Silence had been important earlier. At this point, it became critical. Alex was hyper-aware of every rock grinding under foot and every cricket that stopped singing as they passed.
As they perched above the opening to the canyon, Alex paused. He cocked his head, listening. He could hear the soft sound of the river being churned by a paddlewheel and voices floating across the water to bounce back from the sides of the buttes running along this section of river. A steamboat headed down toward them. He cursed silently.
They couldn’t know if it would stop here, for the prison, or continue down the river. If it stopped, was it delivering supplies, or picking up cargo, likely of the human variety? Was this the long-overdue transfer they’d been watching for? The sounds were faint. Sound carried oddly over water, giving them no clear idea of how far out it was.
They entered the canyon, working over the sharply slanted wall, and then made their slow way down and across the right side of the butte that formed one of the inner walls of the canyon. The observation point hid the observers behind scrub and trees near the top of the butte, just to the side of an overhang.
The prison itself had been built along the curve of the butte, nestled at its base in the far opening of the canyon where two buttes rose up beside each other. The canyon ran between them from the river to the plain beyond. The plains spreading out from the prison on the other side were farmed, the labor to work the farms provided by collared Spark prisoners. The mouth of the canyon behind it had been reinforced and fortified against both water and intruders.
That was fine with him. They weren’t trying to get in; they only wanted to watch the activity of the guards and prisoners. If Lena got an eyeful of the collared Sparks so she’d understand why he and Thomas had worked so hard to build a viable alternative to the Council, even better. Yes, these particular men were criminals. But it wasn’t a leap in logic to guess how easy it would be for the Council to decide the easiest way to guarantee power would be to use the collars on all Sparks. It was barely a hop considering the recent delivery of a box of the damn things to each zone’s Council agents, likely precipitated by the loss of Lena.
If Thom and Alex could move Zone to Zone, they would have accomplished a bloodless revolution, ending the abuse and harnessing of Sparks. Well, not exactly bloodless, he acknowledged, but they were doing all they could to avoid any large-scale fighting or casualties.
As the three of them approached the OP, two shadows rose from the ground. The men they were relieving lifted their gear silently and moved toward and then past them without a word, handing off a pad of paper to Alex as they passed. Jackson led Lena and Alex behind the brush-covered twining trunks of a pair of pines. A long, narrow ditch had been carved out of the canyon-side between the trees and a large rock jutting back up the side of the butte beside the overhang. The three of them settled in.
It would be a tight fit for three, but Lena was small and they’d make it work. Alex settled in next to her behind the juncture of the trees. Their bodies were hidden behind the earth. He reached back for his binoculars, rare and prized, and held them to his eyes.
“Normal guard movement, focused in and not out,” he breathed. “Nothing else stirring. We’re good.” He glanced back at Jackson, who nodded acknowledgment. Alex turned to the activity report he’d been handed as the other agents scooted away. It said much the same. He folded it up and tucked it away until he needed to scrawl his own update on it for the team who’d relieve them.
She pulled her legs up and tucked her arms in between them and her body. She appeared content to wait out the dawn, and with it, the promised camp activity, in silence.
Dawn came more quickly to the prison at the edge of the plain than it did to them. Their position on the near side of the butte guaranteed them several more hours in the shadows. As the first fingers of light crept over the buildings below, activity began to stir.
Alex peered through the binoculars, first at the river, where he noted the paddleboat still hadn’t appeared, and then at the prison. “Shift’s changing,” he told them in an undertone, “won’t be long now before the first crews are sent out.”
He was right. Not even a full hour later, double doors opened up onto the yard and prisoners filed out. They formed into double rows. As the first of them headed out, turning to the left and heading out to the plains and the farms, more exited to shuffle into the center of the yard and form into lines.
Alex looked again, scanning over the men, trying to decide which provided the best angle.
“Let me look.” Lena said, her voice less than a whisper, muted by concern of discovery and by the numbers of the men below.