Unworthy: Marked to die. Raised to survive. (13 page)

Suddenly my feet are pulled out from under me and I’m slipping on the groundcover of beech leaves. The world spins and I let out a stifled gasp. A pain shoots up my leg and I feel a lurch. The dizzying sensation eventually slows and I find myself hanging upside down by my ankle, the noose of a strong cord clamping around it tightly.

“Damn!” My anger flares. Off guard, I’ve wandered into a trap and am now swinging a metre off the ground. I feel stupid and angry, and am not looking forward to the smugness which Hayes will show me for it. Unless I can get myself down without him knowing.

I trace a hand along my thigh feeling for the sheath of the knife. It’s empty. I tip my head back to see it glinting in the dry underbrush, well out of reach of my fingertips.

“Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn,” I curse.

I tuck my knees into my chest. It takes an effort to bend my body over double in order to reach the cord around my ankle, and I try to pull on the rope to take some of the weight off it. I can’t loosen it enough to get my boot through, so I start to untie the laces.

“Lean on me,” a voice commands at my ear. I’d been so engrossed in the trap that I hadn’t noticed Hayes approach.

“I’m fine,” I reply sulkily.

“Do it,” he orders, and straps one arm across my back. He reaches up to cut the cord. I grab him round the shoulders as my leg is released. He steadies me for a moment while my head swims.

“I had it covered,” I grumble, putting space between us once I’ve found my feet and picked up my knife. I’m hungry, cold, homesick, upset, embarrassed, grieving and angry, and I’m ready to pick a fight with him. “You don’t get to order me -”

“Are you alright?” he calmly interrupts my rant, sheathing his knife, and his concern stops me in my tracks.

“I think so,” I reply, but still he bends down and makes me lean on him while he checks my ankle. It makes me feel awkward. “Honestly, I’m fine, just a little -”

“We’re leaving now,” he interrupts again, and takes my arm to just about drag me through the trees. We come to the campsite where he hurriedly packs up and kicks dirt over the fire. He helps me mount. Less than five minutes have elapsed between his cutting me from the trap before we’re moving on again.

Once we’re riding and I clear the pounding from my head, I have a chance to work out why he’s in such a hurry. My embarrassment at being caught in the trap was distracting me from what he realised immediately; that the tracker must be very close.

Chapter Fifteen

We continue riding for the rest of the afternoon. Hayes passes me a small foil packet with biscuits in it, and it’s clear he doesn’t want to stop. They are dry and salty, but fill the hole in my stomach.

“The trap was the tracker’s, wasn’t it?” I ask him as we ride side by side.

“Most likely. It was fairly recent, and expertly laid.”

“Does he have a device like yours?” I motion the thermal imager in his hands.

He nods in answer. “I had been confident in keeping ahead of his range, but the trap means that he’s been through here recently. He could have left triggers out.”

Alarm bells ring in my head. There is so little out here that it would be difficult to miss us.

“Arcadia,” he says. I think it may the first time I have heard him use my name, and I glance across at him warily. He continues riding, staring straight ahead, and I keep pace with him. “I know that you’re coping with a lot right now. You’ve just lost your Grandfather, and you’re finding out some unpleasant things about your world. I need to apologise to you for the scuffle yesterday. I didn’t - I don’t - want to hurt you. This assignment, to bring you to the Polis, is very unusual and, I think, very important.” His fingers nervously flit over the monitor controls and his eyes are looking anywhere but at me. “I have no excuse except that I’m on edge. I’ve made mistakes and for those I apologise too. I’ll step up my game from now on. Be more vigilant.”

I nod slowly. “Thank you,” I say. I hardly know how to take this. His apology makes me feel uncomfortable. Plus, the tracker aside, the last thing I want him to be is more vigilant.

“I need something from you in return though. I need you to do as I say, even though you despise me. My job is to keep you safe, and it’s in your best interests to let me do it well. You’re going to make it a lot harder if you don’t listen to me.”

