Unworthy: Marked to die. Raised to survive. by Joanne Armstrong Page B

willing to let me out of his sight for a length of time. He seems to understand that there’s no danger of my going far. He’s right; for once the thought of fleeing is not foremost in my mind.
    My mind empties itself of all thought and I come back to myself to find I’ve lit a fire and have a dead woodpigeon in my hands. I must be in shock. I have no recollection of killing or preparing it, but there it is, on a spit and ready to roast. My hands had kept themselves busy doing something familiar while my mind tried to cope with what I had seen. I don’t know how long it’s been, but Hayes is pressing his way through the brush and the light is failing. I push the memory of the scene away. I don’t want to dwell on it.
    He drops a backpack in the dirt on the other side of the fire.
    “What’s that?” I ask.
    “Anything useful they had on them… a couple of knives, spears, tools, some medicines, blankets…”
    He lets this hang in the air between us for a moment, and busies himself with the contents of the backpack. It’s not lost on me that the people in the clearing were not robbed. So why were they killed?
    I watch him unpack the bag, and a couple of vials catch my eye. I move forward and scoop them up, my heart thudding in my chest. Holding them up to the fading light, I know that I would recognise those symbols anywhere. All at once I realise who the dead people are.
    “Four bodies?” I ask, with apprehension.
    “Probably. I found four heads,” he replies, matter-of-factly. He doesn’t meet my eyes, but he adds quietly, “I buried them.”
    “Two adults, two teens?” I whisper, watching him.
    He looks up at me from where he is hunkered down next to the items. His cool, grey eyes narrow. “How would you know that?”
    I remember the last time I saw the father. He called at our pod a couple of days before he left with his family, to trade for some of Grandad’s forbidden items. He was excited about leaving, something he’d always wanted to do when the kids were old enough. They had been planning on going inland, towards the mountains. They would fish and hunt through spring and summer, and find somewhere to settle before the colder weather came.
    “If it doesn’t work out,” he’d smiled at Grandad, “we’ll see you in the autumn.”
    He’d been treating it like a camping trip. Now he and his family were dead. They had been slaughtered violently and senselessly, their bodies left to be picked at by scavengers.
    Hayes’s question is still unanswered. “They were from Greytown,” I explain. “They left a month ago, heading for the mountains.” Their name comes back to me. Roberts… the Roberts family.
    “They didn’t get very far,” he shrugs ruefully. “What are they?” he asks, indicating the small containers in my hand.
    “This one is a scent masker - you can use it when you’re hunting to get closer to your prey. This one is ah - an antiseptic.” The second is contraband; a hubbite having it in their possession is a punishable offence. He doesn’t ask me how I know, and I don’t offer it, although I’m sure he suspects. “Who would do this?”
    Immediately his face goes blank, which just about gives me my answer. “I can tell you know something.” I sit down opposite him and lean forward. He appraises me steadily. He’s deciding what to tell me. “I’m not going to stop asking,” I say.
    He raises an eyebrow as if to say that wouldn’t sway him. He takes the wood pigeon from the spit and starts peeling the flesh back, offering some to me. I’m not hungry though, and my stomach just about turns at the thought of the meat. He doesn’t eat it either. He looks it over then puts it down.
    “It was a tracker. Sent to find and kill those people.”
    “Sent by… the Polis,” I finish. Who else? “But why would the Polis want them dead?”
    Hayes shakes his head, as though marvelling at the extent of my ignorance. “We can’t have people going off on their own, starting