The Travels of Scout Shannon: Books 4-6

Chapter 10

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 admirable 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.

But Scout wasn’t fooled. The storm was starting. The one so severe that no one in town had elected to stay and weather it out.

She couldn’t stay where she was, and she couldn’t get back up the mountain. There was only one place to go.

Scout picked up Shadow, squeezing his little paws in the palms of her warm mittens, then clicked her tongue for Gert to follow her back up the trench.

By the time they reached the fissure, the lazy flakes in the air were so thick she couldn’t see to the top of the stairs.

By the time she reached the top and stepped out onto the plateau, the wind had picked up as well. It still had no real strength to it, but it was filled with a blinding amount of snow and liked to blast it all right into Scout’s face.

She didn’t want to be blind here. Not here, on a field of snow strewn with enemies she knew were only temporarily paralyzed. They might recover at any moment. They wouldn’t even have to regain use of all of their limbs, they could just reach out with their arms to trip her up and bring her down to their level.

She didn’t like that image.

Scout hugged Shadow tighter, made sure Gert was still close at her heels, and pressed on. And tried really hard not to regret not getting on that tram. For all she knew, blowing the bottom tram station was only a last resort after she failed to show at the top. She might still have made the right choice, but she would never know for sure.

She couldn’t see the cabin in front of her, was not even sure she hadn’t veered too far in one direction or the other and was going to walk right past it. Worse, she was fairly certain she had forgotten the code to get inside. 7887? Or 7877? Would it give her a couple of tries or would it lock her out entirely when she guessed wrong?

Would the door-opening tool be as ineffective here as it had been in the village?

Suddenly a bright rectangle of light appeared ahead of her and a bit off to the right. She assumed it was a rectangle; the whirls of snow made the edges irregular, but she didn’t know what it could be besides the open door of the cabin.

She was being lured in again. But Shadow in her arms was trembling despite the warmth of his own vest and her mittens on his feet. She had to get him inside. She shifted him a bit to get a rock in her hand, but that was the only preparation she could make for a fight.

She doubted it would be enough. She didn’t dare hope the light was as inviting as it looked.

As she drew nearer, Scout could see the inside of the coat room, now bereft of coats, although a dropped scarf lay twisted across the floor like a snake in motion, as if it had tried to follow the departing family.

No sign of a gray coat. No sign of anyone inside. Had the house recognized her when she approached?

It was a nice thought, but she didn’t really believe it.

Scout waited for Gert to follow her into the coat room before shutting the door and putting Shadow down on the floor. It was warmer than outside, but not by much. Still, she pushed back her hood and goggles and lowered her scarf, then peeled off her mittens. Now with both hands free she could take out her slingshot before opening the inner door.

The kitchen was as they had left it, clean dishes now standing dry next to the sink, the honeypot still on the table. Scout stepped further into the room and looked the other way, towards the desk in its nook and the couch and chairs beyond.

Empty. Shadow sniffed the air, then Gert sniffed too. With the thick vests on, Scout couldn’t see if the hair on their backs was rising up, but neither dog was growling or barking. Maybe they really were alone.

Scout crossed the living area to the short hallway that led to the cabin’s two bedrooms. The boys’ room was a mess of discarded items from the hasty packing of bags.

Then Scout heard the soft thump of a drawer closing in the McGillicuddys’ room. She raised the slingshot, stone loaded and ready to fire before she stepped into the doorway.

The girl inside stood with her back to the door. Her goggles were dangling around her neck, and she had pushed back the tight-fitting hood of the jumpsuit. Her hair was darker than Scout remembered and cut so short it stood up on top of her head like a soft brush, nothing like the long blonde locks from before.

Scout took careful aim at the back of her head. She knew from bitter experience that she would only get one shot at this.

“Before you do that, I should tell you one thing,” the girl said without turning.

“What?” Scout demanded, not lowering her slingshot.

“I’m not Clementine.”