K y wondered if the Customs officers would also show a family resemblance, or be more what she thought of as normally varied. The officers who waited on the dockside were all red-haired, though she didn’t notice that for a moment because the biggest had what looked like silver horns curling around his head from his brow to his ears. Ky blinked, then realized what they were. Enhanced implant plug-ins, probably mobile sensors.
“Captain Vatta? I’m Senior Inspector Vaughn.”
“Yes, I’m Captain Vatta.”
“May we come aboard?”
“Yes. Follow me, please.” She led the way toward the weapons bays. From the expressions of her crew, most of them had never seen that kind of implant plug-in, either. As she’d now expected, the tall man’s “horns” uncurled to reveal a sensor tip, which he ran over the racks of missiles and then the visible surface of the missile tube backlocks.
“Very good, Captain Vatta,” he said. “We will now place our seals, which must remain intact while you are here; they will be inspected again prior to your departure. I understand you have cargo to deliver here?”
“Yes,” Ky said. “This way.” She led him to the containers bound for the rehabilitation center, and he opened them, extending one of the tendril-like plug-ins down into the container.
“Quite correct,” he said, retracting it. “Now I need to see the identification of your crewmembers, if they are going to leave the ship; we do not care about those who stay aboard. Oh, and if you have any livestock—”
“No livestock, but a dog,” Ky said. “We certainly won’t allow him off the ship.”
“You have a dog?” His brows went up almost as high as his horns. “What type of dog?”
“We were told it was a terrier; I don’t know much about dogs, myself.”
“Dogs are very popular here. If he is for sale—”
“No,” Ky said. “He belongs to a young relative of mine.”
“That’s too bad. He would be worth as much as this—” He put his hand on the container of prostheses. “We have very limited genome material for dogs, and terriers, in particular, are both popular and in short supply. Your relative could make his fortune.”
Ky had known from childhood about the vagaries of trade—that something worthless in one place might be highly prized somewhere else. But she had never considered that the miserable pup Rascal was good for anything but keeping Toby busy and happy.
“I’ll tell him,” she said, “but I’m sure he’ll want to keep the dog.”
“Perhaps a DNA sample…that alone would bring a good price,” Vaughn said. “More if the dog is male and could produce a sperm sample.”
Ky didn’t want to speculate on that. “I’ll tell him,” she said again. “Now, about the crew. All but three might want to go offship; your station seems to have good facilities.”
“We do indeed,” Vaughn said. “Excellent shops, local craftwork, fine dining—”
“Then tell me what you need in terms of identification. I can assemble the crew for you.”
“Oh, I just need the paperwork. Scans are fine. Then you must agree to ensure that each has read and understood the local regulations. We take regulations very seriously, and enforce them rigorously. It is the only way to deal with outsiders.”
“I see.” Ky raised her voice slightly. “Jameel, will you bring down the crew ID dossiers, please?”
“Yes, Captain,” came the response from the ship’s intercom. In a moment, the cargo clerk came in with a hardcopy stack; Vaughn took it, scanning it quickly with one of his plug-ins. Jameel’s eyes widened as he watched, Ky noted with amusement. She was beginning to find it natural.
“Hand out the regulations,” Vaughn said to his companions, still scanning dossiers. They reached into the shoulder bags they carried and each handed Ky a small bundle of what looked like booklets with bright green-and-silver covers. “There is also a data cube, Captain Vatta, but this saves you printing out copies yourself. Each foreigner who comes onto the station must have a copy of the regulations in his or her possession while on the station, to ensure that there is no excuse for breaking rules.”
“I see,” Ky said. With her thumb, she opened the cover of the one on top. A table of contents, with headings that looked very organized, if a little odd. Buying. Selling. Eating. Excreting. Sleeping. Conversing (not in the course of buying, selling, eating, excreting). Helping. Fornicating. Obstructing. Damaging. She paged over to Damaging and found a definition of damage, and rules for damaging without incurring the death penalty. “It seems very…thorough…,” she said, running her gaze over the rules for damaging, for receiving damages, for adjudicating damaging.
“It is no more thorough than we found we needed,” Vaughn said. He retracted his plug-in and squared the pile of ID dossiers. “Are these copies I might take and file, or originals?”
“Copies,” Ky said. “You are welcome to take them.”
“You are most courteous, Captain Vatta. We do appreciate courtesy. You may notice that in our regulations.”
