Page 52 of Fifth
Sound folded into one violent command to move. Fingers jammed into her shoulder, and the ground pitched under her bare feet as they shoved her toward the black mouth of the gate. The halter and thin skirt they’d forced on her left her skin cold and exposed, every brush of night air an insult. Smoke from oil-drum fires burned her nose. Men laughed. Coins clinked.
Locus stayed at her side, silent, the heat of his body an iron wall against the noise. His white hair caught the torchlight for a heartbeat, then the crowd swallowed the light again. Guards swung the welded gate wide. Beyond it, darkness breathed like a wild thing.
The hinges screamed. Hands shoved. She stumbled. Locus’s palm closed around her elbow. The strength in that grip was obscene and somehow exactly what kept her on herfeet.
They crossed the threshold. The gate slammed. The clang rang down her spine.A horn blew ahead. Long. Low. Answered by two short blasts to the right and another to theleft.
“Signals,” she whispered.
“Affirmative,” Locus said. His voice didn’t lift. “They are telling each other where we are.”
“So we make them wrong.”
“Affirmative.” He tilted his head, listening. “Stay in my shadow. Do not break from me unless I tell you.”
“I’m not going to argue. Believe me.”
“I do believe you.”
They moved.
The preserve wasn’t wilderness. It was a trap dressed in scrub and trees. Ground shifted underfoot from hard-packed dirt to a ribbon of gravel, then to cracked clay that slid under her soles. Old fence posts leaned like broken teeth. The smells changed too. Smoke faded. Sap and rot took over, mixed with something metallic. The night held itself still, as if waiting for the first scream.
An arrow hissed past her calf and buried in the dirt. The sound of it arriving came a blink after it landed. She jerked sideways into Locus’s chest. Another hiss. Another thud. Locus’s hand clamped her hip and spun her behindhim.
“Move,” he said.
They dove into brush. Branches slapped her shins. The skirt snagged on a thorn and tore up her thigh. She bit off a cry. Locus’s fingers slid down and freed the fabric in one swift tug. He didn’t slow. He pulled her with him, guiding her over roots she couldn’tsee.
Whistles cut the dark. One long. Two short. Another on their right, sharp and confident. The hunters weren’t guessing. They were bracketing, pinching them together.
Hannah kept her head down and counted breaths to keep from spinning apart. Four in. Four out. Her lungs burned anyway. The brush turned to scrub oak. The scrub opened to a shallow run of stones and dry leaves. Ahead, the ground dropped in a paleseam.
“Ditch,” she breathed.
Locus nodded. “Down. Quiet.”
They slid and dropped into the shallow ravine. The air was colder there. The dry bed ran like a dark vein to the right. Stones shifted loud under their feet, then settled. Hannah pressed into the dirt, grit sticking to sweat. Locus crouched and listened.
Boots hammered the ledge they’d left. Another pair hit a second later. Sounds played above them. Voices murmured. The chug of cheap beer and squeak of leather. The scrape of an arrow tugged across a quiver mouth.
She didn’t realize she’d reached for him until her fingers found his. His skin ran hot, almost feverish. He turned his hand and wrapped her fingers in his without lookingdown.
“On my count,” he said so quietly the words came like a thought. “We will move with the wind.”
“What wind?”
“It is coming.”
Air shifted a second later, cool against the sweat at her hairline. Leaves overhead rustled like paper. Torch smoke rolled a different way. The hunters on the ledge cursed as the smoke stung theireyes.
“Now,” Locus said.
They ran bent low, following the ditch. Aflashlight cut the ravine behind them and hit dust. Another arrow hissed into stone and ricocheted, singing like a snapped guitar string. The ravine sank, then rose. They climbed.
Locus dragged her the last foot and set her flat in the hollow beneath a fallen log, tucking her into the shadowed gap where trunk met ground so the hunter’s eyes slid past instead of down. His hand covered the top of her head, keeping her down as a hunter stepped on the log and peered into the ditch. Mud dripped off the man’s boot and hit the bridge of her nose. The urge to sneeze clawed up her throat. She held it like fragile crystal.
The hunter moved on.
