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The weird thing about turning a bad ankle is that you know – you know, long before the weight centers and your calf begins to wobble – that you’re going to fall.
Carmina felt the tell-tale twinge, flaring a red-hot warning in the joints binding her once-broken bones, but it was too late to stop it; by that point, she was running so fast that her body overtook its own inadequacies by three strides before the pain caught up to her. Panicked, panted breathing hitched on a dismayed little yelp of surprise, gloved fingers clawing the air for some sort of handhold. But then her mind caught up with that, too, reminding her that she was running along the narrow strip of a forty-foot wall with nothing but her own audacity to balance her.
Bits of rubbled concrete skidded unhelpfully beneath the twisting soles of her heavy black boots, the noise blending with the sudden staccato shriek of firing guns. The guards, sensing her sudden distress with the uncanny instincts of born-and-bred predators, were taking advantage of the moment for all it was worth. Carmina reached for the pistol at her waist even as she began to fall, twisting around mid-air to fire back an answering report. There was no hope of accuracy, not at this distance and in this dark, certainly not while plummeting unexpectedly off of the wall; but the thought that she might at least dent their self-confidence was worth a wasted bullet or two.
She felt the sudden rush of frigid air like a knife blow in her chest, as icy and piercing as the pale spotlight which panned her body for one brief, blinding moment. The hostile glare of that illumination seemed to slow time for an instant, pinning her up against the darkness of the sky: black hair cutting swathes of untidy, shadowy bands across her winter-pale skin, red cloak unfurled like the bloodied wings of a vengeful angel, the gash of her scarlet-painted mouth bared, feral and defiant.
And then the light moved on and there was nothing but the ground, rushing up to meet her.
“I’ve got you!” someone shouted from below, and he did; instead of being swept away by the agony of shattering bones, she found herself caught up in a pair of strong, supportive arms. It took her a moment to register that she was safe: not dead, not caught. When she did, she thanked him in the only way she knew how.
She elbowed him hard in the face.
“I told you to stay out of this!” Carmina hissed as she was dropped back onto her feet, her dark green eyes immediately sailing skyward to judge the distance remaining between them and her pursuers. The fall might be more than enough to deter even the bravest of jumpers, but it provided no hindrance whatsoever for a hungry bullet. “Did you see the Wolf? I was hot on his heels before he tripped the damn alarm. Unless that was you.” She flicked a suspicious glance in his direction, black-gloved fingers drumming restlessly against the handle of her gun.
He stopped rubbing at his sore nose a moment to raise his hands in self-defense. “I was out patrolling the Fringes when I heard the alarm sound. Came to investigate – luckily for you.”
“Yeah, right, thanks, you’re my hero.” She rolled her eyes impatiently, gathering the snarls of her long hair over one shoulder and shaking out her cloak. “And?”
“And no Wolf,” he confirmed. His bright blue eyes gave her an appraising once-over. “Looks like he slipped your noose again. I’d suggest you start running if you want to slip theirs.” The Woodsman waved one arm in vague indication of the guards, the echo of their footfalls now battering against the concrete wall.
Carmina didn’t need to be told twice. Reaching into one of the pockets of her cargo pants, she pulled out the USB drive she’d taken from inside and tossed it to him. “What he stole,” she explained. “He dropped it on his way out the door.” Before he had a chance to properly look at the device, she had flicked a careless wave in his direction and turned, bolting off into the waiting shadows. For a moment, he was able to track her as she made her way across the yard, her red cloak faded to the color of dried blood in the dark. But then that was gone, too, and only the warmth lingering against the metal piece in his hand suggested she’d ever been there at all.
The night was infinite and starless here, one patch of solid black stretched to cover the whole of their world. The single, cracked light on his motorbike did distressingly little to pierce the gloom, its feeble glow swallowed by the crouching darkness before it could pick out his path. They heard the engine, though, even down in the little gully where the sea had once been, and by the time he trudged up to the campfire, they were all waiting for him.
They sat huddled together in a semi-circle with their backs against the base of the cliff, the firelight throwing their shadows in a menacing arc against the rock. Their eyes – those which were artificial and those which were not – gleamed like gimlets at the sound of his approach even before they could make out his form in the dark, hungry and watchful as the animals they sometimes pretended to be.
