by Kate MacLeod
She looked around the town. The people were clustered in family groups, some of the clusters chatting with each other. She saw mothers adjusting the clothing of their children, fathers wrangling toddlers closer to the platform. Just normal people.
The tram reached the platform, and the doors opened. There was no one inside.
The people at the front of the line started boarding the tram car, filling up the back corners first so there would be room for the others. It would be a tight fit, but they would all make it.
Emma and her family were near the back of the crowd, waiting patiently for their turn to board. Scout stood a little farther away, watching the dogs sniffing along the snowy trench that led to the edge of town.
Then Scout felt it again, the prickling sensation that she was being watched. She turned and looked everywhere, carefully examining every corner of every cabin, every trench dug through the snow, every rocky prominence that jutted from the ground. Anywhere that could be cover for someone lurking, Scout watched intently but saw no signs of motion.
But she was sure. She was sure in her gut that trouble had already come for her.
“Come on, Scout,” Trevor called to her. He and his family were already on board the tram. Only Scout lingered on the platform, Scout and her dogs.
“It’s okay, Scout,” Emma said. “We’re among friends here. We won’t use your name once we get to the crowd in the city above. You’ll be okay.”
Scout looked at Trevor. Trevor was looking up at her with bright blue eyes, his mittened hand out waiting for her to take it and step on board.
She could hear the buzzing of the loudspeaker and the chimes that announced the doors were about to close.
She had to make a decision. She was out of time.
Emma started to take a step forward, to step off the tram, but Scout shook her head, stepping further back.
No,” Scout said. “It’s better if I stay here. I don’t want to bring trouble to you. You should go up to the city.”
Scout expected Emma to try to argue, maybe even to jump off the tram and stay with Scout, but she just gave a curt nod.
“Okay,” Emma said as she stepped back from the edge of the tram car, away from the path of the door. “The code for our cabin is seven-seven-eight-seven. You can wait out the storm there; it’s safer than yours. The communications will probably go down, but don’t worry. We’ll get back in touch with you as soon as we can. I hope you’re wrong about the trouble, but I can see there’s no arguing with you. I’ve been married to a marshal for far too long not to know what that tense set of the jaw means. Be safe, Scout.”
Scott wanted to answer, but before she could get a word out, the doors slammed shut with a hiss, and the sound of the murmuring townspeople behind Emma and her family was cut off. Scout took another step back and watched the tram lift up into the sky.
The feeling of being watched had faded away. Scout almost hated that. Now she just felt alone.
Scout turned back to her dogs. If there were people lurking about, the dogs would flush them out. And they knew how to take care of themselves. They were both fast runners, although Gert was more inclined to fight than flee if Scout or Shadow were in danger.
Scout looked up at the sky. There was no sign of a cloud anywhere. Not of a storm cloud, anyway. The sky was never blue here, just hazy white, but it didn’t look like anything dark or threatening was about to happen.
Not that she doubted that a storm was coming. Not after the whole town had promptly evacuated. It just bothered her that she might not have any warning of when it was about to strike. The rules here were apparently quite different than what she was used to. On the prairies of Amatheon, storms were visible for a long time before they were upon her. But with the mountains all around her, she could only see the sky directly above her, not all the way to a distant horizon.
The dogs were following a smell back down the snowy trench, and Scout trailed after, checking her pockets and making a mental inventory. Her marshal belt was around her waist, but it was under a coat that fell to her knees. Not easy to get to. She would have to adjust it before she ventured out next time.
Her slingshot and stones were in her coat pockets. She wasn’t sure how it would work, trying to fire with mittens on. She hoped it wouldn’t come up. She just had to get to the McGillicuddy cabin and turn on her AI and have Warrior help her turn it into the fortress Emma said it was.
That prickly feeling again. The moment she felt it, both dogs lifted their heads, smelling the air rather than the snowy path.
The village around them looked completely abandoned, but Scout was certain it was not. And looking around for hiding places wasn’t going to reveal anything to her now that it hadn’t revealed before.
She had to get back to the cabin.
Scout broke into a run, scooping Shadow up in her arms and whistling for Gert to follow. Gert charged on ahead, sending great plumes of powdery snow into the air.
Scout heard a whisper of air just by her ear, almost completely muffled by the thickness of her hat but not quite. Then she saw a flash of red, the tail end of a dart burying itself into the snow.
Shi Jian had trained her assassins well. They never missed. Scout was being driven again, back to the cabin for some reason she couldn’t even fathom.
And she was getting a sick feeling in her stomach that the sensation of being watched, the one that had convinced her not to step onto the tram, had been some deliberate manipulation on their part. They had revealed themselves just enough to set her on edge, to make her change her mind about leaving.
Gert had reached the fissure in the rock face and was galloping up the crude steps. The moment snow became bare rock, Scout dropped Shadow and spun around, slingshot at the ready. She pulled a mitten off with her teeth, leaving it to dangle from its cord at the end of her sleeve, then fit a stone into the sling’s cup.