I can’t think how to respond. My anger has evaporated and all I feel is exhausted. It’s difficult to take offence, because as much as I dislike the guy, I can’t find fault in what he’s said. Plus,
despise
is a very strong word.

The silence between us grows until I say quietly, “I’ll listen.” There are probably other things I should say, but his awkwardness is apparent when he urges his horse ahead of mine and I let him go without another word. The truth is that I feel chastened, as though he’s just told me off for misbehaving, but guilty because I know I deserved it.

We follow the course of the water downstream until we come to a point where another, larger tributary meets it. To my surprise my guide turns up this new branch, towards the west, in the opposite direction of the Polis. He leaves a trigger at the place where the streams meet, so that when we move on, it is left behind us sending messages to his receiver.

As the afternoon shadows lengthen, Hayes is more and more obsessed with checking the monitor, and I know that something is up. The forest becomes more dense, the horses having to pick their own paths, and this slows us down. I can feel his frustration ahead of me. When there’s a break in the trees and I can draw alongside him for a time, I ask him to tell me what’s going on.

“We’re being followed. Turning to the mountains might convince him that we’re heading for the northern pass. Then we can cross the stream and double back on the other side.”

“It’s the tracker, isn’t it?” Goosebumps sprinkle my skin, and I try to shake them away.

“I’m sure of it. At first I hoped it might just be chance, someone trailing the horses. But he’s too decisive, and too quick. In this terrain, he’s keeping pace with us. When it becomes rockier or steeper he’ll start catching easily.”

A killer on my heels, intent on murdering me.

“Will you kill him?”

Hayes shrugs. “If need be. But I want to avoid that. I’ve been told to keep the body count to zero.”

I nod. I feel conflicted. I want to cause no-one’s death, but the thought of the predator behind me continuing his unrelenting search makes me uneasy. Will I always be looking behind me? Perhaps if he were dead I would feel more comfortable.

He reads my thoughts and says, “We just have to keep ahead of him until we reach the Polis. You’ll be safe there.”

This doesn’t help of course. Being safe in the Polis is one thing, but I have no intention of ending up there. Will the tracker follow me north? No, much as the thought is abhorrent to me, I would prefer him dead.

The realisation that Hayes’s trick depends on the tracker believing I am heading through the northern pass sinks in. That’s where I
am
heading. Inadvertently Hayes may well be setting the tracker along my true path. The irony is not lost on me.

Instead I say, “Alright, let’s just get to the Polis then. How do we give him the slip?”

He almost smiles. “We do the unexpected. I have a plan, although I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

We start moving in single file again, as the ground slopes steadily upwards. I can still hear the stream on my right, and it becomes louder as we climb. The horses are finding the going harder and are slowing down, picking their way carefully up the incline. It doesn’t surprise me when he says we need to lose them.

We dismount and rearrange our gear, putting what we need in our backpacks. Hayes keeps a close eye on the monitor. The tracker is still in pursuit, and we have about fifteen minutes before he will be within the five-hundred metre range.

“Your boots too,” Hayes tells me. He has taken his off and tied them to the top of his pack. I do the same.

The horses are happy near us, and start quietly foraging while we pack. Hayes gives them a sharp sting with the dazer to send them moving away. I’m sorry to see them go, but I know that there is a chance their prints will lead the tracker away from us. There’s no time to get caught up in saying goodbye to them, we have to keep moving.

I follow him in pushing my way through the brush, towards the sound of the water, only stopping when the land suddenly falls away at my feet. We’re standing at the top of the gorge, on the outside of a bend in the narrow river. The water is about eight metres below us, swirling and eddying in a deep green pool.

“There’s no way the tracker will believe we went in. He’ll think we’re trying to fake him, our prints here misleading him, and that we’ve continued on up into the forest,” he explains. “We have to jump,” he tells me apologetically.