Caelum dropped his pack without ceremony at the edge of the fire, the tools of his trade clinking together softly as they resettled in the dirt. Not pausing to answer their silent questions, he crossed instead to the enormous metal figure hulking at the furthest edge of the light. It did not respond to his reassuring pat, not even when he bent to pull a weed away from one of its rusting legs, but that didn’t keep him from murmuring reassuringly to it – words of failure, yes, but only for its ears alone. The others watched him, charting his progress by the shock of his white-blonde hair alone once he’d retreated away from their meager light, though they did not interrupt. They said nothing at all, not until Caelum had taken his seat near the fire and someone had passed him a bowl of what passed for their dinner.
“Grandmother grows tired of waiting,” one of them ventured tentatively into the lull. It was Crow, Caelum noted, his black scavenger’s eyes glinting like obsidian above the narrow plane of his beaked nose. His eagerness was all of theirs, though he had always been the most adamant about showing it.
“You do not know what Grandmother wants.” Crow visibly cringed into himself at the Wolf’s reprimand, the proper response of an omega to his alpha, though that did not stop Caelum from touching his twin’s arm lightly with his fingers. Ciel had always been too quick to show his teeth, the tempestuous flash lurking behind Caelum’s own indifferent calm. Together, they were the Wolf, the leader, successful only in that they balanced one another out.
“None of us may claim to know Grandmother’s mind.” This from Bear, a peaceable old matron with beads in her silver hair and a blanket which might have once been blue draped around her thin shoulders. The firelight smeared shadows into the creases of her weathered face until even she appeared to wear war paint in the dark. “Not until the day of Awakening.”
“A day which ain’t gonna come unless Wolf gets his head out of his ass.” Coyote scratched derisively at his yellowing teeth with a toothpick before tossing the strip of wood into the blaze. His one remaining eye was dwarfed by the cybernetic implant covering the other socket, the glowing red sphere constantly whirring quietly as it worked to focus on each of them in turn. He had become an excellent sniper after its installation, compensation for the end of his days as a scout. Anyone within fifty feet could hear him coming.
Caelum touched the back of his brother’s hand again, sighing as he combined his fingers through his hair. “We need help,” he announced finally; words none of them wanted to hear. He turned his head to stare blindly out into the night, the edge of the feather wound around a lock of his mane gently brushing against his cheek with the motion. “Grandmother cannot awaken without the proper start-up sequence, and as I’ve told you before, those codes are heavily guarded by the Villagers. The file I meant to steal tonight was only a method of penetrating the first layer of their firewall; this is a long process. One we do not have time for. I am a Predator, but I am no Magpie. We need a thief.” Abruptly, Caelum set aside his bowl and rose to his feet, wandering a little distance away with his back to them. When it became obvious that he would not immediately return, the others looked at Ciel expectantly.
“Red is the most skilled of the Magpies,” Ciel continued, just as though the thought had belonged to him all along. Identical to his brother in outward appearance, it was literally impossible to tell them apart in the dark. “Though we have had our differences with her in the past, she has no love for the Villagers. We must ask her for her help. In her own way, she is just as invested in seeing Grandmother awaken as we are.”
“Magpies are bad luck,” Coyote reminded them uneasily, spitting to his left to ward away the ill omen. Crow nodded his head in fervent agreement. “’Sides, she ain’t gonna truck with you, Wolf. She hates you.”
“The longer we sulk out here, the more we risk discovery. If the Villagers find Grandmother before her awakening, they will destroy her.” Ciel’s ice-blue eyes narrowed into ominous slits. “Is that what you want?” he asked in harsh, clipped tones. “Is that what you think Red wants?”
The others looked at one another in uneasy silence.
“How do we find her?” Rabbit asked finally. He was the youngest and the quietest in the group, and so perhaps it wasn’t too surprising that he was also the most practical. The hacker had been leaning over his bent knees, sketching aimless binary sentences into the dirt near his worn-out shoes, but he looked up at them now through his lowered lashes. “Magpies are untraceable; the System can’t read their codes. Some people think they literally vanish after their jobs are done.” Coyote snorted derisively and Rabbit shot him a slightly wounded look. “… I didn’t say I thought that, but some people do. They’re good at hiding their tracks. It’s not like we can just look up Red’s number in the Directory or something, is it? We don’t even know her name.”
“I know where to find her,” Caelum and Ciel announced in the strange, unsettling way they had of sometimes speaking together; not so much an echo as two halves of once voice united, deeper and more knowing. Coyote’s eye clicked gratingly as it tried to focus on both twins at once, until Fox – the last and most taciturn member of their group – delivered a helpful slap to the back of his head.
“First thing tomorrow, then,” Bear suggested, glancing up into the vast nothingness stretching overhead.
“No,” Caelum amended. “It has to be tonight. The Woodsmen are out on the Fringe; we don’t have any time to lose.”
