Twenty Four Shades Darker: The Hunt

(10) The Skeleton in the Cave

Barley was good at waiting. 

For the last hour he hadn't so much as twitched. To Holly it looked as though he'd fallen asleep. She was on the verge of dropping off herself. They had now been walking for almost a week and there was no sign of any of the markers that her parents had told her about. She'd kept an eye out for pieces of string tied between trees, pictures scratched into trunks, sudden unexpected blooms of flowers, but if they were there then she hadn't seen them.

She shivered and tried to wrap her arms further around herself without disturbing her position. That was another thing. It was getting colder. The last two nights she'd huddled up next to Jute in a desperate attempt to find more warmth but that had been a failure; the older girl had given her sleeping bag to Satine on the first night and had no heat spare. The mood in the camp was getting frosty to match. Personally Holly was quite happy that the two whiny girls were no longer part of the group, but she seemed to be alone in this opinion and hadn't voiced it. Blaire had turned silent in protest, though her personality still kept spilling over and every so often she'd make a sarcastic comment that nobody bothered to react to. Marisa was quiet too, but she was quiet anyway. Without Avery around to talk it felt as though all the life had been drained away. Holly didn't care. She'd been sent here to support Jute and Erik, not to make friends. She'd never really wanted friends much anyway. They were overrated.

But just supposing that she did want friends and that she missed having people to talk to who wouldn't stare at her as soon as she opened her mouth, she wouldn't want a friend like Barley.

Her stomach grumbled loudly and he gave her a weak glare across the clearing. Anybody walking past would have missed him. His hood was up, hiding his hair. He'd somehow managed to wriggle inside a log and had daubed mud all over his face to cover the paleness. It wasn't a disguise that would hold up if anybody looked directly at him, but if you didn't know he was there or if you were trying to ignore him, he was almost completely invisible.

She wanted to go back. They'd been out here for two hours and her hands and feet had gone numb. She was cold and she was hungry and every time she so much as moved Barley turned his best doleful gaze on her and made her feel guilty.

"You'd best be right about this," she hissed, her breath momentarily clouding her vision.

He nodded. "I am."

They waited for another ten minutes. The forest was still. If there were Peacekeepers around, they were somewhere far away. The falling light cast long, chilly shadows along the floor. A few leaves, just starting to turn brown at the edges, plucked themselves free and drifted downwards, settling with as much sound as a snowflake. By now they'd been walking uphill for a while and the ground had started to take a turn towards the rocky. For some reason this had pleased Erik, who guessed that there would be caves soon. She'd asked him what this particular theory was based on and he hadn't known. She liked Erik. Behind the somewhat weedy frame and the glasses was a quiet, unobtrusive determination. She hadn't once heard him complain. When Jute was having one of her staring-into-space moments - by now she was having at least three a day - he filled in her place neatly. It helped that the others seemed to...well, not trust him, exactly, but so far he hadn't openly made a decision that they disagreed with and so he was tolerated. It was obvious that being in authority was uncomfortable for him, but he did it anyway. She admired that sort of thing.

Another ten minutes drifted past. She tried shoving her hands into her armpits in case they were any warmer than the rest of her body. Barley gave her another weak glare.

"Quiet. You'll keep them away."

How was he managing with the cold? He was from Nine; everything she'd ever heard about Nine suggested that it was normally quite hot there. Hotter than the northerly Seven, at least. If this was back home she'd have snuck home some wood chippings, shoved into her pockets until they bulged, so they could have a proper fire. And she'd have her sister's hand-me-down gloves, at least. It got much, much colder than this in Seven and last year it had snowed so much that they'd been trapped in their rickety little house for two days, during which time she and her sister had fought so often that she'd refused to share the same bed and had instead curled up by the cooling ashes in the fireplace. The Peacekeepers had them working double shifts for a week to make up for it.