Quietus Read online

  That’ll do.

  She cuts away a strip of the material with her hunting knife and stuffs it in her pocket. That’s phase one. Phase two: find a white willow tree. A little further south, and it looks like she’s going to be in luck. What used to be an Old World park is now an explosion of grass and trees and other greenery. The surrounding wooden houses have been swallowed up by the vegetation, and the whole area is lush and dense.

  It’s hard to tell apart the different kinds of trees in the dark, and Silver isn’t much of a botanist at the best of times, but the slender, droopy branches and leaves of the willow tree are fairly conspicuous. Upon finding one, Silver uses her knife to cut a strip of the bark away. She slaps it against the wound on her arm, sticky side inward, and binds it there with the piece of fabric she tore from the flag.

  The bark and leaves of the willow tree contain salicin, an aspirin-like substance that can be used to relieve pain and fever. It can also help to reduce joint and muscle inflammation, and Silver’s muscles are still stinging. She grabs a handful of willow leaves and munches on them as she walks away. They’re bitter, but she’s in too much pain to care.

  Making her way back into the more industrial areas of the Cut Off, something suddenly stops her in her tracks.

  A noise.

  A scuttering of something in between two buildings.

  She freezes. She’s practically unarmed. She reminds herself that there aren’t any Chimera here. There can’t be any Chimera here: the entire island is cut off from the Unknown Territories. This place is nothing more than a tomb.

  Rats?

  That damn squirrel?

  Whatever. Silver shrugs and carries on. She walks a few more blocks and finds a few more things to investigate. She pokes her nose in amongst the rubble of old warehouses, storefronts, and homes, trudging onward until something of interest really catches her attention.

  A sock.

  One lonely sock, lying in the middle of the street.

  Not an Old World rag, or a torn scrap of decomposing fabric, but an actual sock. Silver picks it up and takes a closer look at it.

  It’s dirty.

  “Eww.” She flings it over her shoulder. “That squirrel dude needs to start being a little more selective.”

  She’s about to walk on when she sees something else distinctly New Worldy: a silk chemise, dangling off an old fence post. Investigating that, she takes her knife in her hand and enters the building beyond the fence.

  It’s an Old World family home. Though the roof collapsed over a century ago, an old Rec Zone tent has been draped over the top of the walls in a child’s old bedroom. It’s the only room in the house that isn’t completely exposed to the elements.

  In it, Silver finds the usual: toys strewn about the floor, old picture frames and broken memories, fragments of clothing and blankets. The glass has been taken from the window panes, probably sometime during the First Reclamation.

  She also finds the distinctly unusual.

  In the corner of the room, there’s a pile of clothes, blankets, towels, and pillows. All are New World. All are from the Rec Zone.

  A bed?

  A nest?

  Whatever it is, it hasn’t been there long and it’s being used on a regular basis. Silver doesn’t know what to make of it. She kneels on the floor beside a child’s old bed frame, careful to avoid the rusty springs where a mattress used to be. Picking at some relics on the floor, she finds a child’s journal and begins to flick through the pages.

  It ends abruptly in the year 2013.

  Saddened, Silver discards it, lays the flashlight down on the floor and leans back against the wall, closing her eyes. The wind whispering in through the open window sounds like breathing. It’s sporadic. Almost rhythmic. Should wind really be that consistent? Mmm, the salicin is working. She can barely feel the throbbing in her arm anymore.

  Creak.

  Silver becomes rigid with tension, but she doesn’t open her eyes.

  Wind doesn’t bear weight.

  Suppressing a sudden rush of fear, she lifts one eyelid and peers out into the darkness. The flashlight’s beam is aimed across the room, but there’s something in the hallway. She can’t make it out in the shadows, but there is something there.

  Slowly, she wraps the fingers of one hand around the hilt of her knife. With her other hand, she inches for the flashlight.

  One inch.

  Two.

  Three.

