Everyone wakes up early the next morning, if they got any sleep at all, and go out to track down their lead, just as the sky begins to glow from the sun rising beyond the horizon.
“Okay,” Touch says, reddish-brown beard and white mask covering his face. “lets game this out. Why was this mystery woman eavesdropping, why did she run, where did she go, and what’s her next move?”
“She wanted information, I think.” Anea says, “Something professional, not personal. You attracted her interest somehow. The same way she attracts yours. That’s why she chose us. She ran when we lowered our voices and huddled together.”
“She most likely went home, where she felt safe.” Rachel continues. “The only question is whether she stays there or takes the offensive.”
“Right. And that depends on precisely what’s going through her head. If she somehow knows Anea is an empath, she might stay home. If she doesn’t know we’re divs, she might ask around, try to find out who we are, why we’re after her.”
“I can feel the mercs closing in.” Rachel shudders, “We need that cover, double time.”
“What can we give the mayor to get him started?”
“We need to find these Pinchers,” Touchstone says, leading them to a small park and sitting on the ground in front of a bench, “assuming she ran home, we can guess they’re out in the country.” He pulls a fresh paper map from his pack and lays it out between the two girls taking a seat on the bench. “Time for more lessons.”
Anea gets right to work, scanning her finger along the areas outside town. Rachel studies the opposite end of the map, working her way around to where Anea began her search.
“People don’t like me, I need to stay hidden…” Anea mumbles to herself. “I need to keep all my people hidden. Here.” Anea points to the town’s main river, following it up past the district of shanties, stalls, and tents.
“They need easy access to water, somewhere too far away for people to bother them. Mystery girl came out here.” She taps a finger to a system of paths that lead to the dirt road out of town. “But went here.” She runs her finger through a stretch of woods, over to the river.
“Can you still find them if we get close?”
“Not sure. I’ve started tuning out the crowds again. Don’t know what my range will be at this point.”
“Ugh.” Touch pinches the bridge of his nose. “There are too many moving parts. Not enough people to cover them. Me and Anea can find their camp. But if you and Arch go and try to cover our tracks from mystery-lady, then we have no one to watch our gear. With two parties tracking us now, I really think we need someone to guard the room.”
“Me and Anea can find the camp. I’m better out in the woods. You’re better with the criminal stuff in town. Take Dill with you. He can call for help and get people’s attention if he needs. That leaves Arch to watch our gear.”
“Alright,” Touch scoops up the map, “be careful.”
“Hope you find your mystery-lady.” Anea smiles and hops off the bench.
---
“Nothing.” Anea says over the tinkle of flowing water from the river.
“Try meditating like Touch showed you.”
Anea takes a seat under a tree and focuses on her breathing for several minutes while Rachel keeps watch. The hike up here took about an hour and a half. The sun was still low in the cloudy sky. They followed the paths going up and down the river. There had to be someone making them.
“Nothing. A slight presence in the farmhouse over that way and a fainter feeling back in town. But it might be my imagination. There’s a small group farther up the river. But not our guys, I don’t think. Definitely not mystery-girl.
“Dangerous?”
“Bored.”
“Lets check it out. When we get close, stay back.”
“They’re coming our way.”
---
Touchstone leaves with Dill snug and concealed in his pack as the sun stains the clouds with its fiery orange rays. The town is already yawning awake and setting up for the next day of festivities. There was no way for Touchstone to blend in with his two miss-matched sabers strapped to his thighs. So he wasn’t going to blend in. He would be loud. A distraction. Let them come to him first, whomever wanted answers, whoever caught onto their trail, before digging too deep.
---
Around noon, a clean shaven man of middle age, that the girl at the front counter didn’t recognize, strode through the lobby, straight for the stairs. She wasn’t told of any newcomer’s overnight.
“Excuse me, sir. Is there something I can help you with?” The young woman nearly shouts, even though there is no one else in the lobby. The man turns and crooks up the box under his arm.
“Courier, Ma’am, I know where I’m going. Thank you.” The man labors through a hoarse voice. As he turns, she sees a lightly faded scar cutting across the brown skin of his throat.
“I still need you to sign in.” She states.
“Of course, sorry, in a hurry is all.”
The man smiles as walks over and scribbles on the check in sheet. With a nod, he heads back up the stairs.
A few minutes and flights of stairs later, he walks down the hall, takes a look around, and falls to one knee, facing a door. He sets his box down and takes out a small chrome lock pick, tension wrench, and inserts them into the sliver of the lock.
A minute or two longer than he would’ve liked, he turns the knob and the door clicks open. He closes the door behind him and sets his box on the sink outside the bathroom. As he’s splitting the tape and pulling out a small microphone, the man’s eyes follow a scratching noise from the carpet.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
He sees a small fox baring its glistening yellow teeth at him.
“Damn. Don’t suppose you could be one of those regular foxes?”
The fox twitches its head from side to side.
---
“Okay, thanks!” Rachel and Anea waved goodbye to the security guards and went on their way. She should’ve known rivers were a guarded resource for the towns out here. If someone polluted the water, or blocked it off somehow, it would cause a disaster. No one was allowed to settle by the river or do anything close to it without prior approval from one of the council members.
They cleared up the mistake by saying they were looking to meet up with some old friends, but didn’t have their numbers anymore. One of the young guards recommended checking by a small, stream fed pond on the other side of the main road, the one Rachel saw when she studied the map. Marching there took a little more than an hour and a half.
