The Travels of Scout Shannon Books 1-3

Chapter 15

15

The doorway between the second storage room and the locker room also flashed orange when they passed through it but didn’t stop them in any way. Scout supposed that somewhere Viola was getting an alert every time they moved and knew exactly how many were in each room, and probably exactly who as well. She hadn’t gotten even the smallest glimpse past the door to Viola’s private rooms, but there must be a console or something in there with her and Tubbins.

The dogs saw the soiled pad still on the floor near the toilets and pulled toward it. She headed that way to let them do their business. Warrior walked along the far side of the room, looking between the rows of lockers. Ottilie hovered near the doorway uncertainly.

“Ebba?” Warrior called.

“I’m here,” Ebba said. Scout had expected to find her in tears, but her voice gave no hint of it. “Come look at this.”

Warrior waved for Ottilie to follow, then disappeared behind the last row of lockers. Scout decided to use the toilet herself while she waited for the dogs to finish. This necessitated dropping their leashes, but they didn’t seem likely to dart off anywhere except possibly toward the litter box. When she was done she disposed of the dogs’ mess, washed her hands, and went to see what the other three were up to huddled in the back corner of the room.

Scout hadn’t gone this far into the room the night before and was surprised to find the three of them clustered around a door standing ajar. It wasn’t a full-sized door; even she would have to stoop to get through it.

“What’s that?” she asked, holding the leashes more tightly as the dogs sniffed the air.

“Maintenance door,” Warrior said, putting something back on her belt. “It doesn’t seem to be locked or guarded in any way. But Viola must know it’s here.”

“It was open when I came back here,” Ebba said. “Not all the way, just exactly as it is now. Only I thought I heard something moving around on the other side. I’ve been listening, but I haven’t heard it again. Maybe I imagined it.”

“Maybe,” Warrior said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it. She took the light off her belt and flashed it through the gap in the door. “There’s a space inside the wall between this room and the next, and then another door. That one’s open too. If someone is sneaking around the place, why are they being so careless?”

“Maybe it’s not a person,” Scout said. “Tubbins might not be the only cat. If Viola is worried about rodents, she might leave this open to let the cat hunt.”

“Maybe,” Warrior said, but again she didn’t sound like she really believed it.

“Ebba,” Ottilie started to say.

“I’m not ready to talk to you,” Ebba said, an edge of hurt and anger to her voice that made Ottilie flinch away. “Should we check this out?” she asked Warrior.

“It’s dark in there,” Warrior said. “It’s going to be hard to search if we can’t find some lights. Hold on.” She bent down to step through the door. The top of the doorframe caught the edge of her hat, pushing it back to dangle from where it was tied around her neck. She took another step, the door on the other side scraping loudly across the floor as she pushed it wider open.

“That might explain why it was left that way,” Scout said. “Did you hear somebody leaving this room or just moving around on the other side?”

“Just movement,” Ebba said. “Just for a moment. A kind of skitter, but I swear it was bigger than a cat.”

They all bent and peered through the two doors to where Warrior’s legs were visible, taking little steps as she turned in place, shining her light all around her.

“What is it?” Scout asked when she could no longer stand not knowing.

“A hangar,” Warrior said. “Or it used to be. It looks like people kept abandoning things here until they choked up all the space. But it’s huge. Huge and cluttered. It’s going to be tough to search.”

“Should we get the others?” Ottilie asked.

Warrior dropped to one knee to look back at them, her lenses more like inky pools in the darkness, barely reflecting. “No,” she said at last. “It would be awkward for Liv to get in here, I’m not sure what use Clementine would be when she can’t call out to the rest of us, and Viola . . . well, I’m not sure how we’d get her attention just now.”

“Do you have flashlights in your bag from the rover?” Scout asked.

“No. There must be some here in one of those crates,” Ottilie said, looking back the way they had come.

“I don’t want to waste time digging. We can split into two groups. I can see well enough in the dark. The other group can take my light.”

“I’ll go with Warrior,” Ebba said before Scout could speak. She took the light from Warrior’s hand and gave it to Scout, not even looking at Ottilie.

“Okay then,” Scout said.

“We’ll head to the left, you two go right. Give a whistle if you find anything. And keep the dogs close to you. If it is another cat—”

“Got it,” Scout said, double-wrapping the ends of the ropes around her hand and grasping them firmly. She handed the light to Ottilie, who followed Ebba through the doorway. Scout came last, herding the dogs through ahead of her.

