Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  “That’s right.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugs again. Why does he only shrug one shoulder? “The money’s better. I’m good with figures.”

  “You enjoy accounting?”

  “It’s okay.”

  Somewhere out in the night, people are roaming bare-toothed.

  Five Wounds Park. This is our area tonight, the west side of it. I review my knowledge of the city’s history, to keep the word alone out of my head. It’s the second oldest park, the first to be built after Benedict. If you’re a lyco, the name just sounds pious, traditional. Some people who work in DORLA call it Fifty, but it’s a lame joke. The injury rate isn’t as bad as Sanctus; the trees in the wooded parts aren’t as narrow and closely planted. Instead they’re massive, old, trunks you can’t put your arms around, with heavy, jagged bark. Daylight, it’s cool and green, spacious. Tonight, all I can think is that there are immense trees for people to hide behind, trees to be slammed into. Knotted bark cuts a brief, phantom impression into my face, and I shake my head. Nothing can happen to me tonight.

  The tracker glows, empty. If Marty was here, he’d be asking about it, he’d need to know if we were in for a quiet night or if we were just in an unoccupied patch. “We might be lucky,” I say, keeping the van at a steady forty miles per hour and not looking at Nate. “It might be a quiet night.”

  “You think so?” His tone is neutral.

  “It’s Tuesday. We’re on the right side of the weekend.”

  “Oh.” Nate says nothing, looks out of the window at the cool silver streets. Five Wounds Park is on my side, narrow iron bars cutting across the occasional tree. It isn’t bright enough to make out any details; the trunks, half hidden by the fence, wait in the background, solid, patient, opaque.

  I turn around. “Nate, are you nervous about this?”

  He glances at me, a quick flicker. His shoulder pulls around a little as if shielding himself, and for just a moment I think I see something hunted in his expression. Then his face is static again, unreadable. “Are you?” He says it as if he thought I was hinting. I can’t tell if that’s what he really thinks.

  I give up on conversation and turn through the main west entrance into Five Wounds. A colonnade of trees, great towering beeches, looms either side of us. I can see the lumps and bulges and irregularities on each trunk like aging flesh slipping down.

  The light beyond our headlights is watery and pure, and what I’d like to do is switch off the van’s lights and just look at it. Five Wounds is so carefully designed, so stately. I took Leo for walks here, before last week, before Seligmann escaped and I locked myself away. In the daytime it was on a human scale—there were people near us and the park didn’t seem to extend that far—but now that it’s empty and moonlit something has happened to the distance; it stretches on and on, boundless. I could watch it forever.

  I brake the van, pulling to a halt in an open space.

  “Why are we stopping?” Nate says.

  Does he see the night outside? “I’m just going to take some Pro-Plus,” I tell him. “You want some?”

  “Yeah.”

  I break open the packet, dole out the little white pills. Nate dry-swallows his before I can offer him coffee, and I start to say something about it then stop. Instead, I pour myself a half cup and drink. The sound of myself swallowing rushes over my ears, and I wonder if he hears it.

  My head lolls back against the seat, and I look out at the park. I want to sleep. I want to go home, go back to my tiny apartment and find Paul napping in my bed, ready to talk to me when I come in. I want things I can’t have. Paul isn’t in bed tonight. Fatigue presses down on me, and what I want to do is sit quietly in this van and look out at the empty silver night.

  “Are we going?” Nate’s voice digs into me.

  “In a minute.”

  I hear him twitch and shuffle in his seat. The sound pricks me; it’s wire wool at the nape of my neck. The scanner is dull red and blank. Nate settles in his seat, still and tense.

  Yanking back the gearshift, I gun the engine and start up the patrol again. Maybe the motion of the van will steady him down.

  At midnight, the tracker sounds, a sharp electrical cheep. Our mechanical canary. Nate and I come out of our separate worlds and study the image. My glance flicks over it and clocks it, and I open my mouth, then remind myself that Nate’s a trainee and needs practice.

  “What can you tell me about that?” I say.