  Her fingertips make contact with the rubber grip and she takes a deep breath. In one fluid motion, she hooks the flashlight between two fingers, trains the beam on the doorway, pulls her knife from its sheath, and springs to her feet.

  Gone.

  The shadow, whatever it is, is much faster than she is. She catches barely a glimpse of some grayish skin and nothing more. Despite her better judgment, she makes chase.

  But she’s much too late.

  She’s alone in the crumbling shell of someone’s Old World home, and all she knows is that it wasn’t a fucking squirrel, or a berry hallucination. She doesn’t have a name for what it was—she’s so tired she can’t even really begin to comprehend it—but at least she’s not losing her mind.

  Convincing herself of that, she navigates her way back to her felled tree, only taking one or two wrong turns along the way. Not looking forward to the challenge of heaving herself back up through the nasty metal hole, she’s pleased to discover a stairwell with roof access. This time, she sticks close to the reinforced edges of the roof and clambers onto the tree from the ledge.

  Crawling back down the trunk on her hands and knees, she realizes that it must be close to dawn by now. She must get the axe back before anyone from the camp wakes up.

  There’s just one problem.

  The axe is gone.

  Fuck.

  Was this the same tree? She looks around. It must be. She traces her fingers over the gouge where she’d dug in the blade, just to reassure herself that her memory isn’t faulty.

  The axe was moved.

  Someone else was here.

  In her haste, trying to hurry back to camp before dawn breaks, her foot catches on something on the forest floor and she almost trips. She stumbles, catches herself, and turns around to glare at the offending root.

  Only, it’s not a root.

  It’s the axe, and it’s at least twelve feet away from the tree where she’d left it.

  Huh.

  Retrieving it from the dirt, Silver shakes off her doubts and kicks up her pace a few knots. In her mind, there can only be one explanation: Alex must’ve come after her. In anger, he probably snatched up the axe and threw it. He’s probably already back at camp, waiting there for her with a frown.

  Damnit.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Blood & Bruises

  Preparing a satisfactory explanation—or rather, a lie—in her head, Silver’s thoughts are disrupted mid-flow by the realization that the campsite is serenely quiet. Alex isn’t even awake yet—no-one is. The whole place is silent, save for the snoring of one or two male campers.

  This is disconcerting and weird, but first things first: the salicin is wearing off. As Silver flexes the muscles in her right hand, the nerves in her arm send out a sharp twinge of pain, reminding her that she needs proper medical attention. She needs real painkillers and a real bandage, real soon.

  Quickly replacing the axe inside its case, she heads for the first aid station in the communal area of the Rec Zone HQ. After delving through cupboards and drawers and finding nothing more exciting than several hundred elastic bands, some expired multi-vitamins, and a half dozen emergency flashlights, she finally stumbles upon a first aid kit.

  It’s fairly basic, but it has just about everything she needs: a suture needle and thread, saline, gauze, tape, and even something for the pain.

  She discards the willow bark and flag strip into the trash, both things now completely soaked with her blood. She irrigates the wound with the saline and preps a needle and thr
ead to stitch herself up. First, though, she wants a little something for the pain …

  Jimmy walks in as she’s preparing to draw a syringe of an injectable painkiller.

  “Do you even know what that shit is?”

  Silver is moderately startled by the sound of his voice, but you’d never know it. “Yeah. It’s gonna make me feel better.”

  He plucks the glass bottle out of her hand before she even has the syringe ready.

  “It’s Demerol, and it’s highly addictive.”

  “Has Alex been coaching you?” She scowls at him, already digging through the box for something else. “Don’t you people know how to let shit go?”

  “He doesn’t need to coach me, I was there. Or don’t you remember?”

  “Vaguely. If I’m honest, those years are a little fuzzy.” She shoves the box across the counter. “What else do you have, then? There’s nothing in here but anti-inflammatories.”

