Wild Thing (9 page)

But as a Huntress, of course, she kept her bow and arrows close at hand.  Just in case.

One day to her great delight, she even managed to hit an animal.  Unimpressed, the bruised squirrel chittered angrily at her from a safe distance up its tree while she crowed and did a victory dance below.  But then she'd wasted the whole afternoon trying to improve the deadliness of her weapon.  No matter how she tried, though, she simply couldn't break off the rubbery cup at the end of the arrows.  She'd even tried sneaking a sharp knife from the manual kitchen, but it just wouldn't cut through the tough, stretchy black cap.

Nerida had got real upset when she'd found her with the knife.  She'd been all, like, 'Sara, put the knife down, there's a good girl,' as if she thought she was gonna attack somebody with it, or something!

Nerida was super-weird.  Her boyfriend, Dwayne, was also always looking at her sneakily, whenever he thought she wasn't looking, like he expected her to creep into his room one night and do something scary.

Actually, she hadn't decided yet if that'd be a good idea or a bad one.

But today, since it was rainy, she decided she'd hunt inside, prowling down the cold stone passages with their high ceilings and thick layer of off-yellow paint.  Given how many rooms were empty and disused it was surprising how few people there actually were, here.  Only a few of the heavy wooden doors had a sign on them, and even then, most of those just had numbers painted on in black.  A few locked ones had nameplates, like hers and her uncle's.  But they were all boring.

Today's hunting went well, though.  Right up until she shot her first victim.

Normally, she just hunted in the grounds – for It or for small animals – but she'd been sitting in the cafeteria, bored, when Dr Ramsin came in.  Ignoring her completely, he'd gotten a drink from the machine and then left, still ignoring her completely.  Which had given her the brilliant idea.

But when Dr Ramsin complained to the Director, she discovered the tiny problem in her genius idea.  With bow and arrows taken away, she'd had to wait a whole week before being allowed to use them again.  But she took her punishment like a grown up: she hadn't even complained about her prey cheating, by telling on her.

And Uncle had been real nice, too.  At first she thought he might be angry; but if she had to guess, she'd say he actually thought it was funny.  All he'd said, in private, was that perhaps it would be better to hunt
it
, rather than his co-workers.  His voice had been all whispery, and he'd looked around to make sure no one else could hear – even though there was no one else around.

It was cool having a big secret.  She wondered what the others would think if they knew she was hunting
it.
  Probably excited, or scared.  Pro'lly, they'd tell her to stop.

Thinking about it in her room, afterward, she realized she
had
learned a lot from the experience, though.  F'r'instance, her uncle had explained how people made up rules – like not shooting each other – to try to keep themselves safe.  As if that would stop a real hunter!

If she'd had
proper
arrows he couldn't've cheated by telling on her.

Oh.

She thought about that.

If she'd used a real arrow, they would have worked out what killed him.  Sure, she'd picked a stretch of corridor not covered by cameras for the hunt.  But since she was the only one at the Institute who
had
arrows, the Director still would have known it was her.

Wow.  Hunting people was tricky.

The week after she
finally
got her weapon back saw the emptying of her quiver as one by one she lost her arrows.  She'd solved the problem of the rubber caps by first melting them with real fire – she'd been careful not to burn the Forest down, and to put the fire out properly, after – and then cutting them off quickly with the sharp knife, while the ends were still kind of melty.

Later, she'd sharpened the ends.  But then they didn't fly properly, wobbling horribly through the air.  By the time she'd worked out that she needed extra weight near the tips, she was down to just two arrows, each with paper clips unfolded and wound round and round the shaft, near the tip.

Then for three days she hunted deep in the Forest with her last, now brightly-painted arrow.  Wondering if
it
might come, finally.

Or would it wait until she had
none
left?
 

Chapter 8 

In Harmon's office, only the regular tapping of his Tik Tek MetaStylus punctuated the silence as he sat, oblivious to the decades of engineering that had made the combination computer and net access tool immune to such treatment. Deep in thought, he dragged representations of Imaginal structure components into the complex diagram he was building, occasionally murmuring and dragging annotations as he went.  Harmon didn't notice the door opening, nor the sad little figure trudging into his room carrying just a bow.