  Nate looks at me, just for an instant, then looks back at the tracker. “It’s a single lune,” he says. He’s taken his feet off the dash, his hands rest in his lap, shifting a little as if he’d like to drum his fingers and is stopping himself. His voice doesn’t shake, but it’s slightly breathier than usual, just slightly. He sits straight, his legs braced, his head high and alert. “It’s on the move. It’s at the edge of our area.”

  I check, and I agree; it’s right on the edge of the tracker, and when I look at where we are I see I’ve already driven farther east than I’d thought. We’ve been wandering. “Tell me about it being on the move. What do you think the situation is?”

  Nate frowns, says nothing.

  “Why do you think it’s moving? How do you think it affects how we deal with it?” I keep the van on the path and head east.

  “Well, it’ll be harder to collar,” Nate says blankly.

  “How so?”

  “…Because we’ll never outrun it, and if it keeps going when we get out of the van we can’t catch up to it.” The questions seem to assault him, though his answers are right enough.

  “Which brings us back to the first question I asked you: why do you think it’s running? We need to anticipate.”

  Nate shrugs, again the one-sided, jerky movement. For a moment the sight of it goads me, and I press myself back in the seat. “It could be hunting.”

  “Yes. In which case?” The precision of my voice almost drowns out the image of blood soaking through this subtle moonlit grass.

  “We wait for it to catch its rabbit or squirrel. Or we shoot the rabbit ourselves.”

  A man tied to a chair, spitting out blood. “Yes. Or use it to anticipate where it’s going.” I close my eyes, open them. “But we’re careful. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel brave enough tonight to come between this lune and its prey.”

  He looks up, and I tell myself I can’t get angry at him for hearing me talk of my weakness. I can’t.

  “Why else might it be running?” The little point of light disappears off the scanner, and I speed up the van to bring it back.

  I’m so tired.

  Nate raises his hands an inch, sets them down. “It—might just be running. I don’t know.”

  Chasing another lune, injured and trying to flee the pain, trying to find somewhere familiar. Just running. There’s no one here I can ask why lunes sometimes just run. “They do, sometimes,” I say.

  “So what do we do?” Nate picks up his pole. His grip is good, he holds it well. I’ve got to stop thinking about myself alone, I’ve got to start thinking of us as a unit. Just for tonight, just for tonight. It’s too dangerous out there.

  “Well…” The lune is getting closer, we’re reaching it. I don’t want this boy to see me bleed. “I’ve heard stories of people doing collars out of the windows of pursuing vans, but I don’t believe them. What we do is see if we can figure out what it’s doing.”

  Nate says nothing. There’s no satisfaction in his silence.

  “And if we can’t,” I say, “we trank it.”

  Next month I face the short straw. Next month Marty should be on his feet and back at work. I should be thinking about caution, orthodoxy, the rule book. Outside, the night is cold glass and perfect, and I can’t stop to watch it.

  I press on the accelerator and say, “So have your sleeper ready.”

  Our first sight of the lune is an instant, the sight of a massive gray flank that flies in front of the van and is away again. Nate jumps, k
nocks his catcher against the door, and I inhale in a hiss and swing around. Trees block our path and I swerve, jolting us both, to follow. It comes into view again, narrow white legs and a great fringed tail, heading away from us at an effortless, bounding run. The back flexes, the long, snaking neck balances, and the lune covers ground with swift, absolute ease while I tug the wheel and chase with our clumsy, rattling van. A man, it has to be, he’s four and a half feet at the shoulder, double my weight, immense. He weaves fast as a horse in and out of the trees.

  “We won’t catch him,” Nate says, both hands wrapped tight around his catching pole.

  “Not running,” I say, not daring to take my eyes off him. If he tires, he might stop, but lunes run easy as breathing, they can run for hours. “Nate, look around, see if he’s chasing something.”

  “He’s not.” Nate glares into the distance, keeps looking. There’s nothing there. This man isn’t after something. He’s just—running.

  We reel in our seats as I wrench the wheel again, just avoiding a great oak. Ahead of us, the lune runs on, his white legs flash in the light of the van.

