Kira Vex's Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

Kira crouched by the alley wall with the mask device in her palm. The hoofbeats faded, then circled back. The man with her face watched the street. The pup pressed against his leg, one ruined eye tracking nothing. "The coast is two days on foot," she said. "We have one." "Less," he said. "They'll drop the next operative near her, not near us." She ran the math. No vehicle. No contact she trusted in this century. The tracker would follow any fast movement she made. The girl would be dead before Kira cleared the town limits. "You came back from further than I did," she said. "You know a way." He hesitated. That was answer enough. "Say it." "There's a shack at the edge of the marsh. Half sunk. A jump pad under the floor. One charge left. It was mine. I saved it for the trip home." She looked at him. He had already given up the mask. Now this. "Where does it land?" "Coast. Close enough. You'll walk in from a mile out." "And you?" "I stay. I draw the deer. Without the mask I light up like a fire. It follows me, not you." She wanted to argue. She did not. He was right, and the girl had hours. They moved. The marsh started where the last houses ended. Mud sucked at her boots. The shack leaned on rotten posts, boards warped, one window a black square. The pup would not step in the mud. It sat on a stone and watched them. Inside, he pried up three floorboards. A metal disc lay under them, dull, the size of a dinner plate. A single green light held steady on its rim. "Stand on it. Hold the mask. Don't drop it on the other side." She stepped on. The disc hummed. She felt the pull start in her teeth. "Wait," she said. "Your name." He smiled, small. "Later." He pressed the center of the disc. The shack tore away. Salt air hit her face. She stood in wet sand under a low sky. Gulls. A line of shacks a mile off along the water. The disc under her boots went dark and cracked down the middle. She stepped off and ran. Half a mile in, she saw the smoke. Not a house fire. A signal fire. Small, controlled, on the roof of a fisher's shed. Someone was already there. Someone who knew a fourteen-year-old girl on this coast was worth burning wet wood for. Kira dropped flat behind a dune. She had made it. She had beaten the operative by hours, maybe less. But she had spent her ride home to do it, and the person tending that fire was not her handler's operative. It was a girl. Waiting for her.