The Travels of Scout Shannon Books 1-3

Chapter 3

3

The rover was taller than the wall, and even from inside the town Scout could see it was parked just where she had left it, off to one side of the road near the gateway. Still, there was something about its dark silhouette against the bright blue of the midday sky, like a bad omen. Something in the way it hovered over that part of the town, not letting the sun reach the wall to reflect blindingly back from the sheets of metal. Like it was creating its own little patch of darkness.

But some of that darkness was her own vision. Just a few days ago she had nearly died when someone pulled all of the air out of the room she had been hiding in. She had recovered, but she still had headaches and nightmares. She wasn’t well enough to be running again and her brain seemed prepared to knock her unconscious if that’s what it took to make her stop.

Scout clenched her hands into fists and kept her feet moving despite the frightening way her heart was pounding in her chest. Normally she loved that feeling, when she had pedaled as fast as she could for as long as she could, but this time it was different. It was like there was another muscle, some foreign muscle, wrapped around her heart, squeezing and squeezing. Choking. She could feel a wet warmth in her chest, like her heart was beginning to ooze out her own blood because of the squeezing.

But she wouldn’t faint. She wouldn’t stop. Her dogs needed her.

She burst out of the gateway, sending up a small cloud of reddish dust as she changed direction, then an even larger one as she skidded to a halt.

The door to the rover was standing wide open. Not how she had left it. A boy was standing in the open doorway, tossing a bag down to another boy on the ground. It jangled when he caught it. He handed it over to a girl no more than ten, who stacked it with a few others on the back of a wagon.

Scout had encountered their kind before, but only in the domed cities. Still, they looked the same as those she had known in the cities. They all had bedraggled hair, clothes either too large or too small but always old and faded to near unusability, and only half of them had anything at all on their feet. And yet, could you call them street kids, here where there were no streets?

Scout didn’t know quite what to do. They appeared to be robbing her, but then none of it was really her stuff. She had taken the crates of food, clothing, and medicine from the compound, since Viola, being dead, didn’t need them anymore. The crates full of broken machines and electronics had belonged to Ottilie and Ebba, who were also quite dead and needed none of them anymore. Thievery was a bit rude, but while Scout had never considered herself a street kid, they were all orphans like her. In a way, they were like her younger siblings. Annoying, and yet she felt compelled to take care of them as much as she could.

She had taken it all with her because she hadn’t wanted it to go to waste when she buried the compound. Why not just let them have it?

Then Shadow yelped in pain. It took a moment for her eyes to find him. He was no longer in the rover but was crouched under one of the front treads. A girl in a small, belly-bearing T-shirt and shorts that didn’t quite want to stay around her narrow hips was poking at him with a stick. Scout saw a bleeding bite wound on her shin but could summon little sympathy. No doubt that girl had earned it.

“Leave my dog alone,” Scout said.

The girl ignored her, trying to poke Shadow again. Not poke—spear. She was out for blood.

Even ill as she was, the speed of her reflexes was undiminished. Scout had her slingshot in her hand and fired a stone at the girl within one blink of an eye. The stone struck the ground just in front of the girl’s bare foot, sending up a plume of dust.

“Leave my dog alone,” Scout said again, a little louder than before. She started to take a step forward when she heard the distinctive whistle of a stone flying far too close to her ear, close enough to make the brim of her hat tremble.

“There are more of us than there are of you,” the boy on the ground said. He had no slingshot, but at the range they were from each other, he didn’t much need one. He had another stone in his hand, ready to throw if she moved.

“I can’t argue with your math,” Scout said, holding her hands where he could see them, empty slingshot in one hand, no stone in the other. With that stone in his hand ready to hurl at her she couldn’t risk more than a few quick, furtive glances at the rest of the scene around him, but she could see no sign of Gert. “Hey, Mr. Math. I had another dog?”

“That dog bit me,” the spear girl said, sounding near tears.

“I bet she did,” Scout said. Gert had bit her, not Shadow. Trying to stab him with a spear was so loathsome an act that Scout felt sick to her stomach just thinking of it. If she would stab an innocent dog, what would she do to one that had bitten her? “Where is she?”

The kids looked at each other without speaking. Their air of sullen guilt was making Scout’s heart race again.

“Where is she?” she repeated.

The little girl near the wagon pointed to one of the sacks, this one on the ground. Scout’s rising panic abated only a little when the sack twitched.

“You kids are monsters,” Scout said.

“She bit me,” the girl said again.

“Of course she did,” Scout said. She could hear the anger creeping into her own voice. “That’s hardly an odd thing for her to do when I left her to protect this rover and you decided to rob it.”

“The dog’s not hurt,” the boy she had dubbed Mr. Math said. “She bit Sal, but I tied her up in that sack without hurting her. We just needed her out of the way.” Then, almost too softly to be heard: “Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Scout repeated with a humorless laugh. “Hey, do you kids know what’s funny?”

They stared sullenly back at her.

“What’s funny is that if you had just asked me for what you needed, I would have given it to you. You didn’t need to rob me. You certainly didn’t need to attack my dogs.”

“How were we supposed to know that?” the boy standing in the rover demanded. He seemed to be the oldest in the bunch. There was even a dark smudge on his upper lip that might be the first hint of a mustache.