'Uncle?'

Frowning, Harmon adjusted the pressor-chain's handle-patterns from an absolute to a relative emotional index range.  That would provide excellent connective strength for a new stress source.

'Uncle!'

Harmon nodded to himself, tapped the search button, and held the end of the stylus near his lips, still unaware of Sara's presence.  'Perichoresis near concept acquisition.'

Sara stomped right up to the desk and slapped her hand down onto the slightly-raised dome of the holo projector, interrupting the stylus's communications.  'Uncle!'

Harmon looked up, startled and annoyed. 
Couldn't the girl look after herself for five minutes?
  'What is it?' he snapped, moving her hand off the display node and triggering a redraw to refresh it.

'My last arrow got lost up a tree.'

'So?  What do you expect me to do about it?'

'Can't you magic it down?'

'I'm busy.  You may be surprised to learn that I have more important things to do with my time than telekinese toy arrows out of trees where they were shot by careless little girls!'

She just stood there.  'But I'm hunting
it
.'

'There is no-'  Harmon stopped himself.  'No need to use the arrows.  It is in fact better if you fight it with your bare hands.' 
Which would be true, were it a genuine inorganic being or spirit.
  After her account of battling what sounded like a spirit in the woods, he had given her a simple “panic button” to use if it happened again.  Indeed, two weeks later she had triggered it.  Quickly leaving his rooms, he had tracked her via a simple Sending and shadowed her at a distance, mindmeld linked. Of course, as expected, there had been nothing – apart from an odd backlash she'd somehow induced at the end.  So convincing had been her charade as she'd stalked the creature, though, so deeply involved in her imaginative play, that for a time he himself had thought he sensed something near her,
invisible even on the Imaginal plane.
  Impossible, of course.  The Imaginal was the dimension of magic that overlapped the mundane world, perceptible to mages.  The magic itself was what was perceived.  The idea of a magic that was invisible made as little sense as a silent noise.

Beginning to regret the whole “invisible creature” stressor, he drew his mind back to the present, where Sara looked back at him doubtfully.

'Play something else for a change.  Now go away, I'm busy.'

With a sigh, he picked up his interrupted thought and returned to work.  He didn't see her stubborn expression as she stomped out.

Harmon was studying his revisions with a satisfaction bordering on smugness when the sound of a wailing child broke into his train of thought. 
Dammit, what now
, he thought?

The wailing grew louder before fading out.  But less than a minute later there came another knock at the door.  This time, it was the head of his irritating colleague Simmons that appeared in the gap.

'Your girl's had a bad fall.  Probably broken a leg, that's my guess.'

Harmon swore and got up, following Simmons into Sara's room where she lay crying on her bed.

'I hurt my leg!' she wailed.

'Let me see.'

His probing fingers provoked a scream of pain.  He stopped, looked at her coldly.  'Try to be a little less
cowardly
, Sara.  Tears are for weaklings.'

A light went on in Harmon's mind. 
H
ow obvious! 
Slipping into the Imaginal, he tapped into her pain channel, carefully adding it as another input to the original stress Source he had first constructed back in the orphanage.   Returning his perception to the physical, he spoke to the now-silently shuddering girl.  'This is going to hurt for a moment.  But you must lie still.'

He turned to his co-worker.  'Simmons, come here.'  Simmons approached, looking a little ill.  'It's a simple break.  I'm going to set it back in position, then I want you to hold it firmly while I heal it.  Remember: hold it firmly.  And Sara: don't move, or it will heal crookedly and you'll be a
cripple
,' he said, distaste dripping from the word.  'Are we all ready?'

The other two nodded, shakily.  'Very well.  Remember, Sara: lie still now.'  Harmon pulled steadily; there was a most unpleasant sound, and Sara screamed in pain.

'Simmons!  Here.'

Simmons, eyes a bit glazed, grasped the leg gently, Sara crying out at the touch.

'Firmly!'

