Peter Dickinson - Eva

She never got the chance. When the nearest party was almost immediately below her she heard the bipping call sign of a commo. A man’s voice muttered into the handset, then spoke, calling to someone else a few meters off.

“They’ve located ’em. B Gang.”

A passing flivver drowned any answers. By the time it had gone the men were picking their way back along the terrace. Eva and Sniff followed toward the edge of the wood and saw that one of the other gangs was out on the rock face already, waiting to be picked up by the flivver, ferried down the slope, and landed again. The SMI airboat was hovering close in with cables dangling, ready to moor. In the sky overhead thirty or forty flying machines maneuvered for a view of the hunt.

Sick in her heart, full of the sense of failure, Eva led the way down the terraces. Sniff came reluctantly, very nervous, constantly making small warning snorts and grunts. If he hadn’t been so interested in her for other reasons, he would probably have stayed behind. She took a route she knew well by now, mainly from tree to tree without touching the ground. She had no idea what she would do, could do. Hide by herself? Grog had said he could still have used her if she’d been the only one to get free. It wouldn’t be easy. She’d need to hunt for food, to spend several hours on that. She had to sleep. And anyway Sniff would be tagging along. Bright though he was, he wouldn’t understand about the sensors. Besides, alone wasn’t enough. For Grog it might be, but Eva knew that a lone chimp is almost a kind of ghost, not quite real. It was the group that counted. From the very first, she’d been determined to take Lana and the others with her. If they were caught, then it was all over.

Their route took them almost to the edge of the wood. The airboat was moored now, unloading what looked like nets. Yes, of course. You couldn’t just stun a chimp ten meters up a tree—you’d have to catch it as it fell, or it could be killed when it hit the ground. So if the chimps kept moving, if she could reach them and lead them away through the tree-tops . . .

It wouldn’t work. They’d be terrified already, with the bustle in the wood and the racket of machines above. Their instinct would be to climb as high as they could and cling. Without thinking what she was doing, Eva continued on down until she was only a couple of terraces above the one on which the men were going to and fro. Here at last she paused and tried to think. Her mind buzzed. She felt as if she were being wrenched apart, back into her two selves, but it was her human mind that kept telling her that the best she could do was go and join the others and try and get them clear and if she couldn’t, then be caught with them, be shot, and fall and fail—nobody would really get hurt if the hunters did their job properly. Her chimp half simply knew it had to hide.

Something happened while she was still hesitating. Through the buzz of engines she heard a new noise, a cry from throats, a human cheer. Instantly she understood that someone had been caught. Too late. All she could do now was wait and watch. People came hurrying out along the terrace. There was a rope stretched out as a handrail to help them across the rock face to where the airboat was moored. Somebody passed out poles and canvas from the cabin—stretchers. The people hurried off with them into the wood.

Eva waited. After some while the people came back, slowly, struggling to maneuver the stretcher over the difficult ground among the trees. They came and went, in glimpses. She craned. Somehow there always seemed to be an obstruction, a bush, a tree trunk, the people themselves, between her and the pale canvas. Near the edge of the wood they paused. An argument began. Somebody spoke into a handset. Others peered out at the buzzing watchers in the sky above. A woman came scrambling across the rock from the airboat, carrying what looked like a sheet. Yes, of course. They didn’t want the world to see them carrying a dead-looking chimp across the open surface between the wood and the airboat—bad image. The group parted to let the woman through, and now she could see the body on the stretcher. It was Lana.

Rage exploded. Eva didn’t hear herself scream, wasn’t aware of her rush through the branches till she saw the people turn and point, and a gun go up. The movement stopped her, changed the course of her attack. Even in the middle of the madness she knew she couldn’t cope with people carrying stun guns. If the man fired, he missed. By then Eva was hurling herself out and down toward the edge of the wood, toward the open slope where the airboat was tethered. Perhaps some tiny part of her mind told her that if she could disable the airboat the people wouldn’t be able to take Lana away, but all she felt was the need to attack, to break and smash and destroy. Anything human would do, and there was the airboat, huge and smug, trapped by its moorings on the rock below her. She picked up a loose rock and slung it. It bounced off the bag. Next time she aimed better and heard a crash from the cabin. The terrace on which she’d been hiding continued as a bare ledge across the rock face, like the others above and below, before narrowing and becoming just part of the slope. Immediately above the airboat it was blocked by a large boulder. Eva knuckled toward it, slinging loose stuff as she went. When she reached the boulder she gave it a heave, but it stayed firm. She started to scramble over it, looking for more missiles, but at this point she heard a grunt behind her, looked back, and saw that Sniff had followed and was bending to see if he could move it. She dropped on the far side, bent too, and heaved. The boulder stirred. They grunted and heaved together, rolling it from its bed and over the edge. It struck the rim of the ledge below and bounced, turning as it fell, straight into the cabin of the airboat, smashing clean through it and on in great leaps down the mountain.

Eva gave a great whoosh of satisfaction. As it ended, something slapped into her arm, just below the elbow, hurting like fury. She looked down and saw the dart of a stun gun protruding from her pelt. Before she could snatch it out she was in darkness.

Waking. Strange, drowsy, cold, the dream of trees . . .

Mutter and buzz and rumble—flivvers!

The dart!

Where . . . ?

Forcing her eyes open, fighting the remnants of the drug in her bloodstream, Eva saw nothing but dark mist with vague shapes in it. She thought for a moment there must be something wrong with her eyes, but then she heard a grunt, and a face came close to hers, peering into her eyes. Sniff. Every hair of the gray whiskers below his mouth had a droplet of mist at the end. She grunted a welcome and eased herself on to her elbow to look around.

Of course. They were up in the cloud layer. That was why it was so cold. They were on a ledge under a sort of fir with drooping branches from which dangled blobs of moss like seaweed, the shapes she’d seen in the mist. She knew the place. It was quite a long way up. The buzz of the flivvers and airboats came from below—fewer of them? Or just farther away?

How long? What time was it? The drug from a dart usually lasted a couple of hours. She tried to sense where the weight of the sun fell, the way she used to when she lay in the hospital . . . there. Early afternoon—that’d be about right. Plenty of daylight still for the people to find them. Straining her ears, filtering out the noise of the motors, she heard no sound of a hunt.

She felt decidedly sore. There was a cut on her thigh and bruises everywhere. Sniff must have carried or dragged her all this way, scrambling up from terrace to terrace, taking her with him any old way. Would he know about darts? Yes, probably. The keepers in the Reserve had to use them occasionally, and if Sniff had seen it happen he’d have taken an interest, tried to work it out. Good old Sniff.