“Freeze that shot!” said Ekaterin. “Go in close.”
The eyes were a pale ice blue. The ears looked decidedly pointed.
“My word, it’s Miles’s wood-elf!”
“Miles’s what?” said Martya, raising her brows.
“An albino person, surely,” put in Enrique, in a tone of helpful scientific correction.
“Yes, yes, I see that. But Miles, night before last, saw someone moving in the dusk, someone Vadim couldn’t find—he said it looked like a wood-elf. And, oh dear, it really does!” Miles would be—well, among other things, relieved that his vision hadn’t been the harbinger of some mental breakup. But otherwise, Ekaterin was fairly sure, as disconcerted as herself.
In the stilled vid-shot, it became clear that the elf was a boy. Ekaterin’s experienced eye pegged the age as somewhere between a well-grown eleven and an undersized fourteen, beardless, into his growth spurt but not yet into full puberty. Just about the age of her eldest son Nikolai, child of her first marriage.
Enrique, with a glance at her for permission, put the figure into motion once more. The boy set down a saggy cloth bag he’d carried slung over one shoulder and drew from it a liter-sized glass jar, with holes punched in its metal lid, which he unscrewed. He then dodged around the plot picking up the brightest radbugs and popping them into the jar.
“He’s not wearing gloves!” Martya wailed.
“He’s not even wearing shoes!” Ekaterin echoed her horrified tone.
Enrique sat up straighter. “Hadn’t noticed that, the first time through. But he’s stealing our bugs, the little—juvenile delinquent!”
When a dozen or more bright radbugs filled the jar, crawling over each other and making a flashing golden-purple lantern out of their prison, the boy bent and dribbled in a few leaves plucked from the bushes, rattled them down, and screwed the lid back on. He then skipped over to their open-sided shed and began loading the few tools stored there into the bag, examining each judiciously.
“There, right there, he’s stealing all our stuff!” said Martya.
They were all cheap tools designed to be used and then abandoned to their contamination in the zone; it was not the thought of the equipment but its potential radioactivity that raised the hairs on the back of Ekaterin’s neck. She didn’t know why the boy spent so much time shopping, because everything went into the bag just the same except the stepladder, which was too big to fit or, evidently, to be carried off. Though he tried it out, setting it up—but apparently not knowing enough to lock the safety catches, eep—and climbing up and down it, jumping off a few times from higher and higher steps. Luckily, it didn’t collapse on him during this game. Tilting it up against one tree, he climbed to take a closer look at one of the little vidcams. He tapped and yanked at it, but couldn’t pull it off its bracket; then, with an air of experiment, licked it. It certainly provided a closeup of his startling pale eyes. And long tongue. The view through it thereafter was somewhat smeary.
“Eew,” said Martya, dismayed.
Eventually tiring of this uncooperative object, the boy climbed back down, shoved the ladder back into the shelter, and turned away.
“But how did he get all the way out there?” asked Enrique. “There are no roads to the plot, not even old ones. Surely he’s too young for a lightflyer or float-bike license.”
“The backcountry people in the district, especially up in the mountains, aren’t too picky about little urban details like licenses and legal ages,” Martya observed, accurately.
Ekaterin studied the vid displays, following the boy-thief from view to view. “If he had a vehicle, I expect he would have taken the ladder. He seemed to like it a lot.” And what a strange thing to choose for a plaything, not that kids didn’t do that—spurning the toys and adopting the boxes they came in—but he’d treated it as a novelty, as if he’d never seen the like before. And why hadn’t he used some of the tools to take down the vidcams, considerably more valuable? “He might have walked.”
“All the way out there? Barefoot? From—wherever?” said Enrique in disbelief.
Ekaterin almost smiled. “People still do walk places in the backcountry. Not just for exercise, but to get where they’re going. Or ride horseback.” She eyed the slight, burdened figure, now stepping over the force barrier, dragging the bag with one hand and holding up the lantern-jar with the other. “Or on a pony,” she allowed judiciously.