She had. One of the rules for damaging was that the person intending to damage someone or something was expected to give notice “in a quiet and courteous voice; it is an offense to speak too loudly or use foul language.”
“Do please inform your kinsman of the market value of his dog,” Vaughn said. “And please inform Customs when you are ready to certify that all your crew have read and understood the regulations.”
“I will do that,” Ky said. “Thank you.” She wasn’t sure what she was thanking him for, but if he wanted courtesy she would give it to him.
“My pleasure, Captain,” Vaughn said, and led his team back out to the hatch and onto dockside.
Ky closed the inner hatch and went to the bridge. She wasn’t sure how she was going to explain this one to her crew.
“For a society that started with a bunch of backwoods renegades, they certainly do have a thing about politeness,” Rafe commented when he was halfway through the booklet.
“And it’s their own peculiar definition of politeness,” Martin said. “Have you gotten to fornication yet?”
“No,” Rafe said. “I’ve been here before.” Ky looked at him in surprise. “Notice the penalties,” he said. “They kill people for a lot of things. But politely. ‘The executioner will always give the condemned sufficient time to recover from any embarrassing exhibition of emotion; condemned need not fear that they will be exposed to public ridicule as a result of inability to control bodily functions.’”
“That’s grotesque,” Lee said. “Providing clean pants for someone about to be killed?”
“They consider it minimal courtesy,” Rafe said.
“I wonder you survived a visit, then,” Martin said.
“I am always polite,” Rafe said. “It is one of my few virtues.”
Martin and Lee both started to speak; Ky quelled them with a glance.
“‘Fornication is legal among all classes of persons, foreign or citizen, provided that due notice has been given of all relevant diseases and conditions, and that no offer of payment is made by the pursuer, and all payment is made in advance if payment is requested by the pursued,’” Martin quoted. “So what does that mean—do they have prostitutes or not?”
“It means if your chosen partner wants to do it for money, you have to give them money,” Rafe said. “They have much the same system on Allray. Not the bit about due notice given, though, or the part about parental responsibility, or the use of objectionable language during the acts themselves.”
“Very direct, I’d say,” Ky said. She read on, fascinated.
Before Ky had finished exploring the peculiarities of Cascadia’s legal system as it applied to transients, representatives of the West Cascadia Rehabilitation Centre called about the prostheses and bioelectronics.
“The expiration date is critical; the shipment is overdue. Can you confirm that the expiration date has not been exceeded? We have damages owing if it is—”
“I’m not the original shipper,” Ky said. “The materials were held up because of widespread interruption of trade; surely you knew that.”
“Yes, but you’re in charge of them now—”
“I was on my way, in transit here, within twelve hours after picking up the shipment,” Ky said. “None of the delay is my fault.”
“But the expiration date—”
“Hasn’t been exceeded yet, not if the date on the container is accurate. However, it will be in another five days.”
“We’ll send for it right away. We have priority for cargo space in shuttles. How soon can you offload it?”
“When I’m paid,” Ky said. “Because this was an unscheduled transit, and the original consignor was not available by ansible, I agreed to take it as pay-on-delivery. Now given the nature of the cargo, and its humanitarian importance, the charges will be only seventy percent of what other cargo of equal mass would be.” She named a figure.
“Where did you say you picked it up?”
Ky gave the name again.
“Just a moment.” After a pause, the caller reappeared onscreen. “That’s quite satisfactory, within the usual parameters. Thank you, Captain Vatta. To what account should we direct the transfer of funds?”
“I just arrived; I’ll be setting up a ship account with Crown & Spears under my name, Kylara Vatta.” She spelled it.
“Within the hour, then,” the caller said. “Or is that too soon?”
“No, that’s fine,” Ky said. “And your representatives can pick up the cargo as soon as I have confirmation of funds transfer. The containers are standard one-meter shipping cubes.”
She called the local branch of Crown & Spears next.
“Aye, we saw a Vatta ship was inbound,” the woman on the vidscreen said. “So you want to see the Vatta Transport balances? Do you have the account numbers and passwords?”
“Yes, but I want to set up a separate account for my current business,” Ky said. “Under my own name, Kylara Vatta. There’ll be a funds transfer coming in from the West Cascadia Rehabilitation Centre shortly—”
“Oh, you brought the prostheses?” Without waiting for an answer, the woman rattled on. “We really need them, you know. Or I guess you don’t. We had a huge industrial accident months ago and there’s a lot of people waitin’ for ’em. My brother lost his left arm.”