Every Avian had a reason for planting their home where they did, though most of them would not disclose the location of theirs if you asked. To some, it was simply a matter of finding a prime location, some place high, perhaps, where one might watch the comings and goings of the city, or maybe somewhere well-sheltered and out of the cruel, numbing wind. Others settled around locations which held some sort of emotional significance for them, usually from their previous life as a Villager. But whatever their reasoning, the one factor all Avians had in common was that they lived alone. Nests were secret affairs, kept hidden even from one another. When they wanted to, the Birds found you.
Carmina, had anyone had a way of knowing it, fell into the second category. Her home, perched precariously atop the city’s library, kept her close to the books she’d adored as a child and near to the old haunts her beloved father had once frequented. Located across the street from City Hall, the sheer audacity of the location kept the Chimney Sweepers away – in the three years since her father’s death she’d only gotten into one scuffle concerning her new resting place, and that was with another Avian who fancied stealing the location. From here, she could sit just outside of the tiny shack she’d constructed out of stolen pieces in the lee of the chimney, her back to the fire-warmed bricks as she sipped her tea and watched the little flood of Villagers passing below her.
Tonight, however, she was in no mood for silently mocking the government’s latest uniform remodels.
Stretching out on her back amidst a heap of pilfered blankets, she stared moodily up at the smoke-warped ceiling and thought about the man she’d failed to catch. Again. It had all seemed so wonderfully straightforward when she’d begun this chase three years ago. Working as a government spy had given her the training she needed to be a Magpie, and she was frighteningly skilled at the job, working for pay when she ran low on food but always honing her skills with one specific prey in mind: the man who had stolen her father’s greatest work and effectively destroyed his reputation. The Wolf was only a mangy Predator, after all, forced to live with his rag-tag band on the outskirts of society, surviving off of what they could glean from the edges of civilization. It was true that the Woodsman had never been able to catch him, but then, Woodsmen were often incompetent; more boys playing at cops and robbers than actual trained professionals, as far as Carmina was concerned. But she was a Magpie, not a Woodsman. She should have had her revenge long before now.
“I am going to get you back, Grandmother,” she vowed quietly, mostly to reassure herself of her own determination. “That cowardly cur won’t keep you forever.”
“Especially if that ‘cowardly cur’ never intended to do so in the first place.”
Carmina sat up so fast that her head collided with the underside of the house’s only shelf, upsetting its contents into a clattering heap on the floor. She’d hung her gun with its holster on the hook across the room, but her knife was still in her boot. By the time she’d rolled to her feet it was in her hand, flashing with deadly intent in the yellow flare of her lamp.
The Wolf was standing near the chimney, one hand braced against the flue as his feet held precarious purchase on the decaying tiles – out of his element, certainly, but looking smugly triumphant at having located her nest. Between his pale skin and his white hair, he blazed like a beacon against the dark; she couldn’t help but think that he must resemble a star from the streets below. A perfect target for the Woodsmen, had they only the wit to notice their opportunity.
Strangely, it was that thought and not his brazen intrusion which kindled her ire.
“What do you want?” she hissed, rising slowly from her crouch with the blade extended slantwise in front of her chest. “How did you find me?”
He ignored both of her questions. Indeed, it seemed the act of maintaining his footing held much more of his attention than she did, weapon and all. “By your own rules, you cannot draw blood from me unless I draw blood from you first. To do otherwise would sully your home.” Staring hard at the tiles below him, the Wolf took a cautious step in her direction, arms outstretched in a bid for balance.
“I remember the Code,” she spat contemptuously, and it did not escape his attention that she neglected to sheath her knife. “You would do well to remember that it says nothing about pushing you off the roof to your death below.”
First foot successfully in place, he carefully swung his other leg around beside it. “Yes. Perhaps someone would catch me? Though that might be too much to expect; we cannot all be as lucky in our friends as you.”
In spite of herself, Carmina’s pale cheeks flushed. “My relationship with the Woodsman is my concern, and mine alone.” It disturbed her that he had witnessed their earlier exchange – where had he been standing, and why hadn’t she noticed him when she’d been following so close behind? – but pride prevented her from asking the obvious questions. Though that didn’t mean he couldn’t still read them in her eyes.
“The USB drive was a fake,” he supplied, skidding slightly as he braved another small step forward. “Your Woodsman will give it to his tech department, and when they try to open the file, it will spread a virus throughout their system, corrupting their database. A temporary inconvenience at best, but one which will keep them busy for weeks.”
