Hunted by Lindsay Buroker Read Free Book Online

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for brush clearing, it’ll be better to go the long way. It’ll put
us up on top of the ridge where we can look down from above and
maybe sneak up behind her.”
    She caught Cedar gazing into the woods again,
not toward the ridge or the direction of the tracks, but toward the
river and the claims.
    Kali returned the map. “This won’t take long.
We’ll capture her and still make it up to Sebastian’s claim before
it gets dark.”
    “Hm,” was all Cedar said.
     
    * * * * *
     
    Late afternoon sun played tag with the
clouds, though it did little to melt the snow on top of the ridge.
Kali and Cedar knelt in a shadowy hallow, hidden from anyone
looking up from below. She scanned the hillside with a collapsible
spyglass, hoping to catch the smoke puffs of a steam engine. If
they were out there, the forest cloaked them.
    “Do you see the tracks?” she murmured. “If
she drove in a straight line, she would have come out about
there.”
    Her alternate route up had taken an hour. Had
the woman already come through and gone? Or was she hiding in a
cave?
    A creek meandered down into the valley, and
Kali checked up and down the shoreline. It seemed a likely place
for an injured person to stop for water and to attend a wound. The
trees hid much, though, and even from the high ground, she could
not see everything.
    Cedar tapped her shoulder and pointed. She
shifted the spyglass, thinking he had spotted their opponent. He
was pointing out a doe and her fawn, down from the hills to
drink.
    “Cute,” Kali said, though she was more
interested in finding the woman. They would have to go down there
and... She could feel Cedar’s gaze upon her. She lowered the
spyglass. “What?”
    He lifted his eyebrows, and she had a feeling
she had missed something.
    “You were pointing at the deer weren’t
you?” she asked. “I didn’t miss... Oh. Mama probably wouldn’t be
roaming around down there with her baby if a human was nearby.”
    “Especially a human driving a noisy,
steam-powered contraption.”
    “You don’t think she made it this far
up?”
    He did not answer, and Kali did not ask the
other obvious question, whether he thought they had wasted time
detouring out of the way.
    “She was wounded,” Kali said. “Maybe she
couldn’t continue this far.”
    “What’s next?” Cedar asked.
    Kali chewed on the inside of her cheek. He
was letting her take the lead, maybe being nice...maybe giving her
the rope to hang herself. She had asked for it, though, hadn’t she?
After stopping him earlier, she could not bring herself to ask him
to take over now.
    “How about we follow the creek back down
toward the crash site?” Kali suggested. “Maybe we’ll find she came
part way up to the ridge and stopped to deal with her injury. If
she turned a different direction, we’ll probably still come across
her tracks.”
    Cedar held out a hand, palm up. Yes, she was
still the leader.
    As they traipsed downhill, picking a tedious
path between trees and through undergrowth, Kali grew aware of the
passing minutes. Every time the sun poked through the clouds, her
shadow grew longer and thinner where it stretched across the forest
floor.
    Where were those cursed tracks?
    Now and then an animal would startle in the
underbrush, and she’d jerk her rifle that way, half-expecting their
opponent to jump out at them. Each time Kali would chastise
herself—if anything, that woman would lob grenades at them from a
distance, not attack at close range—but she remained on edge
nonetheless.
    “Kali.” Cedar pointed toward a muddy stretch
of land to their right. The parallel tracks of the woman’s
device.
    Kali jogged to the spot. “Huh. Good eye. I
wasn’t expecting them this far over.” She turned to get her
bearings. The ridge stood over a mile away now, meaning they were
almost halfway back to the wreckage. She sighed. Prudence be
damned. She had wasted a lot of time trying to second-guess the
woman. “They’re paralleling the