“I’m sorry,” Ky said.
“Not your fault,” the woman said. “But of course, if you need an account to take that transfer you will have to come by the branch for personal identification procedures.”
“What’s the shortest way?” Ky asked. The listing in the station directory gave an address by direction and branch connection, but no map.
“Get yourself a leader-tag,” the woman said. “They’re free to visitors; there’ll be a booth as you enter the concourse. Type in our name, and it’ll program the leader, and then it’ll tell you the best route.”
“Thanks,” Ky said, thinking that a map would have been simpler.
“People get turned around,” the woman said. “Leader-tags save a lot of confusion.”
The kiosk dispensing leader-tags had both keyboard and voice input; it recognized “Crown & Spears” and spit a green tree-shaped tag into its output bin. Ky picked it up.
“Hold pointing tree tip facing away from you,” a tinny voice said.
Ky turned the tag in her hand until it pointed forward.
“Turn fifty-eight degrees right.”
She almost laughed, but instead turned until the tag said, “Walk ahead.”
By the time she got to the Crown & Spears entrance, she was heartily tired of the tagger’s voice. It didn’t seem to have a volume control, so everyone nearby got to hear its fussy warnings. “Do not walk into trash bins—turn thirty degrees right—now thirty degrees left…” As she came to the entrance, the tagger announced, “You are here. You are here. You are here,” and then “Task over. To reactivate, place in input bin of leader-tag kiosk. If not returned to kiosk within one hour, alarm will sound.”
Ky entered Crown & Spears, the familiar silver-gray-and-blue décor comforting.
“May we help you?” said an elegant young man in black suit and white shirt.
“Excuse me—where can I put this tagger thing?”
“Oh, we have a kiosk. Most businesses do.” He took it from her and put it in a smaller version of the kiosk she’d used tucked between two ornamental pillars. “Now—may we help you with something else?”
“I’m Captain Kylara Vatta; I am opening a new account here.”
“A moment.” His eyes blanked, then focused again. “Yes, of course. You spoke to our senior account executive before. She will be pleased to meet with you now, if that is quite convenient.”
“Certainly,” Ky said. “Thank you.” She followed him across the dark shining floor, past large desks each with its attendant, and then down a carpeted hallway to a large office on the right.
“Mellie, this is Captain Vatta; Captain Vatta, Melanda Torrin.”
“Captain Vatta, what a pleasure.” The woman she’d seen onscreen now looked older, less exuberant. Black suit cut to show her figure, white blouse with a frill of lace at the throat, gold earrings, a thick mop of red-brown hair, shoulder length. And startling blue eyes.
“The pleasure is mine,” Ky said.
“Our laws require that we meet new account owners in person, and confirm identity. That is hard to do these days, with multiple ansible failures, but I believe we have Vatta family DNA samples on file. You would not object to a comparison?”
“Er…no.” She had not anticipated this. “But doesn’t that take a long time?”
“For a reasonably close family resemblance, no. Let’s see. Two years ago, a Captain Vatta came through: Josephine Iola Grace. Would you know how closely she might be related?”
“If she listed her father as Stavros, she’s—she was—my first cousin. Her father and mine were brothers. She—they’re—all dead.”
“I’m surprised to hear that. She was quite young,” the woman said.
“Her ship was blown up,” Ky said.
“You said all dead…do you mean your father?”
“Yes. Father, mother, brothers…and my uncle Stavros and much of his family. You had not heard?”
“I had not, no. I’m sorry, Captain Vatta. I did not mean to offend.”
“You didn’t offend,” Ky said. “You didn’t know.”
“Do you have no one, then?”
“Some survived,” Ky said. “Jo’s sister Stella. Her mother, Stavros’ wife, Helen. I don’t know about her children.” She had never met Jo’s children; they’d been born while she was in boarding school or the Academy.
“I shall hope they are safe,” the woman said.
“I, also,” Ky said. “But I don’t know…the Slotter Key ansible is down.”