At the other end, Warrior caught her arm to whisper in her ear. “Keep an eye out. It might just be a cat in here, but it might be more. Don’t take this lightly.”

“I won’t,” Scout promised. “Do you really think there’s a person down here? Or more than one, like a hit squad sent to take out Ruth or something?”

“I wouldn’t be that dramatic,” Warrior said dryly. “I have been getting a sense of a . . . wrongness.” She sounded almost embarrassed to have landed on that word.

“A wrongness?” Scout repeated. “Like a gut instinct?”

“More like something messing about at the very edge of my sensor’s range and capabilities. It’s unsettling. Just—err on the side of yelling over doing nothing. Got it, kid?”

“Got it,” Scout said, then reached down to give Girl’s side a quick pat. Shadow was sniffing the air intently. Scout wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad thing that he seemed eager to lead them deeper into the dark to the right.

The space near the little door was open, but further along the wall were more shelves covered in crates and loose equipment. In the center of the space was larger equipment—farming and mining machinery, Scout guessed from what little she recognized. It was all covered in a thick blanket of dust, here and there disturbed by Tubbins’s paw prints pursuing other, smaller paw prints. Sometimes the object would just be a thresher or something standing all on its own, its features softened under the blanket of dust, but other times there would be a thresher covered with rolls of tarp, crates both covered and uncovered, shapeless canvas sacks. Like someone had backed up a truck and tossed out everything they had been keeping in their shed and just left it here.

“If someone is in here, they picked the perfect place to hide,” Scout said. “They could be anywhere.”

“Can the dogs smell people? Like, track them?” Ottilie asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never used them for that before,” Scout said.

The hangar seemed endlessly huge, although the further in they went, the more they had to take a winding path between heaps of junk. Ottilie played the light over everything before stepping around any of the junk piles. Occasionally they found more animal tracks on the floor, but mostly the only thing disturbing the dust was their own feet.

“I was about your age when I first met Ebba,” Ottilie said to Scout in a low whisper. “We met at school, a boarding school in the city. The town I grew up in, Wayfarer Crossroads—it was pretty tiny. Of course it’s all gone now, nothing but a crater. Most of the people who lived there worked at the manufacturing plant, and there weren’t many kids. I tested kind of bright, so I got sent to the city to study. But the kids there considered me a hick. I got teased. You know how kids are.”

Scout didn’t say anything. She hadn’t been to a school since her family died, and her line of work didn’t have her interacting with other kids much.

“But Ebba, being a Space Farer, was more out of place there than I was. And she had a tough time. She was part of a test exchange program, an attempt at bridging the gap between our two cultures. It was probably already too late for such things; the drought and rationing had already started before we even met. I think when we first became friends it was really because we had no other choice. No one else would have us. But it became a lot more than that. And so quickly.”

Scout felt a sudden, startling pang. She had never given it a moment’s thought, but hearing Ottilie say the word, Scout realized she had never really had any friends. Well, she had, back in the city when she was young. All dead now. But since then? She was friendly with people in the towns she worked in or traveled through. People who owned the food stands she frequented or flophouses she stayed in knew her on sight and were always happy to see her and swap stories. But that wasn’t like having a friend.

As if sensing her thoughts, Shadow picked his nose up from the dusty floor to look back at her. Scout smiled back at him. Dogs totally counted as friends. And she and her friend had never been apart.

“We were at school together for six years and had plans to get a place together after. I was going to find a job; Ebba was going to keep studying, because at that time that was the only way a Space Farer could stay planetside. I mean, we always knew that our future was one of uncertainty and we couldn’t really plan for more than a step at a time.”

She stopped talking to examine a particularly elaborate mountain of loose junk, shining the light into every nook and cranny before continuing on. “We never did get that place. The war happened first.”

“But you met up again after the war,” Scout said. “That’s a happy ending.”

“I certainly thought so,” Ottilie said with a humorless laugh. “For years and years I thought so. That war, being apart for decades, not being able to see each other, growing older . . . Ebba still looks good, doesn’t she? She looks just like she did the day I met her.” She shined the flashlight over her scarred hands, the corded muscles of her forearms under the sun-damaged skin. “I didn’t hold up as well. But she doesn’t seem to mind.”

