ARC: Peacemaker (21 page)

The creek stretched from a way past the butte towards Paloma station. When you climbed out the other end (which you couldn’t actually do) you could see them in the distance. That end of the gulch disappeared underground – or at least had when it last ran – and popped up close to the surface again below the Paloma station well.

I’d buried the memory dot with Dad’s journals about halfway along and that’s where I was headed.

Before I sent the horse to upstream, I dismounted and set my phone on a rock. I didn’t want Totes tracking me to the exact spot. I also didn’t want to lead the Park admin straight to my illegal activity, if for some reason they confiscated Totes shadow system and found my route.

Satisfied that I’d covered bases, I remounted and urge Benny onward.

Gulch riding was slow going and it took over an hour to reach the site where I’d buried the journals. I’d tucked it in under an ancient tree root sticking out of the side of the riverbank.

I poked in under the root with some long-nosed pliers from my kit bag
–
just in case a snake or scorpion had set up home. It felt hollow, and nothing scuttled out, so I leaned over and reached my hand in. My fingertips brushed the permi-seal around the dot but it was just out of reach.

I withdrew and sat for a moment to think. Digging it out would leave signs of soil disruption. The Park-scan would flag it and it would be photographed and analysed.

When I’d put it here, I’d never envisaged retrieving it. Too painful for me to read and too personal for me to share, it seemed the right thing to do, bringing it out here. Birrimun had been his life’s passion, his life’s work. And in my mind, his death. His innermost thoughts belonged out here as much as the soil and the ants and the mulla mulla.

I went back to my tool kit and took the pliers apart, wiring them together, end to end, so they made a longer leaver. Then I reached back in and stabbed gently at the plastic case, slowly dragging it forward.

After I bit I stopped, took the pliers out and felt with my fingers again.

Got you!

I pulled it free and sat back on my haunches, lifting my hair up off the nape of my neck to cool it. The sun had begun to bite and sweat trickled into uncomfortable places. Packing up quickly, I mounted and took a sip or two from my canteen.

Best get back before Totes got worried and did something rash. Soon as I reached my phone, I’d message him that I was on my way.

But the trip upstream was even slower on account of the old watercourse’s vagaries. Several times I got off and led Benny over ridges so her hooves didn’t crumble the edges in her efforts to climb.

She understood what I was doing and lifted her feet high on my request. We’d done this dance many times. Benny was a park horse. Preservation of the environment was as much in her DNA as mine.

Aquila landed on my shoulder at a bend in the course of the dry river bed. I didn’t feel any pressure, more like sense of movement near my face, a breath created by her wings.

It startled me so much I shifted in the saddle but she took off as soon as she landed and fluttered ahead to a large boulder.

I sat up and slowed Benny, riding as to where she perched as I could.

The scars from her battle with the Mythos at Paloma were still visible, a chunk of feathers missing across her breast and a missing nail on one claw. To protect me. I still found it hard to believe even though I’d seen it.

“What is it?” I whispered. To her. To myself.

Her gaze was solemn as always and my pulse accelerated. I unholstered my pistol and dismounted. As quietly as I could, I crept up to the boulder. With some awkward maneuvering, I was able to peer around it without exposing too much of myself.

Two guys waited there. One had his back to me and the other was bent over examining my phone. They wore long sleeves and jeans, hip holsters and I wouldn’t mind betting each bore the crow and circle ink under their shirts. I couldn’t see any horses, so they must have tethered them up out of the gully.

I eased back, and leaned against the rock, thinking. I couldn’t even contact Totes to sat-scan and photograph them. But if I could get back to the stables in one piece he should have record of their presence on his system. He might even be aware of them now, but had no way of letting me know.

Aquila lifted off the rock and flew back down the way I’d just come. She landed on a tuft of spinifex that was barely clinging to the side of the bank and watched me.

I get the message
.

Trouble was that this
here
was the only way out without significantly destroying the natural contour of the bank. Not only did the idea of damage bother me, but it would leave evidence that I’d been there.

I weighed up my options and decided that a little eco-damage was still preferable to me
never
getting home. Two armed men weren’t good odds.

I crept back to Benny, turned her around and tapped her cheek a couple of times. She knew to keep quiet. I’d used that signal before, though usually so as not to scare a flock of birds or a shy wallaby.

She stepped carefully and slowly, following my lead.

Aquila flew ahead of us in spurts, like a forward scout. Once out of earshot, I mounted Benny and pushed her along a bit faster. Returning home this way would take longer, but once out of Dry Gulch I could really push the pace.

Halfway back to where I’d buried Dad’s journal, Aquila left her perch ahead of me and flew up one side of the creek, disappearing from view. I stopped Benny, wondering what to do. Wait for her? Continue?

