Hunting Party

Chapter Thirteen

“This is the island we’re on,” Petris said, outlining it on the chart. They had survived their first night on the island; Ronnie felt much better, and ignored the dull pain in his head. He had kept that first ration bar down, and another this morning; he was sure he was over his concussion. “About eight kilometers by five,” Petris went on, “but most of it’s narrower. Relief’s about two hundred meters—this hill’s given as two-twenty. It’s steeper on the west, but nowhere difficult, except for this little ravine here—” He pointed. “Now—the cover is mixed: open forest, on these slopes, and down near the water scrub undergrowth. It’s full of trails as a kid’s playground in some park—”

“That’s what it was,” Bubbles said. “I told you; we all camped over here. My cousins, too. About—oh—five years ago was the last time I remember. We’d stay here while the grown-ups were on Bandon. We’d sail over in little boats. My father thought it up—it was out of some old books from England on Old Earth. Kids went camping on an island—”

“Yes, well, this isn’t camping.” Petris dismissed her memories abruptly. Oblo spoke up.

“Do you remember seeing anything that indicated someone else used the island that way?”

“No.” Bubbles wrinkled her nose. “No—in fact, we always had to clear the trails every year. I wanted to have someone do it, but my father insisted we ‘have the fun’ as he put it.”

“So this kind of hunting was either somewhere else, or not going on then,” Oblo pointed out. “It would be interesting to know when it started, if your father hired someone new, who could have set it up. It would take connections—someone who knew likely clients—”

Bubbles frowned. “I’m trying to think. Daddy mentioned he’d hired a new outrange supervisor when Vittorio Zelztin retired, but I don’t remember what he said. It didn’t seem important.”

“Not as important as staying alive,” Petris said. “And we need to break this up and get moving. Let me finish the briefing.” He waited until Ronnie wanted to ask why, then went on, sure of their attention. “They introduce new prey when they have confirmed killing all but two of the old ones. Those are the preeves, the previous survivors. That’s how we know some of the things we do, and that’s where our few weapons come from. New prey’s given two days free, then hunting resumes. They supply basic rations every four days at a single site on the west side of the island, during a non-hunting period. They hunt no more than fourteen Standard hours a day. The problem is, we’re not sure which fourteen hours. Sometimes they do a split shift. If we don’t keep a constant watch, they’re over here before we know it.

“What the preeves told us is that the first week they hunt only in daylight. That weeds out the really stupid and incapable, they think. Then they start night-hunting. They have dark gear; we don’t. If they hunt all night, they’ll leave us alone the following day, but they usually hunt only half a night shift. From sundown to midnight, or midnight to sunrise, say. We’ve been here a couple weeks, so they’re night-hunting almost every night. Last night they didn’t—I expect they were waiting to see if you were followed.”

“If they have Barstow sensors, why don’t they just find us and wipe us out?” asked George.

“They don’t use Barstows,” Petris said. “Again, that’s not ‘sporting’ in their books. The preeves say if someone eludes them the full month, they’ll use a Barstow to find and capture him—but that almost never happens.”

“But if they know we’re here—and they want to eliminate witnesses—won’t they use Barstows sooner this time?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that. They might. And if they do, we’re out of luck. We can’t build a shelter that will shield us from Barstow scans and escape notice in flyovers. The island’s not deep enough, and the woods aren’t thick enough.”

“That other flyover,” Raffa said. “That could’ve been a rescue attempt, but we weren’t there.” Ronnie had missed the flyover, but they’d told him about the flitter that came, hovered above the wreck, and then departed.

“They’d only want to rescue us if they could do it before we made contact with the prey,” Bubbles said. Looking at her now, Ronnie could hardly believe that was her name. None of the fluffhead left, none at all. “They’ll think—if we meet them—the secret’s out. Either they have to kill us all, and fake an accident somehow, or they have to escape. And even if they do escape, there’s the evidence. . . .”

“So the only logical thing for them to do is add our names to the list and go on.” Raffa shivered. “I don’t like this. Yet—if they kill us, there’ll be the evidence then, too. When someone comes to look.”

