THIRTY-EIGHT

Mason squirmed as he walked past shanties crowded in crooked lines. Not from sunshine. Clouds had moved in, a mixture of white and gray, nothing that promised rain. But the temperature had dropped, and wind was coming in gusts. Much better than unrelenting brightness.

Mason squirmed with something else. Desire. He was looking for a victim. He needed to test the capabilities of the Taser Everett had given him, promising that although it was unregistered, it didn’t have fingerprint controls as a safety device. Only an idiot hunted with a rifle that he hadn’t sighted. In the same sense, Mason wasn’t going to put himself in a position of relying on a weapon he didn’t fully understand.

Some stared at Mason. He knew he was set apart because he didn’t have a swirl of tattoos on his face. Set apart because of the eye patch. Set apart because he walked with his shoulders straight and chest out. A confident predator.

He had not been in this setting for long, but he already knew that every person who looked at him was a person trying to decide the answer to an important question based on Mason’s lack of facial tattoos. Was Mason an Illegal and thus someone who could be used? Or was Mason an Influential and looking to use someone here?

Mason had only one question in return.

What kind of victim would best serve his need to test the Taser and his need to savor fear? The terror of the weak and old held attractiveness because, the closer to the end of life, the more most clung to it. Yet there was a satisfaction in taking someone young and strong with a false sense of immortality and introducing the taste of what the old and frail lived with every waking moment.

Mason looked around, then realized he was feeling a foundation of buoyancy beneath his desire. This was so strange; he found himself pausing to analyze it in a rare moment of introspection.

It was rare because Mason didn’t like introspection. Introspection was a weakness. It led to self-justification.

The people he had hunted in Appalachia always offered reasons for why they had betrayed the government. They were weak.

Mason didn’t care whether their reasons for becoming fugitives were right or wrong. Caring was weakness too. He was not a weak man. That’s why he was good at what he did. Right or wrong didn’t matter to him because he didn’t waste time on introspection.

Neither did he waste time on justifying his role as a bounty hunter for Appalachia or why the heretics he had captured needed to be silenced. He was a hunter. They were fugitives.

He enjoyed hunting people. No need for introspection there either. He didn’t need to justify his cruelty and coldness, the two qualities that, along with his peculiar skills, made him so successful. With the exception of Caitlyn, nobody in Appalachia had ever escaped him, and his captures, each one, were celebrated on vidpods that every citizen there was forced to watch.

But buoyancy? This was unfamiliar; it was an emotion that needed attention. If it became a distraction, he’d be less effective.

So Mason stopped walking and turned slowly, as if he were a giant cat, sniffing the wind.

He’d been walking away from the city wall and was still close enough that it dominated the horizon behind him, ominous in a straight line low against the sky, serving as a backdrop to the shanties that seemed huddled in its shadows.

Around him, crowds of people moved in all directions. Dirty people. People dressed in rags. Not like the people of Appalachia—fresh faced and smiling to hide their thoughts. Nothing to mark that they served the religious leaders without question.

These people were marked though. Webs of tattoos across their faces, blurring their features, adding a darkness to the setting.

Buoyancy.

As he turned slowly, Mason concentrated on the sounds. The hum of conversations. An occasional shriek. A dull industrial pounding so low and so far away he couldn’t choose the direction.

Facing away from the wall again, he noted a smudge of smoke that in the still of the day was an ominous broad stroke that, like the wall, made another backdrop to the shanties, putting them in a flat valley between the wall and the smoke.

Mason stilled himself completely. Whenever possible, back in Appalachia, at the beginning of the pursuit, he’d stand alone in the fugitive’s empty house, trying to put himself in the mind of his prey. Invariably, he’d look for soiled laundry. He’d crumple the clothing and push it up against his face, drawing in deeply the smell of the man or the woman he was about to begin hunting. Mason loved the sense of smell.

Here, it was a combination of urine and sweat, an animal smell that gave him shivers of adrenaline. There was more. A vague sense of burning plastic, mixed with foods cooked over open fires.

And hunger. He could smell hunger. Just like he could smell fear.

Buoyancy.

Then he knew.

Around him was freedom. In Appalachia, the people had looked free and happy. But only because the government told them that religion demanded that appearance.

Here, the people were free to be miserable and smelly, free to walk where they chose, even if those choices could only lead to more misery and stench.

Mason drew in a deep lung full. Smiled.

He’d been a bounty hunter in Appalachia. But there’d been no freedom in that. He was sanctioned by the government. His hunting did not involve any risk. It was like penning pigs and setting him loose among them with a rifle. Some pigs ran. Some didn’t. But none ever dared attack him.

Here, he had no protection.

It was just the opposite. He’d killed already, the two Christians who believed he needed their help. It was only a matter of time before the government here began hunting him.

He was truly on his own.

He realized he’d been wrong about this unfamiliar emotion. He had not been feeling buoyancy.

After a lifetime in Appalachia, he had just learned the sensation of freedom.