Heris Serrano (32 page)

"If they have Barstow sensors, why don't they just find us and wipe us out?" asked George.

"They don't use Barstows," Petris said. "Again, that's not 'sporting' in their books. The preeves say if someone eludes them the full month, they'll use a Barstow to find and capture him—but that almost never happens."

"But if they know
we're
here—and they want to eliminate witnesses—won't they use Barstows sooner this time?"

"I was hoping you wouldn't ask that. They might. And if they do, we're out of luck. We can't build a shelter that will shield us from Barstow scans
and
escape notice in flyovers. The island's not deep enough, and the woods aren't thick enough."

"That other flyover," Raffa said. "That could've been a rescue attempt, but we weren't there." Ronnie had missed the flyover, but they'd told him about the flitter that came, hovered above the wreck, and then departed.

"They'd only want to rescue us if they could do it before we made contact with the prey," Bubbles said. Looking at her now, Ronnie could hardly believe that was her name. None of the fluffhead left, none at all. "They'll think—if we meet them—the secret's out. Either they have to kill us all, and fake an accident somehow, or they have to escape. And even if they do escape, there's the evidence. . . ."

"So the only logical thing for them to do is add our names to the list and go on." Raffa shivered. "I don't like this. Yet—if they kill us, there'll be the evidence then, too. When someone comes to look."

"Unless they try to capture you four," Petris said. "And then kill you in some way that can be explained. They might well try a chemical weapon. Knock you unconscious, take you up in a flitter—even your own—and drop you into the rocks. If we're all dead and gone—or if they can create that accident on another island—it might well pass. Ordinarily, the preeves say, they don't use chemicals, but now they might."

Ronnie lifted his head. Had he really heard something, or . . . Petris was alert too. Something—but he couldn't define it. "Flitter," said Oblo. "I'll see about it."

"We make a plan every day," Petris said, as if nothing had happened. "You have to . . . else it's just running and waiting to be killed. That's what happens to most. Or they make a plan, and run the same one every day. That won't work either. The only hope is to make the hunters work . . . get back at them."

"Attack them?" George asked. "You do have more men, don't you? How many hunters are there?"

"More, but not more firepower. Not more resources. We can't attack in force, but we do feint. We scare them sometimes. They like that, the preeves tell us; I hate to give them the satisfaction, but it does make them slow down and be careful. As for how many, it seems to vary. I'm sure we're not seeing the same ones each day; if it's anything like big game hunting, there's a larger party of hunters over on Bandon, and they take turns. I'd like to kill them but so far we haven't."

"Has anyone ever?" Raffa asked.

"So I hear," Petris said. "But you don't know how much to believe. The preeves they send with us are not exactly reliable. They've been known to turn a group that was doing too well. We found a locator on Sid, for instance."

"But you didn't kill him," George said. "Why not?"

"Do you kill everyone who just might hurt you someday?" Petris looked disgusted. "Get some sense, boy. Everyone who's been through this has knowledge we need; we can't afford to lose anyone. He knows we know he might turn; he knows his best chance at survival is with us—at least now."

"So how many do you have, altogether?"

"Never you mind. What you don't know, you can't tell. But we've lost only two, in the time we've been here; the preeves say that's much better than usual. Now—what we're going to do is this. . . ." Petris leaned over the map. "We've got to separate you four, because they need you worst. Can't let them get you in a lump. The longer it takes, the more chance one of you'll be alive to report all this. At the same time, I can't protect you all. My people wouldn't go for it, and I don't have the ability anyway. So you ladies will have to go here"—he pointed to the ravine on the map—"unless you can find those hiding places you think you remember . . . ?" He looked at Bubbles.

"I wish Kell hadn't been so secretive," Bubbles said. "I'm sure there is a cave somewhere—" Petris ignored this; he had not been impressed with a possible cave she had never seen for herself.

"You want me to go somewhere
alone
?"
Raffa asked. She looked pale.

