Quietus Read online

Silver sneaks a quick peek at the people around her. All of them, including Alex, are totally preoccupied with the task at hand. Their eyes are closed and they’re soaking up the kind of inner tranquility that you can obviously only achieve by shoving your bum way up high in the air and simultaneously kissing the dirt.

  Lame.

  Silver slips silently out of position and begins to crawl away from the group on her hands and knees. She follows the trail of footprints to the edge of the yoga-designated clearing beside East Lake, where they disappear into the undergrowth. Looking back over her shoulder, she determines that Alex is going to be busy for a while. He won’t even notice that she’s gone, and she’ll make sure to be back at camp before lunch.

  At least, that’s the plan …

  *************************

  Eventually, Alex does realize that Silver’s gone. He figured that she’d snuck off back to camp and didn’t think anything else of it. He was disappointed by her continued resistance to the idea of a vacation, but he was willing to give her another day or two to relax into it.

  Several hours later, after an exhaustive yoga session that was finished off with a dip in the lake, Alex returns to camp with the rest of the group. His first stop is their tent, but Silver’s not there. She’s not anywhere, it seems. She’s not by the lake, and she’s not in the communal area inside the Rec Zone HQ. She’s gone.

  Exasperated by the fruitlessness of his search, he spots Jimmy over by a picnic table and decides to do a little bit of detective work. Perhaps Jimmy’s seen her. Perhaps Jimmy knows where she is. As he gets closer, he can see that Jimmy’s having a difficult time trying to consol a very angry mother whose young child is crying uncontrollably in her arms. More panty theft?

  Seeing Alex approach, Jimmy gets up from the table and meets him a few feet away, his expression grave. “Where’s Silver?”

  Alex looks surprised. “I was just coming to ask you that. Have you not seen her?”

  Jimmy glowers at him. “I thought she was sober these days.”

  Alex feels a flash of panic sweep through him. She wouldn’t. Would she? Impossible, he concludes. The Rec Zone is an alcohol-free, drug-free, weapon-free haven. Even if she were fixing to have the shortest marriage in Amaranthian history, she wouldn’t have access to the necessary substances.

  “She is sober. And clean,” Alex insists. “Why? What happened?” He notices that the mother of the crying child is glaring daggers at him over Jimmy’s shoulder. “What did she do?”

  “The kid says she strode into camp looking like a mad woman. Her hands were covered in blood, she was carrying a rather large, pointy stick, and was muttering something about monsters. She took a roll of duct tape from the supply room and then disappeared back into the woods. What the hell is going on with her, Alex? She seemed fine this morning.”

  “Which way did she go?”

  Jimmy points west. “Don’t bother bringing her back until she’s down off whatever high made her act like this.”

  *************************

  Armed with a long stick, a sharpened rock chip secured to the end of it with duct tape, Silver crouches low to the ground and inspects a footprint in the dirt. She’s been at this for hours. She’s sweaty, dirty, and has more than a few leaves caught up in her hair from clambering through various bushes and shrubs.

  A noise.

  Freeze.

  Her body tensed for action, she listens closely …

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Alex’s voice almost makes her leap right out of her skin. She was so focused on the task at hand that she had no idea he was creeping up on her.

  “I’ve been looking for you for ages.” He sounds grumpy. “Where the hell did you go?”

  “I had some investigative work to do.” She turns her attention back to the footprint. “What do you think this is?”

  Alex hauls her up off the ground by her ponytail and moves in front of her, completely obliterating the print. “I think this is a woman on the edge. On the edge of what? I have no idea. But I really hope that you’re just faking this insanity to make me take you back to the Sentinel District.”

  “Insanity? You think this is insanity?” She points to her own face. “This is determination.”

  Covered in dirt, her skin smeared with traces of grass and moss, her hands stained with the juice of the berries she’s been picking and eating along the way, she looks more like a Lurker than she does a Hunter. As Alex lets go of her hair, he finds his fingers covered in some thick, mucilaginous slime. It smells like bile.

  “And what is it that you’re determined to do exactly?” He wipes his fingers off on his pants. “Are you trying to punish me for wanting to spend some time alone with you away from the goddamn Hunter Division?”

  He takes her face in his hands and holds her eyelids apart, peering into her eyes to check the dilation of her pupils: they’re slightly dilated.

  Silver bats his hands away. “There’s something out here! I’m sure of it.”

  Alex looks around the deserted woods. “There’s nothing out here, Silver.” He snatches her pointy stick away from her. “Just more crazy waiting to be let loose.”

  He breaks the stick in half over his knee and tosses it away, then presses the back of his hand against her forehead. She’s warm, but not extremely so.

  She swats at his hand again. “What’re you doing? There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.” He snatches up her filthy hands and inspects them.

  The staining is all berry juice.

  Not blood.

  Relief.

  “Seriously, I’m perfectly fine, Alex.” She tries to pull back her hands, but he’s gripping them too tightly. “I know what you’re thinking, but I haven’t eaten any wild mushrooms this time. I swear.”

  Alex glances up into the sky to check on the progress of the weather. Rain clouds had started to move in an hour ago, and now they’re threatening to break.

