Flash Gold - Hunted Part 4

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. "n.o.body 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." Cedar 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 b.o.o.by 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 compa.s.s 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 spygla.s.s, 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 sh.o.r.eline. 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 s.h.i.+fted the spygla.s.s, 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 spygla.s.s. "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 pa.s.sing 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 d.a.m.ned. 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 b.o.o.by 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 b.o.o.by 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."

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 pa.s.sed-and avoided-three more b.o.o.by 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 b.o.o.by 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 a.s.sist 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.

Kali climbed on top of the SAB seat. Though the bicycle was a broad, st.u.r.dy contraption, it wobbled under her weight, and she kept a hand on the smokestack for balance. She peered inside it. And froze.

"What the blazes is that?"

"What?" Cedar strode over.

Something dark and lumpy nestled inside the smokestack. It lacked the clean lines of the b.o.o.by trap from the trail and did not appear mechanical-or explosive-but Kali stared at it for a long moment before reaching an arm inside. Her fingers came up a foot short. Her own body blocked the daylight when she leaned in farther, and the bicycle seat wobbled beneath her toes.

"I need help," she said. "Can you hold me, so I can lean in farther?" She must sound ridiculous with her head stuffed in the smokestack.

Hands squeezed her waist, and she squawked when Cedar lifted her off the seat so her feet dangled in the air. His firm grip had the steadiness of steel, though, leaving her more secure than when she had been relying on her own balance. Thanks to his height, Cedar could also boost her entire body above the smokestack without trouble.

"Thanks," she called, her voice supremely m.u.f.fled now. "I appreciate your strength and-" She inhaled soot and broke into a coughing fit. The stuffy, hot environs pressed in from all sides, and she could see nothing. Lingering smoke made her eyes tear.

"My strength and what?" Cedar asked, his voice distant to her ensconced ears.

When she tried to speak, she ended up coughing again.

"Ah," Cedar said. "I'm to guess at the rest. I see. You appreciate my strength and...masculinity?"

The confines of the smokestack made movement awkward. Kali had to wriggle and twist to loosen a shoulder enough to extend her arm to touch the obstruction. It was hard, lumpy, and faintly sticky. It did not tick or whir or do anything to suggest moving parts or a timer set to spark an explosion. More likely it was there to stuff up the smokestack, which could cause an explosion of its own volition if built-up exhaust could not escape.

"Strength and virility?" Cedar asked.

Kali felt around the edges of the obstruction, hoping she could remove it, but the solidified ma.s.s stuck to the inside of the stack with the tenacity of a badger. She sc.r.a.ped a sliver off and held it to her nose. Though the sooty smokestack made it hard to put her olfactory organs to satisfactory use, the gunk had a pungent identifiable scent. She groaned.

"No? Strength and good looks?"

"Pull me out," Kali said.

"Not until you finish that sentence."

"What?" She had barely been paying attention to him.

"You appreciate my strength and what else?" Even though the smokestack dulled the nuances of his tone, she had no trouble imagining the amused smirk on his lips. Better than the sarcasm, she supposed.