“There. People. More than two dozen. I’m sure of it now.” Anea says as the sun edges closer to its apex.
“Alright. Let’s pick a good spot to watch them.”
They circumvent the gathering of people for another half hour before finding a hill Rachel can watch over. The two keep low against a rock and some scrubby bushes. Going off the size and the number of tents, cooking fires, and gas grills dotting the camp, this place could support right around one hundred people, but Anea was right, there had to be less than thirty running around now, setting up workstations, fetching water to boil, cooking, or attending some business in their private quarters.
“No patrols,” Anea says. “Just lookouts.”
“They don’t have the people. They’re all at work.”
She sees people with swords, clubs, sticks, shaving wood with knives, making repairs to wagons and clothing with hand tools of all sorts, but no guns, except for the hunting rifles on look out.
“Why does almost no one seem to have guns besides us and bad guys?”
“They’re outlawed by corporations, like cars, except under special conditions. We took ours from the bad guys. And plenty of people still have guns, they just hide them.”
“Is that so people can’t hurt each other, like these bandits?”
“No, it’s so people don’t fight back against corporations. If they didn’t have rifles, bandits would still use swords or sticks or even their fists on each other. They let us keep these weapons, so we can still hurt each other, but a sword is all but useless against a gun. So they keep all the power.”
“You’re starting to sound like-
Oh, Touch is going to be so sad. There’s his mystery girl. She stayed put. He’s going to spend all day looking for her.”
Rachel follows Anea’s gaze, but can’t make out a sandy blonde ponytail, even in the thin crowd. Still too many work stations, camp sites, animals, and people moving around.
“Let me show you something.” Rachel holds her hand outstretched in front of her. “Take a point of reference, like that metal-working station. Then, holding out your hand like this, count how many fingers are in between the reference and the thing you want me to see. Don’t know how well it’ll work with your tiny fingers, but it won’t hurt to try.”
“Okay.” Anea holds her little brown hand in front of her, squinting one eye shut and sticking out her tongue as she rotates her hand to point vertically and horizontally a few times. “Three to the left, and four down, moving fast.”
Rachel mimics the movement. “Got ‘er.” She follows the sandy blonde hair and the menacing stride to an outdoor soup kitchen.
“Ho-ly shit.” Rachel drawls as she gets closer.
“What?” Anea looks. “No way. This has to be a coincidence, right? Could this be it? The thing? Why they like each other? Neither one of them could have known, right?”
“Do you feel anything from her?”
“Barely enough to recognize her from this distance. She isn’t spooked. But her mind is occupied on something, she’s focused.”
Less than two minutes pass before she reappears from under the kitchen, bowl in hand, on her way back to her tent.
“Alright, let’s head back.”
---
Touchstone reaches into his pack and strokes the top of Dill’s soft head.
“Thanks for watching my back. Don’t know if you like being in there all day. Either way, I appreciate it.” It was then that Touchstone learned chickens could purr.
He spent all day systematically and thoroughly asking about the woman with hazel eyes and blonde hair, ranging from a darker shade of golden wheat underneath, to a layer a bleached sandy yellow falling down from the top.
That had to have gotten her attention by now. There was nothing left to do but to wait. If she was any good at her job, then she already knew where the hotel was. But she might hesitate to meet him, or send someone there. So he would check in on Arch real quick before settling in at the circus-tent bar and grill where he got his ass kicked the night before and went asking about the woman the following morning.
So far as he saw, someone would approach him eventually, even if the woman stayed in hiding, and give him just a little more information than he had already. He didn’t know this town well enough to go play detective just yet, so his best bet was to go fast and loud and hope something comes of it. Shake the tree, get the apple, and hope you don’t get a hornet’s nest instead.
Between the mask, the swords at his sides, and the spectacles he’s caused since coming to town, he drew eyes wherever he went. But as far as the stone man could tell, he wasn’t being tailed. At least not the old-fashioned way. He’s sure that people were reporting on his location to someone or some-site every twenty minutes.
A message vibrates from his tablet. Touchstone pulls it from the side pocket on his pack as he walks and looks over the conversation.
‘Hey Fay, I need a favor.’
‘Asshole, do you know the shitstorm you’ve caused?’
‘I can guess. I’m not asking for me. The girl, she needs to know what happened to her family. Please.’
‘I’ll see what I can find out’
‘I owe you.’
‘Nothing. They were both in holding for like a week. Then they were released. Is what they’re saying about you true Touch, did you kill people?’
Touchstone smiles, the corners of his lips reaching up through his mask, his cheeks suddenly pushing it up, plastic edges reaching closer to his eyes. He stops in the stairwell and furiously jabs away a reply. Dill lets out a small chirp as he fidgets around.
“Everything’s fine Fluffy. Just got some good news.”
‘Find a way to get my contact information to them. Get them a clean phone if you have to, send me the bill.’
‘No. I don’t kill people, but if they’re turning me into a boogey-man again, then it'll draw the heat from everyone else.’
‘I owe you. Keep me updated, please.’
He makes his way up to their room. Turns the key to find it already unlocked. He slides his pack off and gently sets it down, clear of the threshold, Dill comes spilling out and hobbles a little further down the hall as Touchstone slides his new saber a hands-breadth out its scabbard as he pushes the door aside.
“Hey…” A bald man, face creased with age, and a pale, venous scar across his throat, rasps from the chair in front of Arch. “took you long enough. Let’s talk.”