18. Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
J essica
"It's a sock, " Sophia says.
"It's evidence."
"Freya, it is a sock. "
"It's a sock a hundred and forty meters off the marked trail, in the direction of travel, with mud on the sole and none on the top.
" Freya bags it without touching it, which she does automatically now and which the rest of us have stopped mocking.
"Which means it came off a foot that was moving. Not out of a bag."
"So he lost a sock."
"So he lost a sock going that way, " Freya says, and points into the trees.
Declan's already looking where she's pointing. "That's off our grid."
"Then the grid's wrong."
"The grid's not wrong. The casualty's wrong." Renzo's on a rock with the map across his knees. "Which is the point. Nobody wanders off in a straight line."
It's the third week of the winter Preserve block and we've been out since eight.
Proper exercise this time. Full day, four search sectors, two other cohorts on the northern grids, radio check-in at the top of every hour. Brann's back at the fire road with a clipboard.
And about hundred feet behind us, Corvin and Abe.
That's the part that's different now. Corvin's about fifty and has been doing academy security since before I was born.
Abe is younger and does most of the walking.
They've been with me every day since the card on my bed, they don't hover, they don't talk, and I've made my peace with it in the sense that I've stopped saying anything about it out loud.
"Miller," Freya says. "Stop trying to track."
"I'm not trying to track."
"You're staring at the ground."
"I'm walking. "
"You're walking at about a third of the speed of a person who is walking," she says, and hands me the bagged sock. "Carry that."
"That's it? That's my job?"
"You're good at carrying things."
"I'm good at several things—"
"Name one that helps here," Freya says, and goes on ahead, and Torres makes a noise beside me that he tries to turn into a cough.
We find the casualty at eleven thirty.
He's a fourth-year with a card in his pocket that says hypothermic, confused, non-compliant, and he plays it properly — argues with Declan for four solid minutes about whether he needs help.
Sophia talks him down, and by the time she's finished he's telling her about his brother's wedding while Declan gets his boots off and looks at his feet.
"You're wasted on community," I tell her.
"I know. "
We rig the stretcher. Renzo works the route back. Freya walks ahead.
It takes us eleven minutes to find out we can't get home the way we came.
The Halden footbridge is out, there’s a raging stream, and about a third of the decking is in the water.
"Oh, come on," Sophia says.
Renzo already has the map out. Declan gets the stretcher end down on a rock.
Freya walks to the edge and crouches.
"How long's that been like that?" I ask.
"It wasn't like that on Tuesday," Declan says. "Second cohort came through here."
"Then it went in the last three days."
"There was weather on Wednesday," Renzo says, without looking up. "Alternate for this crossing is the Elmscar track. Two point one north, then east on the fire road. Adds about forty minutes."
"How do you know that?"
"That's in the pack. It's in the laminated thing."
"Nobody reads the laminated thing."
" I read the laminated thing."
Freya hasn't moved.
She's got her hand an inch above the broken end of a plank, and she's looking along it the way she looked at the boundary stone.
"Freya."
"Mm."
"What?"
She stands up.
"Nothing," she says. "Let's go north."
We're forty meters up the track when Corvin says, "Abe. Where's the spare?"
Abe stops. Checks the side pocket of the pack. Checks the other one.
"It was in there at the crossing."
"Was it in there when we left the crossing?"
"I didn't check when we left the crossing."
Corvin swears, once, quietly.
"What's the problem?" Declan says.
"The problem is I've only got one radio." Corvin's already unslinging the pack.
"It'll be at the bridge," Abe says. "It'll have come out when we put the packs down."
"Then go and get it."
Abe goes.
"Six minutes," Corvin calls after him. "Straight back."
Then he gets on his own handset and calls the desk, and I stand there holding a stretcher and listen to him do it.
Corvin, sector four, with the Miller cohort, seven students. Halden crossing is impassable. Rerouting via the Elmscar track to the east fire road. Estimate forty minutes. One officer detached to the crossing, back with us inside ten.
The desk acknowledges.
We start walking.
The Elmscar track is a cut through the replanted forest.
Forty-year-old conifers in rows, planted close, dark underneath, a stony vehicle track up the middle and drainage ditches either side. The trees come right down to the ditch on both sides for about a kilometer and a half.
You can't get a stretcher through the trees. You can barely get a person through the trees.
You go up the middle. That's what the track's for.
