Shadows of Sherwood (3 page)

“You best get on home, girl.” Barclay said. “That's big trouble right there.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Knives in the Nighttime

Robyn raced home to Loxley Manor with her heart pounding and her skin sweat-slick. Before tonight, she had never been truly scared while visiting the 410 Compound or venturing around the Castle District alone. But those men—the sheer number of them and the quiet threat they exuded—frightened her. The danger of being caught sneaking around seemed real now.

Robyn had always been the sort of girl who enjoyed breaking the rules. She was almost never where she was supposed to be. One slim, quick person could go just about anywhere unnoticed, even in the daylight. Robyn especially liked climbing walls—simply to see what was behind them—and the Castle District was full of excellent walls. Not to mention gates and hedges and fences. She may have also leaped the occasional moat.

She would have preferred having a friend to join her from time to time, but she found it hard to interest the other girls in even the most harmless sorts of mischief. It stood
to reason, since Robyn always, always got into a little bit of trouble when she didn't follow the rules.

Her mother chided her for her impatience.

Her father described her as restless, but he usually smiled with secret pride over it.

Her teachers all thought she was trouble, but her grades were decent and more often than not she did her homework, though she didn't always show up for class.

At night, she loved exploring the woods behind her house, or visiting the 410. She was never the least bit tired at bedtime. The manor house was quite large, with more than a dozen rooms, but as it happened her parents' bedroom was right across the hall. And right next to the closet that housed the alarm system controls. Robyn would tiptoe in and flip the second-floor switch off. Hearing nothing but Dad's soft snores, Robyn would return to her room, close the door, and dash to the half-open window. The night breeze always welcomed her.

The sheer two-story drop never worried her a bit. Scaling down the rough white stones was easy enough. Her feet and fingers naturally found the correct toeholds in the mortar. A thirty-second descent. She'd done it many times and had never been caught. But never before had Robyn's restless, reckless nature actually saved her life.

It would soon become known as the Night of Shadows.

As the Hightower Clock struck midnight in the center of Notting Square, as Robyn raced home seeking the safety of
Loxley Manor, a great evil spread through the streets of Nott City. This evil came in the form of dark-dressed men carrying the sort of sharp knives that are perfect for slicing throats.

The leader of the dark-dressed men was, in fact, not a man at all. An elegant, birdlike woman sat calmly in the passenger side of the first truck in the convoy, studying the small screen resting in her palm. She wouldn't dirty her own hands tonight, of course, but a precision operation like this one required firsthand oversight.

The fourteen trucks steamed through the Castle District, where all the members of Parliament lived, each headed to one of the fourteen addresses on the list they had been given. The task was to take out everyone in those houses, a total of thirty-nine people, including spouses and children. Governor Crown had been clear about that. Tonight was not a night for the squeamish, and the guys in the trucks were not afraid of a little mess.

They parked their trucks and approached on foot, snaking toward Loxley Manor—among others—like tentacles through the pitch-black night.

Few saw them coming. Many would die.

But not Robyn. Because on the night in question, Robyn herself was a shadow.

It took a total of eighteen minutes. At eighteen past midnight, the fourteenth and final truck reported to the leader with a single number, representing the total they had captured or killed.

The leader frowned as she scrolled her PalmTab screen, reconciling the number of bodies in the trucks against the list she had in hand. Things didn't add up. Thirty-nine names, thirty-eight accounted for.

At twenty minutes past, each truck received a blinking message on its dashboard screen: COUNT AGAIN.

By twenty-five minutes past, things still didn't add up, but the leader had figured out who was missing.

Her name was Robyn. A girl. Age twelve.

Things were not in order upon Robyn's return to the manor house. A faint light glowed from the kitchen, where no light had been on when she'd left. She didn't want to get caught. So she climbed the white stones stealthily and pulled herself through her window, holding her breath. The sound of a large vehicle driving off down the street caused her to duck her head low. Instinct.

She crouched beneath her window, feeling the wrongness in the air. She found her bedroom door standing open, which it hadn't been when she'd left. The red lightbulb beside her bed was blinking. Her intruder alarm had been triggered—someone had been in her room.

Her first thought:
Busted!
But there was no sound, no sign of wakeful, worried parents. Just an unnatural, eerie hum in the air, a feeling that something strange had happened. And an unusual scent, a sort of metallic tang mixed with a whiff of sweat, as if from men's skin.

Robyn walked into the hallway. Her parents' bedroom
door stood open, too. The room was empty, their covers mussed and slept in, but all was dark. Her heart pounded. She gripped her backpack straps in tight fists and went downstairs, following the soft glow of the kitchen light. Certainly she would find them there, awake, sipping hot chocolate, waiting to pounce and punish her.

Instead, she found something else.

A white light from within the fridge, door standing open.
Why?

Smeared handprints on the fridge door.
Smeared in what?

Robyn flipped on the overhead light. Her body bent toward a scream, but no sound came out. She doubled over and collapsed onto her knees, the scene before her now lit and fully awful. The handprints on the fridge door were bloodred and dripping. The smudges and smears led to the center of the floor, near where she now knelt. A pool of blood. No, a lake of it.

She reached out. First her fingertips caught a bit of it, and it felt strangely warm. So she pressed her whole hand into it, like she was checking the temperature of a bath. Later, it grossed her out, the fact that she had done this. But she never wondered
why
. As if she knew it was the last she'd ever touch of them.

Then she ran straight to the bathroom sink and scrubbed and rinsed until the basin was free of any tinge of pink and the water draining away was as clear as her tears.

The leader in the truck closed her eyes, thinking it through. Anything less than perfection was unacceptable to Crown. To return one body short meant returning in failure. To retrace steps and continue the search meant returning late, which would require an explanation.

After listening to a round of stammering, unhelpful suggestions, the leader ordered her men into silence. Their opinions didn't matter. It was all her responsibility in the end.

“I'll take care of it,” she told the men. “Never speak of this again.”

She directed the trucks to proceed to the surrounding counties: Sherwood, Nottingham, Excelsior, Block Six. There were more houses, more dissidents to confront, and no time to waste.

To the driver of her own truck, she ordered, “Take us to Loxley Manor.”

CHAPTER FIVE