Chapter 351: Beyond the Fence

Chapter 351: Beyond the Fence

The hauler took the Hollowmere road through the eastern gate at six on Saturday morning, and for the first twenty minutes Jin couldn’t stop looking out of the window.

He’d ridden convoy roads before, all the way to Highmarch, but that had been an academy trip on someone else’s schedule. This was a licensed beast hauler he’d booked himself: a squat, rattling truck with a reinforced trailer, a driver named Okonkwo who chewed something constantly, and Glitch in the back, occasionally thumping the wall to make sure Jin was still there.

Beyond the farm belts and last patrol post, the land opened into rolling country dotted with smallholdings and pump houses. Numbered zone markers stood every few kilometers.

"First time out?" Okonkwo asked, without looking away from the road.

"First time on my own," Jin replied.

"Hm." The driver chewed. "Hollowmere’s all right. Patrols cull it twice a season. Still bites." He jerked his chin at the window. "See the claw marks on that post? That’s from the spring."

Jin looked. The zone marker they were passing had four long gouges in it, a little above head height.

He stopped admiring the scenery quite so much after that.

About an hour out, they stopped at the halfway waystation for twenty minutes. It was a squat concrete compound with a gun platform at each corner, a beast pen, and a patrol office whose noticeboard listed current ratings for every sector ahead. Jin checked his, as the module had told him to, and photographed it.

[Hollowmere — Eastern Margin: Rating 3. No current closures.]

Below it was a patrol schedule. Next cull: in six weeks.

Which is why they’re paying me, Jin thought, instead of waiting.

They left before half past seven. Jin confirmed Sunday’s pickup with Okonkwo and saved the waystation contact in case the hunt ran longer. By the time they reached the farm’s turnoff, he was checking his equipment again.

The Pask smallholding stood at the end of a dirt track, where cultivated land gave way to scrub.

A stone house and barn sat at the western end. From there, long strips of tubers with heavy green tops ran east to a fence line of posts and wire, and beyond the fence, the ground dropped into scrub and trees. Most of that fence looked like it had been through a war.

A man came out of the house as the hauler pulled up. He was broad-shouldered and sunburned, with a jacket patched at both elbows. Behind him, in the doorway, stood a girl of about fourteen with her arms folded.

"You the hunter?" the man asked.

"Jin Astor." He held out his license on his phone. "Mr. Pask?"

"Corwen." The man looked at the license, then at Jin, and hesitated just long enough for Jin to recognize the problem. "They said Rank 2."

It says so right there. Jin kept that to himself.

Behind Jin, the trailer door dropped open with a clang, and Glitch walked down the ramp.

Corwen Pask looked at him for a long time.

"Right," Corwen said. "Yes. All right."

The girl in the doorway unfolded her arms.

Once Jin had unloaded his kit and Okonkwo had left, Corwen walked him along the fence.

"Three weeks ago, they started," he said. "Came through the ditch on the north side first and dug up half a strip. I fixed the fence. They came back. I fixed it again. Last week, they took out two posts at once and got into the main field." He stopped by a long stretch of churned ground, where the green tops had been ripped out and the tubers dug up and half eaten. "That’s a quarter of the crop gone. If they get the rest, I don’t make rent on this place. That’s the whole of it."

"Have they gone for people?" Jin asked.

"Not yet." Corwen’s jaw tightened. "But I’ve got four workers on the south strip, and they sleep in the sheds by the pump house. The pump’s the only reason any of this grows. If those things go through the pump house, I’m finished either way."

Jin looked along the curving fence. There was far too much of it for Glitch to guard every damaged section at once.

"How many?" Jin asked.

"Three," Corwen said. "A big one and two smaller."

"They don’t all come together," the girl said behind them.

They both turned. The girl had followed them out and was standing a few paces back with her hands jammed in her pockets.

"Lia," Corwen said, half warning.

"He should know," she said. She looked at Jin, a little defiant, as though she expected him to brush her off. "The big one doesn’t come in with the others. It waits."

Jin turned to face her properly. "Waits where?"

"In the ditch on the north side, where the culvert goes under the fence." She pointed. "The two little ones come first, from different places. One goes at the east gate by the orchard. The other one goes along the bottom corner near the sheds. They make a racket. When everyone runs to them, the big one comes through the ditch." She hesitated. "I watched them from the barn loft. Three nights. It’s the same every time."

"What time?" Jin asked.

"Just after dark. Before moonrise," Lia said.

Jin followed her pointing hand along the fence. "Do they always use those entrances?"

"The big one, yes. The little ones—" She frowned. "Mostly. Last night, one of them came along the bottom corner first and then crossed to the gate. Like it was checking."

Jin looked toward the barn loft. She’d spent three nights watching the very approaches he needed to cover.

"That’s really useful," Jin told her. "Thank you."

Lia blinked, as though she hadn’t expected him to say that. Then she shrugged with elaborate unconcern and looked at the fence.

"They rub their tusks on the oak by the orchard," she added. "Every time. You can see the marks."

He checked her observations as he walked the farm.

The north culvert was a concrete pipe under the fence line, where a drainage ditch ran out toward the scrub. The banks around it were trampled flat, with huge cloven prints pressed deep into the mud. That was where the leader came.

The east gate stood halfway down the fence beside a small orchard of stunted fruit trees. The oak’s gouged bark matched Lia’s description.

The south corner was where the fence turned back toward the house. The pump house stood there: a concrete box with a corrugated roof, the pump inside thumping steadily. Beside it were two wooden sheds where the workers slept. A narrow plank bridge crossed the irrigation channel just inside the corner. The fence there had been patched with wire so many times it was more knots than fence.

The three approaches were widely separated. Jin needed to decide which one mattered most before anything came through.

Jin sat on an upturned crate in the barnyard with the farm sketched on the back of a feed receipt and thought it through.

Before dusk, he sent the workers into the barn, checked its barred doors, and had Corwen close the stout stock gate across the yard. Lia argued until Jin offered her the loft lookout. She took the flare pistol with instructions to signal anything approaching the buildings, then get below the window. Corwen stayed with her until she could show Jin how to use it.

Glitch would take the middle of the field. From there, he could reach the culvert or the gate in a few seconds, and Tremor Sense would tell him which way the leader moved. Jin would take the low pump house roof, which overlooked the south corner, the plank bridge a short distance below, and most of the field. He checked the rear descent too, keeping the concrete wall between that route and the bridge.

If Lia was right, the followers would try to draw them out. Jin would hold Glitch back for the leader while watching the southern approach himself.

The sun went down behind the barn. The pump thumped steadily beneath Jin’s feet. In the middle of the field, Glitch lay low among the tuber tops, a dark, heavy shape against the dusk, completely still.

The light went gray, then blue.

Then Jin felt it, through the bond: Glitch’s Tremor Sense, picking up weight in the ground.

North. Heavy and slow, coming down the ditch toward the culvert. That was the leader, early, before the others had made a sound.

And then, a moment later, east, at the orchard gate. Something lighter.

Jin waited for the third. He waited for it to come along the south corner, right under him, where Lia had said.

It didn’t.

Glitch’s attention twitched. The third weight was there, but it was moving south along the outside of the fence, past the corner, past the pump house, toward the shallow ford where the irrigation channel left the farm. Lia had never seen it use that line.

They’re splitting wider, Jin thought. All three at once.

He stood up on the pump house roof.