The Travels of Scout Shannon: Books 4-6

Chapter 6

6

The corridor ended in what Scout recognized as a train platform. She had taken many trains on Amatheon Orbiter 1, but those had all been under the surface of the city, in the bowels of the space station. She and the Torreses were still on the same level as the processing station under the docks, further down than the top of the dome but still higher than the tops of the other towers. How could there be a train up here?

And yet a row of cars stood waiting, people scurrying on or off as a buzzing announcement and chiming bell said they were nearly out of time. Mary Grace scooped Shadow up in her arms and ran for the last of the train cars. John Carlo still had a grip on Scout’s arm and forced her into a run to follow. Gert galloped along beside her, head swiveling as she took in the activity around her.

Gert was definitely getting more used to crowds than she used to be. Instead of being on edge, she seemed only a bit disappointed no one was noticing how pretty her vest was.

The doors slammed shut behind them, and Scout staggered as the car jerked forward before finding a smoother acceleration.

The car was smaller than the ones she had traveled on before, only large enough for the three of them plus the two dogs. There was a bench against the back wall where Mary Grace had collapsed with Shadow in her arms. Behind the bench was a curved window and Scout could see the train platform disappearing behind them.

Then she was blinded by intense white light, blinking as she realized they had emerged from the tower and were following a narrow track that curved away from the building.

“Where are we going?” Scout asked.

“We have to get you down the mountain straight away,” John Carlo told her. “We had intended to keep you here with us in the city at first, but that’s not possible now.”

“What happened?” Scout asked.

“People are here,” Mary Grace told her. “People who have been asking about you. That’s not good. No one should even know you are here.”

“What people?” Scout asked.

“We’re still working on that,” John Carlo said. “We should have some answers soon, or possibly just better questions. But in the meantime, we’re taking you to Emma McGillicuddy.”

Scout felt suddenly dizzy in a way that had nothing to do with the motion of the vehicle under her. She reached out to touch the wall of the car, then followed it down until she was sitting on the bench beside Mary Grace. Gert flopped down on top of Scout’s feet and Shadow stretched out from Mary Grace’s arms to lick at Scout’s elbow.

The Torreses must have sensed she needed a minute. Mary Grace put a hand on Scout’s knee, and John Carlo turned toward the front of the car to have a whispered conversation through some sort of communicator.

Scout hadn’t consciously made a mental picture of the two, but she realized that part of her had formed an expectation of who she would be meeting. They were lawyers, after all, and she had seen entire squads of lawyers every time Bo had met with his cousins the Months.

The Torreses were nothing like those lawyers. They weren’t wearing flashy, tailored clothing with neat haircuts and the latest wearable tech.

No, the Torreses looked like farmers. And Scout realized that was probably just what they had been, back before the Tajaki trade dynasty had taken over their world. They had become lawyers out of necessity, but they hadn’t bothered conforming to all of the trappings.

Scout looked down at the hand on her knee. That was a hand that was still making time to dig in the dirt, to brush up against hot engines or get splashed with jelly cooking at a rolling boil. Scout had never been a farmer herself—her parents had been bakers—but she had lived among them most of her life.

To her immense relief, she felt comfortable with the Torreses.

Then the car started to slow, pulling up to the next station, and she felt both of them tense.

She might be comfortable with the Torreses, but she was still in danger.

“I felt like someone was watching me back at the processing station,” Scout said.

John Carlo turned to give her a sharp look through the untidy length of his salt-and-pepper hair. “That is a highly regulated area,” he said. But he didn’t sound like he doubted her.

“I think it might be one of the assassins trained by Shi Jian,” Scout said.

John Carlo’s eyes widened in surprise. He glanced at Mary Grace, who shrugged, her eyes just as puzzled as his. Scout opened her mouth to further explain when they were once more plunged into darkness.

“Head down,” John Carlo said even as Mary Grace was putting a hand on Scout’s back to guide her into putting her head between her knees. Shadow whined a complaint at being pushed aside. Gert looked up at Scout’s face looming over her, then up at John Carlo, who had moved to stand at the door, prepared to block the way with his body.