  “He’s heading for the woods,” Nate says, his voice hardening. I draw a quick breath, because the woods are upon us and this is final. A few hundred yards, and the trees gather together in a mass. We could go through them at a crawl, rolling our careful route around each one, but at this pace we’ll die, and it won’t even be death by tearing teeth and heavy claws, it’ll be a smash of metal and scattered glass and our skulls cracking under the blows of our own vehicle. We can’t follow him into the woods.

  “Nate, I’m going to do this,” I hear myself say. “Watch my back.”

  And I slam the van to a halt and shove open the door, a brief tussle and then I leap down, land hard on my feet and stagger to right myself and then I’m running, gun in hand, I’m running for my life after him. The ground smacks against my soles, my arms are shaken by the rhythm and my knees are unstable and I’m so slow, my bare soft shiftless flesh in the moonlight is pushed to its limits and weak and no use to me against the fleet, huge, vanishing man before me.

  I fire a dart, the gun kicks in my hand and I’ve missed, my pounding feet are rattling my arm. I fire again, and still he’s up, sure-footed, farther and farther away.

  I clasp both my hands around the gun and raise it to take aim.

  I fire twice. The first dart flies and stabs into his thigh, he breaks stride and his shot leg scuffles so that the second dart misses but it’s all right, it’s going to be all right because he can run a few more paces but the trank is in his bloodstream and soon he’s going to stumble.

  He slows, lopes, covering ten yards, twenty, his left leg cautious on the ground, lifting up and pointing the foot with an injured, balletic grace. Then he stops, raises a leg to scratch at the dart, and his head droops, his body folds under its own weight and he’s rolled over onto his side, and asleep.

  My breath sears my chest and my heart is pounding, my feet ache from the beating they’ve taken against the ground. I stand, armed, gasping for air, the wide green space open around me and the sky looming above, deep black and clear. I look up. There are so many stars tonight, thick as milk, the sky is cloudy with them. Something could come at me from any side, but the world is empty, soundless, infinite around me. I breathe, and the air feels like a benediction.

  The sound of an engine startles me, and I turn to see Nate driving the van, trundling up to the tranked lune, ready to load. I look down and see that I’m still holding the gun, and I sigh in the cold and remember that this is not the time to stargaze and wonder at creation. So I reload, take four fresh darts off my belt and snap them into place, and follow the van.

  This is a stretcher job; the lune is heavy and we have to roll him onto a stretcher to get him into the van. It can be done alone, but not easily. As Nate unloads him, locks the cage, and gets out the chipper to read his details, I take the metal detector and go out to look for the darts. In a crisis you can get away with not doing this, but there are no lunes nearby. It’s a quiet night. Junkies trawl the parks every Day One, looking for darts that missed their targets, each loaded with enough sedative to knock out two people in the daytime. It’s illegal to use them, to touch them, even—you’re supposed to report them to the park staff and get DORLA to send out some menial with latex gloves to pick them up—but there have been cases where people OD’d. No lawsuits against us for leaving the darts behind have succeeded yet, but the day will come.

  The metal detector is dull and awkward work. Another night, I’d send my subordinate to do it. This night, though, an unreality has taken hold of me. I can’t stand to be in the van. Claustrophobia sucks at me as long as I’m in there, and while it’s crazy to linger out in the moon night, still, as I pull on latex gloves of my own, a precaution against picking up a discarded syringe by mistake, all I can feel is frustration that they block the air on my hands.

  Another circuit, another half hour, and there’s nothing out there but transparent moonlight carving shadows in among the grass blades. The man we have in our cages is one Peter Seadon, a homeowner, a first offender. He was a runner, not a fighter, which suggests a more peaceful nature. The trank will hold him for hours.

  I drive around the edge of our area. The tracker will still tell us if anything comes up, so we can stay where we are. Thoughts keep occurring to me, things I could be thinking about, and they don’t hold my interest. I just keep looking back outside.