"It would be best," Petris said, almost gently. "That ravine's hard to climb; they avoid it except at the ends, and there's a lot of cover—big rocks and so on. They go along the edges, and watch both ends, but they can't see everything. If you tuck yourself under a boulder, that's as safe a place as I can offer."

"I want to
do
something," Raffa said. "Not sit under a rock and shiver."

"We don't have any training," Bubbles said to her. "Not even as much as Ronnie and George. The best we can do is stay out of the way."

"No." Raffa glanced at Ronnie and away; he felt his heart contract. She was thinking about him, he knew it.

"You two," Petris said, with a nod to Ronnie and George, "are another problem. You might be useful, or not—I can't tell until I see you in action. What we're going to do is try to make them think you wandered into the forest north of the stream, maybe heading for the point up there. It's more rugged country. I want you to go up there now, and make some trail. Scuff and scrape as if you're dragging something or someone. Drop something unimportant that might have fallen off your packs. There's no way to disguise what happened to your flitter, but they may not have realized we've met. If you headed that way, and we were keeping watch to the south and east, you could have gotten away from us. Not really, but they might believe it."

* * *

In other circumstances, it would have been a pleasant afternoon's hike up the ravine. Bubbles found it hard to remember the danger; the lower forest smelled as fresh as she remembered, and then the scramble up the rocks took her breath away. A clear rivulet still splashed from pool to pool, and red and gold amphibians still hurled themselves into the water as she came near, with agitated squeaks. A few rocks had moved in seasonal floods—she recognized one boulder by an odd inclusion, now upside down from where it had been—but most of the trail was familiar.

Higher on the slope, a breeze stirred, lifting the hair on the back of her head as it rose from the forest canopy below. She could see more of the sky, now, and smell the sea as well as the rock and flowers. Raffa, behind her, scuffed her feet in the dirt but said nothing. Bubbles was glad. She wanted to combine the old memories, once thrust away as too childish, with the present experience. Finally she stopped, winded, on a broad flat outcrop where the ravine angled south, away from the shore. Looking back she could see nothing but billows of green concealing the shape of the land itself. Raffa, panting, dropped to the rock and lifted the hair from her neck.

"You did this every year?" she asked, after a moment.

"Most years, for awhile. When my Uncle Gene would come, and bring the cousins. . . . I suppose, really, Mother wanted us out of the main house, away from more important visitors. All of us together could be noisy." She grinned down at Raffa. "When we camped over here, we'd divide in two groups, at least, and play hunting games. Stuff we'd read about or seen on the old cubes—"

"We used to go to my Aunt Katy's house and ride up in the hills," Raffa said. "On Negaire—no pretty islands there."

Bubbles shivered. "Ugh. Cold and wet all year round, isn't it? You didn't camp out, surely?"

Raffa nodded. "Better than in this heat. We pretended to be steppe nomads and so forth, but mostly we lived in caves. There was a big one, very handy, about a day's ride away, and another smaller one on the other side of the hill. We painted monsters on the walls; one of my cousins tried to paint us, but he couldn't draw."

"Cave." Bubbles glowered at the water. "I wish I knew if Kell told the truth. He said it was big enough for all of us, but he wouldn't share it, the pig. He's like that still, loves secrets and won't share. There's no place else as good, if it's real."

"You're sure you have no idea where it is?"

"Only where it isn't. We did look, but we never found it in the likely places—up here, or in the valley between this hill and the next. And knowing where not to look still leaves a lot of island. Why—you think we should look?"

"If we found it, we'd be a lot safer than hiding under a rock," Raffa pointed out. "And we'd better be going; we certainly aren't safe sitting here chatting."

"We'll climb straight over the spine," Bubbles said, leading the way up the narrowing ravine. "I hope the old trail along the crest is still there. It has a few hidey-holes I know about."

