Hunted [The Flash Gold Chronicles] (5 page)

Had it killed the woman? Her shoulders
slumped with regret at the thought. It was silly, given the pilot’s
inclination toward killing her, but Kali hoped the woman had
survived. She ached to talk to her, to find out more about the
craft.

A touch on her shoulder brought her attention
back to the cabin. Cedar stood beside her.

“Good thinking,” he said.

“Er, yes, sorry it was slow to come. I wasn’t
expecting to come face-to-face with...” Kali groped for a way to
describe her feelings. Would he understand and forgive her for
being so distracted? Or would he, the professional bounty hunter,
believe there were no acceptable excuses?

“Your mechanically inclined twin?” Cedar
asked. “Yes, that must have been surprising. And intriguing.”

Kali let out a sigh of relief. He did
understand.

“Intriguing, yes.” She wanted nothing more
than to hop down from the roof, sprint into the forest, and find
that woman. “Any chance you’d like to delay our trip to Sebastian’s
claim to go check on that smoke and question this woman if she’s
still alive?”

Cedar gazed into the woods, not toward the
smoke, but upriver, toward the claims. With one of the Cudgel’s
allies nearby, he must feel the pull of his quest more than ever.
But someone who had staked a claim was not going anywhere any time
soon.

Perhaps the same thoughts spun through his
head, for he sighed and said, “Yes, we should check the wreckage.
If the woman recovers, she may come after you again.”

“Me? Are you sure she’s not after you?
Perhaps she’s some ex-lover you irritated, and she’s been planning
for years to take her revenge.”

“I don’t irritate my lovers.” He hopped off
the roof.

“Just business partners?” Kali climbed down
after him and gave him a smile to let him know she was joking.

Cedar did not return it. He
looked...glum.

“Maybe there’ll be a bounty on her head, and
it’ll be worth the side trip,” Kali said.

Cedar grunted and pointed at the SAB. “There
won’t be a trail to the crash site. Think that can maneuver through
the forest?”

“It’d probably get stuck in the snow or
undergrowth,” Kali admitted, feeling a twinge of envy for the
flyer. If she had an air-based vehicle, she wouldn’t have to worry
about such pesky things. Someday, she promised herself, thinking of
her airship design, though she was already wondering if the flyer
might inspire modifications.

“Let’s walk then.” Cedar shouldered his
packsack, and they set out.

* * * * *

A branch swung back and smacked Kali in the
face. She grunted and scraped spruce needles out of her hair. They,
along with twigs, leaves, and sap, already provided her braid with
more decorations than a totem pole.

“I know I mentioned this before,” Kali said,
“But you
could
cut some of this undergrowth with your
sword.”

“One does not use a high quality, imported
Japanese katana to whack weeds,” Cedar said.

“It came all the way from the Orient? You
must have paid a fortune for it. Perhaps, to justify that
substantial investment, you should use it for more than slicing
people’s heads off.”

He slanted her a dark look over his shoulder.
“I got it from Jiro, one of my early mentors. We were hunting a
fellow who’d massacred a family in Florida when Jiro got shot in
the leg. He said I wasn’t experienced enough to go after the man on
my own; I was sixteen and figured I knew plenty. I left him to a
doc and tracked the cutthroat all through the swamps. Nearly lost a
leg to an alligator, but I got my man. Jiro said he’d been wrong,
and I was ready to hunt on my own. He retired and gave me the
katana to put to good use.”

Kali knew Cedar had traveled, but she had not
realized how much. Even though a sane person would probably not be
excited by stories of swamps and alligators, her heart ached with
longing to see such places.

“Alligator tussle, huh?” she said. “Must have
left a giant scar.”

“Yup.”

“Can I see it some time?”

“Reckon so.” Cedar glanced back, his
expression lighter this time. A glint in his eyes suggested her
interest pleased him. Men always liked to show off war wounds.

Kali dodged another branch whipping back in
the wake of his passage and resolved to stay farther behind. Smoke
thickened the air, though, promising they were close. She had to
squash an urge to lean to the side or bounce up and down so she
could see around Cedar. At one point, she tried to slip past him,
but he blocked her with a gentle nudge. Being protective, was
he?