  Close by us, I know there’s a lake. Leo and I have sat by it sometimes, while I cradled him and told him that when he learned to sit up we’d take bread and feed the birds. It’s outside our patrol, some few hundred yards beyond our designated route, but it’s a quiet night. It’s Tuesday, Wednesday, there’s been one lune all night, and I’d so love to see the lake. I’ve never seen it by moonlight, and I may never see such a lucid night again.

  What I feel when I turn the wheel of the van and go looking for this lake of mine is safe. It may be that I’ve had too much adrenaline, that the capture of this man Peter Seadon has gone to my head. Post-hazard euphoria, they call it. Now I’m out here, marooned in a great silk-gray expanse, nobody can come at me without being seen. I have a tracker, I have guns, tonight I can fight. There’s so much space around me, and whoever I find there won’t recognize me, can’t talk or chant rhymes or curse me down. It’s freedom of a sort.

  “Aren’t we going off track?” says Nate as we near the lake.

  “A little.” I won’t tell him I’m looking for something pretty. “Our area’s more or less dead at the moment. There’s no harm in sweeping a little.”

  “Isn’t it, like, punishable by six months’ imprisonment?” Nate says. His voice is harsh rather than scared, and I keep my head turned away, trying for unconcerned.

  “Settle down, kid. Nobody’s going to waste time on a detour we make on a quiet night that doesn’t have consequences. If there were lunes in our area, yeah, but nothing’s happening. There’s no opening for a negligence suit here. Relax.” I’m out of the real world, far away.

  The lake is slate-black, barely dimpled by the wind in this calm night. The moon shimmers on its surface, broken by the moving water into a row of crescents, each shifting a little with the waves. It’s hard to believe that if I touched the surface of the water it would break, my hand would go through and find itself wet and cold and meet no resistance. It looks so tangible and constant, smooth as velvet. It could be a dip in the world. I thought it would be clear like the sky, but here in the dark, it’s a soft, glimmering blank.

  “What are we doing here?” Nate’s voice is edgy. Looking at a lake, I could say. My eyes could rest here for a long time. I turn my head and make my eyes follow, and I see Nate’s legs are curled up in his seat, he’s gripping his knees. A woman he barely knows is bringing him wandering through the night, putting him at risk from superiors he hasn’t met. He wants this to be prosaic, real, he wants a learning experience. He’s on duty.

  I
’m about to resign myself, turn the van and leave the lake behind and go back on route, when I notice something odd. The tracker has a ring inside it that marks out a certain area, lets us know what’s in reasonable range, and it bleeps when an object moves within the ring. The area outside is only a few millimeters of screen. Something is glowing in that area, right at the edge, a smudge to the northeast. It isn’t close enough for the tracker to sound and alert us, but it’s there. It doesn’t look like a single speck.

  “Do you see that?” I say.

  Nate looks and says nothing.

  A coordinated attack. A pack of dogs. A misread signal. This could be anything.

  I want to see it.

  “Excuse me,” says Nate as I start off northwest, “but aren’t we going way out of our area now?”

  “We can get away with it,” I say, focused on my driving, “if we’re going to avert a crisis.”

  “Yeah, but shouldn’t we get on the radio, ask if anyone’s checked it out first?”

  “It’ll save the switchboard time if we can verify that it’s worth checking first.” The words come out of my mouth before I’ve had time to think of reasons, and I don’t believe them.

  “What if it’s a pack?”

  “Then we’re within our rights to request backup, and we’re likelier to get it if we’re in someone else’s area.” The gray path unwinds under the wheels, and I keep driving.

  “Won’t we get in trouble for this? It’s not in our area and no one’s asked us to go there.” The tension in his voice scratches at me.

  “You won’t,” I say. I sit up straight, my voice is clipped. “I’m exercising my own judgment here; you won’t be held accountable for doing as you’re told.”

  The tracker bleeps as the patch of light gets within our perimeter. It’s still shapeless, inexplicable.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Nate.” I don’t look at him. “I’m exercising my judgment on this. That’s enough.”

  Nate sits back in his seat, legs apart, hands clamped against them, and doesn’t say another word.