Scavenger Blood

by Janet Edwards

  Donnell took in the situation at a glance. “At the next general conclave of the whole alliance, I’ll be calling for a vote to overturn the rule against women carrying bows. As an interim measure, I’d like the other division leaders to agree to Raeni carrying a bow on this trip in recognition of her new status as leader of Queens Island.”

  “Brooklyn division agrees to Raeni carrying a bow,” said Ghost, “but feels a vote on overturning the rule against women carrying bows can’t be delayed until the next general conclave. My wife told me that Natsumi and Himeko found one of Cage’s arrows at their fishing spot this morning.”

  Ghost shook his head. “Brooklyn division will not allow its women to continue fishing without bows to defend themselves. We vote to overturn the old rule now.”

  Raeni threw a single startled look at Ghost before speaking. “Queens Island votes for women to be allowed to carry bows.”

  Donnell had been fighting for nearly two decades to get the alliance to allow women to carry bows. He was looking dazed by the speed of this but hastily spoke himself. “The Resistance votes for women to be allowed to carry bows.”

  Ice’s face was as unreadable as usual, but the long pause before he spoke showed he’d been taken by surprise too. “If there’s evidence Cage is targeting the women fishing, it changes everything. I assume that women would be given the same initial archery instruction as men?”

  “Of course,” said Raeni. “Queens Island have already been holding archery lessons for our women in our wing of the building.”

  “As have Brooklyn,” said Ghost.

  Ice nodded. “Then London division votes for women to be allowed to carry bows.”

  Everyone turned to look at Wall. There was a moment of delay before he grudgingly spoke.

  “Manhattan accepts the majority decision of the alliance.”

  “It’s agreed that women can carry bows then,” said Donnell.

  Raeni’s dark face had a triumphant expression as Tindra handed her a bow and quiver of arrows. Both Raeni and Tindra turned to look joyfully at me, and I smiled in return. The rule against women carrying bows had finally been overturned. This was a moment of victory for every woman in the alliance, but with a hunting party missing we didn’t have time for more than that brief second of celebration.

  Donnell and I collected flashlights from Tindra, picked up our knife belts from the Resistance table, and led the way out into the lightly falling snow.

  Chapter Five

  Our group walked past the glass front wall of Reception, and followed the path that led upriver to the Unity Bridge, moving as fast as was safe in the conditions. There wasn’t enough snow on the ground yet to hide the holes left by missing maintenance covers, so no one should fall into an old tunnel or drain, but the path was uneven and the stones wet and slippery.

  “We’ll probably see Aaron’s hunting party coming towards us at any moment,” said Donnell. “You can then all laugh at me for panicking about nothing.”

  “I’d be very happy to see them and laugh,” said Ghost. “My cousin is in that hunting party.”

  “So is my boyfriend, Rogue,” said Raeni grimly.

  “I can’t believe Cage would attack an entire party of expert archers,” said Wall. “He’d realize that was a fast way to get himself killed.”

  Ice shrugged. “We still don’t know that the hunting party’s problem is anything to do with Cage. As Donnell said earlier, it could be as simple as a man with a twisted ankle slowing down their return journey.”

  Raeni sighed. “Whatever is wrong, at least we don’t have to worry about falling stars. The temperature is well below freezing point now, and it will be dark soon.”

  We continued along the path in silence, turning towards the river. As we passed close by the boathouse, the sight of its open doorway gave me a breathless feeling of sickness. Three weeks ago, Cage had ambushed Tad and me in that boathouse.

  That was the moment when my whole world had shattered, and the pieces reformed into a mirror image of itself. Hannah, the girl who I’d thought was my best friend, had helped Cage trap me and stood watching as he deliberately broke the bones in my upper arm and shoulder. Tad, the boy I’d considered my enemy, had fought Cage in my defence, and taken me upriver to a storage facility with the advanced medicines that could treat my injury.