  Jimmy hands her a bottle of aspirin from an odds and sods drawer.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” she grumbles, swiping the bottle from him anyway. “I’m not a child.”

  “No, you’re not. Even children have more self-restraint than you.”

  Silver pulls a face at him as she uncaps the bottle and takes twice the recommended adult dose, just to be a rebel. She nearly chokes on them when he takes her by the arm and begins to poke about in her wound, causing her to wince and bite back a squeal.

  “Your bedside manner needs some work.” She clenches her jaw. “Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  Ignoring her, Jimmy picks up the needle and thread and prepares to start suturing the gash. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I tripped.”

  Jimmy looks up at her with one eyebrow cocked. “You tripped? On what? A rusty razor blade?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “In the Cut Off?” Jimmy guesses.

  Silver doesn’t answer that, and Jimmy doesn’t really need her to.

  “What were you doing out there? The same thing you were doing all day yesterday in the woods?” He looks up at her. “Chasing monsters?”

  As soon as he finishes the last stitch, Silver pulls her arm away, slaps some iodine soaked gauze onto it, and binds it with a self-adhesive bandage.

  “I had a bad day, okay? Nothing else to it.”

  “A bad day?” Jimmy couldn’t possibly be any more dissatisfied with that answer. “That’s all you’re gonna give me?”

  “What more do you want from me? Alex reckons I was having some kind of allergic reaction to the wild berries I was eating. I learned my lesson: no more berries.”

  “An allergy? Really? Other people with allergies go into anaphylactic shock, but you turn into a Lurker. Does that sound right to you?”

  Silver shrugs. “It’s the best I’ve got.”

  She turns to leave, but Jimmy stops her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need to wash up before anyone else sees me.” She indicates her blood-soaked clothes. “However scary I was yesterday, I don’t think it even begins to compare to this. Do you?”

  She’s right. This bloody rampage look easily trumps yesterday’s picture of mental instability. As Jimmy runs his eyes over her from top to bottom, his attention becomes drawn to something clipped at her belt.

  Her hunting knife.

  “Do rules mean nothing to you?!” He strides over to her and removes the weapon from her person without waiting to be invited to do so. “You were supposed to check this in at the border.”

  Silver shrugs. “Oops.”

  She reaches for it, but Jimmy holds it away from her.

  “You can have it back at the end of the week.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “You might be the Hunter General out there”—he points to the Sentinel District—“but in here, you’re just like everyone else.”

  “I’ll never be like everyone else,” Silver mumbles, turning and heading for the communal showers.

  Rounding the corner of the building, not looking where she’s going, she bulldozes through the doorway and ploughs straight into another camper.

  A male camper.

  Luka.

  Stepping out of the communal shower room with a towel slung over his shoulder, he’s dripping wet and stark naked. Silver has no idea what strikes her more dumb: the fact that he’s here, the fact that he’s so unconcerned by his own nudity, or the thing dangling between his legs.

  While she tries not to stare at the latter, Luka casually ruffles the towel over his sandy blonde hair.

  “This is the men’s shower. You know that, right?”

  “I do now.” Her eyes start to drift south and she jerks them back up again. “What the fuck are you doing here, Luka?”

  He upturns both palms to the sky. “I’m on vacation. Obviously.”

  “You can’t be on vacation. Alex is on vacation.”

  “All right, then. I’m undercover.”

  Both of Silver’s eyebrows leap upward at that. He’s not under the towel, much less anything else. “Then who’s running the Police Division?”

  “Technically?”

  “Stop fucking with me.”

  Luka laughs, his green eyes twinkling. “Seriously, I’m here on official business. I’m here for you.”

