Coming into the shadow of the shrubs, which rose over her head, she felt relief wash over her and paused mid-stride. She hadn’t been consciously aware of the unease creeping over her until it was gone.
Her hesitation caught Girard’s attention. He stopped, too, and turned back, brows lifted in a silent question.
Drawing a breath to answer, Hallie caught the acrid scent of something burning. Her nose wrinkled.
“There’s something on fire nearby,” she told him in the quietest voice she could manage, and wondered if that scent was the cause of her unease. Then she realised something else. Apart from the racket of the helicopter, long since faded, and the faintsounds she and Girard had made, she hadn’t heard anything else. Even in low city, with its crowded streets and cacophony of noise from people talking or shouting to the occasional vehicle and discordant music, something like a helicopter would have been noticed. And here, there was open land around them. There was no possible way that the helicopter’s arrival could have been missed. Someone should have come looking to see what the noise was. “It’s too quiet.”
“Agreed.” Girard’s expression was grim. “Let’s get off the path for now.”
Hallie followed him as he turned into the dense thicket of shrubs. Girard seemed to have no difficulty in navigating through the plants even with the extra weight on his back. Hallie had to bite her lip a few times as the harness of her pack dug into her skin, deep enough that she thought she’d have bruises. The bruises didn’t bother her as much as the fact the pack was an unwieldy and awkward weight, constantly threatening to take her off balance. It was going to be a hindrance if they ran into any trouble or she had to try and move faster than the slow shuffle she was currently managing.
After what Hallie thought was a short walk into the trees and shrubs, Girard stopped and shrugged off his pack, moving a few paces forward to the nearest tree. Its lowest branches were within reach if he stretched. He produced a length of what looked like elastic rope from a side pocket. “We’ll leave the packs here for the moment and come back for them.”
It was a sensible idea, so Hallie slipped out of her backpack, too, trying not to sigh with relief as the weight left her. Although her job often required a lot of walking, or running, she was used to carrying limited equipment.
Girard hefted the packs up onto the nearest tree branch, securing them with the rope, and then pulled a few strands of the taller shrubs close in, so that the bags and rope werehidden from casual view. When he turned back to Hallie, he held something out to her.
“I know you said you didn’t want one, but we don’t know what we’re getting into,” he said.
He was holding a holstered handgun out to her, a belt wrapped around it which also held a couple of spare magazines. Hallie hesitated a moment before she accepted it. She unzipped the vents at the sides of her jacket, settling the belt around her waist so that the weapon was in easy reach.
“Let me give you a quick run down of how to use it,” he suggested.
With reluctance, Hallie drew the weapon. It looked like the same kind he carried, and she’d used his gun before, but that had been in desperation. So she paid attention while he went through the gun’s safety mechanism, the trigger, and how to reload. It seemed simple enough, but she wasn’t sure how much she would remember if she had to use it in a hurry. She put the gun away, despite Girard’s frown. “I’m more likely to fall over my feet if I’m carrying it,” she told him honestly.
“Stay behind me, then,” he said. He had his own gun in two hands, carefully pointed at the ground. “I want to go on a bit further, see if we can get some more information before we move into the open.”
That seemed sensible, and Hallie followed him, trying to keep in his footsteps, as he made his way slowly and carefully through the shrubs and between tree trunks. Moving without the backpack was much easier. All the same, Hallie made sure to watch her feet. This wasn’t a city street or pavement where the potential hazards were familiar. She stayed close enough to Girard to follow the path he was making. From time to time a trace of his personal scent carried to her, a welcome and pleasant contrast to the burning she could still smell. Girard’sscent for some reason made her think of the ocean and the whales they had flown over.
A little while later, Hallie picked up another, less welcome, scent. A faint trace of decomposition. That was never a good thing to come across. Her chest tightened and her stomach sank.
“There’s something dead nearby,” she told Girard, keeping her voice as low as possible.
He stopped and glanced back at her. For a moment, she wondered if he was going to ask her if she was sure, but he had a different question. “Can you tell where?”
“Not really. I don’t have your sense of direction. I’ve only just caught the scent, so if we keep going this way, it might get stronger,” Hallie suggested.
“Alright.” Girard moved forward again, just as carefully as he had before. After a few paces he paused. “I can smell it, too. Something’s been dead a while. Let me see if I can track it.”
With his magic, Hallie knew. The natural talent that he had which had seemed to embarrass him the first time she’d learned about it. She’d always thought it was an incredibly useful skill, and it proved to be so again, as Girard turned without hesitating, heading further into the dense plant growth.
He stopped again at a point where the shrubs had been pushed or cut back to open up a patch of bare earth. The ground had been disturbed, turned over, and then re-laid, but with a long, thin shape under it. Just the sort of size and shape that would be made by a dead body. Hallie’s skin crawled. Girard glanced around the open area and found a broken branch lying near the disturbed ground, using it to dig into the earth. He didn’t have to go far before he’d uncovered what looked like plain fabric. Clothing of some kind.
Hallie’s heart sank. Despite the strong smell of decomposition in the air, and the grave-like disturbance in the earth, she’d been trying to hope for a dead animal of some kind, not a person.Setting aside the tangled emotions that went with dealing with corpses, dead people made everything complicated.
“Can you take some pictures?” he asked Hallie. “I know we can’t send them without a mobile signal, but the director will want a record.”
“Of course,” Hallie said. She pulled out her phone, glad she’d remembered to charge it overnight, and took a series of photographs as Girard worked to uncover more of the body.
When Girard had uncovered the torso and head, he paused, taking a step back. “Male. Human, if I had to guess, this being a human-only island,” he said, sounding as if he was mostly talking to himself. “Been dead a few days at least.”
Hallie pulled some leaves off the nearest shrub and crouched by the dead man’s head, using the leaves to clean some more of the dirt off his face. She had seen her fair share of dead bodies, but she was reluctant to touch the cold and slightly discoloured skin or, worse, the still-open eyes, filmed over with decay. When his face was as clean as she thought she could make it, she took a few more close-up pictures. “At least a few days, yes,” she agreed. “If the temperature here has been the same as low city, it’s been pretty cold. Enough to slow down decomposition.”
Girard was crouched on the other side of the man. He drew out a small torch and shone the bright light around the man’s head. Looking for any obvious sign of injury, Hallie guessed.
“Degan or Isoud could tell us more, but I definitely think dead a few days. Buried not long after he died, but he didn’t die here. There’s what looks like a nasty wound at the back of his head, and there’s no blood around,” Girard said. Degan was the Conclave Investigators’ medical examiner and as skilled at his job as Isoud and the rest of the forensic team. Hallie had no doubt that Degan or Isoud would see lots of things that she and Girard were missing, but, for now, the two of them were on their own and would have to do what they could.
Hallie shifted her position so she could see the wound Girard had found and grimaced. Nasty was an understatement. It looked as if the man’s skull had been crushed. She took a few more photographs, even though doing so made her feel sick, knowing that Degan and the Conclave forensic team would expect that level of detail at least.