  Was that the reason why I cared for Tad now? Was it simply because he’d fought on my side that day, and helped heal what would have been a life-transforming injury? Logically, that should be the answer, but I felt some unknown extra factor was involved.

  I might not understand my feelings for Tad, but there was no mystery at all about my feelings for Hannah. It was typical of her blind selfishness that she’d try to talk to me when I was going out with this search party. Hannah had chosen to leave the Resistance to join Cage in Manhattan division, but now that Cage had been defeated she was regretting her decision. She was grabbing every chance to approach me, trying to persuade me to either get her back into the Resistance, or get Wall to give her favourable treatment.

  However many times I refused Hannah’s requests, she seemed convinced that she just had to keep asking and I’d give in eventually. She was wrong. I’d made any number of excuses for Hannah over the years, forgiving her everything from spiteful words to theft, but I’d learnt the truth in the boathouse. Our friendship might have been real when we were both small children in London, but ever since we’d arrived in New York she’d been working for Cage.

  Six years of repeating my secrets to Cage. Six years of telling me lies to keep me isolated from my father. Six years of betrayal that had culminated in that moment in the boathouse. I couldn’t look at Hannah’s face now without remembering her expression as she watched Cage torture me. An expression where horror had been oddly mixed with delight.

  “Is your left shoulder hurting you, Blaze?” asked Donnell.

  I realized I was protectively clutching my left shoulder with my right hand, and hastily let go and made a pretence of adjusting my coat. “No. I haven’t worn this coat for a while, and it’s a little tight on the shoulders.”

  Donnell nodded and looked up at the sky. “The snow seems to be stopping now, and it looks as if we won’t get any more for a few hours, but we’ve got limited time before sunset.”

  We headed on to where the graceful white shape of the reproduction paddle steamer, the Spirit of New York, floated peacefully at her mooring, with the bobbing shapes of small ice floes jostling around her. The path broadened out here to become a wide expanse of concrete that gave us a perfect view of the Unity Bridge upriver of us. It was a delicate thing, designed to be an ornamental walkway where people could stand to admire the Hudson River and the famous landmarks of Wallam-Crane Square in Manhattan.

  We weren’t continuing along the riverside path to the Unity Bridge though, but turning down a path on our left. This took us directly away from the river, past an area that had once been covered by flowerbeds and now was the alliance graveyard.

  I kept my face turned steadfastly away from the graveyard as we walked past it. The older graves had grass growing over them, but the graves of those who’d died from the winter fever were still fresh earth-covered scars, and it hurt to picture the faces of the people we’d lost. Aaron’s wife. One of Wall’s nephews. Donnell’s best friend and previous deputy, Kasim. Twenty-nine others, all loved and mourned by someone.

  I bleakly thought that the graveyard was the one place with no barriers between the divisions. The dead of the Resistance, Manhattan, Queens Island, Brooklyn, and London lay side by side, their old feuds forgotten as their bodies became one with the earth. The number of graves was a harsh reminder that the alliance must leave New York and find a new home in the spring. Even if the power grid didn’t explode this summer, we wouldn’t survive another winter like this one.

  Once we were past the graveyard, Donnell lifted a hand to stop us. “Aaron’s party was supposed to be hunting at the recreation area ahead of us. I don’t k
now if Blaze or Raeni know that place?”

  Raeni was proudly carrying a bow for the first time. I knew that she wasn’t going to admit ignorance of anything connected with hunting in front of the other division leaders, particularly Wall, so I spoke up myself.

  “I’ve heard people talk about the recreation area, but never been there.”

  “Decades ago, there was a central lake here, surrounded by a large, mostly flat, expanse of grassland and scattered trees,” said Donnell. “Now there’s a lot of flooding in the area, so the lake has expanded to twice its original size, and most of the remaining grassland is intermittently underwater. That attracts flocks of geese, but means there are often only a couple of usable paths.”

  Donnell turned to Ghost. “Rather than have all fourteen of us march conspicuously up to the recreation area, could you do a little scouting and report back?”

