Shoggoths in Bloom (41 page)

The reader even works. Although Sanchez’s cover means it’s full of hiking ’zines and romance novels.

Sanchez goes up the tree to the lowest boughs in a series of long kickand-grabs. Dislodged water scatters her hair and drips down her neck. Moss and damp bark stick between the tines of her hooks. Attaining the bough, she straddles it; the spikes make it difficult to stand on something horizontal, especially when that something was nearly as broad as an avenue.

Okay, a sidewalk, anyway.

A Douglas squirrel berates her from a perch just barely out of arm’s reach, its fluffy tail flagging. Sanchez grins to herself and avoids eye contact.

The climb is trickier from here up, because she must spiral and zig and zag to avoid the ponderous branches. As she ascends, the trunk grows thinner and thinner—and eventually, whippy. The claws are a blessing. Sanchez is an experienced climber, but she knows that by the time she had passed the sixty-meter mark on this forest giant, her fingers would have been cramped and sore. Also, the bark is wet and slick throughout, and there is always the threat of it peeling off in her hands.

But the flickering rays of light from above urge her on. When she breaks into sunlight, she can see the last rain steaming off the canopy in plumes and trails of skimmed-milk vapor.

She locks herself to the tree with a length of webbing, the bole now no thicker than her thigh, and leans back on the spikes like a lineman. Gingerly, at first, until she is sure they—and the web belt—will hold. The treetop sways like a skyscraper—gently, with a long period of oscillation. After a moment, Sanchez becomes accustomed. She’s climbed the masts of tall ships, working the clipper trade, and this is not too different. The canopy below could be frozen green surf, the vapor misting off them spray.

Oceans didn’t smell of clean compost and leaf mould.

The spyglass she sets to her eye could have belonged on a pirate ship too, although it is considerably more high-tech than anything Captains Hook or Blackbeard might have fielded. For one thing, Hook probably would have given his eyeteeth for the autofocus feature. But the glasses are also equipped to register variations in temperature, and it is this feature Sanchez expects to be of service now.

It isn’t. She tracks across the forest in a meticulous grid pattern, logging each anomaly, but the variation is never more or less than a few degrees. After half an hour, she bites her thumb in frustration.

All right, then, the facility is shielded. That makes sense; they’d want to avoid detection from the air. But she has a relief map, and she knows what trail she’s been prevented from ascending. It’s not easy—she’s been years learning how to do it, and those skills are a large part of why she’s here—but between those things, she should be able to hazard a guess of where you’d build—

She trains her spyglass upslope, on maximum magnification, and begins examining the canopy tree by tree, watching the shadows move. The sun thumps down on her, the shelter of a hat inadequate, and the beads of water that had rolled down her collar are replaced by sweat. She is exquisitely aware of her own vulnerability, the exposure of her position.

She has a birdwatcher’s book on her reader, but really, there would be no explaining this.

Then, with the movement of the shadows, she catches sight of a curiously regular line of trees. She leans forward reflexively, the change in angle making her boot spikes creak, and skims along the line over and over again.

Yes. There, behind the trees, a span of camouflage netting.

It would fool an air reconnaissance or a satellite. But it has not, quite, fooled her. With the help of her trusty GPS and her reader’s loaded map, she manages to take a bearing without killing herself.

Sanchez smiles softly to herself as she descends.

After the bird vanished, Martha and Matt went out to check the traplines and forage for plants. The fiddleheads were over, but she found a fallen tree full of promising grub-holes, and she and Matt chopped out enough of the waxy worms for supper. Martha loaded them into the pail to take back to the cabin, and Matt went to haul in firewood and bring water.

Martha thought there was still some kindling in the cabin, so she went straight in, tugging the latch string to lift the bar.

When she pulled the door open, a blur of purple feathers nearly took her nose off.

The bird thumped past her, running heavily between wildly flapping wings until one long bound finally lifted it clear of the ground. Martha shrieked in surprise as the thing took off.

Matt turned around, his arms full of sticks. He was just in time to catch the last flicker of purple as the bird vanished into the trees.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said, sounding exactly like Daddy Corey.

“See?” Martha said. “I told you so.”

