The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

She promised Olive she’d be back as soon as she could. There’d be no shame in leaving all this, no shame at all. No one would judge her.

“It’ll only be a couple more days,” she said. “We can do this.”

“I won’t go, Enid. I won’t.” His mouth twisted in horror. She might as well have asked him to slit his wrists. He was scared. Nothing she could say would convince him.

“Then I’ll go alone,” she said.

Investigators worked in pairs for situations just like this one. So they could tell each other when they were off base. So they could check on each other. Suggest, gently, when the other might be wrong. What now, then? Was she wrong?

“But you can’t,” he said, with the certainty of a child who didn’t know any better.

She smiled wryly. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to have a sense of adventure,” he answered.

“Oh no, you have to have a sense of adventure to put on that uniform.” You had to have a spine to wear the brown uniform that made you an outsider, that made people afraid of you. Maybe Enid had too much of a spine, was what Teeg was saying.

“What happens if you go and don’t come back? What am I supposed to tell regional then?”

“Tell them it’s my fault,” she said. “I thought it was a good risk, and I was wrong. It’s not on you.”

“But it will be! I’ll be the only investigator in history to lose a partner!”

“No, you won’t,” she said softly, thinking of Tomas dying in her arms last year. Teeg looked away; he knew the story.

“You can’t go, Enid.”

She stopped arguing. Teeg went back to writing. She wondered how much he could possibly have to say about the Semperfi house. “Maybe if I sleep on it, I’ll come up with another idea. Good night, then.”

“Good night,” Teeg said, not looking up from his work.

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Enid went to bed without drawing any interesting conclusions, then restlessly tossed and turned on the thin blankets and hard wood. Missed Sam’s arms around her. Thought of everyone back home, her folk at Serenity, wondering what was happening there. Would be very easy, to just drop it all and go back home where she belonged.

But she would always, always wonder. She wasn’t finished following this thread.

The sound of water moving, both in the river and on the coast, were unfamiliar and made Enid feel like something was sneaking up on her. Maybe something with a knife.

What had Ella been doing, the moment before she was killed? Had she known what was about to happen or had it been a shock? Had she trusted the person who did it, or had it been a stranger?

In some books about crime and investigations in the old world, from before the Fall—the handful that had survived—experts stated that murders were usually committed by folk who knew the victim. Rarely were they random. The reason might be simple and unsatisfying—long-simmering anger and a burst of temper. But there had to be a reason for this.

There had to be.

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Enid lay awake on her bedroll and heard Teeg come in and settle into sleep.

Before dawn, she got up—very quietly—and put together a pack of supplies. Enough for a day or two of travel, bread and beef jerky, dried fruit, a blanket. Her own knife. She’d find a staff of her own once she got to the woods; she wouldn’t ask Teeg to give up his. She took some tranquilizer patches out of Teeg’s pack.

When the sun rose, she was on the road, walking up the hill, and beyond.

Chapter Fifteen • the WILD

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The Last Bit of Path