“But our bugs, he’s taking them away!” complained Enrique. “What can he want them for? Ransom?” His slightly wild expression suggested that no price would be too much to pay to have them back safely.
“He’s just a child, Enrique,” said Ekaterin, a new and rather horrifying notion of the boy’s motivation growing in her mind. Could anyone on Barrayar, no matter how young or backcountry, not know what those trefoils meant? What if he’d simply thought her deadly radbugs were pretty?
“A mutant child, at that,” said Martya. “Do you suppose someone makes him go into the zone and steal things for them?”
All right, Ekaterin’s vision had not been as horrifying as that. “He looked… rather self-propelled. Cheerful. Active-skinny, not starving-skinny.” No bruises or marks of other abuse had showed on the pale skin, at least not on his arms or head or neck. The few scratches had looked like normal wear-and-tear for anyone crashing through the scrub without heavy clothing. But no one should be crashing through this scrub without protective gear. “I thought it was the District Rangers’ main job to keep people out of the zone. We’d better call Vadim.”
Martya promptly did so, only to discover that it was, apparently, the ranger’s day off; in any case, he was not reachable and did not return a call at her message.
“I didn’t know he had days off,” said Enrique, sounding vaguely puzzled. Naturally enough; Enrique didn’t exactly take breaks either, at least not scheduled ones, his time being divided into days with too many things to do, and days with far too many things to do—much like her own, Ekaterin reflected ruefully. Although he was occasionally dragged out of his lab by his wife Martya as a matter of principle. Ekaterin wondered guiltily if she ought to do that for Miles more often, but vacations with Miles usually ended up being more something you needed a vacation from, afterward. It was easier just to stand out of his way and let him go on till he dropped, which he eventually did. She tried not to let her mind sketch parallels with hyperactive toddlers.
“Did you bring your lightflyer?” Enrique demanded of Ekaterin.
“Well, yes—but even if we flew out there, we couldn’t land it. Or else we’d have to stop at the ranger station on the way back for decontamination,” she added more precisely. Enrique’s pedantic habits of thought were a trifle contagious.
Enrique waved this away as a bagatelle. “The thief evidently came back several times. If he has mechanical transport, we might be able to spot where he hid it. If he came on foot—” Enrique stopped and scowled.
“He couldn’t have come from very far away,” Martya completed the thought.
“Yes, but that would put his start point inside the zone,” objected Ekaterin.
“Then maybe we can spot it,” said Enrique.
“You and Vadim must have over-flown that area quite a few times when you were picking out and setting up the plot. Surely you’d have seen anything visible from the air.”
“Yes, but we weren’t looking for trespassers then!”
It was a valid point. She considered submitting the question to Miles, but first, he would already be head-down in his committee by now, not that he wouldn’t welcome almost any interruption from that, and second, he would likely veto her participation in the scouting expedition on sheer reflex. Try to veto, she corrected this thought a bit mulishly. She glanced at her chrono. It would only take an hour to fly down there and circle the area a few times, and she was already partway. And… she had to admit, the mysterious albino boy had left her both curious and disturbed.
“All right…”
; While Ekaterin called Aurie with this altered schedule, Enrique threw their protective gear into the back seat of the flyer, just in case. Ekaterin took the controls. Her flyer was a speedy little thing—a recent anniversary gift from Miles—and in much less time than it had taken the ranger’s lumbering lift van, they came up on the site of the plot once more.
Despite Enrique’s jittering anxiety, there was, as she’d mostly expected, nothing to see, even circling low and slow: no darting or lurking figures in the scrub, no parked vehicles of any kind, not even a pony tied to a tree.
Enrique hauled out the mass scanner.
“Those things can yield false positives,” she noted. “Even if you narrow the mass range. Dogs, goats, whatever.”
“But also true positives.”