Grace looked out her window before dawn. She had no need to stand in front of it; she used the excellent optics she’d installed and scanned everything in view on that side of the house, methodically sweeping back and forth, working her way out from the crazy-paved walk below, past the strip of grass, the roses trained against the wall, the wall itself, keying to the angle she’d arranged to see its far side, where a striped cat crouched, tail twitching, about to leap on a rabbit nibbling berries a few yards along. Beyond, a stretch of rougher grass to the perimeter fence. Another rabbit, a pair of them, frisking. Courting. Mating. Well, they were rabbits. She wished the cat luck. Beyond the perimeter fence, the land rose in gentle waves to the hills and the road. A bulge of hill cut off any view down-valley to the east; the road curved around it.
Right about now…yes…the first traffic of the day, a truck whose engine had made the same squawk and growl when its driver shifted for the downgrade every morning since they’d come. It was too early for birds to show her if anyone lay hidden in the rock outcrop, now a dark blur on slightly lighter dark. Movement caught her eye. She scanned the top of the outcrop…small, alert but uninterested in the hollow below, ears cocked to something uphill. It stood and trailed its bushy tail over the rocks as it slid down on the riverside. Fox. What had alerted it?
The gentle tonk-tonk-tonk of sheepbells came to her ears, and now she saw, pouring off the road in a slow torrent, a flock of sheep. Two shepherds were with them, and four dogs. Sheep and dogs passed the rock outcrop; one of the dogs leapt up to the top and sniffed, tail wagging wildly, but jumped down and went on when a shepherd called it.
Without moving from her comfortable bed, Grace checked the other sides of the house. Nothing. Ponies up near the house end of the paddock, waiting for the children to run out and feed them. Their girl Caitlyn from the town on her bicycle, leaving a dark trace in the silvery dew as she rode on the footpath instead of the road.
Grace turned off her system and let herself doze as light brightened in the room. She had been up until almost four, interfering with the sleep of the wicked, making them nervous enough to call each other on what they believed were secure lines, and she knew were not. She had recordings; she had made copies; she had transmitted copies to various locations. She needed to think about what they’d said, make sense of it, make plans…but she was tired, and hated the years that had stolen her ability to stay up two nights running.
A cry woke her, completely alert in an instant. She was halfway across the room, bare feet slapping on the floor, weapon in hand, when she thought to grab the security system’s master control and plug in her implant.
The paddock. One pony down, legs thrashing. Justin, Jo’s elder child, sprawled in the grass. Helen running. The other pony standing stiff, head thrown up, ears pricked, with Shar, the younger child, clinging to its mane.
They weren’t supposed to ride until after breakfast. It was after breakfast; she’d overslept and Helen hadn’t woken her. She threw the scans to full power. There. A glint in the briars. No time to get downstairs, outside—
She was across the second-story bridge to the far side of the house, out on the balcony, peering through the exuberant flowering vine and its equally exuberant bees, when the assassin stood up to get a better shot at the other pony or its rider. Or at Helen, who was ignoring the obvious danger and running straight for the fallen child. Ignoring the bees, ignoring Helen’s yells and the second pony’s sudden bolt, Grace focused her whole attention on drilling a hole through the assassin.
He fell. Grace scanned the area again for any other threat. No. A lone assassin? Stupid of them, and she wasn’t sure she believed it. Movement in a neighboring field caught her eye. A rabbit, streaking away from where it had been quietly nibbling grass. Her gaze tracked the streak back, back, to another tangle of briars. There—her vision aided by highly illicit processors in her implant—she detected heat radiation. And there, aided again by other highly illicit bioelectronics, she directed her next shot.
Helen had reached Justin, thrown herself over him as a protective blanket. For all the good that would do, Grace thought. Stay down, Helen, she wanted to yell. The second pony had slowed from its wild bolt; the child still hugged its neck, unhurt, mouth a round O, eyes wide. The pony flicked its ears back and forth, then suddenly lowered its head to snatch grass; the child slithered off, unbalanced by that move. Unhurt, apparently; Shar threw a leg over the pony’s neck and tugged at its mane, trying the trick they’d taught the pony two weeks before, to raise its head and lift a child rider to its back.
Grace didn’t want to leave the window, where she had the best view…but she had to. Downstairs, she heard voices, exclamations, the scurry of feet. She was still wearing her night clothes, the close-fitting black garment with pad-protected elbows and knees in which she’d climbed out of her own window at midnight and back into it at four in the morning. When she went downstairs, Caitlyn saw her and gasped, fist to her mouth. Grace thought of what Caitlyn was seeing—a slim black figure holding a very nasty-looking weapon. One of them.
