Zeph Kaizen's Arc

Chapter 7 of 51

Zeph climbed toward the shout. The pines thinned. Snow crusted the roots. He kept the warmth in his chest where the third refusal had left it, and he moved fast between trunks. Somewhere above, Keji was drawing the hunters wide. Somewhere closer, one had broken from the pack. He heard the man before he saw him. A wet cough. A boot dragging over stone. Zeph dropped low behind a fallen pine and looked through the split in its trunk. The hunter came down the slope at an angle meant to cut Zeph off from the ridge. Blood ran from a gash under his ribs and soaked his belt. He held a short blade in one hand. His other hand pressed a small carved lockbox against his chest, patterned wood streaked red where his fingers gripped it. He was tracking. The box was how. Zeph understood then. The shelter had hidden his ki, but the hunter carried something that answered to the crest on him instead. A lock on his scent. Kill the man, and maybe kill the box with him. He waited until the hunter passed the pine. He stood. The hunter turned fast for a wounded man. The blade came up. Zeph did not reach for the fist in his chest. He named the thing. "I will not let him die for me." The warmth opened. His body went sideways before the blade finished its arc. He was behind the hunter before the hunter's shoulder came around. He drove his elbow into the wound under the ribs. The man folded. The blade dropped. The lockbox hit the moss and rolled. The hunter came up on one knee, breathing hard, reaching for the blade. Zeph stepped on his wrist. He looked down at the crest stitched into the man's collar. Saiyan work. The same mark that had come to his door on a dead crow. "Who else knows where he is," Zeph said. The hunter grinned through red teeth. "All of us. The box tells everyone." Zeph brought his heel down on the man's temple. The hunter went flat and did not move. He picked up the lockbox. It was warm. The carved patterns pulsed faintly against his palm, keyed to something in him he could not feel but they could. He set it on the flat top of the fallen pine. He raised his heel and drove it down. The lid split. The wood cracked open along the grain. The pulse under his hand died. The warmth in his chest held. Up the ridge, a horn sounded. Not one. Three, from different points, answering each other across the pines. The hunter had told the truth before Zeph killed him. The box had told everyone. They were converging now on the last place it had spoken from. On him. Zeph stepped over the body and started to run toward Keji's voice.