We're a quarter mile in when Sophia says, "Guys."
"What?"
"Radio's dead."
Declan looks back. "Whose?"
"Mine. And Renzo's." She's got both of them out. "Not dead-dead. There's carrier. There's just nothing on it."
"Terrain," Renzo says.
"It's a forest. It's flat."
"Try the other channel."
She tries the other channel. Then the third. Then the emergency channel, which we're not supposed to touch, and which she touches anyway.
"Nothing," she says.
Corvin tries his, and I watch his face change.
"Everybody stop walking," he says.
We stop. Nobody says anything for a moment, and the pines don't help — rows of trees, a floor of needles, no wind in it at all. Renzo turns the map over in his hands twice for something to do with them.
Then Freya says, "The bridge bothered me."
Everybody looks at her.
"What about it?"
"The break." She's looking back down the track the way we came. "It didn't look right."
"Right how?"
"I don't know. That's the problem. It didn't look like something that fell down." She scrapes dried mud off the heel of her hand with her thumbnail. "But I'd have had to get in the water to see anything, and if I was wrong we'd have stood at that bridge for half an hour while I looked at it."
"You think somebody cut it," Corvin says.
"I think I don't know."
Corvin looks at his radio again. Then at the fourth-year on the stretcher, and then a long way back down the track.
"We're done," he says. "Exercise is over. We're not standing here and we're not walking back past that bridge."
"I'm all for that," the fourth-year says, already sitting up and reaching for his boots. "Card's in my pocket. I'm not being carried anywhere."
Renzo has the map open on his knee.
"Not back down there," he says. "If Freya's right about the bridge then whoever did it knows exactly where we came in."
"And if she's wrong?"
"Then we've had a long walk." He turns the sheet round. "North end's another half mile of this with trees both sides. I don't love that either."
"So what do you love?"
"Nothing." He points at the black gaps between the trunks on the east side. "But there's the drainage ditch and then forest. It's horrible, it's single file, it's about a hundred yards before the ground opens out. Nobody can drive it and nobody can see down it."
Corvin looks at the trees for about three seconds.
"Then that's where we're going."
We get about thirty feet.
Something goes past my head hard enough that I feel the air of it and hits a trunk behind me with a crack, and Corvin makes a noise and goes down on one knee in the ditch.
For a second nobody does anything at all.
Then Torres has me by the back of the pack and pulls, and we're both in the water, which is freezing and about a foot deep.
Renzo runs — four steps toward the west side, which is unfortunately the direction it came from, before Declan gets a fist in his jacket and hauls him backwards behind the stack of cut timber hard enough to put them both on the ground.
Sophia is still standing up in the middle of the track with both radios in her hands, and Freya comes off the dirt and takes her legs out from under her.
"Where are they?" Sophia's voice has gone high. "I can't— I can't see anybody, where are they—"
"West." Freya, flat, from the ground. "Movement west. That's all I've got."
"Corvin—"
"I'm all right." He isn't. There's something in his thigh and his voice has thinned out. "Stay down."
Declan's already moving.
He goes along the ditch on his elbows with the med kit, past me, past Torres, to where Corvin has slid into the water, and gets a hand on the wound and his weight behind it, his voice level the whole time.
"You. Fourth year. What's your name?"
"Osk—"
"Both hands. Here, where mine are. Press until I tell you to stop and don't get up for anything." He waits until the hands are there. "Sophia. Second kit. Not now. When I say."
And then there are men on the track.
Three of them at the top end, forty yards off, dark gray, faces covered. The one in front isn't carrying a rifle — it's something short and thick with a loop of cable on it. The two behind him are unrolling something across the width of the track.
A net.
And it's far too big.
I lie in a freezing ditch with my heart going like a bird and look at the width of that thing, and I know.
It's for me.
"Jess." Torres, right at my ear. "Look at me."
I look at him. His face is three inches from mine, there's blood on his cheek where the timber went, and he is absolutely terrified — I can feel every bit of it — and underneath that he is completely steady.
"Do you want to run or do you want to fight?"
Nobody else in my life would have asked me that.
"We're in a ditch with a man bleeding," I say.
"Yeah."
"And I'm the only one of us bigger than they are."
"Yeah."
"Then get everyone off the track, because I'm about to make it very loud up here."
I put my hand flat against my sternum and do what I've been doing in an empty field twice a week since October.
This time it goes.