CHAPTER TWO

GROUND-SOUND

 

 

ALONE AGAIN, EVELYN War set to work clearing away Edward Leer’s fire. After a few minutes, she heard another ping.

At first she thought Ben Gun had returned.

There was another ping and then several more at short intervals. It wasn’t a slingshot missile; it was a new sound, one Evelyn had never heard before. It was almost like water dripping from a flask.

After a pause, there came a long, slow whistle that echoed out of the deep tunnels. That was definitely a sound that she had never heard before.

“What is that?” she murmured.

Evelyn held her breath, and turned her head slowly as the pings and eerie whistles continued to echo through the empty space and the surrounding tunnels. She tracked them for several moments, but then she lost them as the tunnels suddenly filled with the sound of rushing feet.

The dogs of Zoo did not need an alarm. They were permanently on guard. Ground-sound had alerted them. A patrol of dog soldiers rushed out along the platform, armed and ready.

“War?” called Thomas Hardy. “You, did you see anything?”

“Not a thing,” she replied.”

“What was that sound?” asked another. “That whistling sound?”

“Me, I know not,” she replied.

Evelyn realised she was worried about the pup. Ben Gun had run off into the tunnels, directly towards the source of the uncanny sound.

She looked up at the dog-pack on the platform. They were armed and ready. Times were tough... tougher and tough. No one could remember a time before the Time of Ice. The Pack, like all of the Berlin packs, protected its territory fiercely.

“It must be Uhland Gang,” said Ward Cleaver, an old scrapper.

The pack agreed.

“Uhland Gang, it is trying to sneak up the tunnels.”

The pack snarled.

“Well, then, us, we’ll bite ’em off, tougher and tough!” shouted Ward Cleaver.

Evelyn hesitated. Why would a sneak-pack attack from the Uhland give itself away like that?

“It’s not the Uhland,” she said.

The dog soldiers gathering in the tunnel looked to one another. No one seemed to know where the sounds came from or what they meant, but no one wanted to respond to the pariah Evelyn War. She might have Heard something, like her crazy sire.

“You, as you were, War,” said Ward Cleaver. “You, get back to your duties,”

A fight suddenly broke out between two of the young beta males in the patrol.

They growled at each other. They swung fists, butted heads and cracked jaws. They wrestled each other to the ground, and the males and dams around them were distracted for several moments, drawn into the squabble.

“Enough of that!” a voice cried.

Hard wood struck marble. Edward Leer had appeared on the platform behind them, and smacked the ground with the staff of office that he always carried. He was not alone. The gathered pack saw that their leader was standing beside the old tale-teller, and fell silent.

Ezra Pound was a vast Alpha male of middle age. He had led Zoo Pack successfully for over a decade, and none had seen fit to challenge him. None had got the bone for it.

Ezra Pound’s reign would not continue for very much longer; Evelyn War’s father had told her so shortly before he had died. Sometimes the thought frightened her, sometimes it felt like a relief.

“Zoo Pack stands firm,” began Ezra Pound, “tougher and tough! Me, I’m told there’s ground-sound. Must be a gang, sneaking onto our lawn. Track Two, it belongs to Zoo Pack. This is our fiefdom. Us, let’s find them, and make sure them don’t forget it!”

Evelyn War had heard speeches like this too many times before. Another exhortation to scrap and to deepen the divisions between packs. It was a philosophy that her father had come to utterly despise.

The face of every male and dam was turned to Ezra Pound, intent on his message. But Evelyn had heard enough.

No pack had made the sounds she had heard.

She slipped away. No one cared about her, so no one noticed her leaving. She wanted to find Ben Gun and make sure he was safe. Behind her, Ezra Pound and the dog soldiers debated the origin of the noises and the tactics they should employ.

Evelyn War moved fast and almost silently, jogging east along the tunnel, dangerously close to the limits of Zoo Pack territory.

In the darkest reaches of the tunnel, Evelyn stopped and flattened her back against the ancient, greasy wall. She caught her breath.

In the airless silence, she listened, tilting her head, the better to hear what was happening ahead and behind.

A ping echoed down the tunnel. It was close, and sounded as if it was coming from above Evelyn’s position.

It was forever cold in the Time of Ice. The warmest places were to be found below ground. The Zoo Pack was one of the richest and toughest of Berlin’s Aux tribes, so it controlled one of the best territories, a well-sheltered stretch of the central Berlin underground. Evelyn had been on an empty platform at Zoologischer Garten because, at night, anyone who wasn’t on sentry duty went deeper into the service tunnels where the cells and communal dorms were situated. The service tunnels were the warmest, safest areas of Zoo Pack turf; there were fewer points of ingress, so they were easier to defend.

Had that idiot pup gone outside? Evelyn gathered her snug fur tighter around her shoulders and pulled the layers of her sleeves closer around her wrists. If she dared to venture above ground, it would be more than just cold.

She had to do her weather checks.

Evelyn pulled a long section of cloth from beneath the collar of her jacket. She secured it around her neck and head, wrapping it carefully so that she could still listen.

She paused. She thought she heard something, so she pressed her body against the tunnel wall and caught her breath again. When no new sound came, she continued her checks. She pushed her fingers down into the tops of her boots to check for the slender hilts of her long stiletto blades.