“You’re lying,” she decided after a pause, watching his haphazard approach with obvious distrust. “He was patrolling the Fringe tonight. He told me so himself. You had no way of knowing that he would answer the system alarm.”
He lifted his head to look at her again, another pale, piercing light to pin her fast against the dark. “But I knew you would come,” he murmured calmly. “And where you are, he is.”
It was a presumptuous comment, and it raised her hackles. “I’ve tracked you for years, but now that you have saved me the trouble of finding you, I demand that you take me to Grandmother. She doesn’t belong to you, and I demand her safe return. Now.” Carmina sliced her weapon through the air suggestively.
“I do not want to hurt you,” the Wolf said calmly in response, and she couldn’t help but laugh. What could he possibly do to her here, unarmed and unstable? “But I require your assistance. Whether you are willing to give it to me or not.”
It was her turn to take a step forward, menacing and sure. “You think I am some witless Villager who flees at your howling? You are in my home, inside my city, and the law is sleeping far below us. You have stolen something from me, and I want it back!”
“I will steal much more from you before the night is over,” he murmured, sounding strangely sad. And then he reached beneath his fraying black shirt and pulled free a little gear on a tarnished chain. “Grandmother must be awoken, Red. She will not open the door to the Wolf, but she will respond to you. You have the key – the access codes to her mainframe. I am certain that you do, whether you remember having them or not.”
Understanding dawned darkly on her tight, angry face, her free hand stealing of its own accord to the metallic patch at the base of her skull. “My system will not respond to you without my consent; you have no power over me, Wolf.”
“No,” he agreed, and then he held up the gear again. “… But Grandmother does.”
He had broken into their home, stolen Grandmother, and now he violated her by consuming her bones for his own sustenance – and the worst of it was that, her code in hand, he could override Carmina’s own programming and steal from her, disguised as Grandmother. Snarling viciously at the sheer audacity of his intent, Carmina lunged forward over the rooftop, ramming into his chest hard with her shoulder until she’d thrown him back against the chimney. Unbalanced and uninitiated into her rooftop world, he was powerless to stop her. But he had anticipated the attack. Letting his body fall down the length of the rigid bricks, he struck out with his leg before she could completely recover herself, sweeping her legs out from beneath her. The momentum of the fall sent her slipping down the roof’s abrupt slant, and – forced to choose between holding on to the tiles or keeping a hold of the knife – she watched the blade sling off into the dark alleyway below.
And then somehow he’d restored himself into a predatory crouch, her scattered lamp light licking off of the barrel of a carefully aimed gun. Just like that, the tables had been turned, as though he’d planned it out from the very start. Blind hatred tinted the world behind her eyes a furious, throbbing red, but she was not about to be cornered without a fight.
Without warning, Carmina threw her body to the side, tucking her arms into the roll until she’d hit the edge and beyond. Fingers scrabbled across the last row of slick tiles, arresting her momentum with a feline’s tenacity as she swung her legs out and leaped onto the lower roof beneath them.
He might be able to out think her, out track her, and even outgun her – but there was no way a Predator could outrun an Avian, at least not here.
Wasting no time looking over her shoulder, Carmina sprinted along the seamed peak of the roof, tiles rattling beneath the thunderous quake of her heavy steps. If she was lucky, the noise would wake the City Watch, and the Wolf – still shining like a guiding light against the world’s dark backdrop – would be signaled out immediately.
Still, best not to leave anything to chance.
Reaching the edge of the roof, the Magpie leapt easily across the empty gap separating the library from the abandoned museum, tucking and rolling across the filthy concrete. She could hear the noisy clatter of his inelegant pursuit behind her as she surged back to her feet, and even as she darted forward, his first shot pinged dangerously off of a fire escape ladder to her right. She veered sharply to the left in response, using her momentum to catapult her sleight weight against the rusted stairwell door. It threw her back and away with stubborn defiance, but desperation made her especially persistent. Two more runs against the peeling green paint allowed the Wolf to gain precious ground, but they also succeeded in snapping the door’s ancient lock. Carmina leapt from one landing to the next, foregoing the stairs entirely as she ping-ponged her way through the musty, stifling dark. The old metal rattled ominously above her as he followed suite.
When Carmina finally emerged through the first floor doorway, the tomb-like darkness of the building brought her up short. This was the perfect place to hide from the law, perhaps, but she knew from experience that the Wolf’s eyes were unnaturally keen in the dark. Running remained her best evasive tactic, but to trip over something now would be to risk life and limb. “Light on,” she commanded her wristwatch in a breathless whisper, and the circular face obediently emitted a bright blue glow. It wasn’t much, granted, and the battery wouldn’t last long; but it was better than nothing.