“You could have asked,” Scout said. “I would have given you everything I could spare. Heck, we could have worked out a deal where I’d’ve let you keep my rover after I leave here in a few days. Lost opportunity. I hope you’ve learned something from all this. Now get out of my ride.” That last bit dripped with every gram of don’t-mess-with-me attitude she could infuse it with.

“What are you going to do? Yell for the grown-ups?” the kid in the rover sneered.

“We still outnumber you,” Mr. Math said.

“And we have your dogs,” spear girl added. Her voice cracked a bit, like she was trying hard to sound unflappable but wasn’t quite there. Then she poked at Shadow again.

Scout dropped the stone she had been hiding in her sleeve for most of their conversation into her hand, then fired with one swift motion, this time catching the girl in her unbitten shin. She dropped the spear and fell to the ground with a cry.

Then Scout staggered back, the wind suddenly knocked out of her. It took a moment to realize that Mr. Math had thrown his stone, catching her right in the chest. She gasped for breath, the corners of her vision threatening to go black again. But through that deepening blackness she saw the boy pull his arm back to throw another stone. She doubted he had thrown as hard as he could the first time, as much as she knew she was about to have an impressive black and blue patch across her chest that would linger for weeks.

Scout reached to the back of her belt, the belt that had once belonged to a galactic marshal, and drew the laser pistol. She had intended to fire a warning shot, but with her vision still filled with black blossoms and her breath coming in hard gasps, she didn’t trust herself not to kill one of them by mistake or maybe even hit one of the dogs.

Luckily for her, just seeing the weapon was warning enough. Scout heard the soft thump of a stone dropping to the dusty ground, the louder thump of the boy jumping out of the rover, and then the scrabble of the two boys helping the spear girl limp away to disappear in the grass, the littler girl who had stood silently beside the wagon all this time scampering after them. The wagon remained silent, abandoned.

Scout put the gun back, feeling more than a little sick. She had just drawn a weapon on kids. Kids.

Granted they had hurt her and tried to hurt her dogs, but was this who she was now? Someone who reacted that quickly with that much disproportionate force?

Still laboring to breathe, Scout staggered forward to fumble at the ties holding Gert’s bag closed. At last the dog broke free, knocking Scout to the ground as she jumped up on her, causing another paroxysm of pain to seize Scout’s chest. Shadow came slowly out from behind the rover tread, eyes on the tall grass in case his tormentor returned.

“Good dogs,” Scout said, trying to scratch them both around the ears at once. As usual, each dog thought it was getting shortchanged in the attention department and fell away from Scout’s reach in a loud, growling tussle. “Come on, dogs. Let’s get out of here.”

Street kids. Another wave of nausea at the thought of what she had almost done.

Scout had been an orphan herself since the age of ten. She had been left with nothing but a bike, a dog, and the clothes on her back, but that had been enough for her. Delivering packages and messages from town to town had kept her and Shadow fed. She had always known a lot of kids who were a lot worse off. In the cities they banded together into groups, groups of such size the city officials took sometimes extreme measures to break them up, to catch strays and lock them away.

For their own good, of course.

She doubted any street kids living in a town could band together like the city kids could. The four she had seen were probably all a town like Prairie Springs could support, however involuntary that support was.

Those kids likely needed whatever they had determined to be valuable more than she would ever need it. She should leave it for them, all of it. Perhaps a little kindness from a stranger would make them rethink how they went about things. Perhaps they would learn to be kinder to dogs, at least.

It wasn’t like she could get all that stuff back inside the rover anyway. Not when it hurt just to move her arms.

But as she got the dogs inside and closed the door between her and Prairie Springs, she knew it was mostly because she felt guilty. She had pulled a gun on a bunch of kids. Without a thought, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Which, after the last four days she had barely survived, it really was.

Scout made her slow, painful way up to the driving cockpit and set the navigation system to take her to Flat Valley. Then she flopped down on the seat to watch the land around Prairie Springs fall away behind her.

Sitting still was better than moving. It only hurt if she took a deep breath.

She couldn’t wait to get off this planet.

Not that she had more than the vaguest idea what life was like anywhere else. Gertrude hadn’t talked about it much, but her revulsion to life on Scout’s world had spoken volumes. That, and the belt of wondrous gadgets she had left behind, said that the rest of the galaxy had to be infinitely better. Wonderful, even.

Not to mention the clothes Gertrude had worn. She had dressed for rough conditions, intending to walk through the open countryside as she stalked her prey, but even so, her clothes had been finer than anything Scout had ever seen. Touching the long white shirt that had protected her from sun exposure had been like touching a cloud, a brightly glowing white cloud. And when the shirt had gotten dirty—more than dirty, bloody—Gertrude had just run it under water and snapped it in the air, and just like that, it was clean and dry.

Scout might have taken that shirt when she took the belt, but it had been badly torn when Gertrude had died. Being stabbed in the back would do that.

Once Prairie Springs was nothing more than a bad memory behind her, Scout turned her attention back to the navigation system. It was going to take a few hours to get to Flat Valley. It would be midafternoon before she got there.

But he was living near there. He had to be. Farlane McFarlane. She would have him before nightfall. Then she would just have to sit on him and wait out the last two days until Liam McGillicuddy came to meet her.

Just two more days. Then surely she’d leave this place forever. It would fade from her memory even as Prairie Springs was already doing, lost in the cloud of dust kicked up by the rover’s treads. She would be gone before the dust could even settle.