Flames came into view, licking bark and
nibbling spruce needles high up in trees. Broken branches hung from
several trunks, but metal glinting on the forest floor drew Kali’s
gaze downward.

She could not muster caution, and she darted
past Cedar, this time evading his protective grasp.

Less wreckage than she expected scattered the
forest floor. The vehicle’s wings drew her eye first. The fall had
mangled them, warping the framework and tearing holes in the
membrane. Kali rubbed the unique mesh between her fingers. Though
cool and sleek like metal, it had a lightweight, sinuous nature
unlike any alloy she knew about. She wished she could talk to the
maker, discover what exactly this was and how to make it. Already,
she could think of dozens of uses for it.

She slipped her knife out and cut a sample to
take home.

A shadow fell over her shoulder, and Kali
jumped. But it was only Cedar, rifle at the ready, guarding her
back.

Still crouching, she surveyed the rest of the
wreckage. “Where’s the furnace, the boiler, and the entire bottom
of the flyer?”

“Where’s the woman?” Cedar asked.

“Yes, that’s a useful question too. Maybe the
bottom half broke off from the top and landed somewhere else?”

He left her side and scouted the crash site.
Only a few seconds passed before he stopped, pointed at the ground,
and said, “No.”

Kali joined him. A pair of long, thin
depressions gouged the spruce needles, mud, and snow. They headed
inland in a straight line.

“These are the same width and depth of the
lines behind the hill outside Dawson,” Cedar said, “except those
were short and didn’t continue into the forest.”

The smell of freshly cut wood mingled with
the smoke, and Kali spotted broken branches on either side of the
tracks. Some had been snapped, but other larger ones were sawn
off.

“Brilliant,” Kali breathed. “The lower half
must be a ground vehicle that can work without the top half.” She
had a hard time tearing her gaze from the tracks. Even the hewn
branches impressed her—the vehicle must have some sort of
fast-working saw created for brush clearing. She hadn’t thought to
add that to her bicycle. “Cedar, I think I’m in love.”

“With the vehicle or the woman who wants to
kill you?”

“The vehicle, one hundred percent. The
woman... It depends on if she’s the person who made the vehicle or
not.”

“I doubt she’ll prove lovable if she works
for one of the gangster’s trying to collect the secrets in your
head.”

Kali sniffed. “Nobody like that would work
for a gangster.”

“You seem certain about a great number of
things for someone so young and untraveled.”

“What
great number
of things?” she
asked, annoyed to be reminded she had been so few places. That
would change one day soon.

“The motives of villains. The fact that
tracking is so easy a hound can do it.”

Ah, so that comment still rankled him. It had
been unfair of her, but she had trouble admitting when she was
wrong. “That’s only two things.”

“If we mean to track her down before dark, we
can’t loiter.” Cedar strode up the center of the broad trail.

“What are you doing?” Kali blurted.

“Walking?”

“Up the middle of the trail? If I was
wounded, and I thought someone was following me, I’d booby trap the
most obvious route. We might get hurt if we presume it’s safe to
amble up the hill after her.”

“You have an alternative proposition?” His
tone held a struggling-for-patience edge.

He probably didn’t appreciate her telling him
how to track. But this person was dangerous, maybe far more
dangerous than the usual thugs he hunted down. He might
need
her help.

“Maybe we can guess where she’s going and
avoid the tracks.”

Cedar waited, arms folded over his chest.

“She may have transportation,” Kali said,
“but clearing the undergrowth will slow her, and we did shoot her,
so she’ll need to stop to tend that wound soon.”

“Likely.”

“Do you have a map?” she asked.

Wordlessly, Cedar removed his packsack and
withdrew a compass and map.

Kali unfolded the latter. Her people had
camped up and down these rivers when she was growing up, and she
knew the area well, but she wanted to see the overheard viewpoint
since their attacker would have been watching the world from
above.

“Maybe this ridge.” Kali tapped a stony gray
terrain feature on the hand-colored map. “There are caves up there.
Should be about three miles from here. I know a trail that heads up
there. It’s out of our way, but it should be faster than cutting
through the brush, especially since someone won’t deign to use his
fancy pig sticker—”

“Katana,” Cedar said.