But she saw nothing. The village looked like it was hunkering down under the white blanket of the previous night’s snow, waiting for the next covering to begin.
She retreated up the steps, pushing back her hood and hat to widen her field of view. She saw nothing, which was maddening because her gut was certain they were closing in on her. Could they somehow swim through snow like fish in water without disturbing the surface?
Then Gert barked her fearsome hellhound bark, and Shadow yelped in a way Scout really didn’t like. She turned to run up the last few steps to the plateau.
The cabin was there on the far side, glowing in the light from the sun rising behind Scout’s back, like a shining goal she had almost reached. Just a few steps farther.
But those few steps were thick with kids in white jumpsuits and dully reflective masks under thick white hoods. She couldn’t tell girls from boys, not with the masks covering their entire faces.
There were more than a dozen emerging from hiding places deep in the snow of the plateau. Four of them were attempting to stuff the dogs into sacks. Scout took half a step towards those four, but before she could even follow through on the motion the others all charged at her, weapons raised.
But silent, so creepily silent.
Scout fired her slingshot, again and again. She made sure to hit the four trying to hurt her dogs, and Gert and Shadow were able to scurry out of anyone’s reach, but they couldn’t get to Scout, and she couldn’t get to them.
And then the nearest two were on top of her – literally, as they tackled her to the ground, burying her in the snow. She kept a firm hold on her slingshot, but at such close range, it was all but useless.
Hands reached for her throat and with a surge of anger-fueled adrenaline Scout twisted out of the way. She was not going to be choked again. She threw back an elbow and heard a hiss of pain as one of the pairs of hands stopped grasping at her.
But it was quickly replaced by two other pairs. Someone caught her foot and pulled, sending Scout sprawling. Her face hit the frozen ground hard enough to make her nose crunch loudly, and she felt the ho
t wetness of her own blood running down her face.
Shadow yelped again, more in concern than pain, but it was still enough to give Scout another burst of anger. She lunged to her feet, sending a wave of snow up into the air. She couldn’t get a rock out of her pocket fast enough, but she used the butt of the slingshot to poke a particularly grabby assassin in the throat just under the mask, and they fell away.
But there were just too many of them. She was never going to reach the safety of the cabin.
Suddenly the air was full of red darts. Scout ducked, covering her head with her arms, and waited for the needlelike sting of their strikes.
But the sting didn’t come.
The dogs were barking again, excitedly. Scout lowered her arms to see the snow between her and the cabin strewn with fallen assassins. A few twitched their fingers or feet, but none of them could move well enough to get up out of the snow.
Paralyzed. Probably not permanently, though. Scout wouldn’t be that lucky.
Shadow was still barking his relentless warning bark, and Scout looked up from the sprawled bodies of her enemies to the cabin on the far side of the plateau.
Someone was standing there. Someone in a white jumpsuit with a hood, looking just like the assassins but with goggles and a scarf covering their face instead of a mask, and with a billowing gray coat that floated like a cape behind them as they crossed the snowy field to where Scout stood speechless.
There was no reason to ask if they had done this. There was no sign of a dart gun or any other weapon in their gloved hands, but it was clear all the same. Nothing else could explain that sudden change in events.
“Who are you?” Scout asked instead.
The figure stopped a few meters away and reached up to push back the hood of the coat, then peeled away the glittering goggles that covered the top half of their face.
The goggles that had been protecting a pair of blue-gray eyes. A very familiar pair of blue-gray eyes. And the face? She knew that face as well.
Clementine.
It made no sense, but Scout could try to make sense of things later.
For now, the only thing to do was run.
10
Scout stumbled back into the fissure, nearly falling down the crude staircase but catching herself with her unmittened hand. The jutting rock was sharp, and she could see the blood welling up from under her palm, but the cold was so intense she couldn’t feel it.
Yet.
Shadow collided with the back of her leg but quickly righted himself and charged on ahead, Gert close at his heels. Scout squeezed her bleeding, half-frozen hand tight and ran after.
At the bottom of the fissure, she chanced a look back. Clementine—or the Clementine doppelgänger or whoever they were—wasn’t pursuing.
Scout didn’t find that comforting.
The rising sun was warming the snow now, melting the top layer into a thick slush that clung to Scout’s boots and slowed her steps. The dogs were having an even harder time. Shadow repeatedly got bogged down and had to put all of his energy into a super jump to get clear. Gert charged on like a tank, oblivious to the growing layer of the stuff clinging to her vest and dark fur.
Scout didn’t like having Gert so far ahead of her. She hadn’t counted heads up on the plateau, but there had been about a dozen, nowhere near the number of kids she had seen in the training room back on Bo Tajaki’s ship. There must be others about, somewhere.
Even one waiting in the village to spring a trap on her was too many.
Scout didn’t dare whistle for Gert to stop. Even the plastic dog whistle in her bag was no good; she had used it to cripple the assassins with their augmented hearing once before, but she knew they had compensated for that now. She would only give away her position.
