Kira Vex's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

The cut ended at a lip of broken clay. Kira stopped Kayla with a hand and crawled up to look. Open pine flats stretched inland, sand and needle mat and low scrub. Somewhere in that quiet, a fourteen-year-old girl waited, and one hunter waited too. Kira had a compass that found people and a girl who had run these flats since she was nine. She did not have a map of the ground between. "Draw it," Kira whispered. She smoothed a patch of clay. Kayla scratched lines with a stick. "Cut ends here. Two ways in. Straight line runs up a sand rise. Open. Fast. He'll see us before we see him." She drew a second line curling south. "Old bog trail. Goes past a sunken shack, cuts through alder, comes at her from behind. Slower. Wet." "Which one does a hunter watch?" "The rise. Always the rise. Bog stinks. Nobody goes." Kira pulled the brass disc from Kayla's shirt and thumbed the ring herself. The needle jumped, steadied, jumped. The stationary hunter sat north of the rise. Not on the bog line. She turned her body until the needle showed him at her right shoulder. He was maybe six hundred yards off. "Bog," Kira said. "You lead. Every hundred steps." They dropped off the lip into black water that came to Kira's knees. The smell hit like a slap. Kayla moved without splashing, foot flat, weight slow. Kira copied her. Halfway through the alder, Kayla froze. Something moved at the base of a rotted stump. A frog, or what was left of one. Its skin hung in green rags. One eye dangled on a wet string down its cheek. It did not hop. It watched. Kira felt the cold under her ribs she knew from the deer. A tracker. Small. New. "Don't sweat," she breathed. She pushed the wrongness down inside her chest and held it there. Kayla did not move. The frog's good eye rolled toward them, then past them, then away. It sank into the mud. Kira exhaled once. "Walk." They cleared the alder into a stand of pine behind the sunken shack. Warped boards, half in mud, roof caving. Kayla checked the needle. The girl's line pointed through the shack's back wall, close. The hunter's line still pointed at the rise, unmoved. "He's watching the wrong door," Kayla whispered. Kira nodded. She walked around the shack low and fast. A pale face lifted in the black doorway. A girl, thin, fourteen, eyes wide, a knife shaking in her hand. Kira showed empty palms. "Your name is on a page I wasn't supposed to see," she said. "Come with us or the next one who finds you won't talk first." The girl looked at Kayla. Kayla nodded once. The knife lowered. Kira had her. Behind them, in the bog, something small began to croak.