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I let him run.
He crashes through the undergrowth somewhere ahead of me, branches snapping, boots slipping on wet roots, every desperate footstep carrying clean through the trees. Mine don’t. I move where the forest lets me, following the noise instead of the tracks because frightened prey always tells you where it is.
The wind changes around us. It catches my cloak first, then the treetops, carrying a dry hiss through the canopy. One grain of sand strikes the visor. Then another. Soon they drift between the pines like flecks of gold, catching in my cloak, collecting in the bark, turning the whole forest the colour of old sunlight.
The storm’s here.
Ahead, he stumbles, catches himself against a trunk and keeps running, coughing now, the pack dragging at his shoulders. He burns through everything he has left before diving beneath an exposed root tangle at the base of an old pine, dragging his pack in after him and, with shaking hands, pulling dead branches across the opening.
For a while he stays completely still. Then his face appears between the branches. He looks back the way he came, waits, checks again and finally disappears beneath the roots.
I stop thirty yards away.
He actually thinks he lost me.
My slate vibrates against my wrist. Giving the root tangle one last look, I answer.
“Where the fuck are you?” Ryven’s already talking, his voice agitated. “I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour. Tell me you’re already moving west.”
“Well, I’m a little busy.”
“Then un-fucking-busy yourself. Something’s gone wrong with the weather programme. The wall turned overnight and accelerated. It wasn’t supposed to reach this sector until tomorrow.”
Behind him, the ops room is coming apart, voices stacked over voices, boots hammering across metal, somebody shouting for a headcount.
“The candidates stay in play,” Ryven continues. “Apparently surviving whatever the Hunt throws at them still counts as entertainment. We don’t. We’ve lost the western cameras and half the western sensors, and every Adjudicator is being recalled inside the walls before the main front lands.”
I look toward the roots.
“Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, drop it and come home before your father notices you’re the only officer unaccounted for.”
“Dad worries too much.”
“Your father buries people who embarrass him, Ash, and right now that’s shaping up to be you. Where are you?”
“Northwest.” My eyes stay on the root tangle. It hasn’t moved since I stopped walking. “I’ll be along.”
I lower the slate without ending the call. Ryven keeps talking anyway, his voice swallowed by the wind.
Yeah, Ryven is furious.
Well, good. He can join the queue.
Crouching at the edge of the cutbank, close enough that I don’t have to raise my voice, I look down at the roots.
“I know you’re down there, prey.”
Nothing.
I rake my fingers through the sand collecting against the roots.
“Unless your plan is to become a sand sculpture, I’d suggest you come out.”
His voice comes at last, rough beneath the roots.
“Why won’t you just leave me alone?”
“Why?” I smile. “Because I’d rather not have to dig for you.”