But Gert didn’t keep running all the way into town. When she reached the end of the trench, she turned to look back at Scout and Shadow. The wet snow gave way under her weight, spilling her into the trench, but her head quickly bounced up again as she waited for her companions to catch up.
Scout leaped down into the trench, then looked back again. Nothing. What did that mean?
Why had Clementine or whoever taken out all of Scout’s attackers, then let Scout just run away?
Scout bent low and crept along the trench, searching for signs of other assassins lurking in the abandoned village.
She didn’t have to search for long. There were another dozen of them on the tramway platform.
Scout squatted low, putting a hand on each of the dogs. Shadow jerked and looked back to see what was dripping on his back, and Scout realized she was still bleeding. She grabbed and squeezed a fistful of snow, hoping the cold would stop the flow.
She didn’t know anything about living in the cold. But at least the numbness that came with it took the sting out of the cut on her palm. She would take it.
Scout watched the distant figures of the kids in white jumpsuits and face masks moving from pillar to pillar. Scout looked up the other way, following the wires up to the city on the mountaintop above. The last tram had disappeared. Scout couldn’t make out any details at this distance, but she thought she saw where the wires ended: just above a pair of metal doors covering the opening in the stone wall.
At least the villagers were safe. And Emma and the boys.
Now Scout just had to find a way to safety herself.
When she had run back this way, she hadn’t really had a plan, just a vague hope that she could find a way to call for another tram car to come get her. That hope swelled as she saw the kids stepping off the platform, disappearing among the cabins. Even white jumpsuits shouldn’t be that hard to distinguish from snow; Scout suspected some sort of technology helping them disappear.
Still, she was certain none of them remained in the tram station. She would just wait a few minutes to be sure, then slip inside and see if she could make that call.
If that didn’t work, she could try using the unlocking tool in her marshal belt on one of the cabins . . .
The thought was blown from her mind by a boom of noise, the boom that came just a fraction of a second after the shock wave bowled her over.
Scout gasped for breath, her diaphragm spasming painfully. Her ears were ringing, and white stars were exploding in front of her eyes.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t been knocked over by explosions before. Or by the destruction of her entire city. She even felt like she was bleeding from shallow cuts all over her body again, like that day when the shards of the dome that had failed to protect her family and her home had showered all over her and Shadow kilometers away across the prairie.
But it wasn’t glass. It was snow, propelled by the explosion of the assassins destroying the tram station. Sharp ice, but not sharp enough to really cut her or her dogs.
Scout finally drew a proper breath, then sat up to look around.
No sign of the assassin kids. It was as if they had actually melted away.
Nothing remained of the station but a smoking crater and a wide blast pattern of soot and debris marring the drifts of snow. The cables had fallen to the ground of the steep mountainside.
Someone up top was bound to notice that. Someone official, someone who would want to fly down and investigate. She should stay nearby.
Scout unzipped her jacket, sucking her breath in with a loud hiss as the cold air quickly infiltrated her shirts and vest to freeze her skin. She retrieved the tool she needed from its pouch and rezipped her jacket, but it was like sealing that bubble of cold up with her. It was going to take a while for her body temperature to warm the inside of her jacket back up to something tolerable.
But the plan was to get inside a building. She wouldn’t freeze before she accomplished that.
Scout touched each of the dogs to get their attention, then climbed up out of the trench to crawl over the snow to the nearest cabin. Shadow figured out what she was after and ran ahead, but Gert stayed at her side.
Scout would find that loyalty more admira
ble if Gert weren’t a big deep-blue-vested target against the white snow, slowly tracking alongside Scout. Just in case anyone on a rooftop wanted to snipe her.
Scout pushed herself to her feet and ran to the door. She put the device on the door and waited for the light on the side to turn green, to hear the little click of the locking mechanism inside the door opening up in the name of a galactic marshal.
Nothing happened. The red light on the tool flashed over and over as if wondering why its attempts to open the door weren’t working.
Scout thrust the tool back into her pocket and looked around for signs of movement before risking the run to the next cabin.
That door wouldn’t open either.
Scout put the tool back in her pocket, then struggled to pull her mitten back over her stiff hand. The bleeding had stopped, but so had any sense of feeling. That probably wasn’t good. But the mittens felt unnaturally warm, like they had little heaters in them.
Or she was starting to lose it. Which might be more likely.
Shadow sniffed the air and Scout watched for what he would do next, but he apparently decided it was nothing and turned back to nose at Gert. He kept lifting his paws, one after the other, trying sometimes to keep two up at once.
Up out of the snow. He was going to freeze if she didn’t get him to shelter.
Gert’s wide paws seemed unbothered by the cold, but Scout had seen Gert ram things with her head and seem unstunned as well. It was possible she just wasn’t smart enough to understand her own sensory input.
Scout bit her lip and looked around again, hoping for a sign. Perhaps a cabin with an inviting light that indicated its door still functioned or someone had left a back door open.
But all she noticed was that the light was getting darker, and thick flakes were starting to swirl down from the sky. Not many, and the paths they traced were beyond lazy, catching updrafts to dance back up before resuming their gentle fall.