“Unless they try to capture you four,” Petris said. “And then kill you in some way that can be explained. They might well try a chemical weapon. Knock you unconscious, take you up in a flitter—even your own—and drop you into the rocks. If we’re all dead and gone—or if they can create that accident on another island—it might well pass. Ordinarily, the preeves say, they don’t use chemicals, but now they might.”

Ronnie lifted his head. Had he really heard something, or . . . Petris was alert too. Something—but he couldn’t define it. “Flitter,” said Oblo. “I’ll see about it.”

“We make a plan every day,” Petris said, as if nothing had happened. “You have to . . . else it’s just running and waiting to be killed. That’s what happens to most. Or they make a plan, and run the same one every day. That won’t work either. The only hope is to make the hunters work . . . get back at them.”

“Attack them?” George asked. “You do have more men, don’t you? How many hunters are there?”

“More, but not more firepower. Not more resources. We can’t attack in force, but we do feint. We scare them sometimes. They like that, the preeves tell us; I hate to give them the satisfaction, but it does make them slow down and be careful. As for how many, it seems to vary. I’m sure we’re not seeing the same ones each day; if it’s anything like big game hunting, there’s a larger party of hunters over on Bandon, and they take turns. I’d like to kill them but so far we haven’t.”

“Has anyone ever?” Raffa asked.

“So I hear,” Petris said. “But you don’t know how much to believe. The preeves they send with us are not exactly reliable. They’ve been known to turn a group that was doing too well. We found a locator on Sid, for instance.”

“But you didn’t kill him,” George said. “Why not?”

“Do you kill everyone who just might hurt you someday?” Petris looked disgusted. “Get some sense, boy. Everyone who’s been through this has knowledge we need; we can’t afford to lose anyone. He knows we know he might turn; he knows his best chance at survival is with us—at least now.”

“So how many do you have, altogether?”

“Never you mind. What you don’t know, you can’t tell. But we’ve lost only two, in the time we’ve been here; the preeves say that’s much better than usual. Now—what we’re going to do is this. . . .” Petris leaned over the map. “We’ve got to separate you four, because they need you worst. Can’t let them get you in a lump. The longer it takes, the more chance one of you’ll be alive to report all this. At the same time, I can’t protect you all. My people wouldn’t go for it, and I don’t have the ability anyway. So you ladies will have to go here”—he pointed to the ravine on the map—“unless you can find those hiding places you think you remember . . . ?” He looked at Bubbles.

“I wish Kell hadn’t been so secretive,” Bubbles said. “I’m sure there is a cave somewhere—” Petris ignored this; he had not been impressed with a possible cave she had never seen for herself.

“You want me to go somewhere alone?” Raffa asked. She looked pale.

“It would be best,” Petris said, almost gently. “That ravine’s hard to climb; they avoid it except at the ends, and there’s a lot of cover—big rocks and so on. They go along the edges, and watch both ends, but they can’t see everything. If you tuck yourself under a boulder, that’s as safe a place as I can offer.”

“I want to do something,” Raffa said. “Not sit under a rock and shiver.”

“We don’t have any training,” Bubbles said to her. “Not even as much as Ronnie and George. The best we can do is stay out of the way.”

“No.” Raffa glanced at Ronnie and away; he felt his heart contract. She was thinking about him, he knew it.

“You two,” Petris said, with a nod to Ronnie and George, “are another problem. You might be useful, or not—I can’t tell until I see you in action. What we’re going to do is try to make them think you wandered into the forest north of the stream, maybe heading for the point up there. It’s more rugged country. I want you to go up there now, and make some trail. Scuff and scrape as if you’re dragging something or someone. Drop something unimportant that might have fallen off your packs. There’s no way to disguise what happened to your flitter, but they may not have realized we’ve met. If you headed that way, and we were keeping watch to the south and east, you could have gotten away from us. Not really, but they might believe it.”

