“Crash,” Cedar agreed without any of her regret.
Kali leaned her rifle against the logs, jumped, caught the corner of the roof, and wriggled herself up top. Conscious of the fire damage, she stayed over the stout support beams as she crept to the peak. Though the trees still towered over her, the added height let her see smoke wafting in the distance. Definitely a crash.
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.” Ced
ar 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.”
“As you wish.”
The tracks only ran parallel to the ridge for a quarter of a mile. Then they surprised Kali by angling back toward the main river and the route she and Cedar had been on when they were attacked.
Her heart lurched. “We’re heading back toward the cabin.” And the SAB.
What if the woman, deeming her own transport too damaged to keep, stole Kali’s vehicle? While they were not so far from Dawson that they could not walk, she hated the idea of losing her latest invention. She had so many refinements she wanted to make. For one, a brush cutter was a brilliant idea. And she could add an—
“Kali!” Cedar grabbed her arm.
She tumbled back against him. “What is it?”
Nothing stirred in the brush, and birds chattered in a nearby thicket. When she detected nothing out-of-place in their surroundings, she searched his face. He was peering at the tracks a few feet in front of them.
“What’s that black rectangle?” he asked.
It took Kali a few seconds to find the object. There, mostly buried beneath needles and leaves, lay something flat and dark, the size of poker card.
“Back up,” she said.
When they had gone ten meters, she grabbed a rock and tossed it at the object. Her projectile clipped the corner. A boom thundered through the forest, and rock and dirt flew twenty feet into the air, pelting branches overhead and landing all about. Kali lifted an arm as shards rained down upon her and Cedar.
“There’s my booby trap.” Kali had no reason to be smug, not when she would have blundered onto it if Cedar had not stopped her, but being proven right about her hunch mollified her. The woman was someone to employ protective measures.
“And now the owner knows exactly where we are,” Cedar said, an eyebrow arched.
“Oh.” Yes, that sound had probably been audible for miles. Kali closed her eyes. Idiot. “Guess we could have gone around it without detonating it.”
“Likely.” r />
She would have given him a lengthy glower, but she was worried about her bicycle. With an eye toward the trail, she strode forward again. They passed—and avoided—three more booby traps before reaching the cabin.
“There’s the SAB!” Kali blurted, relieved when it came into sight.
She kept herself from running over to check it since the tracks led straight toward it. She and Cedar stepped carefully, searching for hazardous deposits on the ground. They found nothing more treacherous than a pile of bear dung, but Kali lingered a few feet from her vehicle without going close enough to touch it.
“Let’s be optimistic,” she finally said. “Maybe she knew we were after her and went straight through.” She pointed to the tracks, which continued past the bicycle and back down the road she and Cedar had followed up the river. It made sense that the woman would need to return to town to have her wound treated.
“She stopped here.” Cedar pointed to the ground next to the bicycle. “The tracks are deeper where the vehicle came to rest.”
Kali groaned. She spent the next fifteen minutes inspecting the SAB, checking all the spots she would booby trap if her goal were to incapacitate someone’s steam vehicle.
Cedar spent the time leaning against a tree, cleaning beneath his fingernails with a knife. “Shall I set up camp?” he asked at one point.
“No, but I wouldn’t mind something to eat, if you’re offering,” Kali said, her voice echoing oddly since she had her head stuck in the furnace. The fire had burned out while she and Cedar were roaming the hills. When he did not respond to her comment, she withdrew her head and looked at him. “Oh, was that sarcasm?”
His eyebrow twitched. “Possibly.”
He had to be getting impatient with this side trip. Might he be wondering why he had bothered to take her along? Aside from providing a mode of transport, what had she done to assist him? Even the transportation was of dubious worth. He would be closer to Wilder’s claim by now if he had walked up the trail.
Maybe they would catch this woman and find out she was some sort of super villain with a huge bounty on her head, and that would make this detour worthwhile.