It hadn’t been the endangered animal smuggling that originally brought the attention of Cascadia LEC to the slopes of Rainier. It was the dismembered body.

Not a complete body. On the list of reasons one might dismember a dead person, preventing identification of the remains is still high. Even in this era of skin-biota mapping and DNA identification (and forensic DNA reconstruction), it helps to get rid of the teeth and hands. Hiding cause of death is another popular reason, as is aiding disposal of the corpse. Bodies are awkward heavy things.

But not everybody is in a DNA database. And the reconstructive techniques only give an idea of what a person might look like—you only have to look at any pair of forty-year-old identical twins to understand that environment and accident have a certain amount of influence over a person’s appearance.

Still.

This particular dismembered body—or the portions of it that had been actually recovered here—turned out to have belonged to a University of Washington geneticist, one Darwish by name. Whose DNA was on file. And who had not been the sort of person to go casually missing, despite some gambling debts and an incautious affair or two. Which led to a Cascadia LEC operation, which led to the discovery that an Interpol-North America agent was already somewhere on the mountain, engaged in hunting down a poaching operation dedicated to shipping the Pacific Northwest’s irreplaceable biodiversity to wealthy collectors everywhere else in the world.

Cascadia LEC would need to send in its own guns to investigate the murder, however. Enter the woman now known as Rebecca Sanchez, who in her secret other life made her living as a licensable peace officer— previously operating out of San Francisco, so local Cascadia crooks were unlikely to know her face or reputation.

The smuggling is the sort of thing you might get off of with a wrist-slap. A body, though—that could send somebody to jail for a long time.

Metaphorically speaking, Sanchez has her fingers crossed.

After Sanchez marks the position of the camouflaged facility she continues on until nightfall, making sure that it looks like she’s left for real. Somewhere downslope is her contact—the agent licensed by Interpol whose presence on the mountain hinted that more was going on than a random murder, however gruesome that murder might have been.

At the rendezvous point, she makes a cold camp and eats energy bars for supper.

It was too hot for the fire, but Martha didn’t like to eat the grubs Matt brought home without boiling or roasting them first, so she was piling sticks into the stove. Honestly, she didn’t like to eat grubs at all, but they were better than going hungry. And she knew, because Daddy had said, that they were very good for you. Full of protein and amino acids. And easy to collect from under the bark of fallen trees. Much easier than catching a squirrel in a deadfall, for example.

They were one of the best things to eat in the woods, now that Daddy didn’t bring them food any more. They didn’t taste bad. Like the smoked kippers Daddy used to bring in tins, only wriggly. Unless you roasted them. But they were grubs, and Martha did not like them.

Daddy has also said that they were invasive, that they came with the palm trees when the winters got warm, and that he and she and Matt were doing a good deed by eating them.

So she was still trying to decide what to do about that—fire or no fire?—when the cabin door banged open and the man came in. He was big and dark, in stompy boots with moss and mud caked on the soles, and Martha’s first impulse was to yell at him to wipe his feet. Daddy wouldn’t like the mud in the house.

But then she remembered she wasn’t supposed to let anybody but Daddy and Matt see her, and she shrank back into the corner by the stove and accidentally kicked over the big pail of grubs. They writhed horribly on the floor, and she danced aside, against the cold iron side of the stove, trying not to squish them.

He towered over her until he crouched down, reaching out a hand. He made himself smile. She still didn’t like him.

“Hey, little girl,” he said. “Are you Martha?”

“You can’t come in here,” she said definitely. “Your shoes are muddy.”

“Are they?” He looked down. “Well, if you’ll come with me I’ll go right back outside. And then I won’t be breaking the rules.”

“I’m not supposed to go with strangers,” she said. “Where’s Matt? I want Matt.”

He’d know what to do. He was older. He always had a plan. And they were supposed to take care of each other. Daddy always said so.

“Matt is outside,” the man said. “Come on, sweetie. My name’s Doselle Callandar. I’ll take you someplace where you can get a clean outfit and something to eat that’s better than that.” He waved at the grubs. “Cake. You like cake? Kids like cake.”

She backed away, wedging herself between the cold stove and the wall. “No.”