Scout stayed quiet as the doors hissed open and the sound of a busy platform beyond filled the train car. She heard laughter, voices calling farewell, someone playing a wind instrument in a swooping, dancy melody.

A moment later the doors hissed back shut, cutting out the sound, and they continued on their journey.

“Two more stops,” John Carlo said. “Then we change to the tram.”

“What’s the tram?” Scout asked.

“Like a train car but suspended from wires,” Mary Grace explained, and Scout remembered that like her, John Carlo and Mary Grace had grown up on a much lower-technology world than anything in Galactic Central. They didn’t make her feel foolish for asking basic questions.

“The McGillicuddys are in a hamlet at the end of the tramway,” John Carlo told her. “A winter home for a collection of herders. Not a big town, but with winter coming on it’s not as desolate as in summer.”

“And I’m going to hide there?” Scout asked.

“No one would think to look there,” John Carlo said. “Or so we thought. The city should have been safe enough for you, but bad people are out looking for you.”

“We have contacts in the criminal element here,” Mary Grace explained. “Someone is paying for any information on your whereabouts. As far as we can tell, you aren’t meant to be harmed, but normally there would be a specific instruction to not hurt you, and the orders as they’ve been relayed to us have no such instruction.”

“We could be getting a garbled version. Or an incomplete one. We’re not sure. But to be on the safe side, we’re sending you down the mountain,” John Carlo said.

“What if they follow me there?” Scout asked.

“It’s too small of a town,” Mary Grace said. “There is no way they could hide there. Even one person who doesn’t belong there would be noticed. You’ll see when you get there.”

Scout nodded, then hunched over in the seat again as they drew into another station. When the doors had once more shut and they had plunged back out into the white light, she slid sideways in her seat to look out the back window.

The rail the train ran on was so narrow it was hard to make out its path further back than the building they were just emerging from, but then Scout’s eyes caught a glimmer of light reflecting on metal and followed it around.

The train ran at a slow spiral, plunging through each tower at a slightly lower level than the last. She wished she could see up ahead. Would they stop at ground level?

John Carlo turned away to have another whispered conversation, and Mary Grace opened a bag she wore close to her side to offer Scout a sandwich. Scout took it with a nod of thanks, aware of both of the dogs’ eyes on her as she took a bite. Soft bread spread generously with a dark-colored nut paste, slathered with such a thick layer of honey it was spilling around the sides of the sandwich. Scout had to twist her hand repeatedly to lick at the backs of her fingers and catch the sticky trails before they reached the cuff of her coat.

She didn’t mind. The honey was like sweet golden sunshine, so exactly what she needed after days of the tribunal enforcers’ strange food. And the places where the honey had soaked into the bread crust while still wrapped in Mary Grace’s bag had crystallized like candy.

Scout was sticky when she was done, but the dogs were eager to help her clean up the last few sticky spots on her hands. And when the dogs were done, Mary Grace handed her a napkin to wipe off the dog spit.

“Nearly there,” John Carlo said, moving to stand by the door. Scout hunched over, listening to the sounds of people on the other side of John Carlo. She wished she had been able to walk through the city; everyone in the stations sounded so merry, like it was a holiday and they were all celebrating together.

Then they were back in the silence of their car and then back out into the sky.

Only it wasn’t so bright here, and Scout saw that they had spiraled so low she could see the streets below, the cars and bikes and people. There was a marketplace full of light and color as hundreds of shop signs all competed for her attention.

The streetlights were decorated with banners, each a silver snowflake on a bright blue background. Some of the bags the shoppers carried had similar patterns. Maybe it really was a holiday here.

“This last station connects to the tramway as well,” John Carlo said. “Just stick close with Mary Grace, and we’ll move through as quickly as we can. We’re catching the last tram of the night. Once we’re on board, everything will be fine.”

For the night, anyway. But Scout didn’t say that out loud.

