Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 51 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Chapter Thirty-Nine

There had been much evidence over the years to suggest that Jotan had better eyesight than humans. Or at least, as much evidence as could be gathered without breaking the strict protocols prohibiting human medical experimentation. In any event, Tagen had plenty of first-hand experience to prove to himself that human vision was notably poorer than that of any Jotan, and his eyesight in particular was excellent.

So it came as no small surprise when it was Daria who bolted upright and gasped, “My God, it’s them!” before he had even seen the occupants of the oncoming vehicle.

That it was them was almost as astonishing. Sunrise was not far behind them, but he had by this time more than half-convinced himself that they had been passed unknowing in the night as they sat unspeaking in the fore of the groundcar. But no, the driver of the approaching car was clearly the same female E’Var had taken with him at the fair (the odds of there being two humans with purple and white-striped hair made that a certainty), and the face that gaped back at him in the brief instant that their eyes locked was indeed E’Var’s. He saw the prisoner shout and the oncoming car swerved suddenly even as it passed them before lunging on ahead even faster.

Daria was already turning the car out to follow them, the wheels flinging back a fountain of gravel and dust. “I don’t believe it, they really came,” she said, her expression simply thunderstruck. The car screamed as it struck the road, and then they were shoved forward in pursuit of the rapidly-diminishing vehicle.

“Yes,” he said, grimly smiling.

“Like you never had a doubt.” The groundcar’s engine was in full voice, a song of elation all its own, as if it too were eager to take the enemy down. “I don’t believe it,” Daria said again, shaking her head. “We’re actually going to get them!” Her eyes dipped down the console.

“So it would seem.”

“I don’t believe it!” Daria shouted. “We’re almost out of gas!”

“What?”

“We’re almost out—We’ve been idling the car all morning, we—we—” She shot him a single tight and baffled glance and said, “We have approximately ten miles to figure out how we’re going to get them to stop before our ass is stranded out here.”

They had less than that. Looking ahead, Tagen could see the trees beginning to thin and the hills rising. Soon, the mountains would open, and a mistake on that narrow stretch of road would mean a short, sharp ride and an explosive finish. Tagen bared his teeth and rubbed at the bridge of his nose, trying to think. He could allow the prisoner to escape, he could ask the gods to strike down what was apparently their favored son, or he could fire a few rounds of superheated plasma at E’Var’s groundcar, melting through its hull and inner workings, thus halting it so that they, in close pursuit, could smash into it and kill all of them. Hm.

“Well?” Daria pressed.

“I have a plan.” The name of Pahnee was famed throughout the known universe with good planning.

“Thank God. What do I do?”

“Remove this window,” Tagen said, tapping the glass beside him.

Daria’s left hand flew from the guidance wheel to her door and the window hummed down to admit an angry jet of air. “Now what?” she asked anxiously.

Tagen leaned his head out and shouted, “Pull over!” in his most authoritative voice.

She stared at him.

He pulled his head back inside the vehicle. “Well, that did not work,” he said.

“No, it sure didn’t.” She brought his window back up, her chin thrust forward. One of her hands rose in an aimless bird-like flutter before slapping back down on the guidance wheel. “You know, this whole thing has been one nightmare after another!”

“You have no idea.”

“All right,” Daria said, and suddenly laughed. It was an unexpected thing, like sunshine rendered as sound, and completely free of hesitation or fear. She smiled broadly straight ahead out the console fore-window and said, “Hold on to Grendel.”

“What—” are you planning, was how that was meant to end, but it was superfluous. He was not a man of great insight, but he was a soldier, and the soldier in him knew instinctively exactly what she was planning. If there was time to argue or even to be alarmed, he might have indulged himself, but there was not. He reached into the cargo hold, hooked out the crouching cat, and hugged its struggling body securely to his chest. “I love you,” he said simply. “Aim true.”

As last words go, those were fine ones. Tagen watched, at peace, as the distance between their two vehicles was eaten under the fore-wheels of Daria’s car. E’Var seemed to shout something; his arm cut an arc through the air, harnessing himself in the last instant before impact.

Daria struck the rear left quarter of E’Var’s vehicle and yanked the guidance wheel hard to starboard as she did, not merely pushing at the enemy but slapping them violently from the road. It was an unimportant sound, neither a bang or a crash, but only a hand-clapping sort of bump followed at once by the shrieking of tires as both cars spun out. E’Var’s vehicle shot off at nearly a crosswise angle to the road. There came a resounding detonation as it smashed into a tree, but this was peripheral. Daria’s car twisted violently side to side and she fought with it for control, spinning over the roadtop in a shroud of tire-smoke until the moment came that Tagen had been waiting for. The right front tire, the same one that had split away earlier, caught the road’s edge and suddenly they were airborne.