“Mm, that’s so…”
A famous criminal gang had once infested the zone, radioactive Robin Hoods who stole from, well, pretty much anyone, and kept it for themselves, but that had been thirty years back. They hadn’t lasted long. They had become instant local legends, though—Miles as a young boy had been just of the age to be impressed. She hoped he identified more with the brave local guardsmen who’d finally rousted them out of their holes than with the repellent robbers. But it was a stretch to imagine such dramatic figures stooping to filching gardening tools.
Nevertheless, at Enrique’s insistence she banked the flyer in a widening spiral around the plot, at treetop level and the lowest possible speed. The red-and-green woods flickered by below. She wondered briefly if being colorblind would have actually helped her confused perceptions. If their quarry was anything as dangerous as criminal fugitives, Ekaterin thought she’d be perfectly happy for someone other than herself and one gangling and not very physically coordinated off-worlder to be the first to find them. Wasn’t the ranger cadre trained for just such tasks? She was about to point this out to Enrique when he suddenly sat up and exclaimed into his scanner. “There, over there!” He waved urgently out the windshield.
“What? People?”
Enrique fiddled. “Mm, oh, not at three hundred kilos. Maybe wild ponies, or red deer… ah.”
Ponies, three of them, browsing in a slice of water meadow. Wild and shaggy and probably with hot bones. No sign of a paddock fence. She was about to bank away when one of them trotted, well, not trotted—hopped its way out of the longer grass and put its head down to the streamlet running from the ridge to the west.
“Hobbles!” Ekaterin cried in excitement.
“What?” said Enrique.
“That pony is wearing hobbles! They’re like, like… binders, restraints people fasten around the front fetlocks—front legs—to let them wander and graze but not go too far, when they don’t have fences. That pony is tame!” Staring at the unkempt, cranky-looking creature, who snorted up suspiciously at the hovering flyer and braced to bolt, Ekaterin corrected this assertion to, “Owned, anyway.” She eased the flyer away so as not to spook the little herd.
If they had been flying any higher or faster, Ekaterin would not have seen it, that faint rectangle in the trees covered with moss, vines, and rocks. “Is that a roof over there?”
Enrique followed her gaze and swung his mass scanner around as she banked the flyer again. As their altitude dropped and the angle changed, the dilapidated gray structure swam into her focus. A shack, a cabin—Ekaterin gulped. I am not superstitious, drat it!
It was not a sinister hut in the forest on chicken legs, it was not… Ekaterin’s heartbeat came off its sudden sprint as the ‘chicken legs’ resolved themselves into an array of dead tree trunks, cut off at about three meters from the ground and supporting the structure like pillars under a platform. The gnarled, dry old roots spread out like talons at the bases of their boles. As false a first impression, if as understandable, as Miles’s wood-elf.
Also, the hut did not lack windows or have a hidden doorway to be invoked only by a virtuous and intelligent girl with the magic words; the wooden door was right there on the end, with a ladder descending from its narrow slice of porch. Good protection from feral dog packs or other ground-based hazards, including the poisonous soil itself, the rational part of Ekaterin’s mind insisted, firmly. All very logical, made perfect sense, and her stomach could just turn itself back right-side-up any time, now…
A faint haze of smoke dispersed from a fieldstone chimney.
“Land, land!” Enrique thumped her shoulder.
“I’m landing!” They scraped through the tree branches that squeaked over the flyer like clawed fingers, then bumped to a halt a dozen meters in front of the strange structure.
Ekaterin stared. Enrique scanned.
“Is there anyone inside?” Ekaterin asked through a dry mouth. Where there was smoke…
“Not right now…” Enrique scrambled over into the back seat and handed up Ekaterin’s protective gear. They each began to don the cumbersome overalls and booties in the cramped confines of the lightflyer. Lab gloves, their hoods-and-masks, and then they both popped out of their respective doors, puffy white ragdoll figures with vaguely insectoid heads, although properly, Ekaterin thought, the round air filters should be set at eye and not cheek level in the half-cylindrical transparent face masks in order to complete the illusion.