“Right, since someone won’t use his katana
for brush clearing, it’ll be better to go the long way. It’ll put
us up on top of the ridge where we can look down from above and
maybe sneak up behind her.”

She caught Cedar gazing into the woods again,
not toward the ridge or the direction of the tracks, but toward the
river and the claims.

Kali returned the map. “This won’t take long.
We’ll capture her and still make it up to Sebastian’s claim before
it gets dark.”

“Hm,” was all Cedar said.

* * * * *

Late afternoon sun played tag with the
clouds, though it did little to melt the snow on top of the ridge.
Kali and Cedar knelt in a shadowy hallow, hidden from anyone
looking up from below. She scanned the hillside with a collapsible
spyglass, hoping to catch the smoke puffs of a steam engine. If
they were out there, the forest cloaked them.

“Do you see the tracks?” she murmured. “If
she drove in a straight line, she would have come out about
there.”

Her alternate route up had taken an hour. Had
the woman already come through and gone? Or was she hiding in a
cave?

A creek meandered down into the valley, and
Kali checked up and down the shoreline. It seemed a likely place
for an injured person to stop for water and to attend a wound. The
trees hid much, though, and even from the high ground, she could
not see everything.

Cedar tapped her shoulder and pointed. She
shifted the spyglass, thinking he had spotted their opponent. He
was pointing out a doe and her fawn, down from the hills to
drink.

“Cute,” Kali said, though she was more
interested in finding the woman. They would have to go down there
and... She could feel Cedar’s gaze upon her. She lowered the
spyglass. “What?”

He lifted his eyebrows, and she had a feeling
she had missed something.

“You
were
pointing at the deer weren’t
you?” she asked. “I didn’t miss... Oh. Mama probably wouldn’t be
roaming around down there with her baby if a human was nearby.”

“Especially a human driving a noisy,
steam-powered contraption.”

“You don’t think she made it this far
up?”

He did not answer, and Kali did not ask the
other obvious question, whether he thought they had wasted time
detouring out of the way.

“She was wounded,” Kali said. “Maybe she
couldn’t continue this far.”

“What’s next?” Cedar asked.

Kali chewed on the inside of her cheek. He
was letting her take the lead, maybe being nice...maybe giving her
the rope to hang herself. She had asked for it, though, hadn’t she?
After stopping him earlier, she could not bring herself to ask him
to take over now.

“How about we follow the creek back down
toward the crash site?” Kali suggested. “Maybe we’ll find she came
part way up to the ridge and stopped to deal with her injury. If
she turned a different direction, we’ll probably still come across
her tracks.”

Cedar held out a hand, palm up. Yes, she was
still the leader.

As they traipsed downhill, picking a tedious
path between trees and through undergrowth, Kali grew aware of the
passing minutes. Every time the sun poked through the clouds, her
shadow grew longer and thinner where it stretched across the forest
floor.

Where were those cursed tracks?

Now and then an animal would startle in the
underbrush, and she’d jerk her rifle that way, half-expecting their
opponent to jump out at them. Each time Kali would chastise
herself—if anything, that woman would lob grenades at them from a
distance, not attack at close range—but she remained on edge
nonetheless.

“Kali.” Cedar pointed toward a muddy stretch
of land to their right. The parallel tracks of the woman’s
device.

Kali jogged to the spot. “Huh. Good eye. I
wasn’t expecting them this far over.” She turned to get her
bearings. The ridge stood over a mile away now, meaning they were
almost halfway back to the wreckage. She sighed. Prudence be
damned. She had wasted a lot of time trying to second-guess the
woman. “They’re paralleling the ridge now, aren’t they?”

“Appears so.”

She gave him a flat look. “I know what you’re
doing. You’re hoping I’ll be proved wrong, that tracking isn’t as
easy as I claimed.”

“Shall we follow them?” Cedar asked. “Or do
you still fear booby traps?”

“Follow,” Kali said, eyes narrowed. “But
let’s keep our eyes open.”