The groundcar rose and flipped twice, producing a howl of bent air and a swirl of highway and sky all around them. The cat screamed but it was the only one. Tagen felt the churn of gravity in motion. He waited tensely and in silence either to live or die.

The tumble was cut short by a crunching collision with a number of bushes that caught and suspended them nose-down and not quite fully on one side. Gradually, thin branches snapped and bent and the vehicle settled. With a muted thump, the left side of the car evened out and there they were, the rear of the car slightly hoisted and the wheels spinning freely as the engines hummed, but more or less intact.

Tagen opened his arms and the cat sprang into the rear hold, all its long fur spiked out, leaving several rips in Tagen’s uniform as proof that it had struggled. He could hear Daria breathing, which was a relief; her eyes were wide and unblinking as death, and blood was steadily making its way down her cheek to drip onto her shirt.

“Speak if you hear me,” he said tersely. The shoulder of his gun-hand was aching. He tried to move it and could, but only through a haze of white-hot pain. He unharnessed himself with his clumsy left and reached out to her. “Daria, speak.”

“Arf,” she said, which was speech, even if it was nonsensical. She drew a single shuddering breath and craned her neck to look out the fore-window at the sky. “My God, we’re alive. What are the odds?”

“Slim.”

She panted out a laugh, and then suddenly, she jerked and stared around at him. “What are you still doing here? Go on!” She began to pull at her harness, grimacing with some hidden hurt. “Go on, go get him! Run!”

Her harness wasn’t opening. Tagen tried to help her, but she slapped at his hands.

“Leave me!” she said, sounding more exasperated than anything else. “I’m not going anywhere! Don’t let him get away!”

“Daria—”

She left off her battle with the harness lock to slide her hand around his neck. He let himself be pulled to her and he kissed the mouth that sought his so urgently, but she pushed him away with the taste of her still new on his lips and gave him a severe stare. “Go get him, soldier,” she said quietly.

He held her eyes for a moment more, and then pulled out of her grip and turned away. His door was blocked and bent inward by broken trees. He crawled into the rear hold, kicked out the hatch window, and left her. He could feel her danger like a live coal in his chest, but he made himself be an officer now. He made himself leave her behind.

E’Var’s groundcar was smoking and empty. The passenger’s door hung open. The pilot’s was torn entirely away. Tagen reached into the crumpled interior and took the keys from the ignition, not to prevent the use of the car (which even Tagen could see had passed into the realm of the non-functional), but only to silence the tortured engines. He heard nothing, but E’Var’s trail was evident and bloodied.

Tagen drew his gun and started running.

*

Raven would not wake up. Her face was half-painted with blood from a wound in her scalp. Right before his eyes, her throat was purpling in a wide bar the very image of the groundcar’s harness. Her right leg had been pinned when the front hull buckled inward in the crash. It was bleeding heavily and was probably broken. He hadn’t had time to check for injuries beyond these obvious ones. He’d torn the shirt from her body to wrap her leg in and that was all.

He’d been lucky by comparison. His left leg had been knocked a damned good one when the console erupted. It ached relentlessly, but it wasn’t broken. His chest was scored by the same harness-mark as Raven’s, only in reverse angle, and it burned with every breath, hinting at a cracked rib or two, but more likely it was only bruised. Nothing seriously wrong, in other words, just wrong enough to keep him from running to his ship.

Kane had no intention of running anyway, even if he’d sprung from the crashed groundcar utterly unmarked. The Jotan he’d glimpsed in the car just before the impact had been the same one from the fair and he’d been the only Jotan in the car. The Fleet had sent just one officer to bring Kane down and now he was here, on foot and fresh from a collision. It was time to settle this.

Kane laid in a trail from the wreckage of his groundcar. He didn’t run far, but he did run clumsy, favoring his good leg much more than it deserved and counting on Raven’s extra weight in his arms to throw his tracks even more off-kilter. The blood from her injuries added an extra dimension to the lie, but it was a cold comfort with her lying so limp, so silent.

