They could agree on that. But it didn’t mean he’d know the rest of her signals: working with a stranger, sensible as she was, meant they couldn’t predict each other’s moves if the ambient went as crazy on them as he was afraid it would.
Another reason she needed one of the guns.
It was likely she had her own doubts about him. She was mostly thinking about her partners, with that skittish, spooky skipping-about of thoughts she had—or Flicker had. Hard to pin down. Hard to understand, sometimes. Skittish as Shadow, and that was going some. But bright, not dark; she blinded you with sunglare when you came too close to her. She whited out your vision.
And he wanted—
Hell, he didn’t know. Flicker’s change-abouts were contagious. Confusing.
Just—Aby was dead. And he wasn’t. He’d discovered that unsettling fact last night, felt guilty, and angry, and distracted, and glad—none of which he could afford right now.
Autumn promises. He needed his mind on present business. He needed his mind on the ambient, not pouring problems into it.
So he wanted the rogue to show, dammit—he saw no reason for them to freeze chasing it. He <wanted > it into the ambient, until Burn began to be disturbed with him and laid back his ears and nipped at his leg. Something ghosted at him in that second, drifted through the ambient—and stopped.
“Tell you something,” Tara said to him then, in that moment that the air was still a little spooky and strange. “I was through this stretch of woods a few days ago with the rogue on my tail. I didn’t know what it was at the time—but it’s hard to be back here and not think about it. Sorry if I do it. Just so you know. It’s a memory.”
“Yeah,” he said. He’d just had a momentary sending, just <white-white-white> for a moment as if the blizzard had come back. Scary. Something in the trees.
He’d provoked it, he thought.
Begging trouble. With a shell in the chamber. Driving his partner crazy. Making her doubt what she heard and saw. A help. A real help, he was being.
<Kid on that horse.> That was what scared hell out of him. Tara’s image of that damnfool kid. It wasn’t neat, it wasn’t clean— they had a townbred junior to separate out of the problem.
A kid who, if she hadn’t frozen to death, might not be sane.
Or might not want to be sane, if they did get her back.
“Kid opened a gate,” Tara said sharply. “She went out where she knew she wasn’t supposed to go.”
“Not the only village kid who ever did it,” Guil said. Her anger with the girl bothered him. There wasn’t compassion. Maybe it was because it was a girl, and Tara made demands she’d have made of herself. He didn’t know.
It was her village that was dead. It was her partners that were dead, the way Aby had been his. Her dead—her whole village, old people, kids and all—were because a kid who knew the rules had wanted what she wanted and to hell with the consequences. She was angry. And he couldn’t argue with it.
It would have been a beautiful sight, all that untracked snow, blanketed thick around the trees, the rider shelter snowed-under up to its roof on the side; but the door was all shoveled out, there was no smoke from the chimney; and the single track of a horse went right up to that area, and lost itself in the general churning up of the snow, where at least one horse had broken through the drifts.
It wasn’t what they hoped they’d find: they’d arrived too late to catch Stuart.
“Third set of tracks,” Luke said in apparent surprise. “Somebody was with him.”
Harper, Danny thought, was following. But when he caught the <tracks> Luke was looking down at, he saw the footprints of a third horse overlay two outbound horses—how old, that second horse-track, or whether the last was Stuart following the other two, wasn’t clear in his inexperience. Cloud was imaging <female> and <Spook-horse.>
Harper was Spook’s rider. But—Quig? he asked himself. Quig’s horse wasn’t a mare.
The rogue was.
“Suppose the first is the rogue?” Hawley asked. “Suppose Stuart went after it this morning? Or it’s after him?”
“Check the board,” Jonas said, basic common sense, and Luke went and pulled the latch-cord, carrying his gun, even though the horses imaged no other presence, and warily checked inside.
Luke shut the door again. “Stuart. And Tara Chang, of all people.”
“Tara’s alive!” Randy said, <delighted.> Carlo was excited, too, all but moved to tears—because, Danny suddenly thought, they weren’t the only survivors any more. There was somebody else they knew in the world. They remembered <Tara in the camp,> remembered <looking for Brionne,> and there wasn’t a doubt in their minds that that was why their rider had come here. <Tara looking for Brionne. With Stuart.> On that, their hopes sprang up to a wild possibility—he felt it, even Jonas felt it, the whole ambient disturbed, but Hawley remarked, sourly,
“That son of a bitch was real comfortable last night, wasn’t he? Didn’t wait till Aby was a month gone.”
That made Carlo <fighting mad.> It took Randy, on the far side and away from Hawley, a moment to catch what Hawley meant, and then Randy was <mad.> But Jonas told everybody to get back on their horses and get the hell back on the road.
Danny swung up, nudged Cloud with knee and heel until he caught up with Shadow, on the edge of the road, urgent with the only answer he saw. “Harper’s out to kill Stuart,” he said to Jonas, fast, because horses were moving. “That’s all he wants. He knows who he’s tracking now—he’ll have seen that board, too. He’s going to break his neck getting caught up and they’re not hurrying— they’re not going to know he’s stalking them.” <Jonas hurrying. Three of them. Up the road. Stuart and the Tarmin rider. Him going slower, with Carlo and Randy.> “Don’t lag back for us. I’ll take care of the boys. Just for God’s sake get Harper before he gets Stuart.”
Jonas didn’t take to orders. Or suggestions. You never told him a thing and expected him to do it—for sheer stubbornness, if nothing else.
“Stuart’s your friend, isn’t he?” he flung at Jonas. “Isn’t he why you came?”
<Truck,> hit the ambient. <Wrecked truck.> Something about a <box.> Jonas was as upset as he’d ever felt the man, spilling things that didn’t make sense to him. And thinking <Stuart, > with an edge of anger. <Mad at Stuart.>
But Jonas gave a jerk of his head, said, <“Come on,”> to his partners, and hit a traveling pace, hard and fast, with <Stuart> the fading image in the thinning ambient.
<Cloud standing. Cloud stopped,> Danny wanted, and Cloud dropped out of a half-hearted run.
“Where are they going?” Carlo asked, panting, as he reached Cloud’s side. “Danny?”
“Just stay with me.” God, he wanted <running down that road.>
Cloud was exploding with the instinct to stay up with the rest, Cloud wanted <fight > and <follow.>
Cloud wanted—something that shivered in the air. There was everywhere the <smell of female about the trees, tracked in the snow—female and male horse. Sex. And winter.>
But catching Stuart and Chang wasn’t the job they had. It was doing what riders generally did, getting villagers safely from one point to the other. Getting Carlo and Randy somewhere they wouldn’t die.