  “Okay. You’ve made your point.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re not into yoga. Fair enough. I get it. We’ll do something more exciting tomorrow, I promise.”

  The first drops of rain begin to fall.

  Silver shakes her head in protest. “I wasn’t trying to—”

  “You’ve been wandering around in the woods for hours. You’re overheated and dehydrated. Let’s get back to camp and get you cleaned up.”

  More rain.

  Alex takes her by the arm and tries to lead her away, but she refuses to budge.

  “What about the footprints?!”

  Alex looks down at the already damp ground. “What footprints?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Silver crouches down in the dirt, pointing to a slight indentation in a spot of mud by the base of a tree. “Right there.”

  The rain’s now really beginning to pound, and Alex can barely tell what she’s pointing at.

  He tilts his head to one side. “It looks like a fish to me.”

  “What? Now who’s crazy? Fish don’t have feet.”

  “No, I mean … look.” He draws a face on it with a twig. “That’s its head, and its fins are right here …”

  Silver snatches the twig away from him. “Are you mocking me?”

  Alex laughs. “No. I’m just joining in.”

  “Whatever. I don’t care if you don’t believe me.” She gets back on her feet and surveys the woodland around them, her hair now drenched and matted to her body, her clothes already soaked through. “I found a trail of weird tracks. I tried following them, but they just led me around in circles. You know what we need?”

  “Towels?”

  “Luka.” She bites on a fingernail, deep in thought. “He’s the best tracker I know.”

  Okay, that does it. Alex is officially no longer enjoying this.

  “Why does it seem like his name’s always on the tip of your tongue lately?”

  Silver rolls her
eyes. “Why does it seem like you’re always jealous of something that happened nearly twenty years ago?”

  “It’s not what he did twenty years ago that bothers me, it’s what he did last week.”

  Silver retrieves her broken stick from the ground. “He was confused.”

  “He was out of order.”

  She pulls the stolen roll of duct tape out of her back pocket, ready to bind the two halves of her stick back together. “He’d been drinking.”

  “It was our wedding day!”

  “He—”

  “Stop making excuses for him.” Alex steals the pointy end of the stick off her and hurls it away into the undergrowth. “He made a pass at you an hour before you and I stepped into the registrar’s office together.”

  “He didn’t make a pass at me, Alex.” Silver throws down the other half of her stick in frustration. “It was more like a cry for help.”

  “I don’t care what it was. I made him my Deputy and that was how he repaid me.”

  “He won’t do it again.”

  “He can’t.”

  “The restraining order is unnecessary.”

  “Yeah? Well, I feel better knowing that he can’t be in your company without someone else present.”

  “We’re too old for chaperones, Alex. It’s fucking embarrassing.”

  “Then he needs to learn how to—”

  Without warning, Silver forces a kiss on him and smothers his building anger. When the kiss breaks: “I married you, not him. He made an ass of himself when he tried to coax me out of City Hall with him, and he knows it. Let’s not keep dredging up the past, okay? This is supposed to be our honeymoon.”

  “Some honeymoon. You ditched me and went wandering about in the woods, hunting a hallucination. What kind of berries have you been eating?”

  Silver looks down at her mucky hands, now slowly being washed clean by the rain. “You told me not to eat the wild mushrooms. You didn’t say anything about the berries.”

  “Well, just lay off the berries from now on. I don’t think they’re agreeing with you.”

  “Damnit.” She sighs, feeling a headache coming on. “I really thought I was on the brink of something.”

  “You were.” Alex laughs. “It’s called madness. And if they have the same berries in the Fringe District as they do here, I think that explains a thing or two about the Lurkers. Thank god I got to you before you started eating people’s faces off.” He wraps an arm over her shoulders. “That would’ve been a deal breaker.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Wind & the Willow

  Silver opens one eye and peers at Alex in the darkness of the tent. He’s fast asleep, drooling onto his pillow.

  Good. She’d managed to wear him out after all.

  Trying not to make a sound, she peels back the covers and slips quietly out of bed. She pulls on her Hunter Division boots and pants and a moderately clean tank top. Checking over her shoulder to make sure that Alex is still sound asleep, she reaches for a hold-all full of her camping gear and navigates its contents by touch alone.

  Aha!

  She pulls free a picnic blanket, rolled up tightly inside a canvas bag. Taking care not to rock the airbed, she slides the blanket out of the bag and unravels it on the ground. Concealed in the middle of it, tucked away in the folds of the fabric, is her hunting knife and sheath.

  A self-satisfied smile begins to takeover her lips. It’s not as good as a gun, but it’s the next best thing. She fixes it to her belt and snatches up a small pocket flashlight from a front pouch in the hold-all.

  Fuck yoga.

  Now the real fun begins.

  Walking with a purpose, she’s at the Cut Off boundary fence within fifteen minutes. Traversing the width of the island from east to west and back again, she looks up and down the fence, inspecting it for any signs of weakness.

  As per government policy, the Rec Zone is inspected annually by the Omega board of Health and Safety, and the fence is always under close scrutiny. One broken link would be enough to constitute a code violation and have the whole Zone shut down until it could be repaired and reinforced.