He took his time circling out after he reached the end of his false trail, even with time at such a high premium, making the best of his considerable skill at leaving no mark as he came around and back toward the site of the Fleet-fucker’s car. When it was in view (and on all four round feet, how in the fuck did he manage that?) Kane knelt and lay Raven out. She looked impossibly small and fragile against the dry earth, and the sight put the heat in him for killing. He hunkered over her, his claws combing at her hair. One of her alluring white stripes had been turned into a matted spike, and he rubbed at it futilely, trying to work up the nerve to leave her. If only she would open her eyes!

But she didn’t, and a smashing sound from the groundcar told him the officer was on the move. Kane had to act.

He unslung his pack and set it at Raven’s side, twining the strap through her slack hand and trusting her to know by seeing it that he was coming back for her and she should not move. He bent low, growling in her ear, hoping that some subconscious part of her would hear and know him. But that was all. And then he left her.

Kane got low and watched the lawman run toward the smoke of the crashed groundcar. He ran fast and fairly steady, too, and that was bad. Kane was all too aware of the hurts inside him. This had better not come to a hand-fight.

He waited only long enough for the officer to get out of sight, and then he was moving, still low, with the human gun in one hand and the other in claws. He circled the groundcar (noting with the cold half of his mind that it appeared to be working pretty well, even if it was hung up. He could move it when this was done, assuming Raven was in any condition to drive, and if she wasn’t, well, maybe it was time he learned for himself), watching the human within struggle with her harness. She was flushed, her face pinched with an expression that was one part fear to nine parts pure exasperation. Pinned in, somehow. Completely helpless.

Kane eased the safety off of his gun and got in close on the blind side of the car. He could hear her now, swearing softly and continuously under her breath, punctuating her words periodically with grunts of effort: “…let go of me, you—ungh!—goddamn thing. Stupid seatbelt bitey-thingy, the only fucking thing that’s—aagh!—damaged and it would be you, you piece of shit! If I have to write to the Ford company and tell them aliens got off the planet with a keg of human hypothalamuses—urrgh!—because their fucking seatbelt clicker locks up on impact, I will! Arrgh! Goddammit!” She banged her little fist on the guidance wheel just as Kane hooked his hand into the door handle, and then covered her face in defeat. “God, I could use a hand here,” she muttered.

Kane ripped the door open and had the gun pressed to the thin skin just below her eye before she could do more than just twitch.

“Very funny, God,” she said, her lips barely moving.

Kane cut the strap of her frozen harness with one pass of his claws, seized her by the throat, and pulled her from the car.

*

The trail vanished after a hundred paces. Just vanished, right before the rotting husk of a fallen tree. Tagen continued on another step, his eyes sweeping left and right as dread bloomed in him. He turned, forcing soldier’s stillness, and retreated along the line of E’Var’s flight, searching for the place his prisoner had split off after backtracking. He was aware of every tree, every thicket, every shadowed place where a Jotan might be sighting on him.

His plasma gun was a comforting weight in his hand, his thumb at home beside the kill-switch. “Surrender yourself,” he called in Jotan. The hot, dry air swallowed his words, giving him the surreal impression that they had not carried at all. “Kanetus E’Var, you can be arrested or killed! Choose!”

No answer, not that Tagen expected anything (unless, of course, it was the expectation of human gunfire splitting him open). Tagen eased out from the false trail, scanning for further signs. “I have you, prisoner! Surrender! You have no hope of escape!”

“No?” a voice called in N’Glish. “Then maybe I could interest you in a trade?”

Tagen dropped and spun, his gun hand aimed without thought or effort. His thumb was already on the kill-switch but he did not fire. If he had, he would have killed E’Var instantly, for he was sighted right at the slaver’s heart.

And at Daria’s wide, terrified eyes. E’Var held her before him, his hand clamped over her mouth and a human’s gun cocked at her temple.

“I realize I can’t help but offer you a clear shot to my head,” E’Var said from somewhere in the world. He was speaking Jotan again, clearly and quietly, so that the words registered without requiring any of Tagen’s concentration. “But these human guns are no toys. If my hand should twitch just a little, your fuck-mate’s brains are going to be spattered over every tree in arm’s reach.”

Tagen could not answer. Daria’s eyes transfixed him. There was no pleading in them, none. It was the look of a woman who sees her destiny and knows she will not escape it. Fears it, perhaps, but does not intend to fight it.

‘What have I done to you?’ he thought faintly. ‘I am sorry, Daria. I am so very sorry.’