I opted for dismounting yet again and climbing the steep side to see where she’d gone. The first few feet were loose gravelly dirt but once past the initial scree, it packed down into heavier soil. After three of four large, awkward steps I discovered a ledge hidden by a swathe of mulla mulla. The purple flower that thrived in the red dirt turned up in places no other flora could survive because it preferred low water and full sun.

Beyond the ledge was a natural rock wall. I scrambled up onto the rocks and found myself back out on the plain with a clear view south. Aquila was on the ground not far away, ripping into the guts of a small dead marsupial.

I turned away, not ready to process how that could be possible, and looked back to the climb I’d just made. If I started Benny from the far side of the creek bed, she should be able to jump onto the ledge with minimum damage. Getting over the next rock wall was more difficult. Though low, she’d be jumping from a standing position.

I looked up and down the gulch. Going back towards the ambush was not an option and the further I went west, the deeper the gully became until it turned into the steep rock wall end I couldn’t climb.

Aquila had led me to the best option I had.

I climbed back down to my horse and led her to the opposite bank.

“Come on, girl,” I said remounting. “Just a couple of leaps and we’re home free.”

She nickered at my ajoling tone. It usually came associated with fresh clover treats.

I straightened, loosened the reins and clipped her ribs with my heels.

With all the affront of a person slapped, she leapt across the creek bed and up the sandy scree towards the ledge.

Her front legs didn’t quite make the distance and she started to slide backwards. I squeezed her sides with my calves and thighs. She responded by bunching her haunches underneath her and propelling herself forward. We dangled for a moment, but I threw my weight forward over her shoulders and she found purchase. With all four feet on the ledge she pranced a little, ears flicking back and forth.

I glanced down. The damage behind us looked minimal, some hoof marks in the loose gravel. In a day, the wind would have changed it all again.

Now for the hard bit.

I got off and climbed up over the rocks again. Aquila was still on the ground, picking bits of fleshy somethings from her claws.

I went back to Benny and talked to her again.

“You have to trust me,” I told her. “Just one jump and we’re out. The other side is wide open and level.”

There was no soft nicker in response this time and as I mounted. Her ears flattened. She knew what I wanted and she wasn’t keen.

I gathered up the reins and put enough pressure on the bit just let her know this wasn’t optional. She tensed under my signals. Bunching up high on the saddle, I used the end of the reins to give her a light slap on her shoulder. She jumped forward stiff legged and then baulked.

I fell onto her neck and she reared letting out a loud whinny that echoed along the gulch.

Shit!

I waited for her to settle before employing a stern tone. “You have to jump this. They’ll be coming.”

Her ears flicked back and forth and she danced on the spot, backing dangerously close to the edge.

“BENNY!” I gritted my teeth and jabbed her hard in the ribs.

She baulked again but I persisted.

“Come on, girl. Come on!”

From behind me in the gully I could hear voices. Then shouts as they sighted me.

“BENNY!”

On my final yell, she launched from standing, into the air, and cleared the rock wall with plenty to spare. Landing on the other side was a different matter. She stumbled and went down on one knee, sending me catapulting over her shoulder into the dirt.

Aquila flew into the air, screeching.

I lay there, spitting dirt from my mouth and feeling around my limbs. Everything whole. But as I rolled over a shooting pain from the Mythos wound sucked my breath away, burning worse than fifty levels of hell.

Get up
.

Aquila fluttered down near me. This close, I could see flecks of gold in her eyes and the how the feathers around her eyes were dark brown and fading to grey. She looked regal and the intelligence in her gaze astounded me.

I reached out my hand to her.

She flew back a little way and turned her head sideways in the way birds do when they want to eyeball you.

“Thank you,” I said, “for the warnings. But why have you come back now? What are you trying to tell me?”

Her crest rose and she shrieked, as if letting me know that now was not the time for conversation.

The voices were getting closer.

I forced myself up and into the saddle and gave Benny her head. She pointed home and went hell for leather.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Totes jumped out at me as I walked Benny in through the Interchange.

“Virgin, where the hell you been?”

“Just let me stable her. Then I want to see a visual history of the geographical area on my phone’s GPS coordinates for the last few hours.”

I stalked past him down the corridor hiding my trembling legs and sore body in an angry gait.

Leecey was in Sombre Vol’s stall and followed me down.

“You must have pushed her hard. Girl’s foaming,” she said.

“Had reason too,” I said. “Give her some electrolytes and an augmentation top-up.”

“She’s not due for her booster until next month.”

“Leecey.”

“OK. OK. Everything alright, Virgin. Can I help?”

Leecey had a ruddy kind of complexion that glowed when she’d been working. It gave her a permanently flushed look that some people mistook for guilt.

It worried me the amount the police were around so much right now. Detective Chance had already shown she wasn’t beyond targeting Leecey.

“Just stay clean and away from me,” I said.

Her skin flushed even deeper and she tugged at Benny’s girth.

