Twenty Four Shades Darker: The Hunt

(14) An Argument and A Consequence

If Barley listened, really listened, he could hear beyond the bickering in the camp and out into the woods. He could hear the trees rustling miles and miles away, hear the chuntering of the factories in Eight, the distant roaring of mutts. How much of it was real and how much was his imagination he wasn't sure, and in a way it didn't matter anyway. Eight was there. The mutts were there. The Peacekeepers were there. If they weren't then they wouldn't have been still on the move, wandering in whatever Jute and Erik said was the right direction, and he wouldn't have been having to hunt and...and that meant that he'd still be on the fringes of everything, ignored half the time and just barely acknowledged for the rest.

When he'd brought back the rabbit he'd seen the surprise on everybody's faces. They hadn't been expecting him to be any good. And since then there'd been another rabbit and some small birds that hadn't been quick enough to spot him, and the delicious smell of the meat still lingered in his nostrils and in the minds of the others too; you could see it in their faces. They smiled at him now. Wearily, tiredly, but it was at least a smile.

He dodged under a fallen tree and sped up a bit until he was back at the pace of the others. He was small for his age and most of them were tall - the exceptions being Blaire and Marisa, who were about the same height and still appeared to tower over him - and although they now stopped to wait for him whenever he fell behind, it was with a restless impatience to be moving again. The discovery of the cave and its contents seemed to have fired the three rebels up again. Now they moved with purpose, but faster. He kept having to jog to rejoin the group.

Whenever he closed his eyes he could still see the skeleton-girl, limp in Satine and Lincoln's arms. Will's face, pale and petrified. Barley had seen dead people before. You saw them in the Games. And in Nine you saw people who had just given up on trying and died wherever they were stood, little more than limp bags of flesh and hair crumpled by the side of pathways, or tucked into an alleyway somewhere, or slowly starved in the middle of the fields so that they looked like skeletons by the time they finally moved on. But as long as they had skin then they looked alive. You could fool yourself into thinking they were just asleep, even when you knew deep down inside you that they weren't.

What about Avery?

He'd liked Avery. She'd been bright and funny and could make him laugh even when he felt like curling into a little ball and crying. Blaire was the same, really, but she was older and she didn't talk so much now. Not since Cordelia.

He'd wanted to go and look for Avery, though he hadn't said so. He felt like if he'd mentioned it then he'd just have been talked down with the others. Once or twice he'd wanted to say something to Blaire, to grab hold of her arm and say that he was annoyed about it too and would she please tell him a joke to take both their minds off it, but that would have meant going up and starting a conversation. And that wasn't the done thing. Not for him. For everybody else conversations just seemed to spring out of nowhere. Satine would say something, something pointless - what he'd be doing back home, maybe, or sometimes it was his prediction on how many of them would still be alive at this point in the Games - and it was never a question but somehow everybody else managed to find answers to it, and then out of nothing everybody was talking.

Or, more often, fighting.

Like now.

"I vote we carry on," Lincoln was saying. "Thirteen is probably the safest place for us right now."

"Nobody's making you stay," Satine added. Blaire glared at him. She had the sort of glare that Barley attributed to older sisters; it was a look that promised potential violence somewhere along the line if you kept pushing. The fact that both of the Career boys were armed would make next to no difference, Barley was certain. She had the expression of a girl who was close to her limit.