“Okay,” I nod. It sounds like as good a plan as any.

He seems relieved that I’m willing to do it. “I’ll go in first and when you jump I’ll tow you to the shallows. You just need to relax and not panic - “

“I can swim,” I say. Obviously he can too. That makes things easier.

His eyes widen in surprise. I’m guessing he’s not met a hubbite who swims. Well, truth be told, neither have I.

“Alright. Give me your backpack.” I take it off and stuff my blowpipe and pouch into it before handing it to him. He backs up a bit then gives a heave to fling it out across the gap. The bag lands with a soft crunch on the shingle bar of the inside bend, just clear of the water. His bag is heavier and lands in the shallows. He lets out a grunt of annoyance.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Wait, is it deep enough?”

“I think so. We’ll find out, won’t we?”

With that he’s gone, stepped off the overhang and plunged down into the water. I lean out to watch him surface and strike out for the opposite shore. I take a breath and leap in, opening my feet forward and back to make sure I don’t go down too deep. Even then I feel rocks beneath my feet; the pool is deceptively shallow. The water is immediately a shock to my system, drenching my clothes and weighing me down, but in two strong kicks I’m breaking the surface and moving towards the other side.

Hayes has watched me from the shallows but turns when I reach him. On the shingle fan of the inside bend, he drags the bags further from the water and hunts out the triggers. I put on my boots then start to look through my bag for some dry clothing but he stops me.

“Not here,” he says. “We need to keep moving, further into the trees.”

He slides a trigger, needle-thin, into the leaf of a tree near the water’s edge, and we start off into the cover of the forest.

“The triggers… won’t they leave a trail?” I ask, as we tramp.

He looks over his shoulder at me, but keeps moving when he answers. “They’re tiny, and hard to spot, even when you know what you’re looking for. Here,” he passes one back to me. I hold it between my index finger and thumb.

“It looks like a pine needle,” I comment.

“Bend it.” I do, and the needle snaps just as a pine needle would. “They disappear over time.”

Clever. It means they’d never have to go back and retrieve them.

We make our way through the trees until the stream is far behind us. Hayes had started out at a pace which betrayed his anxiety about the tracker, and I’d found it hard keeping up, but after a few kilometres he’s slowed to such a manageable walk that I’m starting to wonder what he’s looking for. He’s breaking the trail ahead of me and I can’t see his face, but the monitor is slung from his backpack, unchecked for the moment.

“Captain Hayes,” I call.

He doesn’t answer me, instead putting out a hand and leaning heavily on a tree trunk. He sways alarmingly then tries to straighten up. “I’m alright,” he mumbles, but his words come out faintly, “just dizzy.”

Looking at his face, I’m startled by how pale he is. Evening is coming on and on the forest floor the light is beginning to fail, but it’s clear he’s not alright. I offer him my canteen, which he takes, but after drinking his hands are shaking when he hands it back.

“You need to sit down,” I tell him.

“No,” he shakes his head. “We’ve got to keep going. Get as far from our crossing as possible.”

He looks exhausted, and I can see sweat standing out on his pale face. It’s obvious to me that he won’t make it another kilometre. However, he straightens up and continues plodding up the trail. I follow in silence, realising that he’s in absolutely no condition to follow me right now, and that I have found the moment that I’ve been waiting for for three days.

Chapter Sixteen

We only manage another hundred metres or so before his steps have become so haphazard that I know he must be ready to stop, or keel over. He drops heavily into the ferns, supporting his forehead in his hands.

“You need to keep going,” he mumbles. “Stream is just through the trees. Follow it.”

I’m taken aback. Did he read my mind? Suddenly, as soon as he says it out loud, I know how callous it would be to just leave him here sitting by the trail. I feel guilty that I would even consider it. I feel torn.

“What’s wrong with you?” I ask. How did he get so sick so fast? Or has he been sickening all day and I simply haven’t noticed?