Along the spine of the island, the rock outcrops formed stout pillars, two to three meters tall, in ragged rows that wobbled along parallel to the crest like rotting teeth. Between the rows, the hollows were unevenly filled with soil and overgrown with thorny vines and bushes. A winding thread of trail had been hacked clear at the very crest; Bubbles could not tell if it had been cut by hunters or hunted. It didn't really matter. They would have to get off it quickly, because the hunters certainly knew about it.

She counted the pillars. If only she could remember the pattern . . . three tall ones, a short, two talls and then two—three?—short ones . . . there. She squeezed between two of the shorter rocks—had she been that much thinner five years ago, or had the rocks shifted?—and then crouched to wiggle beneath the huge briar that lay over what had always been her own special hiding place. The hooked thorns scraped on her knapsack as she slithered further in, her nose hardly off the dark, dank-smelling soil. It hadn't felt this small the last time. . . . She called back to Raffa. "You have to go under this thing—you can't go through it with anything short of power tools."

"Give me a steppe pony any day," Raffa said, but she gave only one muffled yelp when the thorns caught her hair, and slithered very efficiently for someone who often pretended disdain for physical exertion. "Do you want me to do anything about the way we came in?"

"Nope." Bubbles edged past the cluster of woody stems and felt around the far side of it. She had had a little hole there, once, with a box in it, but she couldn't see. It was dark under the briar's canopy after the brilliant sunlight on the trail, a warm brown gloom lightened by freckles of sun.

"As much as we've shaken it, the outer branches will go back down. I used to do this all the time, and the guys never found me." The little hole in which she'd tucked a boxful of handy items years before had grown into something a handspan across and deeper than her fingers. Burrow. Something was living here. She tried to remember just what did live on this island. Nothing venomous, nothing particularly large or dangerous. Except the hunters. She realized she'd forgotten them for a few minutes, here where her safe childhood was so real, and the hunters hardly believable.

On the far side of the briary tangle, lodged in fallen leaves against another standing stone, Bubbles found her box. She blessed her younger self for insisting she wanted a
real
expedition box, the kind that was supposed to last through anything. She dragged it out of the leaves and scrunched sideways so that Raffa could come up beside her.

"I forgot this the last time we were here," she said. "We were in a hurry to leave—I was going to St. Eleanor's for the first time—and by the time I remembered I'd left it, there was no time to go back." The box had no lock, only an L-shaped catch, now crusted with dirt and time. Bubbles broke a fingernail on it and muttered. Probably nothing in it—a decayed sandwich, some childish bauble—but something drove her to open it.

"Let me try," said Raffa. Bubbles slid the box over to her, and sucked her bruised fingertip. Raffa had picked up a twig, and used that to prod out the caked dirt around the latch, then spit on it. When she pushed, the latch moved with a minute squeak. "Here," she said, handing the box back. "You open it—it's yours."

Bubbles felt a curious reluctance to open it, as odd as the determination a moment ago to make that latch move. Silly, she thought. There could be nothing really useful in this box—not as useful as the things in the survival packs on the flitter. Just junk that would remind her what a silly child she had been. She struggled for a moment, having forgotten the exact movement it took to pry the lid up—the box had a good seal on it. Then it lay open, a time capsule from her childhood, her forgotten treasures rattling a little from the movement of her hand.

A seashell, one of the purple cone-shaped ones. A bracelet woven of dune-grass—she blushed, remembering who had woven it, and why. A little black blob, smooth all over . . . raked from the fire the time Kell had melted the handle from the frying pan. A single sheet of photocells, ready to be spread in the sunlight again . . . if she had anything to recharge. A bit of faded ribbon . . . she remembered clearly the shade of purple it had been. A whistle, a foil-wrapped ration bar, a tube of first-aid ointment and a packet of bandages, a length of fine fish-line, neatly coiled, with two hooks and a handful of differently shaped sinkers. And the compact silvery locator beacon, with the lanyard still looped through the ring on top.