“What is that, a plasma gun?” E’Var asked.

“Standard Fleet issue on deep-space assignment.” His voice seemed to come from somewhere behind him. It was a calm voice, almost the tones of a disinterested bystander, as steady as the hand that continued to aim a killing bolt directly at Daria’s pale face and the Jotan heart it shielded.

“Power it down and throw it to me.”

“No.”

E’Var bared his teeth and made an extremely human clicking sound of frustration. It was the first time Tagen had ever heard that sound issue from a Jotan. He wondered if E’Var meant to make it or if it were something that he’d just picked up.

“I’ll kill her if you don’t,” E’Var warned him.

“You’ll kill her if I do. I am not a fool.”

E’Var’s snarl melded unexpectedly into a rueful, queerly likeable grin. “Well, we’d better think of something fast or my hand will get tired. How about you point it at the ground?”

“And will you?”

“No, but I will aim mine for her guts. Not a killing shot, not all at once, anyway. More importantly, if you don’t point yours at the ground, I’ll be forced to try to impress you and that’s going to go poorly for your Earth-cunt here.”

Tagen eyes moved narrowly away from Daria’s face to the slaver’s.

E’Var’s gaze was black and cold and empty as space itself. “Compromise is the highest sign of intelligent reason,” he said mildly. “And unless you’re willing to negotiate, lawman, I might as well blow her open and eat your plasma. As you say, I have no hope of escape and a man without hope can do anything he damn well pleases.”

Tagen’s arm lowered slowly until it was pointed harmlessly at the ground. His thumb remained lightly aside of the kill-switch.

The gun in E’Var’s hand moved from sight to the unknown field of Daria’s back. A shot might travel through, might shatter her spine, might rupture any number of vital organs. In some ways, it was worse than seeing the weapon aimed at her head.

“So,” Tagen said, rising to face E’Var on level. “What is it you mean to do?”

“I mean to get off this hell-shat rock, that’s what I mean to do,” E’Var replied. “And I think I’d better hold on to your fuck-mate until I do it to ensure your cooperation.”

“No.”

“You want to think,” E’Var said softly, “before you say that. This tasty little cunt is a twitch away from an open breeze on her entrails.” He showed his fangs in a hard smile. “Somehow, I doubt you’re quite so willing to kill my hostage this time.”

“Neither am I willing to free a murderer.”

The slaver clicked again, and then cocked his head and looked thoughtful. He put his mouth close to Daria’s ear and, in N’Glish, murmured, “Your fuck-mate is telling me he’ll kill you to capture me.” He moved his hand from her mouth, inviting reply.

Tagen’s blood sparked, but, “Good,” was all Daria said. Her voice shook a little, but the emotion behind it never did.

“Good,” E’Var echoed. He shook his head. “You’d rather die than be saved by him. I suppose that’s what I get for assuming you liked the fucking he threw into you. But that’s v’kai for you. They do everything by regulation.” His eye came back to Tagen and narrowed. He bent again, this time to nip at Daria’s jaw. “But I don’t.”

There was no point in showing fang. Warning him off Daria would only be playing into E’Var’s game. Tagen bit down on his surging temper and remained expressionless and silent.

“Listen to that, ichuta’a,” the slaver continued. “That is the sound of a whole lot of don’t-care-if-you-die. Look at him. He doesn’t even look a little upset. Well, why should he? You’re human. The only thing a v’kai sees when he looks at a human is a nuisance.” He grazed his teeth again along Daria’s jaw. “But I don’t. And if I had a little more time—” His hand slid down along her body to cup her groin. He rubbed slowly twice, and then lightly squeezed, his eyes boring into Tagen’s. “—I ‘d show you a few things. Unluckily for you, I’m in a hurry.”

“Aren’t we all?” Daria shot back in her quavering voice. “So why don’t you give up on the whole scaring-me thing and skip to the fucking point?”

E’Var shook his head with a father’s indulgence. “Mouthy,” he remarked, and suddenly spun Daria around, wedged a claw into her mouth to pull it open, and inserted the killing end of his gun. He hushed her choking cry with that patient, soothing purr of his, his black eyes locked with Tagen’s all the while. “Just relax, ichuta’a. Relax. Don’t! Don’t pull away, just let it be. Now back up, nice and steady.”

E’Var walked, pushing Daria ahead of him gun-first. To Tagen, still in N’Glish, he said, “This is how it’s going to be, v’kai-untak. Your fuck-mate and I are going to watch you walk away—”

“No.”

