The Travels of Scout Shannon Books 1-3

Chapter 21

21

Scout felt a moment of panic as the dogs charged at Clementine. It didn’t look like much of a knife, but it had been enough to take down Warrior. The dogs had no fear of it. But Clementine made no move to defend herself as the dogs jumped on top of her. The knife went skittering across the floor to disappear under one of the shelves. Girl and Shadow were both on Clementine, and the girl tucked her head in her arms close to her chest, drawing up her legs to curl into a ball. The dogs were probably biting her, but Scout couldn’t muster the empathy to care.

Liv said nothing, her eyes inscrutable as she watched the girl try to crawl toward the table. Instead Liv drew closer to where Scout still stood motionless, Warrior sprawled at her feet.

Then Scout finally dropped to her knees at Warrior’s side. The blood was spreading everywhere—so much blood for such a little cut.

“What is she?” Liv asked.

At first Scout didn’t understand the question. Then she saw the sparks erupting from Warrior’s knife wound. It looked like Clementine had been aiming for her kidney but had hit something quite different.

Scout turned Warrior over and pulled her into her arms. Warrior looked up at her, really looked up at her. Scout realized the tinkling sound she heard when Warrior fell had been one of her lenses shattering against the floor. Now one blue eye was looking up at her from between the jagged edges of the broken lens still clinging to her cheek. The other lens was scratched but intact. The effect was disconcerting.

“Scout,” Warrior said, her hand clutching Scout’s arm.

“You can heal from this, right?” Scout asked, wanting to press her hand to stop the flow of blood but worried what those sparks meant.

“Not this time, kid,” Warrior said.

“Oh, no . . . the cat. You gave your nanite to the cat,” Scout said. “It’s all my fault.”

“One nanite wouldn’t have made any difference,” Warrior said. “I can heal from almost anything, but not a direct hit to my power source. I’m draining away.”

“No—there must be something we can do,” Scout said, looking back over her shoulder to the closed hatch that led to Viola’s room.

“No time,” Warrior said, the hand on Scout’s arm squeezing weakly. “Listen, kid. Remember what we talked about. You said you were clever; you’re going to have to be more than clever to get off this planet. But don’t stay here. This isn’t the place for you.”

“You were going to take me with you,” Scout said. Not a question.

“I was going to take you with me,” Warrior agreed. Her fingers clutched one last time, then behind the broken lens the blue eye that was looking at her rolled back and Scout knew she was gone.

Scout laid her gently on the floor, then picked up Warrior’s fallen gun and tucked it into the waistband of her cargo shorts. Her fingers felt numb; her whole body felt numb. She didn’t feel like she was really there, more like she was watching herself move from a great distance away. Like she was watching herself the way she had watched Warrior when she first left the rover. A remote, untethered sort of feeling.

She knew it well. She had felt the same that day when the asteroid fell, and for days after. Her emotions would catch up with her soon enough, but for now she would just keep moving, keep doing all the necessary things in complete dispassion.

The gun tucked away, she turned back to the others. Clementine was sitting on the table, knees drawn up to her chest to keep her feet out of reach of the dogs.

Liv had disappeared. Scout couldn’t manage any feeling of surprise. She just turned to Clementine. With Warrior gone, there was no one left to convince her not to ask her questions.

“You knew,” Scout said. “You knew exactly where to hit her. Clearly you want us all dead. I have no idea why. Not sure I care. But I do wonder: Why am I still alive?”

Clementine stood up on the table, towering over Scout. The smile was gone, a welcome change, but her placid face revealed nothing of her thoughts.

Scout looked around until she found the knife under the shelves. Keeping one eye on Clementine, she reached under the shelving to fetch the blade and put it in her back pocket next to her own utility knife. She still had her slingshot, and of course Warrior’s gun.

She wasn’t sure it would be enough.

“I know you understand me. You might not be able to talk, but if you wanted to, you could communicate with me. You could answer all my questions. You choose not to,” Scout said.

Clementine just shrugged.

“Are we alone here? The two of us and Liv?”

Clementine shrugged again.

“Are you going to be killing us too? Why wait? Why didn’t you just poison us all the first night?”

Another shrug.

Warrior had said that she hadn’t untied Liv, and yet Liv and Clementine had both been freed. Had one escaped and uncuffed the other? Were they working together? “Is Liv in on it with you? Where is she now? What is she going to do?”

