The decoy had cost the double seventy yards.
In the narrow throat of the battery tunnel, sixty paces behind Len, the dry chuckle died away into the metal drone of the exhaust stacks. The creature had found Deren’s brass bell resting motionless on the silt-covered flat stone slabs. It hadn’t kicked the casing aside in frustration or snarled at the trick. Its Signal Recognition milestone had simply audited the sound signed name, separated the static chime of an uncarried mass from the rhythmic shaking of living muscle. Then it finished the math within twenty seconds.
To an ordinary tracker, twenty seconds was nothing. In a dead-sprint pursuit through confined stone chimney pipes, twenty seconds was an eternity measured in lead distance.
Len dragged his right foot across the cold granite threshold of the archway, his teeth grinding down on the salt grit of his lower lip. Every shift of his weight sent a jagged lance of fire through his ankle joint. The strain of the wrench between the dark rock slabs had torn the outer lateral joint cords. The joint was swelling rapidly against the stiff leather of his boot, ballooning the calf collar until the laces bit into his flesh like bailing wire. His left arm hung in its ashwood splints, dead and numb from the wrist to the elbow, taped flat against his ribs with oilcloth straps.
