He walked on, down the length of the wash and around a second bend, following a flurry of footprints. Someone running away, someone else chasing. He stopped. Ahead, draped in shadows, lay a second cluster of bodies. More would-be soldiers, their bodies heaped on top of one another. The fourth was Praxia.
He knew right away what had happened. A unit of rogue militia had found the Elves. Maybe just stumbled on them, maybe saw their tracks. They shot the male Elves in a firefight. Some of them died in the process. The three survivors went after Praxia. Caught up with her here. Big mistake. She killed them all, was killed herself. No one had survived. He knew this because a survivor would have taken one of the two jeeps, and all the tire tracks stopped where the two were parked.
He moved over to Praxia. She was propped against a large boulder, eyes closed. Patches of dried blood marked half a dozen wounds in her chest and stomach. She had been shot repeatedly. She looked frail and broken, all the toughness drained away. One hand clutched a Sig-Hauser twelve-shot automatic rapid fire, clip ejected on the ground next to her. It was a favorite weapon of militia commanders. How she had gotten hold of it or even known how to use it was a mystery.
He bent down and touched her cheek, and her eyes opened. He froze, staring at the blood-streaked face. “My hand,” she whispered.
He looked down. The hand that wasn’t holding the Sig-Hauser slowly opened. In the palm lay the pouch that contained the Loden Elfstone.
Her lips moved. “Tell Kirisin . . .”
Then she trailed off, and her eyes fixed. He felt her neck for a pulse, found none. He sat back on his heels, staring at her. What must it have taken for her to stay alive this long? The fight was clearly hours old.
He took the pouch from her hand, checked to make certain the Elfstone was still inside, and then slipped the pouch into his pocket.
Tell Kirisin . . .
He stood up wearily. “I’ll tell him,” he promised her.
Angel, standing next to him by now, didn’t say anything, keeping her thoughts to herself. Logan searched Praxia’s young face. Just a girl, he thought, but she had fought and died hard. He thought suddenly of Simralin. He tried to imagine how he would feel if something happened to her.
“We’d better bury them,” Angel said to him.
He nodded. “And then get back to the camp.”
Without waiting for her response, he started toward the Ventra to collect the shovels.
TWENTY-FOUR
A NOTHER SWELTERING DAY, air thick with heat and steamy dampness, sky brilliant blue beneath a sun that burned white hot and implacable.
Angel Perez plodded ahead, her boots kicking up puffs of dust as she walked flats that stretched away for miles in all directions. Grasses were few and burned crisp and sapped of color, and what trees survived were withered scarecrows, their leaves in tatters. The Cascades were behind them and fading fast into the distant haze. If there were mountains ahead, they were not yet visible to the naked eye. Bluffs crested the horizon north, long stretches so distant they lacked clear definition.
No water was visible anywhere, and in the heat of the midday it felt as if there never would be.
The caravan stretched away for the better part of a mile, a collection of trucks and AVs, wagons and haulers, and people afoot. Supplies and equipment were loaded on the wagons and haulers along with the smaller children and the injured and sick. The AVs carried others, a select few who needed special attention or to whom had been assigned special tasks that required extra mobility: scouts, medics, machinists, and the like. One of the AVs just behind her, Logan Tom’s Lightning S-150, carried Owl, River, Tessa, Candle, and a couple of smaller children from the camps. The older children and most of the caregivers walked, strung out through the line of vehicles in ragged clumps. Ahead, in the vanguard, Hawk led with Cheney, Panther, Bear, Sparrow, and several handfuls of armed men and women. Trailing everyone was a conglomeration of Lizards, Spiders, and other creatures, a couple of which she could not identify, even though she had thought she had seen everything there was to see by now.
It was the whole of the refugee camp save for those who had been left behind to defend the bridge. The caravan had been on the move since sunrise, traveling north and east away from the Columbia River and up into country that had once been farmland and was now dried-out hardpan. The caravan had started out as a cohesive whole, but over the course of the morning had begun to drift apart, to break into pieces that sprawled all over the flats and had taken on a segmented look.