I put my hand on hers. “Look, it’s just… best to keep your distance from me at the moment. You don’t want to be caught up in…
whatever
it is.”

“That’s not just your choice, Virgin.”

“Well it’s my preference.”

She crossed the stirrups up over the saddle, slid it off and walked off to the tack room humming, “
You cain’t always get what you want.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that but I didn’t have time to chase her and find out. Instead, I went and invaded Totes’ hidey-hole.

“There were two guys in the park. They’d tracked the GPS on my phone,” I said.

“Impossible!” said Totes, typing commands and tapping screens. “I have the sat scans for your route and the only person there is you. In fact, according to the tracker you’re still there.”

“Had to leave my phone behind on account of guys with guns.”

Totes picked up his phone.

“What’re you doing?”

“Telling Bull. The police should–”

“Stop! Just show me the scan.”

Lower lip pouting in disagreement, he reached for one of the dolls on his desk and petted it as he set the replay in motion for me to watch.

My GPS showed me as a moving dot on a topographical map. At the entry to Dry Gulch it became stationary.

“I figured you’d gotten off to have a walk around. But you stayed there so long, I nearly sent the EMS out.”

“I went around across the gulch and further north. My phone must have dropped out of my pocket when I crossed the creek bed. When I backtracked, looking for it, I found some guys there waiting for me,” I lied.

“I’ll do an infrared retrieval scan on the area around your phone. See if anything was hot.”

He whispered to and touched his system like it was a friend with whom he shared a secret language. I was beginning to feel like the third wheel on a date, when he finally ran some more footage on the main screen.

“My shadow system only analyses basic wavelength imaging. Let me match up the time… Wait… There...”

I watched the time meter on the bottom of the screen as an amorphous blob moved across a dark landscape.

“That’s you and Benny,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“You have a particular signature. See.”

The horse and I separated for a few moments and then joined together and moved off again.

“That must be when you dropped your phone, when you got off. What were you looking at?”

“Just checking some damage to the sides of the Gulch,” I lied again.

“But hey, then you’re heading west, not north,” he added.

Shit. “I went west for a bit and then north. Listen; just flip forward to the same spot an hour later. I’m in a hurry.”

He did as I requested, and the evidence of me staying on a westerly course disappeared in a blur of dark pixels. He stopped it an hour along and we watched again for a while.

“There you are again. According to the contour overlay you’re up on the bank.”

“Yeah, behind a boulder. I heard something ahead of me, so I left Benny in the creek and climbed up behind a boulder to look.”

“Look at what?”

Totes was right. There was no other heat signature. No other horses, no other guys with guns.

“They
have
to be there. I
saw
them,” I said, distressed.

Totes held out his doll for me to cuddle. “Been a rough few days. You want some love?”

I left the stables preoccupied and upset. I
had
seen those guys, heard their voices. They
were
real. Totally real. Not Mythos like the crow had been.

But then Aquila and the Mythos had looked totally real to me as well.

Maybe I was losing my grip.

I took the underground tunnel to the taxi- rank on the other side, thinking I would go home but a taxi pulled up and Sixkiller got out.

He fixed me with a narrow-eyed, pursed-lip look and let both hands rest on his holsters.

Seems he was mightily pissed.

“Hey. You sleep in?” I asked lightly.

He gestured for me to step away from the rank and the commuters in the queue.

“I’ve been looking for you all morning. Thet little sidewinder Totes told me he hadn’t seen you. But you’ve been in the Park all along.”

I felt a burst of gratitude towards Totes. Maybe Dad was right about him. “It’s where I think best. And I needed some time.”

“Thinking get you dirty?”

I looked down at my red dirt-stained shirt and jeans. “Took a tumble off my horse. Just going home to clean up.”

“Then I’d be accompanying you. Got something you need to hear.”

I sighed. “Sure.” And followed him to the back of the queue.

“Check the news feeds,” he said as we waited.

“Can’t. I… er... dropped my phone in the park somewhere.”

“Couldn’t Totes track it?”

“Must have been damaged. No GPS signal.”

He stared at me suspiciously and fished a black scroll from inside his jacket and unrolled it to squint at the flexible screen.

“You been holding out on me, Marshall? Didn’t think you carried a phone.”

“It ain’t a phone.”

Our taxi turn came up and I climbed in the back, sliding across so he could fit.

He handed me his tablet and on the drive back to Cloisters, I flipped through the local news headlines. There’d been a mass shooting last night in Mystere
–
fourteen tourists dead and three locals. No one had claimed responsibility and even the press didn’t know who to pin it on. Some were saying it was a random attack.

“You think it’s them: the crow and circle?” I asked Sixkiller.

“Fits with what the fat man said to us.”

“What’s the point though? I don’t get it? No political statement made. No ownership. Just a bunch of dead people no one wants to be responsible for.”