E’Var’s fangs showed in a flash of ugly emotion. In Jotan, he snarled, “I’m not suggesting, slave-fucker, I’m telling you, and if you say ‘no’ one more time, I’ll shoot the head right off your bitch.”

“You offer me nothing,” Tagen said evenly, also in Jotan. “What assurance do I have that you will not kill her the instant I am out of sight?”

E’Var spat out something that was not quite a laugh, although it tried to be. “What do you want, my fucking station-dock pass card? Oh, I know. My solemn promise and word of good faith.”

“I propose we all walk to your ship together,” Tagen said. “I can therefore see that the hostage is safe, and you will know at all times where I am. You will release her when you reach your ship and by the time I get to mine, you should be through the Gate and well away.”

E’Var’s eyes were slits as he listened and when the offer was out and waiting for an answer, he grunted. For a long time, there was no sound but the droning of insects in the hot air. Then: “No.”

Tagen was genuinely surprised. It was a good offer, irreproachably canted in favor of the criminal’s escape. He could feel a frown working its way onto his features. “I will leave my weapons here,” he said, and placed the plasma gun carefully on the ground beside him. He straightened again, showing his empty hands, his empty gunbelt. “You have every advantage.”

“No.”

And this time, E’Var’s eyes flicked left to the trees, far too briefly to give Tagen time to claim his gun and fire, even if he wanted to risk such a shot. There was something in the woods, something the slaver did not want Tagen to know about. The Vahst. He’d stowed the Vahst somewhere in the forest and meant to collect it after Tagen was gone.

“What was it you said about compromise and reason?” Tagen pressed.

“You’re appealing to my sense of fairness?” E’Var did laugh this time. “Have you even read my file? No. We play this one way and one way only. I’m taking your fuck-mate with me and you are staying here. If I see you anywhere behind me, I’ll kill her. But I’ll give you a good trail to follow.”

E’Var’s hand sliced down and Daria cried out around the barrel of his gun as he cut into her arm.

“I’ll make sure there’s something fresh for you to find every so often,” he added, as Daria’s blood pattered down over the tree-needles. “Including her eviscerated corpse if I so much as glimpse you in the shadows. Now.” He did something to the gun in Daria’s mouth that made the human weapon click ominously. “Tell me we have a deal, lawman, or get ready to fire that thing.”

Tagen held the empty gaze of the slaver as the seconds slipped by. He had no thoughts. There was nothing, really, to think about. At last, he nodded.

*

The two aliens spoke for a long time in their snarling, guttural tongue. Daria could see only E’Var’s reactions, and as expert as she was in projecting the outward appearance of okayness while internally hemorrhaging emotion, she could easily read his rising frustration behind his sarcastically genial mask. Tagen’s voice remained quite calm. She was glad she couldn’t see him. She didn’t want to see anything but calm in his face.

She really hoped he wouldn’t go Hollywood on her. If Tagen promised to let this bad guy go just to let her live, she was going to slap him silly. Yes, she knew E’Var was probably going to kill her, and yes, she knew it was probably going to be a very bad way to die. But if he was going to do it anyway, she wished he’d do it fast and open himself up to Tagen’s fire.

Gosh, she was taking this well. And to think, last month she’d had a full-out panic attack when Troy had tried to cop a feel on her in the kitchen. Now she was the rope in an alien tug-of-war, peacefully contemplating her impending horribly painful death. Life was funny.

Then, without warning, E’Var cut her open with one pass of one claw—a long cut on her forearm, but not a deep one. She tried to shout, choked on the barrel of the gun in her mouth, and grabbed at the wound instead. Oddly enough, there seemed no malice in E’Var’s face when he’d hurt her and he was again ignoring her as he spoke to Tagen. But it wasn’t long before the conversation was over. E’Var cocked the gun and said just one thing more, his eyes narrowing.

Silence then. The whole woods were waiting.

And when it was done, E’Var smiled thinly.

‘Tagen,’ she thought, sighing. ‘You idiot.’

“Start walking, ichuta’a,” E’Var said, and gave her a little nudge to the back of her throat.

Oh hell, no. This was not going to end this way. Daria had been a lot of things in her life of which she was miserably ashamed, but she refused to be the girl in the movies that everybody in the audience rolls their eyes at and just hates for making the good guy give up, especially since out here in the real world, there were no script-writers standing by ready to draw up a highly-implausible happy ending.