  Ghost strolled into the tangle of bushes next to the path, and vanished.

  “I can never work out how Ghost crawls through bushes without disturbing even a single leaf,” muttered Wall.

  “There’s a secret to it,” said one of the Brooklyn men, in a confiding voice. “The secret being that he really is a ghost.”

  Nobody laughed. We’d all heard the joke too many times before to find it funny, especially with the graveyard so close behind us. I was feeling tired after being on guard duty all day, so I brushed the snow from a fallen tree trunk and sat down on it to wait. Everyone else stayed on their feet, staring down the path towards the recreation ground. After about ten minutes, Wall got restless.

  “Ghost’s been a long time. We’d better go and look for him.”

  “I’d give him another minute or two,” Ghost’s voice spoke from startlingly close to my left ear.

  I gasped, turned, and found Ghost was sitting next to me.

  “Hunting parties always base themselves on the patch of high ground on the east side of the lake,” said Ghost. “I managed to get a good view of the old wall that the archers hide behind, but there’s no sign of Aaron’s hunting party.”

  “If there weren’t many geese in the area, then Aaron could have decided to take his party somewhere else entirely,” said Ice. “That would explain why they’re taking longer to return than expected.”

  “Where would Aaron take them though?” asked Donnell. “He couldn’t move them back in this direction, because Vijay’s party were hunting on the Hudson River near the Unity Bridge, and the recreation area is surrounded by apartment blocks on the other three sides.”

  “There’s a path on the far side of the recreation area that leads to another hunting spot nearer the Hackensack River,” said Wall. “Luther took a party there last week, and they brought back a lot of geese.”

  “Luther took a party there on a clear, sunny day,” said Donnell. “I don’t believe Aaron would lead his party that far from the Parliament House on a day when the clouds showed it was likely to rain or snow heavily.”

  He shook his head. “Aaron’s hunting party must still be at the recreation area. If they aren’t on the high ground itself, then they could be among the trees beside it.”

  “They’d have to be deliberately hiding among the trees or I’d have seen them,” said Ghost. “If they’re deliberately hiding then ...”

  He let the sentence trail off, and Donnell finished it for him. “If they’re deliberately hiding then they’re probably hiding from Cage. We’ll need to get closer to find out for sure. How high are the water levels?”

  “Close to maximum,” said Ghost. “The only path that isn’t flooded is the wide paved path that runs across the open ground on this side of the lake.”

  “I’m not risking taking us across the open ground when Cage could be lurking nearby,” said Donnell. “We’d better go around the outside of the recreation area to reach the sports hall.”

  Wall frowned. “How does going to the sports hall help us? We won’t be able to get across to the high ground from there without wading waist-deep in freezing water.”

  “We won’t be able to get across to the high ground,” said Donnell, “but we’ll be close enough to whistle Morse code messages to anyone hiding there.”

  He waved an arm and led us back towards the graveyard, then took a side turning along an overgrown path. We had to climb over two fallen trees before reaching a wall with an iron gate that was hanging off its hinges. We squeezed through the gap between the gate and the wall, then went across an area of cracked concrete to an ivy-covered building that had to be the sports hall.

  As we reached the doorway, my gun’s tracking display appeared. I instinctively tensed, thinking that meant Cage was hidden nearby, but then the gun gave its standard warning for a falling star, and I saw a purple dot at roof height near the far end of the building. Given the temperature was below freezing point, I suspected the falling star was inside the sports hall rather than on top of its roof.

  I couldn’t warn the others of the falling star’s presence without betraying the secret of my gun’s tracking display, so I followed Donnell into the building in silence, reassuring myself that his gun must have given him a warning too. The lights were on inside the sports hall, but half of them seemed to be broken. We walked down a dimly lit corridor with closed doors on either side, and on into what looked like a long, green-curtained room.

