Don't Disturb Stella and Her Mates novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Salt and a Snare
Thora survives her first night alone on Karst and cuts Keir down from his own trap. He drops an empty tonic vial with Stella's mark on it, and she pockets it.
The first thing Thora did on Karst was stop walking before dark.
Forty kilometers was two days over a river and a ridge, and whoever set the override wanted her walking it hungry.
So she would not walk it blind.
She kept the override line from the drop log in her head, and decided to ask whoever entered it, face to face.
She found a stream in the last hour of light and drank through the filter straw until her stomach ached.
Then she climbed the bank and picked the biggest black tree she could find.
Its roots stood up out of the ground in a hollow wide enough to lie in.
She stretched the tarp across the roots and tied it down with cord.
She stretched the steel wire across the only gap, knee high, and hung her tin cup on it with a handful of stones inside.
A small silver drone hummed down through the branches and hovered over her.
A red light on its belly came on.
"Live," a voice said from it, brightly. "Contestant Thora Ostrow, day one, camp one."
Thora looked at it.
"You can't help me," she said. "Don't get in my way."
The drone drifted backward and kept filming.
She ate half a protein bar, checked the seal on the other half, and sat with her back to the roots and the axe across her knees.
Night on Karst was loud.
Things clicked in the trees and something far off screamed again and again.
Around midnight the cry came close.
She heard the bark crack and a heavy body pushing through the undergrowth.
The cup of stones rattled on the wire.
The thing that came through the gap was the size of a dog and the color of wet slate, with a mouth full of long teeth set in rows.
It hit the wire and went down on its front legs, snarling.
Thora was already moving.
She brought the axe down on the back of its skull.
It kicked once and went still.
The drone buzzed in close, and she pushed it aside with the flat of the axe.
"Don't film the body," she told it. "It will draw more of them."
She sat back down and checked the wire.
It had held.
At dawn she cut meat from the hindquarters with the saw, cooked it on the fire starter's coal until it was gray all through, and rubbed salt into the rest.
A fire made smoke and smoke made visitors, so she kept it small.
She packed up and followed the stream east toward the green dots on the tracker.
By the second hour she was climbing the ridge, and by the third she heard a man shouting.
It was a thin, furious shout, with a lot of swearing in it.
She came over the crest and found Keir Marek hanging upside down from a tree.
His ankle was caught in a loop of cord, and one boot was pointing at the sky.
His rifle lay in the leaves below him, a long way out of reach.
He saw her and stopped shouting.
For a moment he looked almost relieved, and then he remembered who she was.
"Of course," he said. "Of course it's you."
Thora stood under him and looked up.
"Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine."
"Is the cord the show's, or yours?"
"Mine. I set a snare for a boar, and the tree fell over on it, and now I'm here."
He tried to grin.
It came out crooked, because the blood had run to his head.
"Say something clever, then. Come on. Tell me how you've been following me all night."
"I wasn't following you."
"Sure."
"I'm not chasing you either," Thora said. "I'm going to cut you down, and then you can go where you want."
His grin faded.
"What's the catch?"
"There isn't one."
She dropped her bag, climbed the leaning trunk and reached the branch above his foot.
The cord was tight with his weight.
She sawed through it in four strokes, and Keir fell face first into the leaves.
He lay there a second, winded, and then rolled over and sat up.
"Ow," he said.
"You're welcome."
"I didn't say thank you."
"I noticed."
He got to his feet slowly, favoring the ankle.
He looked at her salt pouch and her cord and her hand axe, and at the meat she had wrapped in leaves.
"You've got half a boar in that bag," he said.
"It was some kind of dog."
"You killed a ridgehound?"
"It came in through my wire."
For the first time since the launch pad, Keir looked at her without the grin.
"Stella said you'd never last a night," he said.
"I did."
"She said the forest would bring you running back to us."
"Then she should have asked the forest."
Thora shouldered her bag.
"Your ankle's swollen, and you'll walk slower than I do," she said. "Keep up or don't, Marek. I'm not stopping to find out."
She turned and walked down the ridge.
Behind her she heard a pop, a curse, and the scrape of a man picking up a rifle.
Something small and glass rolled out of Keir's jacket when he fell, and he did not notice it go.
Thora stopped, and came back, and picked it up.
It was a little glass vial with a silver cap.
The label had been scraped half off.
What was left showed a curved white S and the Ostrow crest.
She held it up to the light.
It was empty, except for a thin ring of dried gold at the bottom.
She smelled it.
It had no scent she could name, only a sharp, sweet bitterness at the back of her throat.
She had smelled it once before, in the old world, on the lips of the men who sold sleep to the starving.
Keir limped up beside her.
"What's that?"
Thora closed her hand.
"Nothing," she said. "You dropped it."
And she slid the vial into her pocket and kept walking.
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