The Travels of Scout Shannon Books 1-3

Chapter 18

18

“Which one of them did it?” Viola asked, but Liv’s chair was blocking the way for any of them to get back into the main room.

“Can’t you shut those dogs up?” Liv demanded, then flinched back as Warrior lunged at her. But she wasn’t attacking her, just hopping over the top of Liv’s hover chair to run to Ottilie’s side.

Scout had thought, as Viola apparently had, that one of the dogs had knocked the bottle to the floor, but that wasn’t what had happened. The broken pieces were all around Ottilie’s feet, Ottilie who had been cuffed in a chair nowhere near the bottle on the table. But somehow she had gotten it, smashed it, and cut both her wrists to pieces trying to get out of the chair.

“Ottilie!” Warrior yelled, grasping the older woman’s head and tipping it back to look into her face. Ottilie’s lips worked like she was trying to form words but nothing emerged. Scout squeezed between the front of the hover chair and the doorway to stand at Warrior’s side. Ottilie’s gaze moved from Warrior to Scout. She was pleading with her eyes, tears freely streaming as she struggled to speak. Warrior ripped off her own shirt to try to stop the bleeding, but Scout saw the life drain out of Ottilie’s eyes.

“Why did she do this?” Viola asked as she and Liv drew nearer.

“Guilt,” Liv said. “For killing her lover.”

“No,” Scout said. “She wouldn’t have done this.”

“She couldn’t have done this,” Warrior corrected, looking at the fragments of glass all around the chair. “She couldn’t have reached that bottle.”

“Maybe one of the dogs did knock it down,” Viola said.

“Right into her?” Scout said skeptically.

“Anything is possible,” Viola said.

“But not probable,” Warrior said.

“Why couldn’t she speak?” Scout asked. “She cut her wrists—why would that make her unable to talk?”

Warrior tipped Ottilie’s head back again, gently opening her mouth, but there was nothing visibly wrong with it. Warrior’s fingers probed every centimeter of Ottilie’s skull, but in the end she just shook her head.

“An effect of the poison, maybe?” Scout wondered.

“We all had the antidote,” Viola reminded her.

“Nobody could get in and out of here quick enough to do this,” Warrior said, looking around the room.

Scout looked over at Clementine, who was halfway through yet another of the ready-made meals. She gave Scout a little smile between bites, a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

Warrior stood back up, wiping the blood from her hands on her own shirt. She looked suddenly tired, the skin around the lenses over her eyes drawn tight. She put a hand to the back of her neck and stretched.

“You liked her,” Scout said.

“Respected her, I guess,” Warrior said. “Come on, help me carry her to be with Ebba.”

Scout helped Warrior cut the remains of the cord from around Ottilie’s tattered wrists, then Warrior bent and lifted her out of the chair, throwing her over one shoulder and heading for the lockers. Scout followed behind with the bloody chair and Warrior’s stained shirt. Warrior laid Ottilie on the bench next to Ebba’s, folded her hands onto her belly in the same pose as her lover’s, and draped another towel over her. Scout pressed a hand to her eyes, fighting back tears. No one was loudly grieving, and she wasn’t remembering her own loss, but seeing Ottilie there with no spark of life left in her felt like a great wrongness in the world.

To think, before she came here she’d never seen a dead body. Now she’d seen three. And her heart pounded away, unable to slow back to normal.

She was terrified there would be more.

Scout took a deep breath and forced herself to drop her hand. “She didn’t do this to herself,” she said.

“No, she didn’t,” Warrior agreed, washing her hands in one of the sinks, then taking her shirt from Scout and soaping it up as well. “Liv seems very good at talking people into things. She’s been trying to manipulate you since we got here.”

“I’m not going to off myself.”

“Ottilie didn’t either,” Warrior said. “As much as Liv may have wanted it, that’s not what happened. I don’t think that’s what Liv wants out of you anyway.”

“Why would she want anything out of me? She doesn’t even know me. And it’s not like I have a fully equipped waystation or ties to the Space Farers. I’m just a messenger, a delivery girl.”

Warrior turned the shirt over in her hands, finding another darkly stained patch to scrub at, but her head tipped as she glanced over at Scout. “Is that what you are?”

“Yeah,” Scout said warily.

“Well, that’s what you told me, and I have no reason to doubt you. But just as a general-purpose warning: You say you have nothing. Okay, I understand. You’ve lost your family, it’s reasonable to feel that way. But given that, I would expect Liv to try to make you feel like you do have something. She needs you to believe that in order to manipulate you.”

“What do you mean?” Scout asked.

“She can’t convince a messenger and delivery girl that she ought to be helping Liv with whatever her game is. And believe me, she has a game,” Warrior added. “But if she can convince you you’re really something else. Well.”

Scout’s scowl deepened. She didn’t like where this conversation was going. She didn’t have to search her mind long to find a different tack. “Everyone was right there with us, everyone except Clementine,” Scout said, then bit her lip anxiously. Warrior just kept scrubbing at the shirt and Scout wondered if she had even heard.

“I think this increases the possibility that we aren’t alone,” she said at last, shaking out the shirt. The water droplets sprayed everywhere, but after four good thwacks she slipped it back on. It wasn’t as white as it had been, but it was quite dry.