“Look,” he said. “Martha, I know it’s you. I saw your picture. Your Papa Corey sent me. I’m going to take care of you and Matt now, all right?”

Now she knew it was wrong. That he was lying. Because if he knew Daddy, he’d know that Daddy was Daddy, not Papa. “NO!” she yelled, very loudly. “Matt, Matt help.”

“Oh, bother,” the man in the boots said, sounding like he wanted to say something else entirely. But even though she screamed, he reached out and grabbed her arm, and no matter how she twisted and wiggled—like the grubs squirming on the concrete—she couldn’t keep him from pulling her out from behind the wood stove.

In Sanchez’s line of work, reputation is all you have. The new models of distributed policing bear a debt of concept to the U.S. Marshals, Texas Rangers, and Mounties of old. It’s a kind of knight-errantry, albeit with better communications technology. But if you work for hire for law enforcement agencies, they like to know what they’re getting.

Word of mouth between agencies that have employed her—the personal recommendation—is the only currency that counts.

She’s known as somebody who gets results, and gets them in the cleanest manner possible. She thinks of herself as an heir to frontier lawmen of an earlier era, and she’s all too aware of the pitfalls of thinking of one’s self as Bat Masterson or Wyatt Earp.

All in all, she’d rather be Virgil.

And if she gets away with what happened in Oakland with her nose clean, she swears to herself that she will never step across that particular line again.

There are other cops with other reputations. Some get more work than she does, at higher pay. Some of those are cowboys, some braggarts. Some— like Doe—believe that the way to make an omelet is to bust heads.

Some of those stop being hired by large enforcement divisions after a while—they just find the licenses they’re offered getting cheaper, the work getting dodgier. Some of them stop getting licenses at all.

A few of her colleagues, Sanchez considers good cops, and Sanchez passes their names along when she can, confident that they’ll do the same for her. And that they’ll keep doing that.

As long as Doe keeps his mouth shut.

Man, she hates having to trust anybody that much. Even somebody she used to love. Maybe especially somebody she used to love.

Sanchez sleeps lightly, when she manages to sleep at all. The ground isn’t bad—she spreads a tarp, and she has her summerweight sleeping bag, and she’s found a good spot: sheltered in a deer wallow among pressed-down ferns.

But she’s keyed up and nervous, still full of unspent adrenaline hangover, and as much as she needs rest the restlessness won’t leave her alone. Eventually, she gives up tossing and turning and listening to the things move in the darkness and pulls her reader out. Indigenous Fauna of the Pacific Northwest. That should be stultifying enough to send her off to dreamland post-haste.

To her surprise, however, she finds it moderately fascinating. She’d still prefer case studies—Sanchez has always been a fan of talking shop—but it turns out that there’s something very soothing about the lifestyles of Pacific Tree Frogs.

She wonders if maybe that’s what the glossy brownish thing she glimpsed slithering through the trees on the previous day was, though she imagines even tree frogs probably move like frogs. They have to hop, right? It’s what they’re built for.

She’s still awake when something big makes a crunching sound in the wilderness. A pass of her hand dims the background on the reader and she blinks, rapidly, willing her eyes to adjust. Okay, so maybe the reader was a bad idea.

Still, it has given her a host a possibilities for the lurker in the darkness. Elk? Mule deer? The wolves that have recolonized these slopes are supposed to be shy of humans. Hopefully it’s neither brown bear nor cougar. That would be a little too ironic, getting eaten by one of the species whose exploitation she’s come to prevent.

But the crunch is followed by another, and a low and human mutter, so Sanchez does what she supposes any normal hiker would do in this situation.

“Hello?” she calls, drawing he knees up inside the bag so she can move fast if she has to. “Is somebody there?”

There’s a pause, and then a male voice answers, “Stand up, miss, and show your hands.”

Some cops who can’t get licensed anymore go to paramilitary organizations like Edgewater, but in Sanchez’s opinion they’re no more than mercenaries to hire to any warlord who wants them, and who won’t put too much in the way of limits on their behavior. As the silence stretches, she tries to imagine herself grabbing tourists by the chin, but she’s got that too-prickly awareness that tells her that her fight-or-flight reflex is just looking for an excuse.