in packs or clothing. Armed or not, the gangs could still do damage; Hunter kept herself and Lia hidden, out of their way.
They only saw hunters once, towards morning. Yet again Hunter had shoved Lia back into a niche in the rubble, protecting the med with her body as men pelted by, but this time was different. These men weren’t hunting, but fleeing, running full out across an empty square only a dozen paces from where Hunter and Lia cowered. They passed close enough for Hunter to see the terror on their faces. A few breaths later she knew why: three hunters came behind them, moving with deliberate speed, fanned out to drive the cityens ahead of them as they might drive small game in the desert. And the end result would be the same.
Hunter pushed Lia deeper into the niche. She crouched as low as she could and still keep the med’s body sheltered. “Shh,” she whispered. “Don’t even breathe.” She wrapped her arms around Lia’s shoulders, burying the med’s face in her chest, then turned her own face against the rock, so even the glint of eyes or teeth against the dark would not betray them to the hunters’ sharp sight. Lia’s body shook, but she stayed silent. It wouldn’t matter, if the hunters got too close; they would smell the fear. Hunter’s pulse pounded in her throat. She heard the whine of their static wands as they drew close. Rock chinked beneath their boots. Every muscle in Hunter’s body tensed, waiting for the shock of a wand discharged between her shoulder blades. It was a long while before she realized they had passed.
She was shaking almost as hard as Lia.
Finally, near dawn, they made it to the fringe of the city. They were very close to the place Hunter had entered months ago, carrying the baby some cityen had left to die. Hunter realized she never asked what had become of it. She felt an absurd hope that it and the woman raising it were somewhere safe this night.
Meanwhile she and Lia were not. The forcewall was near, but Lia was at the end of her strength, weaving on her feet. Hunter sorted through options. She desperately wanted to be out of the city, but the Church would see them as soon as they crossed the barrier. Their best chance was with a long head start into the desert, but Lia wasn’t good for more than another hour’s walk, maybe not that. It wasn’t near enough.
The better choice was to wait until night to cross the forcewall. That would mean hiding through the day here among the rubble and detritus. It seemed unlikely the conflict would reach this far; there was nothing worth fighting over, and no population here to do it. The worst danger would probably be the human scavengers, the failed cityens so desperate that the strife tearing at the city could not make their lives any more precarious. Perhaps, if anyone came looking, Hunter and Lia could disguise themselves among those broken people. Hunter stifled a laugh, then caught herself. She was exhausted too; she recognized the dangerous moment when the most immediate threat had passed and the temptation to relax seemed overwhelming.
Fighting the lassitude that crept into her limbs, Hunter turned to look back at the city. A column of smoke drifted gently east, over the river where the sun was rising. She smelled fire and something else, an acrid edge in the smoke that stung her nostrils even above the organic tang of the river. An occasional muffled bang echoed this way, dulled by distance. Crop powder, that was the smell; someone must be blowing it up on purpose. She had to tell—no. That was not her mission any longer. The Patri, the cityens—they would do what they would do. She was finished with them. Lia was here, safe, that was all that mattered anymore. Everything else was gone. A deep weariness rose to fill the void.
“The one thing we knew we couldn’t let happen.” Hunter heard the tears in Lia’s voice. “Cityens against Church. Everything we worked for, everything we dreamed—I have to go back, Echo. They need me.”
Another girl, facing the pain of her city, trying to heal it all. And the mob, chasing at her heels when she failed. “No.” Too sharp, that tone; Lia made a tiny sound of confusion, hurt.
Hunter turned to her to make amends.
But the med’s eyes were huge and frightened, and not at what she saw in the city. It was Loro who had all her attention, Loro and the weapon he held beside her face while his other hand twisted in her collar, dragging her tight against his body, between him and Hunter. He crouched a little behind her, making himself as small a target as possible. Only his head showed above the med’s shoulder, and his right arm from elbow to wrist to the hand that held the projectile weapon.
Hunter took a step back, arms spread wide to show that she herself held nothing. “Let her go, Loro,” she said, marveling even as she spoke at how calm her voice sounded, not even the faintest tremor to betray the terror shaking through her veins. Stay quiet, she urged Lia wordlessly. Trust me. I’ll get you out of this. Other faces tried to superimpose themselves on the med’s, others who thought they could trust her. She forced the visions away with a vicious effort. Lia gave the tiniest nod, as if she heard.
Loro’s head jerked as another dull boom sounded from the city. “Listen to that. This morning—yesterday—a couple of hunters came into the Ward. That’s what started it all. Some Wardmen went after them, and cornered them in
a ruin.” Hunter could imagine the scene, the hunters trapped, coldly running through every scenario that would have prevented the battle now taking place, willing to sacrifice themselves if that were the best option. Even Gem. The thought of that proud, hard strength wasted at a mob’s hands brought an unexpected twist of pain.
“You can’t blame them for fighting back,” she said.
“It wasn’t the hunters, it was the Benders,” he cried. “They heard the firing, or maybe they knew all along. I don’t know. I got there just in time to see—all of a sudden the Benders were just there, and I think our people thought it was to help, and there were three men down before they realized they were shooting at them. . . .” Tears of frustration and anger ran down his face. “I tried to tell him. I knew this would happen. Once the Benders knew we had weapons they would have to have them too. They’re idiots, they were sure to start something like this. But the Warder said it would be all right, they would know that the Church was the enemy, not each other.” His voice caught. “He couldn’t understand. He’s too good. He doesn’t know the way people think. He thinks we’re all like him. . . .”
Lia twisted in his grip, trying to face him. Her face was a mask of sorrow. “No one’s blaming you, Loro. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s her fault.” His voice rose to a shout. “All of you. You ruin everything. Even the men I sent after you, after the fest—” He shifted his grip on Lia, holding her close to him, arm across her chest. “They wouldn’t have hurt you. It was just to scare you, I was supposed to come after, to seem like I was saving you. . . .” Saints, Hunter thought. A child, playing children’s games. He went on in a shaking voice, “But they knew what she was, and they were so afraid, they brought those weapons with them. I told them never to carry them. No one would have gotten hurt. I only wanted to show you that I could protect you better than she could.”