  So needless to say, she finds nothing. Not even a patch of rust. Clamping the flashlight between her teeth, she grabs hold of the fence and tries to pull herself up onto it. It’ll definitely take her weight, but the wire’s too abrasive against her skin. If she were to scale it like that, she’d end up with nubs for fingers.

  Planting her feet back down on the ground, she looks around for another option. A hundred or so feet away, almost exactly where she started, a large beech tree is bristling in the breeze. It’s rooted close to the fence, and on the other side of the fence is an old two-storey warehouse.

  Convenient.

  Now she just needs to find the right tools.

  Back at base camp, she borrows two paperclips from a stack of ‘Rate Your Experience’ questionnaires that Jimmy keeps in a plastic tub fixed to the side of the Rec Zone HQ. Balancing the flashlight on a nearby ledge, she uses the paperclips to pick the lock on the emergency box that contains the axe.

  Bingo!

  The case pops open and she seizes the axe. It should be all she needs.

  Minutes later, she’s back at the base of the beech tree and she’s ready to do it some damage. Exerting all the force she can muster—breaking a sweat, despite the cold night air—she begins to chip away at the base of the trunk and gradually manages to cut a ‘v’ shape out of the wood.

  By the end of it, her shoulders are burning. Not that the pain she knows she’ll face in the morning even comes close to dissuading her—she’s far from finished. The tree is still upright, refusing to topple, but it shouldn’t need much more encouragement.

  Silver digs the blade of the axe into the side of a nearby tree, making a mental note to retrieve it on her way back to camp, hoping to put it back inside the case before anyone realizes that it was gone. Then, wiping the sweat from her face with her tank top, she prepares to give gravity a bit of a helping hand.

  She backs up several feet and readies herself.

  One, two, three …

  She takes a running leap at the tree and slams a back kick into the trunk, just a foot or so above the cut. It makes a sharp crack, but remains vertical.

  Damnit.

  Shaking off her sore muscles, she backs up and repeats.

  Crack.

  Nothing.

  Fuck.

  Again.

  Another crack, and now splinters of wood begin to snap away from the trunk as it starts to tilt precariously forward.

  Almost.

  Silver takes one final run at the tree, but this time she doesn’t propel herself back from it—she keeps running. Momentum carries her up the leaning tree, her weight forcing it to give under the pressure.

  Boom!

  The sound of the snapping trunk echoes around the Rec Zone like a crack of thunder. Silver tries to steady herself and keep balance, but as the top of the tree hits the roof of the building on the other side of the fence, the trunk bows and flexes.

  As it springs back up toward her, it throws her off her feet and into the air for a few terrifying, disorienting seconds. When she lands—which seems like forever later—she loses her footing. She tumbles off the side of the trunk, reaching out desperately for anything to hold onto, or anything to break her fall.

  Success!

  She wraps her arm around a branch and thankfully, though it protests, it holds her weight. Dangling there, seven feet in the air, she summons up the last of her strength and hauls herself back up onto the trunk. By now, her shoulders are screaming at her. She rests there for a moment, straddling the tree and catching her breath.

  Convincing herself that the hard part’s over, she gets back on her feet. Holding her arms outstretched for balance, she walks the length of the trunk like an awkward, spiky tightrope, feeling nothing but relief when she finally reaches the rooftop on the other side.

  Hopping down onto what looks like a corrug
ated metal roof, the darkness of the night obscures the fact that the metal is almost completely rusted through.

  She hears the crack of splitting metal.

  “Oh, crap.”

  Too late.

  Fortunately, the floor beneath is still intact and she only falls eight feet, but the rusty metal roof leaves its mark on her. Falling through the jagged hole, a razor sharp shard of metal slices deep into her skin and gives her a nasty four inch gash in the flesh of her upper right arm.

  Searing pain.

  Perfect.

  Fumbling the flashlight out of her back pocket, she casts its beam over the wound and satisfies herself that nothing major is damaged. It feels like a knife is being twisted under her skin, but experience tells her that it’s not life threatening. Not even close.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” she reassures herself, heaving herself up from the floor. “Not my crowning moment, but still.”

  Hurting all over, she makes her way to the ground floor and out into the street. She’s never been here before, but she’s been here before. This place looks just like any number of the other derelict Out District ruins she’s spent her life using as a playground. The only thing different about this playground is that it’s empty.

  No Chimera.

  Nothing.

  It’s dead quiet.

  Most of the wood frame residential buildings are almost completely collapsed. They’re piles of tinder, with plastic garden chairs and other useless junk sticking out from underneath. These buildings were all raided for electronics and other items of value at the collapse of the Old World. Most places were. Anything metal was of value then, just as it is now. The scrap metal trade is big business in Amaranthe. Without it, industry would slowly grind to a halt.

  Old World tin cans, cars, shopping carts, signs—anything. Almost everything can be melted down and recycled back into the New World. After all, it’s not like there’s anyone out there mining for ore anymore.

  Further into her exploration, she finds some brick buildings that have stood the test of time much better. The rooftops are long gone, but the walls are still relatively intact. Snooping around inside their remains, she finds the tatters of an old American flag.