Holding her wrist out before her, Carmina began running again, nostrils filling quickly with dust and the scent of decay as her boots squeaked faintly across the gritty flooring. She could just make out an army of sullen, brooding shapes looming in the periphery of her vision – harmless boxes and abandoned displays, no doubt, though the darkness in here was ancient and it leant something especially sinister to the shadows hovering all about her. She felt a little like a tomb raider in one of her father’s old books, desecrating something sacred. But the Wolf’s footfalls continued behind her, regular and inexorable as a heartbeat, and there was no time to make her apologies.
The Magpie’s path was wandering and aimless, her intent being to find the exterior doors, but her feet having no idea which direction to take. She bolted through room after room, inhaling the dust deeply into her heaving lungs and struggling not to choke. Exit, exit, exit she chanted steadily in her head, over and over like a mantra, eyes frantically panning the gloom for something resembling a door.
But what her gaze eventually located was a wall – insurmountable and solid and standing defiantly in her path.
Dead end, she realized with a sickening lurch. She had found the back of the building instead of the front. Her only options now were either to try retracing her steps or to hide, and with the echo of the Wolf’s footfalls sounding louder and louder every second, Carmina opted to dive behind a shadowy, box-like shape to her left. “Light off,” she whispered, and then the darkness was complete again.
In the absence of sight, every other sensation seemed bigger. The sound of the Wolf’s pursuit was everywhere now instead of just behind, a carnivorous sound which ate into the floor and the ceiling and the marrow of her very bones. Dust clung thickly to the back of her throat, making every labored breath a struggle for air and for quiet. Carmina drew her knees up to her chest to steady her trembling body and counted slowly in her head, fighting for calm and composure.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, Red,” the Wolf called out suddenly, even closer now than she had expected – or was that just a trick of the dark? “We want the same thing, you and I. I told you; I have no wish to harm you.”
Carmina said nothing in response, concentrating hard on his echoes and struggling to pinpoint his location. Futile, perhaps, but it kept her focused.
“If the Villagers had found Grandmother, they would have destroyed her,” the Wolf continued, from somewhere off to her left, she thought. “Your father’s work would have been in vain. You wish to preserve his memory, Red, and I wish to preserve his creation.” Carmina risked turning her head slightly, willing her useless eyes to find something to hold on to –
– and then his palm collided with her chest, shoving her back against the box behind her with enough force to steal her barely recovered breath. A sudden white light exploded in the darkness behind him, flattening him almost into a silhouette directly before her: piercing and penetrating, the glow seemed to slow time for just one, precious instant. In that moment she was keenly aware of the heat in his hands, the sharp rictus of his bared teeth; “What big eyes you have,” she whispered in awe, gazing into his burning irises, so hungry, so old –
And then the gunshots rang out, splattering his crimson blood across her startled face. Even as the Wolf slumped forward into her numbed arms her Woodsman was there, thrusting the Predator aside and pulling her to her feet. “Are you hurt?” he asked her anxiously, the white beam of his flashlight – just an ordinary light now, and nothing more – skimming across her body. There were other Woodsman in the room, flooding in through the door she hadn’t been able to find, and she watched for a moment in silence as they searched the Predator’s body. He was dead, the soles of their boots mingling his blood with the ancient dust on the floor.
Just one more artifact in the neglected museum.
“I’m fine,” she said slowly, blinking heavily against the weird sense of vertigo and loss. Only a moment; in one here, in one gone, so many tiny moments accumulating like grains of sand in an hour glass, now shattered and scattered across the filthy floor tiles. She shook her head and left that particular moment behind.
“I told you, he was mine,” she snapped angrily, giving the Woodsman an impatient shove away from her. Wiping the untidy, shadowy bands of the Wolf’s blackening blood from her face with one scrunched-up sleeve, she spat disdainfully on his corpse and sauntered towards the open door. She was upset with her Woodsman for stealing her kill, but there was at least one thing which even she could not deny: the Wolf was dead. Without him, the pack would soon fall and Grandmother would be safely restored.
Scarlet lips twisting in grim satisfaction, Carmina pulled the hood of her battered red cloak over her head and began to walk through the maze of city streets, boots clicking rhythmically in the curfewed quiet of midnight. The cold wind prowled beside her for a while, eddying around her ankles each time she paused to glance over her shoulder.
She was almost home again when the howling began: agonized and lost and entirely too thin, like the ghost of a voice that had already faded off into silence.
Then again, it may have just been the wind. In this city, it was always a little hard to tell.