  Silver’s heart almost stops beating. She flounders for a moment, her mind racing at a million thoughts per second, her jaw dropping half open. “Luka, I—”

  “I was responding to a complaint about some lunatic who was running through the woods threatening to eat children,” he explicates. “I’m not clear on all the details, but I knew instinctively that it had something to do with you, and maybe some bath salts. To be honest, I only took the call so that I could come out here and get some fresh air.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Last night. By the time I arrived, Harkin had already talked the complainant out of pressing charges. He had no idea she’d even called the Division in on it. He apologized, said it was a misunderstanding, and put me up in staff quarters for the night. So here I am.”

  “In all your glory.” Silver’s gaze flickers.

  Luka smirks. “Yup.”

  “Wait a minute, if you’re here on official police business, does that mean you were allowed to bring your weapon?”

  “Yeah. Of course. Why?”

  “Just wondering. When are you leaving?”

  “I’ll be out of here tonight.” Luka’s own gaze begins to wander. “Why do you look like that?”

  “Huh?”

  “You look like you got beat up by something sharp and angry, so I guess that means the honeymoon phase is over.”

  Shit. She’d temporarily forgotten all about her appearance, and she chooses to ignore the snide reference to Alex’s past. There’s no time to dwell on it. She checks her invisible watch and begins to back away from Luka, suddenly self-conscious that they could be seen together.

  “I have to go. Alex will be up soon and—”

  “The restraining order?”

  “It has to be this way. He won’t tolerate you under any other conditions, and you’ve only got yourself to blame for that.”

  “Yeah, about the other day. I want to apologize for—”

  “Don’t, Luka.”

  “I should never have done what I did.”

  “You shouldn’t have, but don’t lie to me. Don’t apologize when you know full well that you don’t mean it.”

  She disappears, leaving Luka dangling in the breeze. Eventually, she makes her way back to the tent, trying to recollect the details of the lie she’d made up to explain her bandaged arm, but her troubled mind keeps drifting back to the axe. If Alex didn’t move it, then who?

  Stuck on that thought, she almost knocks heads with Alex as he emerges from the tent, fully dressed and raring to go.

  She waits for him to say something as he slowly looks her up and down, taking in all the blood and bruises.

  “Do I
wanna know what this is all about?” He waggles a finger at her bandaged arm and the rest.

  “Probably not.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “I got up early. I went for a run and tripped down an embankment. That’ll teach me to go full tilt before the sun comes up.”

  “You’re okay, though?”

  “Always.”

  “Good.” He breaks into a grin. “I promised you something more interesting today, right?”

  Silver holds back a sigh. “What is it this time? Tai chi? Power walking? Lawn bowling?” She doesn’t let on that all she wants to do is sleep. “Competitive milk chugging? Or chessboxing?”

  “Chessboxing? Honestly?”

  “I swear to god I didn’t make that up.”

  On the other side of the camp, a horn blows. A truck is getting ready to take a group of campers to the other side of the island, where the dinghy is being prepared to take them to Ruffle Bar. Strapped to the top of the truck: a set of wooden staffs.

  Great.

  Staff fighting.

  Her shoulders are still complaining from a night spent tree felling, and the last thing she’s in the mood for is to spend the better part of her day working on parries she hasn’t practiced since the Academy.

  Nevertheless, she showers and dresses in record time and hops on the truck with seconds to spare. If she wasn’t so sore, she might actually be excited about this. She’d started practicing with a staff when she was still in a training bra. Not because Chimera are ever likely to develop weapons skills, but because it promotes a sense of accuracy and balance. It speeds up your reaction time, and trains you to anticipate and effectively counter physical attacks, just in case you get cornered without a firearm.

  Still, it’s been well over a decade since she’s held a staff in her hand, much less sparred with anyone. The same goes for Alex. He’d taken all the compulsory Academy classes, but soon found that there wasn’t much call for staff fighting in a world full of guns and grenades. They were both going to be badly out of practice. To make things worse, being partnered with Alex means that Silver has no choice but to work on her upper parries. He’s almost a foot taller, and that’s the angle he comes in from. She knows her shoulders are going to give her hell, and she’ll be in agony for days, but she’s determined not to ditch out this time.