Free Benighted by Kit Whitfield Page A

available?”
    “Just a moment…No.”
    “None?”
    “No. Everyone’s miles away, and it’s a heavy night. You’ll have to handle this alone.”
    I hadn’t expected anything else, not really, but this is still shattering. “Thank you.”
    “Sorry, Lo,” says Josie’s voice, and then the radio clicks off.
    “Lola?” Marty’s voice sounds in my ear, very softly. “How are we going to handle this?”
    I count my fingers. I don’t know. “We’ve just got to round them up.” He draws breath, and I keep talking before he can start. “It depends on the size of the group. Now, we can leave most of the cages open because we’ve only got one of them occupied, so that’s one thing working for us. If there’s only two of them, then we can go for one each. And it’s possible that the group may scatter when they see us, I’ve seen that happen.” I have. I hold this thought.
    “What if there’s more than two and they stick together?”
    I inhale. “Then I’ll do the catching and you cover me. No, listen to me. I go for one, and if the others close in, you fire your silver gun into the air. It makes a lot of noise, and they’ll probably back down. Two bullets, so you can do it twice if need be. If there’s more than two, one of us needs to stand guard the whole time.”
    “Will we—will we be able to see them?”
    I look at him, seeing the narrowness of his shoulders, his height lost as he sits down. “You mean because of the trees? Well, they—they sometimes provide cover for us, too, Marty.”
    “Can’t we just trank them?” It’s soft, plaintive like a bird’s song. I close my eyes briefly before answering.
    “Not to start with. We can’t. Not unless we’re in serious danger.” He gives a strangled laugh. I try to scowl at him. I want to laugh too, I really do, but if I start laughing I’m afraid of not being able to stop. “That’s the law. You read it at school, you’ve done exams in it, I know you know the drill. Tranking is a last resort. We may well have to take it, but not until we have to.”
    “Oh.” Marty makes no complaint. He hangs his head.
    “Listen.” I try to soften my voice. “Normally we could. But after that first mistake tonight, you could lose a lot if we bend the rules on this one. I know it’s hard, but we’ve just got to try.”
    “I thought the bullets were the last resort,” Marty says quietly.
    I shake my head at him. “Don’t let a lyco hear you say that. As far as the rest of the world wants to know, they’re not a resort at all.”
    “Have you ever fired the bullets?” Marty wants to know. He’s picking at his fingernails.
    I swallow. “Not so you’d want to know about.”
    I start up the engine again, and we roll over the ground. The branches are unreal in the artificial light; they loom around me and I have to remember that they’re solid. The dark, the quiet, the figure on the tracker, they’re making me light-headed, and if I’m not careful, I might try to drive through the trees.
    The tracker glows red in the darkness, with the white cluster of light still there. It’s very close to the center. The lines across the tracker meet in the middle—there’s a point of convergence which is us; and just a few millimeters away from it is this foreign, multiple shape. I drive forward just a little more, and the shape breaks open, splits like an amoeba into three separate circles. I look out through the cracked glass of our windshield, and see nothing but textured, receding shadows.
    “Okay,” I whisper. “Now we’ve got to be very quiet. Don’t knock the windows, don’t rattle your seat belt, just keep still.” There are three separate shapes on the scanner, ten meters from us. I press the accelerator, and the shapes move. They can hear us.
    Ten meters, fifteen. The van moves forward, and I check again. It’s the same reading. They’ve moved with us, they’re keeping out of reach, they’re not running away. Ten meters. We’ve got to