The doors opened on an even greater roar of sound, lots of people moving about through an even larger space, echoes filling the vaulted ceiling above them. John Carlo went first, finding breaks in the crowd for Scout and the dogs to follow. Mary Grace stayed close behind Scout, head constantly swiveling as she looked all around them for any signs of trouble.

Scout wanted to look too, but it was all she could do to keep the dogs calm and close at her sides through the crowd. She kept them both close to her left side, Shadow between her and Gert, as he was the one more likely to be trampled on. She had a vague sense of the room around her: large, the only windows high above offering nothing more than a glimpse of white sky, the walls all cold gray stone.

Those walls felt old, like someone had found the remains of an ancient city and put a layer of modern city over the top of it. But she didn’t think that could be true. With the low gravity and low oxygen levels of the atmosphere, no one could have lived here before they had the technology to enclose everything under a dome, could they?

John Carlo reached back to catch hold of her elbow to guide her through one last thick throng of people to a separate room off the main hall. The ceiling still vaulted high above her, the windows offering only cold, remote light, and the old stone still surrounded her, but there were considerably fewer people here.

And in the middle of the room was an immense machine that held a system of cables aloft. The cables disappeared through a hole in the stone floor at a steep angle. Even as Scout was trying to peer down into the large rectangular opening in the floor, something rose up through it, dangling from the wires and rocking softly as it came to a rest at the top of the wires.

The machine stopped turning, and the voices around her settled to a quieter level, no longer shouting to be heard over the racket of the machine.

“This way,” John Carlo said, leading her to the doors in the side of the tram car. The doors opened but only four people trickled out. One appeared to recognize John Carlo and greeted him with a smile and a nod. John Carlo nodded back, his smile more of a thin-lipped grimace.

Then they were on the tram car. Scout brought the dogs to the back corner and got them both to sit beside her.

Mary Grace paused in the doorway, one hand resting lightly on the door frame as she looked over the crowd, occasionally rising up on tiptoe. Scout suspected a pantomime; she wanted to look like a woman looking for a lost companion and not someone trying to suss out a shadow.

But if it were really Shi Jian and her girl assassins gunning for Scout, the subterfuge wouldn’t matter.

Scout felt that prickling being-watched feeling again and looked around, scanning as quickly as she could, desperate for a real glimpse of whoever was watching her. Had she really seen blue-gray eyes, or had she only imagined it?

But she could see no one looking their way, and when the doors closed, they were the only ones in the tram car.

“Is this weird, being alone?” Scout asked.

“Not at all,” John Carlo said, and indeed he looked far more relaxed now than at any moment since she’d met him.

“So everyone pretty much lives in the city?” Scout asked.

“Oh no,” Mary Grace said, still with that gentle tone of voice that said that none of Scout’s assumptions were silly in any way. “There are many villages, but most are on the southern slope of the mountain. It’s less rocky there, more suitable for the winter sports and other visitor highlights. The village we’re going to is on the north side, colder and darker and too steep and rocky for anything but goat herding.”

“They make fantastic cheese,” John Carlo told her, his dry tone at odds with his word choice. Scout was getting the sense that John Carlo was a very serious sort of man. Probably a good thing in a lawyer fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle.

“I know you’re from a warm world, and this isolation might be hard for you,” Mary Grace said. “We’ll bring you back to us just as soon as we safely can. Hopefully before Schneetagen. That’s the winter festival here. It lasts for three days of feasting and dancing and games. The city is actually quite nice. It has all of the modern amenities of Galactic Central but feels more like the sort of world we’re used to. I’m sure you’ll have the time to explore all of it while we build our case.”

“I don’t mind being alone,” Scout assured her. “But seeing the city does sound nice.”

Scout looked out of the window. The world around her was already dark, the sun still shining down on the city blocked here by the mountain itself. Everything below was all jagged rock and silvery snow and long, impenetrable shadows.

She hoped she would be back in the city soon. But if there was one thing that seldom worked out for her, it was hoping for a thing.

She was just going to have to get used to this new, dark world.