Under Cover of Darkness (2 page)

Denye's voice came to her inner self, a voice she heard only within. An inner ear for which the citties feared her, feared them all.

Dive?
she asked him. To sound the dive would send the youngers scurrying for their burrows, dousing their lights and clearing the arena faster than any cittie could imagine. To sound the retreat would send them bolting for distant, ready caves—but they hoped never to make that run.

That shook her. Too late? Had someone managed to come so close unperceived?

Only if they'd meant to. If they knew to stay concealed.

That shook her more deeply yet, a hard fist clenching around her insides. After all this time, did someone suspect? Did someone hunt them?

Can't
—

Denye's voice cut short, interrupted by another of the elders in a focused call that Galetia couldn't hear. Didn't matter. She understood. Denye wasn't in a position to stop the intruder without giving them away—or worse, without killing the cittie.

And that was the strongest of their rules. No killing the citties; no hurting them. Not even in self-defense. Those things would only draw attention to the arena.

As something else already had.

Galetia glanced down into the arena, taking an instant to open wide, both arms spread in reception, both hands opening and closing in unconscious hand flashing as she did what no cittie could ever do—that which made the Scoria pity them all, and never regret who they were. She drank in their joy, their exultation.
Alleksa!!
they shouted, as loud in their unspoken celebration as in their spoken.

And then she whirled into the darkness, leaping familiar architecture with the surety of the hill goats, bounding cityside with the confident abandon of her
otherness
, knowing her face held the overlay of the changes and her eyes had gone huge and wild. She circled downwind of the crooked footpath that had once been a heavily traveled road and almost instantly picked up the scent—a single man. He wore an expensive scent overlain with dank, nervous sweat and he oiled his hair, and it was enough to tell her more than he'd ever suspect.

And there was no good reason for him to be here. No good reason for anyone to be here—not on this road, not at this time of night. Not ever. He'd heard something; he'd guessed something. And he looked to impress his patron with information of unique importance.

Galetia ran a parallel path uphill of the one the man traveled. None of the Scoria ever used it; they hoped for it to grow over. They kept idle explorers away, fostering the belief that the arena had become a nest of cabra dens—using the carefully relocated carcasses of actual cabra kills to do it. They developed a cabra team, those who could most influence the big cats and who practiced guiding them—herding them. Taking them to staked-out prey, until the cabras came to associate the herding with the pleasant coincidence of food, and resisted less and less.

Only a fool would come out here at night. And a fool could be easily fooled.

She eased in so close she could smell nothing else, could hear his rapid breathing, could even feel the warmth of his body radiating into the night, a body perfectly visible to her in the scant moonlight he used to navigate. “
Rrrrrr-chk-chk-CHK!
”

Only one thing made that noise.

The man gasped, freezing so abruptly he stumbled in his tracks.

“
Rrrrrr-chk-chk-CHK!
” She brushed her hand through the dried grasses of autumn, a rustling so faint she wasn't sure the man would even hear.

He heard. The stink of his sweat increased; his breathing all but stopped.

“
Rrrrrr!
”

“Goddess!” he gasped, and turned on his heel, bolting back down the path in the moonlit darkness, even though running from a cabra only guaranteed that the cabra would leap to pursue.

A
real
cabra.

Galetia laughed into the darkness and bounded back to join the celebration.

 

Alleksa did not noticeably crave wisdom.

Made restless by the onset of the change, made wily with the new skills that came and went like the breaking of a young man's voice, she slipped away from her outmatched vigil sitters to run in the hills, to sit along the ridges with the breeze lifting her thick ragged hair, to crawl through the interlaced branches of the north slope bittertree woods. She took her sling and brought back small game; she took bow and arrow and brought back a yearling deer. But she couldn't slip Galetia off her trail. Galetia ghosted her, the only one whose skills ran nearly as deep as Alleksa's would—but did not, not quite yet. Galetia tried to reach her mind, found it polished and impenetrable . . . kept trying anyway. And unseen, she followed Alleksa as the younger ran the ridges closer and closer to the city, gaining enough ground to look down into that crowded collection of homes and grand official buildings and the colorful awnings and brightly painted stalls of the marketplace.

Galetia did not have to touch her mind to know her thoughts. Once the youngers had mastered the change, they became elders. And the elders were allowed into the city. There they used their skills to steal much-needed supplies, took odd jobs to earn coin for the group, and learned the skills the citties knew. They learned to blend in . . . to pick up bits and pieces of information, sometimes even to hear when someone's newborn had shown glimpses of
otherness
in those few precious hours before it subsided, hidden until the change.

Then the Scoria knew to send someone to the hillside, to snatch the baby from the certain death that waited.

All the Scoria obsessed about their first encounter with the city. With the citties themselves. And Alleksa, a girl raised with lessons of mistrust that had never quite taken, now driven by the changes, barely sane at that . . .

Galetia caught her, once, on the verge of descending the hill to creep in the backside of the city. She stood at the edge of an outcrop, hidden by a sentinel of stone. Her features had gone fey with the change, her expression determined.

And Galetia, atop that stone sentinel with Alleksa none the wiser, spoke sharply, with intent to startle. “Lose your change-phase halfway down, and you die. No plain old younger can make that slope. No cittie.”

Startle Alleksa did, with those first few words. She leaped back into the darkest shadows of the rocks, looking for Galetia with a mix of guilt and insanity. “You!” she said. “You shouldn't be able—no one should be able—”

“Too true.” Galetia swung her legs over the side of the sentinel and leaped down, as light on her feet as the stealthy cabra she'd imitated only a few nights earlier. “Ought to say something to you, that.”

