“Is he going to be alright?”
“Hope so.”
Cass noticed something behind those few words Three was willing to say on the matter. His usual stony gaze was shadowed by a slightly furrowed brow.
“You think it was a mistake to leave him behind?”
“Yeah.”
He let it hang in the air, as if that was all he was going to say. But just before she pressed him further, he added, “Might’ve been a bigger one to force him along, though.”
“He seems pretty sharp. If he survived that long with all the…” she trailed off, unsure of the diplomatic way to say it, “trouble… he was having, I’m sure he’ll be fine. I don’t think we need to worry about him.”
“I’m not.”
“Look, if you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.”
Three clenched his jaw, grimaced slightly. Frustrated with her, or himself, she couldn’t tell.
“Biggest footprints a man leaves behind are the people whose lives he crosses, intentional or not. And there’s no way to cover those tracks… I just hope he keeps his head down, at least for a while.”
With that said, Three lengthened his stride and was soon several paces ahead of Cass and her son. End of conversation. Cass shoved the implications of his words to the back of her mind and focused on keeping pace, the thought of pursuit too heavy to pick up so soon.
Before long, they’d fallen into Three’s natural broken rhythm, and begun their twisting but steady journey towards Greenstone under his ever-watchful eye. It was late afternoon on the third day of the journey when trouble came.
Seventeen
The sprawling city shell changed in small but perceptible ways as they followed their wandering south-easterly path. Fuzzy as she was from the Somalin doses Three insisted she take, Cass nevertheless felt that her awareness of her surroundings was growing sharper from the time she’d spent with Three. Wherever they went, he seemed utterly in the Now; never reflecting on what came before, or thinking of what might be ahead. Just fiercely, aggressively, rooted in the instant.
Cass worked to cultivate a similar mindset, to push the inconsequential past from her thoughts, to chase the imaginary, unknowable future from her daydreams. And over the course of the past few days, she’d noticed details in the world around her that had escaped her before. Some were of little value, such as the subtle changes in architecture, or shifts in the concentration of the residual signals that still haunted the abandoned buildings. Others were more important, like the widening of streets that offered less concealment, or the decrease in functioning tech that signaled the likely presence of scavengers, whether past or present. Even as the winds and temperature blurred the lines between late autumn and early winter, Cass felt more alive, more in tune, than she had at any time before.
And so it was, though Three had said nothing, that Cass knew from the shift in his demeanor that danger was near. They’d been making good time up to that point, but he’d slowed the pace, taken to narrower alleyways. They were moving forward, but in lines far less straight.
“What’s going on?”
Three waved vaguely towards an alley as his eyes roved the wide road ahead. Cass caught the barest glimpse of three figures moving along parallel to them.
“Bad guys?”
“They were headed the opposite way when we passed ’em the first time.”
Cass hadn’t even seen them before, but the fact that Three had, came as less of a surprise than it once would have.
“And there were four of ’em.”
She felt the icy pinprick of fear stab at her heart. She couldn’t boost off Trivex, and worse, Three had dosed her with Somalin, a tranquilizer, to slow her burn rate. She felt like she was moving at half speed: a poor quality if it came to a fight.
“What do we do?”
“Keep your eyes open. And keep moving.”
He led them out of one alley, then down a corridor formed by one sagging high-rise leaning into another. Pace slow, but deliberate, like an icebreaker through a frozen sea. He seemed to be looking everywhere and nowhere all at once, eyes taking in everything without focusing on any one thing in particular. Cass pulled Wren close to her side, kept a hand on his shoulder. He’d gone quiet, sensing the danger even before she’d spoken to Three.
Ahead, Three halted, held out a hand behind him to stop them as well. His head swept slowly back and forth. Cass strained to hear any warning sound, but there was nothing, save for the soft sighing of the late-autumn breeze through the twisted steel branches bending above them.
Cass felt Wren pull away from her, and looked down to see her son creeping carefully to Three. He placed a hand on Three’s elbow, and Three bent down so the boy could whisper in his ear. Three glanced up to windows on their right as he nodded, then pushed Wren gently but firmly back towards his mother. Wren clung close to Cass then, his head pressed against her hip, making himself as small as possible. Cass cursed herself silently for her helplessness. Worse, for the danger her helplessness presented for Three. She longed for quint, not because her body craved it, but because she wanted desperately to stand at his shoulder, strong and capable, not behind him, like some creature to be protected, or pitied.
“You might as well come on down from there, brother,” Three called suddenly, in a booming voice that echoed within their confines. “We’re not here to hurt anyone.”
After a few seconds, something shifted in one of the windows, and Cass realized it was a man standing up out of the shadows.
“You can call your friends, too.”
The man disappeared from view. In front of her, Three slipped his pack off and set it on the ground, then stepped a few paces away from it. Cass felt the air go electric. The familiar feeling she’d learned to trust as a sign of imminent danger. The sign she’d used as the signal to boost.
“Three…” she said, without knowing why. Ahead of her, he seemed simultaneously relaxed and coiled as a steel spring. Stance wider, one foot slightly ahead of the other.
The man from the window emerged from the building, and as he did so, the other three swung into view from the end of the alley behind them. From the looks of it, the man from the window was the pack leader. He was round but solidly built, greasy hair in a ring around his head where he wasn’t balding. A coil of leather hung at his waist, some kind of whip, she guessed. He smiled as he approached, but not in friendliness. It was the smile of a predator who’d cornered its prey. A gap showed where one of his front teeth should’ve been.
“Out for a bit of walks, are we? On our way to a visit?”
Three moved closer to Cass and Wren, blocking them from the leader’s view.
“Just passing through.”
The other three men continued to close in, casual.
“Ones don’t ‘pass through’ without paying the toll.”
“Didn’t realize there was one, or I would have. I’ve got some food. Couple of batteries. What’s the price?”
“Treats.”
The three men were close now, and Three pushed Cass and Wren around to his side, shielding them as much as possible from the group. Cass noticed the leader lick his lips, his eyes roving around her waist, searching her out hungrily, burning with naked lust. Her stomach turned in revulsion. If she’d been able to boost, she would’ve forked the eyeballs out of his skull.
“Not for sale. And it’s probably best if you all just move on, and let us do the same.”
The other three men flanked their leader, formed a semi-circle with Three at its center.
“Not for sale, because we ain’t payin’,” said one of the pack, a gangly redhead with a patchy beard. “That one’s ours now. You can move on, or you can die.”