Clementine sighed. She gave Scout a long-suffering look, as if she didn’t mind the questions so much as being asked all the wrong questions. Well, those were the only questions Scout knew. She guessed Warrior had been right that it was futile to ask.

“Whatever. I’m going to check the monitors.” Scout went into the communications room, walking sideways to keep one eye on Clementine still standing on the table. The dogs stayed near the table, Girl making her customary low growling sound that built in intensity every time Clementine moved a centimeter.

Scout looked at all the screens. She saw Liv moving through the hangar, hugging the wall but still visible on all the cameras. Scout didn’t know where she was heading, or if she even knew where she was heading. Did she have a master plan, or was she just looking for somewhere to hide in her chair until the storm had passed? Scout called up a schematic of the entire station and looked for anything interesting in the direction Liv was headed.

Suddenly both of the dogs were barking like mad. Scout pulled the gun from her waistband and charged back into the common room. Clementine was still standing on the table, but she had something in her hand. She opened her fingers to show it to Scout. It was a palm-sized cylinder with a red flashing light on one end. She smiled that maddening smile again, then tossed the cylinder to Scout.

Scout flinched away, covering her face with her arm without lowering the gun. The cylinder made a small popping sound, and the air filled with a thick smoke. Coughing, Scout rushed up to the table, but Clementine was gone. The dogs were still barking, half in panic now. They didn’t like the smoke.

“Come, dogs!” Scout commanded. The two dogs came to her side and followed her into the kitchen. The kitchen had a hatch, a door she could shut and lock from the inside. She slammed it shut and bolted it, then found a large tray to dissipate what little gas had flowed in from the other room.

If only the communications room had had a door. Being able to see all over the station would’ve been nice. But the kitchen was probably better. She didn’t think the hatch would be impenetrable, but she was sure that anyone trying to get in would make a great deal of noise. Enough to wake her if she should fall asleep. Certainly enough to wake the dogs. This was as close as she was going to get to safe for now.

Surely she and the dogs could wait out the storm here. They had food, they had water, they could make do with the plumbing. Just three more days.

But was she safe? Was there another door?

Scout went into the pantry where she had seen Liv and Clementine speaking before that first dinner. The room was lined with shelves filled with more MREs, as well as cans and packages of food she could cook. That would probably come in handy; whatever had killed Viola could be in any of the food in the kitchen. She hadn’t turned her back on Clementine long enough for her to poison that tray of food, she was sure of it. Clementine must have poisoned everything that first night. Scout would be sticking to food she could clearly see hadn’t been tampered with, food that would reassure her with the soft hiss of released vacuum compression when she opened it.

The pantry wasn’t large, and there was no second door. She looked up at the camera over the doorway. It was possible either Liv or Clementine could be watching her on the monitors in the communication room. But Scout didn’t think that would matter. Once they entered the common room and saw the locked hatch to the kitchen, they would know where she had gone.

Scout looked at the refrigerator that had been calling to her since she had first arrived. Row after row of gleaming bottles of jolo. More than she could drink in a week. Each individually sealed. Safe. And the last thing she wanted now was sleep.

Scout took out a single bottle of jolo and closed the fridge door, then changed her mind and fetched a second. She brought them both to a heavy chopping block that sat directly across from the hatch. She sat on the floor with her back to the block, the dogs settling in on either side of her. She set the second bottle behind her on the block and turned the first bottle over in her hands.

She didn’t really want it. Not like she had before. She was still numb; this apathy was part of that. She thought of Warrior with her broken lenses, lying on the floor in arm’s reach of Viola’s body. Their blood pooling over the floor was probably flowing together by now. Scout remembered that blue eye. She had imagined voids of darkness behind those lenses, but never eyes like those. The same intense shade of indigo the sky had been the day her family died.

Scout sighed, still handling the bottle without quite opening it. Even her most morose thoughts weren’t bringing the tears. She would just have to live with the numbness until it was gone. Perhaps it was better this way. Clementine would surely be back, and Scout didn’t want to be caught crying when she needed to be fighting.

She needed to be alert. She needed the caffeine and the sugar. She had to drink the jolo.

She wiped nonexistent dust from the neck of the bottle before finally popping it open and taking a long swallow of icy cold fizzy goodness. Her brain sang at the sweet rush of sugar, if a bit more muted than its usual opera to the glories of jolo.

Just three more days.