  A second look showed me the green curtains were actually dangling lengths of ivy. Three walls of this room had narrow windows at intervals, each of which ran from close to the floor right up to the high ceiling. All the panes of glass were intact, but ivy had found its way in at the sides of them to take over this place.

  Donnell glanced briefly up at the ceiling, and then tested the floor with his foot. “The ceiling still seems solid enough, but the wooden floor is rotten in places. Be careful where you put your feet.”

  I gave a wary look at the ceiling myself. There was no sign of the falling star, so it must have found its way into the space between this ceiling and the roof. It was unnerving to think of it lurking, invisible, right above us.

  We made our way cautiously to the windows at the far end of the room, and Donnell yanked a mass of ivy strands down. “These windows are made of reinforced glass, so we’ll need to open them rather than break them.”

  He took the knife from his belt and started hacking away more of the ivy from around a panel of glass at head height. I moved across to another window, and scrubbed at the grubby glass with my sleeve before peering out.

  I saw a narrow tangle of vegetation on the other side of the window, but then the ground sloped steeply downwards to a flooded area. The skeletal branches of a couple of drowned trees, and the top of a signpost, showed the water varied between knee and waist deep. Beyond it, a lonely piece of high ground was surrounded by water on three sides, and trees on the fourth.

  That must be where the hunting parties based themselves. I frowned. The high ground was beyond the tracking range of my gun, so I was dependent on my eyes to see who was there. Anyone out in the open, whether standing or lying down, would be instantly visible against the white dusting of snow, but Aaron’s hunting party could be hidden among the trees.

  Donnell put his knife back in his belt, and struggled to open the window. Wall went to help him, and they forced it slightly ajar. There was a snapping sound, and the complete window fell outwards, flattening a group of bushes.

  “That wasn’t what I intended to happen, but it serves our purpose,” said Donnell briskly. “Aaron’s party might not be able to hear us if we shouted from here, but they should be close enough to hear whistled signals.”

  Donnell took the whistle from his belt, and blew the status check signal. One long blast, one short, one long. Everyone stood in perfect silence, listening for a response. I was just giving up hope when I heard a whistle answering us. The sound was quieter than I’d expected, and not coming from either the high ground directly ahead of us, or the trees next to it, but somewhere further to our right.

  The reply wa
sn’t one of the standard single-letter responses, but a long message. I’d often used Morse code when fishing, exchanging whistled messages with the women at other fishing spots, so I could easily follow what these whistles were saying. We’d been right to think Cage was responsible for Aaron’s hunting party failing to return.

  Donnell waited until the message ended before speaking. “That whistling had to be coming from the old restaurant between the high ground and the apartment blocks, and the first word was definitely Cage. I lost track after that though.”

  “Cage. North thirty-five degrees east. Top floor.” Ghost and I chorused the words in unison.

  “That can’t be right,” said Donnell. “If Aaron’s party is in the restaurant, then that would place Cage at the top of one of the three apartment blocks near the swimming pool. Even with the advantage of height, he couldn’t fire an arrow as far as the restaurant or ...”

  Donnell broke off his sentence because there was more whistling. I buried my face in my hands, and took the cowardly option of letting Ghost break the bad news to Donnell.

  “Precision projectile sniper rifle.”

  “Chaos weeping!” Donnell hammered a fist on the wall. “How could Cage have found a working sniper rifle? There are plenty of guns in New York, but they’re all security locked to their old owners so totally useless.”

  “It’s obviously possible to get hold of working guns,” said Wall. “You and Blaze are wearing Armed Agent weapons yourselves.”

  “We’ve only got these weapons because my old deputy, Kasim, was a Military Security Armed Agent,” said Donnell. “He managed to steal two unbonded weapons before he defected from the Military to join the Earth Resistance. Cage certainly won’t have any serving Military officers helping him, so how did he get a working rifle?”

  “There’s no point in us standing here discussing how Cage got this rifle,” said Raeni impatiently. “The important thing is that our people took refuge in the restaurant, and can’t set foot outside it without being shot, so we need to rescue them.”