give a whoop of triumph, and they both laughed. I stepped into the small clearing. A target was carved on a tree trunk, studded now with their knives. Zoe was grinning as she retrieved the knives. Sally and Xander were by the fire, watching the game.
“No need to ask who won, then,” I said.
“Piper’s setting the snares tonight,” said Zoe, wiping her knife blade against her trousers. “And taking first watch. He’s already lost two rounds in a row. He’s throwing so badly you’re lucky he didn’t hit you on your way back.”
She handed Piper back his daggers. I settled on the ground next to Sally and Xander, and watched Piper and Zoe as they played another round. Zoe went first, standing behind the line that they’d scraped in the earth, while Piper watched from the other side of the clearing. The first time Zoe edged one foot over the line, Piper laughed at her and she denied cheating. The second time she did it, he let fly one of his own knives, skewering her shoelace to the ground so that she couldn’t snatch her guilty foot back.
“Try denying that,” he said to her with a smile. She bent to pull the knife free, swearing when her shoelace snapped.
“Pity you can’t throw that accurately when you’re aiming for the target,” she said, and handed it back to him.
He laughed, and she stepped back behind the line.
I’d laughed too. But even as I watched Piper and Zoe play their target game, my neck was tense. She was laughing now, but I’d seen her slit a man’s throat and leave his body in the dust. Piper was rolling his eyes at Zoe’s latest throw, but I’d heard him speak of killing a man as casually as I might talk of plucking a pigeon.
Watching Piper and Zoe, I couldn’t forget that even their games were made of blades.
Ω
After another day of walking, it was midnight when we crested a large hill, and saw the quarry below us. It was a scar on the hills, a gouge nearly half a mile long, the white clay bright under the moonlight. It started off shallow, a series of clay pits and chalky pools, but in the middle it became a gully, carved more than a hundred yards deep. On the northern side were sharp cliffs, seamed with red stone; on the southern side, whole sections of the wall had given way, slumping down and carrying with them boulders and trees that now lay, half-buried, in the rubble mounds that had engulfed half the pit. A wide, well-kept road passed only a mile to the west, but the quarry itself must have been abandoned for decades—its base was thickly wooded, where the landslides had spared it.
We were able to edge within a few hundred yards of the quarry’s mouth, under the cover of trees and ditches, but there was no way to get closer without being exposed. To the east, where one or two Omega shacks were dotted, there were fields stretching close to the quarry’s eastern side, but they’d long ago been harvested, so offered us no cover. On the quarry’s western edge there was a scattering of trees, but nothing thick enough to conceal our approach.
I stared at the quarry’s steep sides. “If the Council’s already been here, then we’ll be walking straight into a trap.”
“If the Council had already been here, I doubt they’d have left Omega sentries on the lookout,” said Zoe quietly. “Look.”
She pointed west. Piper saw it before I did: the figure perched high in an oak tree, where the woods petered out. The sentry was watching the road to the west, but when he turned periodically to scan the woods on each side, I could see his profile. He was a dwarf, bow slung across his shoulder.
“It’s Crispin,” said Piper. “And he won’t be the only sentry. The others?”
“Haven’t seen them yet,” Zoe said. “But I’m thinking that hay shouldn’t be sitting out, months since the harvest.” She gestured to a small stack of bales in a field to the east of the quarry. “I’d bet there’s a watch post under there. That’d give them a view of the whole eastern perimeter.”
“I didn’t train my guards to be slack,” Piper said. “They should’ve spotted us already.”
“Careful,” Sally said to him. “Simon’s guards. Not yours anymore.”
“I’m not likely to forget that,” said Piper. But he was already moving off toward the oak, stealthy but quick. We followed as he led from