I stand there a second with the pack still on. The cot’s flat. The blanket she’d wrapped around herself is crumpled at the foot of it. Lantern on the floor beside the entrance. Cold.
“For fuck’s sake.”
I set the pack down.
I already know how she got out. I walk over to confirm it anyway.
The fault sits high on the left, where the rock above the boulder’s groove was never worked. Rough, uneven stone that shows the marks of some sort of tool. I roll the rock into place and look at the edges again. There’d been a two-inch gap when I left.
It’s not two inches now.
The gap’s been pried open a hand wider. The stone is scraped bright where something bit into it, and my flat spade lies on the floor below, off its peg, dropped where she finished with it.
There’s a smear on the rock at the narrow point, gone brown at the edges. She tore herself getting through.
I checked that seam with my own hand. Decided it was nothing and walked down the mountain, and while I was gone, she took a tool off my wall and opened the one fault in this cave I’d already dismissed.
I saw it coming, too. That’s what sits worst. I watched her case this place all morning. Watched her read the slope, study the boulder, work every question for a way out. I knew exactly what she was doing. Then I trusted that the boulder would do its job and left anyway, because my mind was on her instead of the job, and now the cave’s empty and that’s on me.
Under the anger—and I don’t want it there—sits something else. She put herself through a hole barely wide enough, bleeding, onto a mountain she’s never set foot on, because sitting in the cave waiting on me was worse.
I leave the food where it sits. Wherever this goes, I’m not carrying eggs to it.
Her trail comes off the rock face left of the boulder. A scuff in the needles where she dropped down, then a wobble in the soft dirt. She landed and ran before her legs were square under her.Feet turn to paws. She shifted. The prints steady out and head south, downslope, into the fir.
South is trouble.
I know this ground. South runs down toward the lower road—the direction she was measuring this morning from the tree belt. It’s the only place she knows to aim for. What she doesn’t know is what’s between her and it. The fir gives out to a shale field, then a wide saddle. Three hundred yards of grass and bare rock with no cover before the next tree line.
The trail keeps telling me things about what she’s doing. No switchbacks. No doubling back to break the line. Straight downhill, fast, everything spent on speed. Anyone trained for this knows a straight line is the first one that gets found.
She’s not running wrong because she’s stupid. She’s running wrong because she’s never done it, and there’s no way for her to know what she doesn’t know.
The bear doesn’t like it.
He’s up and shoving at me, aimed downslope at the open ground and the woman somewhere out on it, thinking she’s clear when she’s just exposed. The force of him should be a warning to me. I don’t stop to examine it.
Down through the fir, fast as the footing allows. The shale opens where the trees thin, and I find where she crossed it, a line of loose rock kicked downhill by weight moving hard. Tracks moving wider, the wolf bounding. Picking up speed.
Smart to pick the wolf. Except the wolf leaves more scent than the woman, and her cloaking magic is useless against scent. It fools eyes. Nothing else.
I’m out on the shale when I look up and see the shape.
High over the ridge. Dark against the clouds, circling slow on a thermal, wings spread wide and riding the lift. Not flapping. Hanging. The patient kind of circling—the kind that means it’sfound its current and plans to work the ground beneath it for as long as that takes.
Dragon. Aurora wouldn’t have sent one. Not in broad daylight.
Syndicate.
They’d have had trackers out since the retrieval went bad in town. I counted on it. Kept us under the trees, kept her sealed in rock, and that was enough. It isn’t anymore. The saddle is bare, and she’s running for the middle of it.
I glance back up at the huge beast, assessing it. Not an old one. The ancients don’t fly retrieval themselves; they send the field tier and watch from a distance. This is a tracker. Smaller through the body, tighter in the wing, sweeping a search grid instead of holding territory. It hasn’t locked onto her.
Yet.
I come off the shale at a run.
The trees fall back, and the saddle opens flat ahead. Gray-green grass, broken rock, the far tree line a dark wall a long way off. Her trail cuts straight across it. Wolf prints, deep and driving, pointed at the far side. Two hundred yards ahead of me. More. The wolf is fast. The wolf is eating ground.
