Chapter Three

That night Elena's dreams were swallowed by darkness. She was back in the dark place, among the bone-white trees, lying in the chalky dirt and staring up into their branches. Skeletal fingers clawing at the inky sky.

The creak of leather, a flash of silver hair, silver knives, white teeth twisted in a little smile.

"Play with me."

And then comes the hurt.

She woke up and lay in the night, quivering, too frightened to even think as the sweat cooled on her skin. She wanted to light a candle but she was scared to move. If they noticed she was still conscious the pain would start again.

In some corner of her mind she knew she'd been dreaming, but the rest of her brain wouldn't accept that. The darkness could be hiding anything. That was the worst thing about it, the dark place. You never knew when the pain was going to start.

When the first fingers of dawn stretched into the room she finally uncurled from the ball she'd been huddled in. She lay on the bed for a few minutes, feeling wet and limp – wrung out – and just listened to her breathing even out.

Then she remembered she had work to do. She hauled herself up and wasted a few minutes standing in the shower. She pulled on some clothes – shorts, a thick jersey for warmth – and laced up her boots. She buckled on her shoulder holster, checked her pistol was clean and loaded. She shouldered her backpack and went downstairs, out the door.

Dawn was just breaking, orange above the peaks around Nibelheim, and the town was dusted with a fragile light that cast deep shadows. The only sound was the crunch of Elena's boots on the earth. She felt like the only person in the world.

The previous evening, Raymond had shown her the best route up into the mountains, and she took his advice, heading west from the village, past the slumped, decaying manor, out along the road to the old reactor. She was hoping to find some sign of the bandits – vehicle tracks, bullet casings, discarded food – that could start her on their trail.

What she did find were chocobo tracks. The birds that lived up here must be black as night, she thought, looking up at the rocky peaks rising on either side of her.

She wondered if she still had the knack for catching them. She hadn't had a chance to practice it since Reno showed her how. That must have been, what, a year ago? They'd been driving out someplace – Rocket Town, that was it – but the mako cell powering their car had died. So while Reno was messing around under the chassis, trying to coax some more juice from it, she'd gone for a walk. And then she came across the footprints.

For some reason that was never made entirely clear, Reno had a chocobo lure stashed among the materia in the car's boot, so he'd sent her off to look for some greens while he hunted around for it. By the time she came back with a fistful of leaves he was ready.

"You know, I fucking hate these birds," he'd said as they waited for one to show up. "You never know what they're going to do."

Once they'd wrangled a couple and mounted up, Elena had found herself enjoying it. Getting a wild one to go in the right direction meant you were constantly wrestling with it – it was a challenge. And the feathers were so soft under her hands.

What had they even been doing out at Rocket Town? It took Elena a while to remember: some old guy, an ex-chemist, was claiming he could cure the stigma with an elixir compound. Rufus was understandably interested, so Elena and Reno had gone to see if there was any truth to what he was saying. Of course, the elixir did nothing to stop the tar eating into the kids' limbs. It just took some of the pain away.

In those days, the intervening years between one calamity and the next, the stigma was like a stormcloud. The way it hung over everything. All their efforts had been focused on finding a cure. The painful thing was, it was really a job for scientists, not Turks. That last year, with Rufus dying before their eyes despite everything, Elena had felt redundant, blunted. She was sure the others were the same, even if they'd never talked about it. She'd been excited when the operation at Northern Cave came up. Finally, a chance to be useful. But that was before – before -

She turned back to look how far she'd climbed. It was full daylight now, and the red roofs of Nibelheim were glowing like tiny embers far below her. As she got higher into the clean mountain air, she could feel her mind cool off and untangle, and her fears seemed far away. Maybe this was what she needed, after all, she thought. Some perspective.

At first she wasn't sure if she was imagining the gunshots. From far off they were just quiet pops. But as she got in closer, the sound widened into deep booms that rolled around the mountains. The way the shots echoed made it difficult to tell where they were coming from, but Elena thought it was in a valley to her right.

She left the reactor road, scrambling up a scree bank and along a terrace dotted with boulders and thorny scrub. The gunfire was getting louder, which was a sign she was heading in the right direction. A lot of shots were being fired – about fifteen a minute, Elena guessed. Almost like some kind of fight was going on. Cautiously, she eased her pistol from its holster.

The valley narrowed as she got deeper in, and bent around a corner near the end, where the shots were coming from. It presented Elena with a problem. There was no cover in the valley, no trees to conceal her, so as soon as she came around the corner, she'd be in plain sight of whoever was doing the shooting.

To avoid that, she climbed up a bluff just before the valley's bend, and hiked up a steep slope until she was well above the valley floor. Then she sidled around, careful placing each foot so she wouldn't send any loose stones tumbling down the mountainside.

When she caught sight of the people she ducked behind the nearest boulder, and waited. The shots kept booming, but none were aimed at her. She swung off the backpack and got out her binoculars. Then, carefully, she stuck her head above the rock and glassed the shooters.

There were six of them, four female and two male, and they all carried rifles. Target shooting – that was what they were doing. They'd set up a range of objects – glass bottles, cans, scraps of metal – on some rocks and were taking shots from about 80 metres.