At the foot of the shack’s ladder they paused and stared at each other. While happy to defer to Enrique in the areas of his considerable technical expertise, she was, after all, Lady Vorkosigan. This task wasn’t anything she’d ever pictured appending to her new role, but the implication was clear. Ekaterin swallowed, wrapped a gloved hand around a ladder rung, and hoisted herself aloft. Still clutching the scanner, Enrique awkwardly followed.
A string-latch opened the plank door. The hut was a single room, lit only dimly by small, mismatched windows on each side, slate-and-fieldstone hearth at the far end. A few coals glowered out through gray ash. As her eyes adjusted, Ekaterin saw that the walls and floor were crowded by a motley assortment of goods—partly handmade backcountry tools and furniture that might have come straight out of the Time of Isolation, familiar enough from Ekaterin’s trips with Miles up into the mountains, partly what clearly were recent rubbish-tip gleanings.
The rag-stuffed mattress on a wooden cot to one side was held up by a net of woven plastic rope bits. Another rag-stuffed mattress, shoved out of the way underneath like a trundle bed, seemed to have an old print shower curtain for a counterpane. A crudely cobbled-together double bunk on the other side of the room was similarly decked out. Four people live here, then…?
The kitchen goods around the hearth were a like mix—one solid ancient cast-iron frying pan hung on a hook, a very miscellaneous assortment of plastic and metal and formerly electric gadgets repurposed to a powerless—in both senses, perhaps—lifestyle. Impoverished, yet not wholly uncomfortable… Ekaterin was reminded of Miles’s description of his grandfather, the crusty old count whose childhood went back to the time Barrayar had been rediscovered, as a man notably indifferent to indoor plumbing.
Less historically romantic in the winter, to be sure.
But what are they doing for food…? The shelves included ordinary food in modern packaging that could have come from any grocery in Hassadar; home-dried vegetables and herbs hung in strings from the rafters that might have looked quite enticing, except, grown here? and dried meat likewise alarming; a basket containing a few feather-and-dirt-flecked eggs plainly filched straight from feral chickens.
“Nobody home,” Enrique stated the obvious. His voice, though curious, did not quaver with nerves.
Ekaterin steadied her own. “They’ve not gone far, I’d guess. Let’s take a look around outside.”
The kitchen garden, now she knew to look for one, was not in one big tidy plot visible from the air, but distributed around in small, sunny patches. In a dark, moist, shaded dell hidden among the trees behind the cabin was… what? What looked like yellowish fence posts, but it couldn’t be a garden in that gloom. As she ventured nearer, the posts resolved into a cluster of
peeled saplings, with strange pale knobs on top. Oh.
“Now, that’s a touch disturbing,” admitted Enrique, peering over her shoulder. “Or is this another of your local customs?”
“Not… really.”
Skulls on posts. Eleven of them, Ekaterin counted. A twelfth post stood up new and bare. Most of the skulls seemed old and weathered enough to be free of flesh and hair. Ekaterin couldn’t decide if that was reassuring or not. Variously weathered, so different death dates? As she studied them, her stomach knotted at a further observation.
“They’re… small. Mostly. Enrique, I think these are children’s skulls.”
“Unless they are microcephalic people,” he offered. Was that supposed to be helpful…? But really, he didn’t look as if he believed his own alternate hypothesis. “One might tell from the teeth, I believe. I wonder where the bodies are?” He lifted his mass scanner and walked around among the grinning posts, eventually looking downward. “Ah. They seem to be buried by the bases of these poles.”
“Are there very many?”
“Mm, no, they seem to be in a one-to-one ratio with the disjecta membra.”
Not a mass grave, then, though certainly a graveyard. She was no trained forensic pathologist, but she could recognize milk teeth when she saw them, and the meaning of those small jaws. Children; a variety of ages. A couple of the smaller crania were notably misshapen. Her own teeth set. She unhooked her rad scanner from her belt and held it near to test several skulls. It chittered excitedly. The concentration of radiation was well above background, if not quite as intense as some of the hot animal bones found in the zone.
Enrique, who had been circling the plot waving his scanner and squinting into the woods, said, “There’s another structure over there.”