She had just one instant to act. So she acted.

She raised her fists at once and socked him in both eyes. Not a wise thing to do by any means with a gun in her mouth, but to her utter astonishment, not only did E’Var not stop her (all his attention was fixed on Tagen) but he didn’t shoot her, either. E’Var’s reaction to getting hit was as instinctive and unreasoning to him as her panic attack had once been for her. He yanked the gun out of her mouth and walloped her with it, knocking her to the ground so fast, she was seeing the bells of impact even before she was aware she’d landed.

There was a split-second of perfect stillness during which E’Var actually gaped down at her as he realized he’d just thrown his own hostage and only shield out of the way. And then the whole world went to war.

E’Var was blasting away, Tagen was blasting back, and every bird for a five mile radius suddenly took off at once, screaming blue hell and a British invasion. White fire was spitting from the muzzle of the handgun, answered by bolts of brilliant blue from Tagen; both of them were running for cover and neither of them seemed to notice that she was lying there directly under their feet. Suddenly, two hands came out of nowhere, seized Daria’s feet, and yanked her into the bushes.

Roots and rocks scraped up her back, momentarily eclipsing all her other senses (even the holy agony that was the inside of her mouth, ripped to hell when E’Var had pulled the gun out), and when her eyes stopped tearing, she was looking at a girl.

She’d clearly come out the worst of all of them in the car wreck. Her shirt was gone, tied around her knee in a bloody make-shift bandage, and the chest this exposed to open air was badly bruised. She was gripping her side, breathing with what looked like a lot of strain, but she still managed to look more frightened than hurt, and that had to be promising. The face was instantly recognizable, despite the fact that Daria had never seen it before. A smooth little heart-shaped face, with rings of gold above the eyebrows and locks of white hair fringing out a fall of eggplant-purple. Her head was bloody, her face swollen in an airbag rash, and that took out a lot of the cute-factor that ordinarily would have stuck to her, but not all of it. Some girls could be cute no matter what.

“Raven, I presume,” Daria said.

The girl raised a finger to her lips and shhh’d, her eyes owl-wide. In a sketchy whisper, she said, “He’ll hear you. He can hear everything.” The girl’s lip quivered and she bent violently over, her hands covering her face and her shoulders shaking with the force of silent sobs.

Daria sat up. She started to reach for Raven and ended up grabbing her own swimming head instead. E’Var had really cracked her a good one. She peered back through the bushes, struggling to see past her headache, and what she saw on the other side chilled her.

Tagen had caught a bullet in his arm, maybe the last bullet, since E’Var was now using the handgun as a club. The sound of it thudding into Tagen’s body was very nearly the only thing she could hear. They weren’t shouting. They weren’t even snarling. They fought as Titans must have fought before the age of gods, slashing and grappling and stomping and all of it in near-total silence.

There was no walking away from this one, Daria realized. Someone was going to win. And someone was going to die.

The thought kept striking, like a hammer on a bell, sounding starker and starker with each repetition until Daria was physically flinching at the reality of it. And with the final silent tolling of its gruesome truth, she saw Tagen’s foot slip and he fell.

*

Raven came out of the dark in patches. First, sight-black lace over blue, dazzles of light like mental explosions. Then, sound—Kane’s voice in his language. She found herself dazedly trying to spell his words.

Another voice, same language. Who—?

Raven sat up, both hands pressed to her head as if to hold it on. Her eyes went first to the pack nestled at her side. The strap was wound around her wrist, but it still took her several groping efforts before she could catch on to it. Once it was securely in her grip, she felt much better, anchored back in the real world and ready to move on.

Where was she? She was in the woods. Lying on the ground in the woods. The car. Where was the car? It must have crashed. Had she been thrown all this way? The other car had bumped them. Bumped them, going ninety on that road! What kind of crazy goddamn driver…?

Raven rolled over, meaning to crawl onto her knees, and instantly, she collapsed on her belly biting both wrists to keep from screaming. Her sight trickled away from her, losing color first, and then clarity, until all the world was a fuzzy palette of grays. When it came back to her, she looked down and saw her leg.

‘I fell off my swing,’ she thought distractedly, and then gave her head a hard shake. ‘That’s broken,’ she thought next, more alertly. There was no bone showing through or anything nasty, but nothing could bleed that much and hurt that much unless it was broken. But it was broken below the knee, and that meant that, from a strictly physical standpoint, she could crawl.