He glanced at the taxi driver then back at me, indicating he didn’t wish to answer yet, so neither of us spoke again until we were in my apartment.

My fortnightly grocery delivery had been and I was able to pour us both some fruit juice and magic up a plate of mixed nuts, some rye bread and cheese.

Sixkiller declined everything but the nuts and juice.

I skirted John Flat who was still straddled by the coffee table plum and sat down to take off my boots.

Then it hit me. Something was wrong in here.

“What is it?” he asked.

I had my boot in my hand, sock half off. “Nothing… I just…”

I got up and wandered around. It felt like someone had been in here; carefully, things were in their place but… I went to the bedroom. Everything looked undisturbed except the bedcover. It was smooth, no crinkle or hump or crease. Had I really left it like that?

I shook my head, unsure of myself, and returned to Sixkiller. “It’s nothing. Just jumpy. So what’s your theory on the murders in Mystere?”

He relaxed. “Could be just a local power play. Or a low scale terror attack. Either way it might also be someone’s way of deflecting attention.”

“From what?”

“Thet’s the problem. We don’t know. Back in the hive there’s a bunch of analysts that do thet sort of thing all day long. They look for spikes in violent events. Then they try to work out what those events might be hiding.” He waved his tablet at me. “It could be any damn thing mentioned on here. Or it might be somethin’s that’s barely bin reported.”

“Sounds like a whole world of paranoia you got going on, Marshall.”

“Welcome to international intelligence.”He took some more almonds from the bowl and removed his hat, setting it on my narrow sideboard next to the Virgin doll.

Free from it, his hair fell dead straight around his face. In some people it would have been a severe look, but on him, it softened the hard lines of his face.

“The Mythos has been finding ways to influence our world for a long time. But we believe there’s a change in intensity of their desires. Their timeline, whatever it is, has accelerated,” he said. “Could be this damage in Mystere is them distracting from other things that they are changing. We tend to see more activity on certain lunar cycles.”

I took some time to think this over. “We believe? Or
you
believe, Marshall?”

He pressed his knuckle to his forehead. “Thought we’d gotten past this, Virgin. Thought you understood that we were dealing with something
not from here
.”

“Didn’t my personality profile say stubborn, Marshall?”

“Stubborn. Not stupid.”

We glared at each other.

Then Aquila appeared in the air above him.

He saw the direction of my gaze and looked up. “Thank you,” he said to her.

She swooped to the sideboard and perched on his hat.

I laughed outright and suddenly all perversity drained out of me. I don’t know what had happened in the park this morning, why I couldn’t see the guys tracking me. But this was real. Aquila. Sixkiller. Me.

“I found some clean-skin meds in Teng’s room. Caro traced them to a warehouse in Baltimore, Maryland. Does that mean anything to you?” I asked.

He stiffened. “You found traceable evidence. You should have told me.”

“What, and have you send it back home to Virginia, never to be seen again? Finders keepers, Marshall. It’s not like either of us were going to go to the police with it. And this way we got the trace done quickly.”

I liked to think his expression was begrudging acceptance but it could have been closer to reignited fury.

“So does Baltimore mean anything to you?” I asked again.

“We may have people there on our watch list.”

“Then maybe you better get watching them a bit closer.”

“I’ll need some physical evidence as proof.”

“I’ll talk to Caro. As long as it doesn’t implicate her or her contacts, I guess it’ll be fine to share.”

He made an effort to relax his mouth. “When’re you going to trust me, Virgin?”

“Why
should
I trust you, Nate? I barely know you. You’ve been sent out here by a foreign government to spy on me because they think my father has something to do with some… supernatural conspiracy.”

“Does savin’ your skin count for nix?” he said in his most humble cowboy voice.

I hugged my knees to my chest and contemplated my toes. “Just give me some time. I don’t take to people easily or quickly.”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “We don’t got time.”

“Then we’ll have to make do with what we have got.”

“Which is?”

“An agreement.”

“I’m listenin’…”

“Simple. We watch each other’s back.”

He nodded slowly. “Well I guess that’s a start. Though I thought I was doin’ thet already.”

“I’m going to catch some downtime in my room. You’re welcome to stay out here and chill. Oh, and I have a date tonight.”

“I’ll escort you to it and pick you up when you’re done.”

“Sweet.” Not.

I retrieved my tablet from the coffee table, went into my bedroom and locked the door. Drawing the blinds, I fished out Dad’s journal dot from the lining of my bra, peeled off my jeans, and jumped into bed.

Heart’s scent on my pillows lifted my mood. He was the one good thing happening to me right now and I didn’t have time to make the most of it.

I detached the ear clip from the side of the tablet and slotted the journal dot into the tablet’s port. After a copyright preamble, provided by the manufacturer, Dad started to speak. His voice struck like a fist to the softest part of my stomach. I wanted to throw up.