“It’s all right, Caitlyn. It’s just me—”
“But…but…Miss Grace—”
“Caitlyn, go in the kitchen and stay there.”
“The police—”
“Don’t call them. I will or Helen will.”
“The doctor?”
“One of us will call if a doctor’s needed. Stay in the kitchen until you’re called, can you do that?” A nod from Caitlyn, still paler than she should have been.
Grace moved to the back of the house. The garden, from above, had an obvious plan, but from the ground presented too many obstructions and distractions. She wanted to hurry; she might be needed now. But hurry brought her too predictably to walks and open spaces easy to range. They—if any such were still out there—would expect the hurry, the predictable direct approach through the main aisle in this garden, wide enough for a small tractor and its implements. Grace chose a slower route, but not much slower for someone who had prepared carefully, for whom the straight lines of apparently solid walls and hedges had gaps ready for use by those who knew them. She knew them all.
Now she came to the paddock, where the injured pony still made those unhorselike sounds but more quietly. One leg was gone, ending in a mangled stump still spurting blood. The other legs kicked less vigorously. She should kill the pony humanely, but she had humans to check on.
“Helen,” Grace said, just loud enough above the pony’s groans. “How bad is it?”
“Not hurt,” Helen said. “Just stunned. Shar?”
Stunned could kill, as they both knew. “Shar’s fine,” Grace said. Down the paddock, Shar was back astride the second pony, kicking hard, but the pony didn’t want to approach.
“Are they coming?” Helen asked.
“Not those two,” Grace said. “I’ll get Shar.”
“I meant the police,” Helen said.
“Not for a while,” Grace said. “Not until after we call them, so don’t.”
“Don’t call—?”
“No.” She walked up to the first pony, whose glazing eyes barely turned to see her, squatted down, and aimed carefully at the crossing of the X made by lines from right ear to left eye and left ear to right eye. “Sorry,” she said to the pony, and fired. The pony jerked and then went limp.
“What did you do?” Helen asked.
“Gave it peace,” Grace said. “Get Justin inside, if you can. I’ll get Shar.” She walked down the paddock, itchy with tension, an easy target, to the far corner where the second pony was grazing in quick, nervous snatches. Shar, sitting bolt upright on the pony’s back, stared at Grace as if she were a stranger. Perhaps the child didn’t recognize her. She herself felt more at home than she had in decades, the carefully constructed veneer of slightly batty and prudish old lady falling away to reveal the same familiar interior Grace, a Grace perfectly at home in black climbing suit with a weapon in hand.
“Easy now, Buttercup,” she said to the pony. And to the child, “Shar, your mother wants you. It’s time to go in.”
“He won’t go,” Shar said. She looked so much like Jo at that age that Grace almost choked.
“He’s scared,” Grace said. “You sound a little scared, too.”
“What happened to Rosy?” Shar asked. “Did you shoot Rosy?”
“Rosy broke a leg. It was a bad break. It couldn’t be fixed. Come down, now.” She started to reach for Shar, but the pony sidestepped and she had only one hand, the other being still occupied with her weapon. Shar had tilted toward her, and now slid too far off balance, falling to the ground just as something slammed into Grace’s left arm, whirling her around as if in a dance. She fell, furious with herself, knowing instantly what it was and that there had been more than two. The pony bolted again, the quick thuds of its flight scarcely faster than the rhythm of her heart.
She was on the ground. Shar, facedown and head-up, stared at her. “Stay down,” she said to Shar. “Stay flat—put your head right down and be quiet and hold still no matter what.” Waves of pain washed over her, nausea racked her. She turned her head and saw, without surprise, that her arm was lying folded up all wrong, in a widening pool of blood. “Damn,” she muttered.
“Bad word,” Shar said. “Gramma says…”
“Quiet,” Grace said. “You be the baby possum, like in the story.” She had to do something about the bleeding or she would be dead, like the daddy possum in the story. But that would mean letting go of her weapon, something she was sure the assassin would like to see.
She heard a crackling in the brambles beyond the paddock fence, footsteps, and willed herself to stay conscious until she could shoot the scumsucker in the gut…there was the dark shape, in a suit similar to her own, but with a hood and mask. She struggled to bring her weapon to bear…and then the figure staggered, fell facedown, and behind it was someone she recognized too slowly as MacRobert, bloody fish-gutting knife in hand.