“You can’t let that Liv woman poison what you have with her words,” Scout said. “She said some things to me too, secrets meant to hurt. She’s crafty, like a fairy-tale character, knows just how much truth to tell to make you believe the lies.”

“But Ebba admitted it.”

“You know her heart.”

“I thought I did.” Her voice was raw with pain. She had let her anger go and it no longer masked her deep hurt. Scout desperately wished there was something she could do or say to help erase the last fifteen minutes of their lives. But there was nothing.

“I guess the only real question is, can you forgive her?” Scout asked. Her own feelings had changed. Ebba had seemed so kind, even to strangers, and yet it was entirely possible she had been part of the chain of command that had destroyed Scout’s hometown and killed her family. Just the possibility and she couldn’t look at Ebba the same way. How much worse was it for Ottilie, who knew for certain just what Ebba had done?

“I have to,” Ottilie said with a ragged sigh. “I don’t think I have a choice. I don’t have a life without Ebba. But I don’t know how I can do it.”

Scout realized the two of them had stopped searching, were just standing and talking as the dogs pulled at the end of their leashes, anxious to continue.

Then they started barking, both at once, like someone had flipped a switch from “calm” to “complete panic.” Scout dug her heels in, gripping the leashes with both hands as the dogs jumped and pulled.

“What is it?” Ottilie asked, her voice all but lost in the chaos of dog noise. She shined her light all around, but neither of them could see what had set the dogs off.

“Wait!” Scout yelled. “Shine the light back up there!”

Ottilie took a moment to figure out what Scout was asking for. She had been passing the light over the hunched remains of a broken-down rover, but while moving it to the next pile of junk, she had briefly arced it up toward the ceiling far overhead. She put the light back up, deliberately, then found what Scout had only half seen.

A hatch in the ceiling hanging open, the bottom of a ladder just in sight. Ottilie moved to stand directly under it, shining the light up the long shaft.

“No one could jump up there from here,” she said, loudly enough to be heard over the dogs.

“And the dust under it wasn’t disturbed,” Scout said. “But something spooked these two.”

Ottilie kept shining the light around, her motions more and more jerky as the dogs kept barking and she kept not finding anything. Scout saw she had that object back in her hand, the one she had taken from the bag while Warrior went to confront Viola, the one she had quickly slipped out of sight when Viola had put her gun away. She spun back to Scout to hiss, “Get those dogs to quiet down!”

Scout reeled in the leashes until she had each dog by the collar and dropped down to one knee as she whispered calming nonsense. Shadow stopped barking first. His bark was more yip-like, shrill and annoying. Girl kept barking her deep, hellhound woofs, still too loud but not so painfully shrill.

Then Shadow was suddenly tense again, and Scout followed his line of sight to see Ebba approaching out of the dark. She was lurching about, hands waving in front of her, and Scout guessed her night vision wasn’t up to the near-total darkness of this room. Her face was contorted in fear, but that fear faded into almost a smile as she finally met Scout’s eyes, as if realizing she had succeeded in following the sound of barking to find the two of them.

Ottilie was facing the other way, shining the light up at the shaft. With Girl’s continued barking, she had no idea Ebba was approaching.

“I think the top hatch on this thing is still open,” Ottilie was saying. “I see the sky.”

Ebba’s still-waving hands brushed against Ottilie’s back, just a whisper of fingertips over shoulder blade, but Ottilie was badly startled. She dropped the flashlight and it spun away across the floor, lighting up mostly their legs in a series of flashes as if from a pulsar. Scout couldn’t see what was happening but she heard Ebba cry out, then saw her legs buckle and her knees go down into the dust.

“Ebba!” Scout cried, scrambling back to her feet.

“Ebba?” Ottilie said, dropping whatever was in her hand. Scout couldn’t make out any details in the still-rotating light from the flashlight, just something the size of her palm, something flat on the side that had hit the ground and sharp spikes thrusting up into the air. Spikes that dripped with blood.

“What have you done?” Scout wailed. She wanted to rush forward, but so did the dogs. She held them back as Ebba, already on her knees, hands pressed to her belly, fell to one side. Ottilie lunged forward to catch her shoulders before her head hit the concrete.

“Ebba,” Ottilie said again, pressing her own hand over Ebba’s two. The blood gushed through all those fingers, unstoppable.

“Why?” Ebba said, more grief than pain marring her features. “I never meant . . .”

But she had no more words in her.