Alleksa's pretty face closed up in stubborn denial. Her lips, pouty baby lips, pursed. “Give me a few days,” she said. “You won't be able to do it anymore.”

“Longer than a few days,” Galetia said. “You know that. Longer yet, before you have the control to be safe among the citties. And even then you go out with someone.” She smiled, much as a cabra might smile. “Proba bly me, from the looks of things.”

Alleksa turned her back with a flounce of offense and stalked back into the garden of rocks between which the citties believed no man nor woman walked.

And they'd be right. Such places were for the Scoria alone.

 

Galetia understood. They
all
understood, all the elders. The change made you that way—took away your common sense as it altered your body, inflating emotions from joy to anger to carefree abandon, all in the space of a conversation. And the elders knew no one had been through a change so great as Alleksa's, not and expected to live. They spoke to her, but they did not punish her. They turned the entire Scoria underground into a watch network, and if the youngers couldn't reach the elders through silent communication, they could still pass the word from one to another with amazing swiftness. They confined her to her section of the warrens, and they ran regular head counts.

When they came up short, it was Galetia's job to track her down. She wore herself thin, maintaining her duties along with her new responsibilities to Alleksa, and so the elders pulled her from those duties. She rested as she could, waiting for the call . . . knowing that at the end of the trail she'd find Alleksa with eyes fever-bright, the change flaring through her body, and no more sense than the goddess had given a mud mite. “It will pass,” she told Alleksa—told herself, if truth be told. “It will pass, and one day you'll wake and wonder that it ever was. That you were ever other than you.

“You don't know that,” Alleksa told her, fierce with the natural inner ire of the small bak-bak squirrel that lived in the lower hills. The changes took her more deeply these days, and showed no signs of letting up. “None of you know that. There's never been one like me. You don't know that it'll
ever
end.” And the tenacity of the bak-bak left her in a rush, turning her back into a younger who sobbed with frustration and followed meekly as Galetia returned her to the warrens.

And Galetia knew she was right.

 

“Two more babies this week,” reported Rurie, the elder only a year younger than Galetia. “Looking good for their survival.”

“Two more,” echoed Kisa, stroking her stomach as if she could imagine bearing babies herself one day.

It happened, sometimes. But they took pains to keep it from happening here in the warren, knowing their space was precious and their expansion room nonexistent.

Bodhan shook his head, running his hands over the veil of long, knotted rivergrass hanging at the uneven, rounded wall. Their tally system—of supplies, of warren space, of the Scoria themselves. “The grass is becoming unbalanced.”

“We cannot leave them to die,” Kisa said, flaring as though any of them had or even would suggest it. They only looked at her. “They are our own kind. Our
only
kind.”

“We will all die if we cannot balance things,” Bodhan said. He had a skill with the tallies, and for details.

That's when they looked at Galetia. All of them. Elders with the weight of the warrens on still-young shoulders. Elders facing their mortality, their inevitable expansion, and their limitations. They looked at her, and Rurie said, “Watch Alleksa. She's the one who can change things. Who can find us a new home . . . or teach the citties to leave us this one even if they learn we're here.”

Galetia said, “I will.”

 

She's been seen
, Bodhan told Galetia, calling from as far away as the city. Stone houses, cobbled streets . . . cittie lives were surrounded by stone, and copper. Bodhan was an occasional day laborer there, and he had, aside from his practical skills, a knack for culling gossip.

Although this particular gossip hadn't needed any culling; it came freely.
It's all they talk about. The wild girl, lurking in the hills. How did she get there? How does she survive? That she's one of their castoffs is evident to them. They merely argue over which wild animal took her as its own, snatching her off the hill.

An entire community of wild animals, that's which one. A community grown over generations until it was finally outgrowing its allotted territory. A community grown strong enough to keep even Alleksa alive.

If they were lucky.

It's going to take more than luck now,
Bodhan said, picking up on Galetia's not-so-subtle thoughts.
Now they're looking for her. And in looking for her—

He didn't need to finish. In looking for Alleksa, they would find the Scoria. All of them.

The interruptive babble in her mind started all at once.

And one inner voice from the city silenced them all, horrified into an inner shout—
Goddess, she's HERE!

Galetia bolted to her feet, scattering the littlest youngers who had been practicing knots and roping, clustered around her cross-legged work position. Even those youngers, still blind to inner voice, understood the import of her reaction. “Is it Alleksa?” they asked, all at once and half of them still lisping. Nothing more than ordinary children in these years before the change. “Is she in the city?”

They were too young to comprehend the nature of the development, or what it could mean to their survival in these next few years. Not so the other elders, the new elders who only went into the city with an escort and trainer and who had still heard every word of the babble and the emotions behind it. A new elder burst into the warren, her eyes wild. “I'll take them,” she said, meaning the children who crowded Galetia, their knotwork forgotten and dropped to unravel on the floor. “Find her! Save her!”

Her outer voice generated an echo of inner voices.
Find her! Save her!

And what they really meant was
save US!

Galetia ran from the warren. She ran out into the arena, waved ahead by a sentry who signaled the all-clear. She bounded up the stepped seating with borrowed grace, not wasting her time wondering how Alleksa had gotten past them all. She'd been in the change phase and she'd done it; she'd been in the change and she'd made it into the city, endowed with all the speed and cunning of every animal that had ever wanted to go unseen. But while the change was upon her, she was vulnerable to detection as cursed . . . and when the change left her, she'd be vulnerable to the citties.