“You—” she said.
“You’re having an interesting morning,” he said. He moved up beside her, grabbed her left arm, and shoved what felt like a spear into the bone. She knew it was his thumb on the artery, but that’s not what it felt like.
“I got two of them,” she said, and wondered why she was justifying herself to him.
“Good,” he said. “Because I don’t think I could sneak up on any more that way. May I take your weapon if I need it?”
“Go ahead,” she said, relaxing her grip.
“I heard their shots, but no answering fire,” he said. “Took me a while to make it from the river—”
“Glad you did,” Grace said. Her vision was going; she was peering down a dark tunnel at a small bright image.
“Stay with me now,” he said. She felt his hand at her mouth, a tiny hard something on her tongue that tasted bitter. “Bite that.”
She bit. She had tasted it before, and military-grade stimtabs hadn’t changed that much. The tunnel shortened, then disappeared; she saw very clearly, with little bright halos around everything.
“You may lose this arm.”
“I thought so,” Grace said.
“Aunt Grace…” That in a near-whisper, from Shar.
“This is a friend, Shar,” Grace said. Or maybe not, but she could not at the moment cope with the possibility that he was one of them.
“Can I get up?”
“Not yet,” MacRobert answered for her. “Just lie quiet, and let me help your aunt Grace.”
He had placed a tourniquet now, doing it one-handed with a deftness that indicated he’d done it before. Grace thought of offering to replace his thumb with her right hand for arterial pressure, then—as another wave of nausea hit her—decided to just lie there and let him work.
The stimtab and her own biochemistry finally reached equilibrium about the time he had the tourniquet tightened and started to straighten her arm out. She rolled her head to see.
“Better not look,” he said.
She looked anyway. A mangled mess where her elbow had been, only a shred of skin holding it on. Beyond, her undamaged left hand, now looking like the corpse it was, bloodless.
“Might as well take it off the whole way,” she said.
His brows went up. “I’m no surgeon.”
“It’s not an arm, at this point,” Grace said. She felt only mild regret, which she knew to be shock and drug combined. Still, two live children for one lost arm was a good bargain.
“As you wish.” He cleaned the gutting knife carefully, something she appreciated fully only later, and cut the arm free. Grace felt nothing physical, but despite her determination to accept the loss, there was something profoundly wrong about her arm—her arm—lying there with no connection to her. It was not her arm; it could not be her arm…it must be someone else’s arm. What a disgusting thing to leave lying in the paddock, where a child might find it…
She had a dim memory of MacRobert helping her back to the house, of his voice assuring her the children were safe, Helen was safe, everyone was safe, when she opened her eyes to find herself in bed, floating above the mattress in a pink cloud. That was so unlikely that she closed her eyes again, willing herself to dream properly and wake up completely. On the second try, she recognized the drifting sensation as drug-induced, and the memory of the morning’s—that morning’s?—events appeared in chunks, accessed by her implant’s recording.
“—Transfer to regional trauma center immediately—” she heard a voice say. She wanted to argue, but her mouth was full of very dry cotton. “Should have called immediately—”
“She said—” That was Helen’s voice.
“She said!” A pompous voice, full of scorn. Grace felt anger stirring. “Why would you listen to a woman missing an arm, a woman in shock? People in shock say all sorts of stupid things.”
Her tongue was working its way through the cotton. “Na’stoo-id,” she croaked. Even to herself it sounded more like a frog than a human.
A stranger’s face appeared on one side, Helen’s on the other. “Grace!” Helen said. “You’re awake.”
Not really awake, she wanted to say. Too full of drugs to be really awake. But the other face annoyed her, as full of self-righteousness and scorn as the voice had been.
“Who you?”
“I’m the local doctor. Please stay calm. You’ve had a rather serious injury, some kind of hunting accident. These idiot summer visitors never seem to think about how far their shots go…missed a rabbit, I daresay.”
And he had called her stupid. Three hunters, shooting at and missing three rabbits?
“Where Mac—” She couldn’t say the rest of his name.
“The man?” Helen misunderstood the word. “The fisherman who helped you? He’s gone to help the police find the…the hunters.”
So there was a reason for the stupidity about hunters. She wished she could think what it was.