She would have liked a projectile weapon. Had she been on patrol, Evelyn would have been carrying a neat crossbow on her back. A pair of bandoliers for handmade bolts would have tightly criss-crossed her body, so that they didn’t clatter when she ran and alert her prey. She missed the bandoliers. They had hugged her torso, making her aware of her every breath and, somehow, making her feel secure.

The blades would have to do.

Evelyn ran her hands over her boot clasps and elbow pads, and around the toggles and laces on her jacket. She needed to make sure that she was sealed from the weather and that her clothes wouldn’t catch or be ripped. She couldn’t risk getting ice-burn.

Before fastening her gloves back in place, she also checked her waist seal. Her finger caught on something. She hooked out the slingshot that she’d taken from Ben Gun.

Evelyn smiled. She had a projectile weapon, after all.

She tucked the sling into the double cuff of her jacket, where it would be easy to hook out, and she wouldn’t have to hunt for it. Then, not relaxing her vigilance, she bent and picked up a handful of the small, smooth stones that could be found all over the U-Bahn tunnels. She couldn’t pocket them; they’d cause a bulge, and they’d clink together when she moved.

She tucked them one at a time into the tight double cuff of her other sleeve, leaving a few millimetres between each stone so that they wouldn’t touch. She could only carry half a dozen stones, but she’d only need them in an emergency, and if six wouldn’t get her out of trouble, more wouldn’t help.

As she tucked the last stone into the thick cloth, she heard the ping again.

The sound was definitely coming from above.

Without a second glance behind her, Evelyn War jogged hard down the tunnel for thirty or forty seconds, her thick, soft-soled boots making almost no sound.

She made her way beyond the edges of the Zoo Pack’s fiefdom to the long-abandoned station at Wittenbergplatz.

The tunnel narrowed alarmingly as she approached the station. Rubble from the destruction of the old Track Three tunnel decades before, when the Krumme Pack had been defeated and buried alive, all but filled the space, almost blocking her way.

Evelyn had to climb over shattered slabs of concrete, and crawl through impossibly small gaps in the heaped debris in almost pitch darkness before she emerged on the other side.

She stopped again and listened. Behind her, she heard a call and then a chant. Zoo Pack was gathering for war, sending up a battle cry in preparation. She would be missed, and she would have to answer for that. But she would not go back without the idiot pup.

She was squatting on the tracks, below the platform level. Her back against the wall, she slowly straightened her legs, and her eyes rose above the height of the platform. In the deep gloom of the abandoned station, she could see the rusting girders holding up the arched roof, and the banks of broken-down machinery that had once carried passengers to the surface.

Evelyn War inhaled deeply. She froze, mid-breath, one hand on the platform’s cold lip, when she heard the ping again. The station was anonymous, its sign obliterated by time and decay, living on only in the legends.

Evelyn swallowed hard. The pinging sound came again, echoing down the broken remains of the escalators just metres from her position. It was much louder now. She could taste the bite of the freezing cold surface air. She gently exhaled a cloud of moist steam, and hurriedly clambered onto the platform. There, her well-learned skills of hunting and stealth took over. She lay flat on her stomach on the impossibly cold surface for a couple of seconds. One move at a time, nothing too hasty. She braced herself for her next action.

“Tougher and tough,” she said to herself, her breath curling around the words as she climbed to her feet. “Do your father proud, dam, or die trying. He was a Hearer and you’s a Believer, and that’s tougher and tough.”

Evelyn War had not been to the surface for weeks. No one went outside alone. Her father had died above ground. Outside was the most dangerous place of all. All of the legends were about outside.

In the fables, the Masters had lived in the World above ground. Now, nobody but Evelyn believed the fables.

Evelyn knew that the Masters had been real, as an article of faith. Her father had Heard the Voice. He had died trying to follow their Urgings. He had died trying to save not only the Pack, but all Aux.

There is strength in numbers, that’s what her father had said the Voice told him. There is strength in numbers and we need strength to survive. A change is coming. An Age is ending. The Master wants us to form alliances.

Evelyn War would never forget those words, and she would never forgive Ezra Pound for ignoring them.

Zoo Pack traded and bartered with other packs when it had to, but Ezra Pound was proud. He believed Zoo Pack needed to stand alone. In his mind, it was weakness to rely on the comfort of other packs, and weaker still to rely on their weapons.

“Tougher and tough,” Evelyn said, climbing the old machinery of the unmoving moving staircase. There were no tread-plates left, just exposed machine guts. She climbed the handrail instead, going hand-over-hand and step-by-step up a narrow strip of metal that had once been covered by a thick sheath of rubber, long since perished.

Evelyn wished she had back-up as she scaled the skeletal remains of the escalators.

She reached what had once been the grand entrance hall of the Wittenbergplatz station.

She could not imagine what it must once have looked like. It had long ago been stripped of anything that could be looted or used to build with, or to burn, although most of the marble floor was intact, impossible to dig up without shattering the tiles. Everything not torn out in the old time was almost exactly as it had always been. The freezing temperatures of the Time of Ice had taken its toll on the glass, so there was little screening from the elements.

The next ping almost made Evelyn jump.

She swung around to get a full view of the entrance hall, something she had been avoiding.

The last time she had been in Wittenbergplatz station, she had been there with her father. The last time she had seen the grand hall, her father had been lying on the cold marble floor with blood oozing from the wound in his chest. The blood had congealed as it hit the air, freezing solid before it could spread across the bitterly cold tiles.

Evelyn looked at the spot on the floor where her father’s body had lain. There was no mark of him, no stain. The only trace was in her memory.