FIVE

Mason Lee roamed the valley, hunting the fugitive’s daughter.

No one had ever escaped the bloodhounds before, at least not alive, and Mason Lee was confident the girl would not be the first.

Wearing a buckskin vest, he walked among the trees on the creek bank with the efficiency of a cougar. The top of the grass had already been dried by the sun, but the ground was still wet, soaking his boots and the hem of his denim pants. Mason held his trademark shotgun in his trademark manner, crooked open over his right arm, a double-barrel 12-gauge loaded with shells of deer shot. At close range, the blast could tear through a tree trunk.

Mason was with one of four teams with dogs moving along the creek at the bottom of the valley. Three other teams had dispersed nearby in a grid pattern to pick up her trail, if it existed. Mason had little doubt the girl was dead and the climbers would find her body. But if somehow she had survived the descent of the cliff, Mason would find her.

In two decades of bounty hunting for the Appalachian government, he’d only failed three times—in each case the men had killed themselves before he could capture them. His reputation was such that once fugitives heard that Mason Lee had been hired to track them, as often as not they fled to the sanctuary of the nearest church to seek the protection of an Elder.

This fugitive had avoided hiding among people, keeping to the woods and hills, but Mason still found and trapped the man the night before, after several days of pursuit with the hounds. Although the agent from Outside had made it clear that the fugitive was to be taken unharmed, dusk masked Mason’s discreet hand signal directing one of his handlers to release a few dogs. To Mason’s satisfaction, the savage attack had nearly killed the man. Nobody, let alone an Outsider, told Mason Lee how to hunt bounty. But there was more at stake for Mason than pride, or his pleasure in seeing and hearing pain. He knew his men were as vicious as the dogs they handled. And just like the dogs, at the slightest sign of personal weakness—such as letting an agent give him orders—they’d turn on him with the same savageness he wielded for his own purposes.

Mason had not been concerned when he found the man without the girl. The climb down was difficult enough that Mason wouldn’t be surprised if she’d jumped, or even if the father had pushed her off as an act of mercy. Mason took pride in the well-known fact that female fugitives suffered worse at his hands.

Either way, Mason didn’t expect the final chase to take long. They still had a piece of the girl’s clothing, and it was all that the bloodhounds needed to locate their prey.

Even at its widest, here at the open end where it spilled into Cumberland Gap, the valley was narrow. Five miles upstream to the waterfall, the width was only hundreds of yards of deep chasm. Climbers were using ropes there to descend in a careful search for her body. In the meantime, in case she was alive, Mason and his teams would simply crisscross the valley and work upward to the waterfall to flush her out. The girl might slip between the teams as they traversed from side to side, but the hounds wouldn’t miss her trail as they crossed it.

Mason rarely considered the reasons behind his assignments. Most of the time, they were straightforward. Fugitives from Bar Elohim, men or women who had transgressed against the Holy Word of God. Thieves, murderers, or worse, anarchists and blasphemers.

This time, however, it was the ultimate hunt. Not because she would be more difficult to find but because of what he’d learned in the hotel room. The reward for her capture was higher than any other in his past. Ending the girl’s life meant freedom for him—especially now that he knew what the canister would be worth once he disappeared with it.

Other men might be squeamish about how and what he was supposed to harvest from the body. Not Mason Lee. The canister was designed to preserve human tissue for weeks. Perfect. Much easier to steal and hide a canister than a girl. Much easier to travel with it than an unwilling captive.

The pleasure of harvesting from the girl was an added benefit for Mason. There was something mystical and exciting about watching a life force dissipate. He knew this because he had gutted animals before they were dead.

But never a human.