Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,2

wave.

She dressed in dark jeans and a plain cotton stretchie - tan, not suspicious burglar-black. Then she reached up to the top shelf of her closet, feeling behind her winter clothes till her fingers located the thick plastic bag that held her father's ashes.

They were heavy. So much heavier than the flour she'd substituted for them in the granite urn, that she'd raided her father's tackle box and thrown in half a dozen weights to make up the difference. The ashes were a different color as well, grayish, so she'd gone up to the attic and swept up a pan of dust to mix into the top layer of flour. It was still too white, but her mother never opened the urn to look, and Kelsa didn't think anyone else would either.

Her father might have. He'd had a scientist's curiosity about most things, and he'd been too logical to care how he was buried.

Kelsa cared.

She put the plastic bag into her day pack, and in case she was stopped by some patroller who didn't know her, she folded a light jacket over the top. Water, because her father had insisted she never set out on any hike without it, and rain gear too, no matter what the weather report said. In case her mother woke up and checked on her, Kelsa left a message on the house com board saying that she couldn't sleep and had gone for a walk. Her personal ID card would identify her to the house security system, so she could lock the back door and leave the system on behind her. Kelsa might be angry with her mother, but she wasn't about to take chances with her family's safety - not even in a quiet neighborhood like hers.

The night air was rich with the smell of petunias, and the moonlight was so bright she could almost see their colors. Kelsa's house backed onto an urban greenbelt, with a rubbercrete path running down it. Their fence was so low she simply swung her legs over it. The Stattlers' fence, five houses down, was almost as low, but pulses of red light flashed along its base, prepared to offer a discouraging shock to wayward rabbits - and if Kelsa shook the fence on the way over she might get shocked as well. The rabbits eventually tunneled under the barrier and ate Mr. Stattler's lettuce anyway, but at least, he said, they had to work for it.

In the end Kelsa climbed into a neighbor's yard, up into an old fruit tree, and then leaped over the Stattlers' fence. The Stattlers' trees would let her depart the same way, but for now ... she'd remembered correctly; the tool shed wasn't locked.

It was so dark inside that Kelsa couldn't see a thing, and she knew the cluttered tools could make an incredible racket. She frowned, and after a few seconds managed to focus her eyes in the way that brought up her night vision, her tense shoulders relaxing as the stacked tools, boxes, and sacks emerged slowly into sight.

She'd had to get her vision corrected in second grade. The Reformed Church felt the same about mechanical vision enhancements as they did about unnecessary drugs, but her mother was moderate enough not to argue when Kelsa's father said that as long as they were messing with her eyes she might as well get the standard package.

She used the enhancements so seldom that she sometimes had trouble bringing them up, and even with her ability to see what she was doing, one of the shovels clanked against a laser trimmer. It wasn't loud enough to wake anyone, and Kelsa finally extracted the posthole digger. Its cylindrical blades were attached to a shaft over four feet long, with a plain wooden bar crossing the top. Wood and steel - the old-fashioned tool felt right to her. You should have to dig to make a grave, metal carving the earth. She hoped she'd raise a sweat, that her hands would blister, her muscles ache.

She tossed the awkward tool over the fence and climbed out of the Stattlers' yard. She didn't see any patrollers on the familiar walk down the greenbelt, down two streets, while moving in and out of the street lamps' coppery glow. She did swing wide around the traffic lights. Their cameras generally came on only if someone ran the light, but the police could set them to continuous wide scan at will, and you never knew.

The quiet was soothing. Kelsa was