Nesbitt leans toward me. “She’s been told to bring us some water. But I wouldn’t touch it, mate; she’s bound to have spat in it.”
A few minutes later the girl appears with olives and a carafe of wine. She spends the next few minutes going in and out of the house, bringing bread, olive oil, tomatoes, peppers, all for Gabriel and Pilot. Nesbitt was right: we just get water, and the glasses are filthy.
Gabriel talks to Pilot. I think he’s explaining what’s happened; I think I hear my name once or twice but he’s talking in French so he could be saying anything.
The talk goes on and on.
The house is old and ugly. There’s a low, plastered wall round the patio that was once painted white but is now gray. A structure of wooden trellis rises from the wall and connects to the house and over this is a thick growth of vines.
Gabriel and Pilot are sitting cross-legged. Pilot puts a log on the fire, Gabriel keeps his eyes on her, and they talk.
Nesbitt is splayed across his rug, half asleep. He says to me, “Sounds like this is going to take some time.” I lie down too, trying to remember when I last slept.
*
I wake. The sun is jabbing at my face through a gap in the trellis.
Nesbitt is lying on his back, his arm over his face, but I see his eyes are open and I think he’s listening to the conversation that’s still going on between Pilot and Gabriel. Nesbitt yawns.
I sit up. A cricket lands on the rug beside me. It chirps and then jumps away as I reach for it. I realize now that the noise of the crickets is all around, and it sort of swells and dims, almost pulsing with the heat. It’s a sound similar to mobile phones but it’s in my ears not in my head.
I stand, stretch, and yawn, and then I walk to the edge of the patio to look through the trellis and up to the dry hills that surround us.
Gabriel and Pilot have gone quiet.
I can hear crickets. Lots of crickets. But also, maybe, sometimes in a lull I catch a c h c h c h c h in my head. It’s so faint that it might not even be there. I move to the corner to listen rather than look.
Nesbitt is standing beside me now. “What?”
“I’m not sure. Can you see anything?”
Nesbitt looks through the trellis. He shakes his head. ‘I see better at night.”
And I think I catch it again, so brief and quiet that it’s almost drowned out by the crickets—but it was in my head, I’m sure.
“There’s someone out there with a mobile phone,” I say. “Maybe a fain.”
“Just one?” Nesbitt asks.
“I dunno,” I say.
“Let’s take a look.”
I turn to Gabriel. “Wait here? We’ll scout around.”
He nods. Pilot looks not too worried.
I circle wide to the left, Nesbitt to the right. The crickets jump ahead of me and fill my ears with noise. When Pilot’s house is a distant square I turn uphill, slow now, keeping well to the left of the house. The hill seems to go on and on. I veer left a little more and come to a dry valley, three meters deep, steep-sided. I send a rock clattering down it. I curse inwardly as I stop and hold still. I’m surprised to be rewarded for my sloppiness as in return I hear . . .
c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h
I can’t tell where the mobile is but it has to be uphill and I think I can hear it when its owner moves, like he or she did when the stone fell. I guess that if the owner of the mobile is a Hunter she’s lying on the ground on the edge of the valley, watching Pilot’s house. She’ll be well hidden and the noise from her mobile blocked so that I hear the phone only when she rises up to look.
I move fast now, downhill, then stop. Listen again.
Just crickets here.
I move slowly and carefully down into the little valley, each footstep chosen so that no stones are dislodged, and at the bottom I stop and listen again.
Just crickets.
Then up the other side, slow and careful. Keeping low, I run quickly over to a stand of olive trees and through them, looking to my right. No movement. I stop, look left—nothing—and turn round to survey the whole area. I can make out a few houses that form the edge of the village way down the hillside but Pilot’s house is out of sight.
I turn back to face uphill, close my eyes, and listen.
c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h
I think I know where the Hunter is and I’m sure it’s a Hunter now. There’s no reason for anyone else to be up here, hiding. For a second, I consider trying to unleash the animal in me but I stand the best chance as a human. Celia has trained me for combat and it’s time I used the skills she taught me.
I move as fast as I can back to the right, toward the dry valley. Then I see her. A black figure laid out on the ground, in plain view from here but hidden from Pilot’s house. She’s looking through binoculars. It seems like she hasn’t realized that Nesbitt and I are scouting around.