Simmons gulped but gripped the small, tanned leg more firmly, and Sara screamed again.  But although her upper body writhed in slow agony and tears flooded from her eyes, she kept her hips and left leg still.  Harmon's senses shifted back to the Imaginal and
reached
as he grasped the angry break in the pattern of the bone and began altering it, accelerating the in-built regenerative mechanisms.  He was a little surprised at how easily the healing flowed; and at how quickly the girl's cries stopped.

Simmons was quite gray.  'I say, shouldn't you have… you know, used an anesthetic or something?'

'No.  This was faster, and safer.  Besides, a little pain is good for the soul.  As well as being a reminder not to do foolish things,' he declared, staring at the girl as she wiped her face.

Soon, though, she was engrossed in her magically-healed leg, scarcely believing the pain was gone.  Harmon watched her feel the limb gingerly.

'Wow!'  She grabbed a tissue and noisily blew her runny nose.  Swinging both legs off her bed she stood up, carefully.  Put her weight on the left.

Her sudden whoop of joy took both men by surprise, as did her leap as she impacted into Harmon with a hard hug around his abdomen before breathing a short “Thanks!” and running back out to play.

Harmon smiled.  She truly was remarkable.  He ignored both Simmons' disturbed expression and the way the fellow shook his head as they left her room.

After she left, Harmon went to a window overlooking the front entrance to watch her.  He was pleased to see her stalk straight across the lawn, heading determinedly back into the woods.  Smiling, he returned to his office.

That night he visited Sara in her room.  Harmon noted the brightly-painted toy arrow on her bookcase, though neither of them mentioned it.  Sitting on the edge of her bed, he surreptitiously cast his usual mindmeld.

'Do you remember your parents, Sara?'

Harmon's question took Sara by surprise, but the girl nodded.  She smiled at her most precious possession – her one and only memory of the woman she knew must be her mother.  Closing her eyes, she remembered, unaware of his intruding spell:
«A close, warm room; very small; where one
wall, of meshed triangles, somehow moved.  The smell of wood smoke.  Firelight flickering on a woman's face bending over her: dark, twinkling eyes.  The smile.  The beautiful, fierce smile.  Long, black hair hanging straight down, caught in her own small fist.  The sound of men's voices outside, singing deep.»

Sara, eyes still closed, smiled.  Her mind drifted toward
«another night, a cold campfire, darkness-.  No.»
  She forced her mind away from the pain.  Back to the warm embrace of the woman with the long, silky black hair.

'Yes,' she whispered, smiling.

She did not see Harmon frown, annoyed and surprised, then shake his head.

Chapter 9 

'Who are
they
, Mr Shanahan?'

Sara was visiting the security officer before heading off with Faith on a patrol.  'We're gonna check the lake shore,' she'd told him, 'because there could be tracks from invisible monsters.'

'That sounds like a good idea, but
please
keep Faith out of the mud this time.'

She hid a giggle at the way he said “mud” – rhyming with “wood” – but then noticed that one of the screens he was watching showed views of people in separate little rooms.

There were only five pictures, but for some reason, it looked like one person, a grown-up man, was in four of them, in different positions.  He was pacing.  In the only other window with a picture in it, a woman was scratching her arm.

Down the side of the screen, there was a list of words that looked like codes, and places.  Places like “CorrWB1, CorrNSB1, CorrWB2”; and eleven two-letter codes.  There were also, she saw, codes G1, G2, G3, and G4, all in green.  One of the other two-letter codes was also in green and said AS.  She wondered if the four Gs matched the man in the four windows, and if the AS matched the woman.

She knew that the windows only showed stuff where unusual things were happening.  The computer did a lot of automatic watching for Mr Shanahan, he'd explained one day.  Though if he wanted to, he could choose to look at any of them at any time.  He'd shown her some of the views from cameras that watched the outside of the buildings from high up on the walls, sweeping back and forth across the grounds.  She'd noticed each sweep took exactly one minute.  She was always careful to notice as much as she could.  Like how each window showed its own time, even though the time was always the same for all the windows, of course.