Elena started taking mental notes. She could almost imagine herself being debriefed by Tseng, the questions he would ask.

What kind of weapons did they have?

Looked like old rifles, sir, but they were in good condition.

Was that all?

I think – no, sir. One of them had an SMG. Looked like an old Shinra-issue one. He wasn't shooting, just directing the others. Adjusting sights, changing their grip, that kind of thing. I think he might have been in charge.

What were they wearing? Did they look well equipped?

Nothing they wore matched, sir, but it was all military style. Fatigues, boots. The boots might have been Shinra-issue too. But sir, the weird thing was they all wore scraps of this blue-green cloth. The colour of mako. Some of them had it wrapped around their heads, some their arms.

And how was their shooting?

Mostly pretty good, sir. A couple of them looked like they were still new to it. Not quite comfortable holding their rifles.

It was a training exercise.

Yes, sir. That's what I thought. There were no signs of a camp – it looked like they'd walked out to practise their aim.

So what action did you take?

I waited, sir. And then I followed them. I wanted to find out where they were camped out.

Elena, you've done well.

But would he really say that? After what happened in the crater, Elena wasn't sure. Why was she here, if Tseng thought she was competent? Competent Turks, like Reno and Rude - like her sister, they didn't get vacations. Unless they asked.

It was another couple of hours before the bandits stopped shooting and moved off. Elena spent most of the time behind her rock, trying to keep warm, sticking her head out every few minutes to check nothing had happened.

When they left they did so in single file, heading up a steep slope at the end of the valley, and over a saddle between two snow-capped peaks. Elena watched them through the binoculars. When they were out of sight, she pulled her backpack on and set off towards the valley floor, running and sliding on scree.

It was a steep climb up to the saddle where the bandits had disappeared, and by the time Elena reached it she was sweating under her thick jersey. Her fatigue made her take a second to realise what she was looking at.

Down below her – several hundred metres below - was the old mako reactor, squat, rusting, ugly. And there were bandits all around it. Elena flattened herself against a rock face, before anyone could spot her silhouetted against the skyline. From her altitude the bandits were just insects, so she fished out the binoculars and put them to her eyes.

They'd made camp around the reactor, and it wasn't a small operation. Elena counted three trucks, five motorbikes, and about forty people. They all wore those strips of mako-coloured cloth. They'd pitched tents in a ring on the flat ground around the entrance to the reactor, and a cookfire was burning in the middle. Supplies – food and ammunition, judging by what she could see of the packaging – were piled up under tarpaulins on the edge of the camp. Two anti-aircraft guns were pulled up next to the trucks.

Was this really a bandit hideout? Surely a pack of bandits wouldn't be this big, this well-organised. And if they were, they would have moved in on Nibelheim by now, wouldn't they?

So just who the hell were these guys? And what was their game?

Well, there was only one way to find out, wasn't there? She'd wait for the night to fall, and then sneak in to the camp, see what she could dig out. Perhaps she could pull one of the bandits away, make them talk.

For a moment, she thought about calling Tseng or Rufus, letting them know what was going on. But she could imagine what they'd say. They'd order her to come back in, go and lie on a beach in Costa, let someone else handle the situation. They might as well come out and say it: "You're not good enough". Well, she'd show them.

Night took forever to fall. Elena squatted out of sight, out of the cold wind. She ate the food Raymond had given her and watched the sun slowly drop. By the time it reached the horizon and the sky had started to pale, Elena's breath was wafting from her mouth as steam, and she had to tuck her hands under her armpits to keep the feeling in them. She'd been stupid not to bring warmer clothes. Every fifteen minutes she got up and did squats to keep her body temperature up – a trick she'd learned in Icicle.

When the night fully fell it was a clear one, with a half moon and a vast glowing spray of stars. That was good and bad, Elena decided. She'd be more visible, but it would also make her descent into the camp a lot easier.

She was itching to get down there; her body was craving the action. But she knew she had to wait until the whole camp was asleep.

Finally, with the moon high overhead, she judged the time was right. She took it slow going down the hill, following a path that looked like it had been worn in by the bandits.

When the ground flattened out she crept into a pool of shadow between two of the tents, and crouched there, peering into the centre of the camp. The fire had died down to embers and she couldn't see any sentries. Someone in the tent to her left was snoring.

Moving quickly but as quietly as she could, Elena dashed over to one of the supply piles and peeled back a corner of the tarpaulin to look at what the crates contained. The pile was definitely food – flour, rice, dried fruit – but so much of it! How long were these guys planning on staying up here? This stock looked like it would last them six months.

The next pile was ammunition, as she'd suspected, and again they were well-supplied. Big shells for the aircraft guns too. She darted over to the third stack, and there made a surprising discovery: the crates contained rows and rows of pamphlets.

Pamphlets? What kind of bandit group kept bundles of pamphlets on site? Elena held one up to the moonlight to try and read it. The word "Phoenix" was written in big red letters on the front page. She was about to stuff it in her pocket and take off when she heard a foot crunch in some gravel behind her. She spun around.

A man stood a few feet away with his rifle trained on her.

"Don't move," he said.


Thanks for reading!