“Clementine was right there with her,” Scout said.

“I was watching out of the corner of my eye. I admit I looked away for a moment, but just a moment. I thought I saw something on one of the monitors . . . at any rate, it wasn’t nearly enough time for Clementine to get up from the table, do that much damage, and sit back down again.”

“It’s more likely someone traveled from further outside the room and then disappeared again?” Scout asked.

“It’s problematic,” Warrior admitted. “I don’t know what we’re dealing with here. But do some investigative work on your own. Clementine doesn’t have a drop of blood on her. If she did that to Ottilie, how’d she move so fast and stay so clean?”

Scout fell into a sullen silence. She could see the logic, but she couldn’t bring her gut to believe it.

When they came back out into the main room, Liv was watching Clementine closely as she sipped at a mug and ignored the dog still intently growling at her. Scout shot Warrior a glance, and Warrior gave a conceding tip of her head, accepting Girl’s perpetual distrust of Clementine as another piece of information but not the conclusion. Scout sat down at the table where Ottilie and Ebba had sat the night before, eyes scouring every inch of Clementine even as her hand reached down to quiet the growling Girl.

Viola emerged from the kitchen with the samovar once more full of fresh coffee. She also had the last of the bread from the night before, some sort of nut paste darker than any Scout had tried before, and a little pot of honey. Scout’s stomach rumbled loudly and she eagerly reached for a piece.

“What happens now?” Viola asked, slumping into one of the chairs. Warrior had gone behind the bar for more mugs. Someone had cleaned up the mess—glass, bourbon, blood, and all—leaving a large wet patch on the concrete floor. No one was sitting too close to that. Warrior filled a mug of coffee for herself and sat down between Viola and Scout.

“We need to conduct a search. We can work together on that,” Warrior said, taking a sip of the hot coffee. The rich, roasted smell filled Scout’s sinuses, hinting at the full alertness that was waiting for her. She gripped her pasted and honeyed bread between her teeth as she reached for a mug of her own. Liv gave her a disapproving look, but Scout didn’t care about being unmannerly.

“I don’t want to start poking around the whole place,” Viola said. “I’m allergic to the dust.”

“You sure leave a lot of it around for that to be the case,” Liv said, wrinkling her nose as she looked around the room. And she hadn’t even seen the state of the hangar.

“I leave it around because I flare up when I try to get rid of it,” Viola snapped, rubbing at her temples as if Liv were giving her a headache.

“You don’t have to poke around, I’ll do that,” Warrior said, taking another huge gulp of coffee as if the heat didn’t bother her and the taste didn’t interest her. She just needed to get the caffeine in her. “I want you on the cameras, in contact with me. If you don’t have radios or comms, I have a work-around.”

“I have comms,” Viola said, looking around at the shelves as if she weren’t quite sure where.

Scout took a cautious sip of the too-hot coffee, then quickly took a bite out of the crust of bread before the honey could drip onto the table. The dogs were watching her intently, anxious for any crumbs that might drop. Clementine was watching her just as closely, her hands folded neatly on her lap, as she had apparently finally finished eating.

“What?” Scout snapped at her. Viola and Warrior had pushed away from the table to find the comms and Liv was working the controls of her hover chair to follow them. Clementine didn’t say anything, of course, just summoned another of those unconvincing smiles.

“What’s your story?” Scout asked, moving her chair closer to Clementine. Girl gave a warning growl but was distracted by a corner of the bread that Scout tore off and dropped. She had to give another to Shadow before she could meet Clementine’s blue eyes again. “I don’t think Ruth knew the first thing about you. She was just room and board for you.”

Clementine slowly blinked, but if that was meant to be an answer, Scout didn’t know what that answer was.

“You’re hardly the only war orphan wandering the streets of the cities. Most of us found jobs of one sort or another, helping out on farms or in factories, doing whatever little tasks we can until we’re big enough for proper work. I’ve been biking messages and packages between the cities since the asteroid fell on my parents. If Ruth really was upset about the plight of all of us, why did she take just one of us in? Why not six, or eight? Why not do something actually helpful for all of us, or at least prompt her father to? A boarding school or something just to start. Why just acquire you like an accessory?”

Scout wasn’t sure, but she thought the corners of Clementine’s mouth were just beginning to crease, the start of a more genuine sort of smile.

Then Scout saw it: the light spray of blood that was still drying across the face of the cartoon character on Clementine’s T-shirt. She leaned forward to get a better look and Clementine recoiled, trying to cross her arms over herself.

She was going to obliterate the evidence! Scout leapt to her feet, catching Clementine’s wrists in her hands and pulling them well away from her body. Clementine stumbled back, knocking her chair over and nearly striking Shadow with it. Scout let the momentum of Clementine’s struggles pull her to her own feet. Scout was only a little bit taller, and Clementine was surprisingly strong given the bony spindliness of her arms.

“Scout!” Warrior commanded, and Clementine took advantage of Scout’s momentary distraction to pull herself free. She straightened, giving Scout a look of pure victory, which lasted for all of a half of a second. Then she was on the ground, Girl’s paws planted on her chest, the dog’s snarling jaws closing on the girl’s exposed neck.