In other circumstances, it would have been a pleasant afternoon’s hike up the ravine. Bubbles found it hard to remember the danger; the lower forest smelled as fresh as she remembered, and then the scramble up the rocks took her breath away. A clear rivulet still splashed from pool to pool, and red and gold amphibians still hurled themselves into the water as she came near, with agitated squeaks. A few rocks had moved in seasonal floods—she recognized one boulder by an odd inclusion, now upside down from where it had been—but most of the trail was familiar.

Higher on the slope, a breeze stirred, lifting the hair on the back of her head as it rose from the forest canopy below. She could see more of the sky, now, and smell the sea as well as the rock and flowers. Raffa, behind her, scuffed her feet in the dirt but said nothing. Bubbles was glad. She wanted to combine the old memories, once thrust away as too childish, with the present experience. Finally she stopped, winded, on a broad flat outcrop where the ravine angled south, away from the shore. Looking back she could see nothing but billows of green concealing the shape of the land itself. Raffa, panting, dropped to the rock and lifted the hair from her neck.

“You did this every year?” she asked, after a moment.

“Most years, for awhile. When my Uncle Gene would come, and bring the cousins. . . . I suppose, really, Mother wanted us out of the main house, away from more important visitors. All of us together could be noisy.” She grinned down at Raffa. “When we camped over here, we’d divide in two groups, at least, and play hunting games. Stuff we’d read about or seen on the old cubes—”

“We used to go to my Aunt Katy’s house and ride up in the hills,” Raffa said. “On Negaire—no pretty islands there.”

Bubbles shivered. “Ugh. Cold and wet all year round, isn’t it? You didn’t camp out, surely?”

Raffa nodded. “Better than in this heat. We pretended to be steppe nomads and so forth, but mostly we lived in caves. There was a big one, very handy, about a day’s ride away, and another smaller one on the other side of the hill. We painted monsters on the walls; one of my cousins tried to paint us, but he couldn’t draw.”

“Cave.” Bubbles glowered at the water. “I wish I knew if Kell told the truth. He said it was big enough for all of us, but he wouldn’t share it, the pig. He’s like that still, loves secrets and won’t share. There’s no place else as good, if it’s real.”

“You’re sure you have no idea where it is?”

“Only where it isn’t. We did look, but we never found it in the likely places—up here, or in the valley between this hill and the next. And knowing where not to look still leaves a lot of island. Why—you think we should look?”

“If we found it, we’d be a lot safer than hiding under a rock,” Raffa pointed out. “And we’d better be going; we certainly aren’t safe sitting here chatting.”

“We’ll climb straight over the spine,” Bubbles said, leading the way up the narrowing ravine. “I hope the old trail along the crest is still there. It has a few hidey-holes I know about.”

Along the spine of the island, the rock outcrops formed stout pillars, two to three meters tall, in ragged rows that wobbled along parallel to the crest like rotting teeth. Between the rows, the hollows were unevenly filled with soil and overgrown with thorny vines and bushes. A winding thread of trail had been hacked clear at the very crest; Bubbles could not tell if it had been cut by hunters or hunted. It didn’t really matter. They would have to get off it quickly, because the hunters certainly knew about it.

She counted the pillars. If only she could remember the pattern . . . three tall ones, a short, two talls and then two—three?—short ones . . . there. She squeezed between two of the shorter rocks—had she been that much thinner five years ago, or had the rocks shifted?—and then crouched to wiggle beneath the huge briar that lay over what had always been her own special hiding place. The hooked thorns scraped on her knapsack as she slithered further in, her nose hardly off the dark, dank-smelling soil. It hadn’t felt this small the last time. . . . She called back to Raffa. “You have to go under this thing—you can’t go through it with anything short of power tools.”

“Give me a steppe pony any day,” Raffa said, but she gave only one muffled yelp when the thorns caught her hair, and slithered very efficiently for someone who often pretended disdain for physical exertion. “Do you want me to do anything about the way we came in?”

“Nope.” Bubbles edged past the cluster of woody stems and felt around the far side of it. She had had a little hole there, once, with a box in it, but she couldn’t see. It was dark under the briar’s canopy after the brilliant sunlight on the trail, a warm brown gloom lightened by freckles of sun.

“As much as we’ve shaken it, the outer branches will go back down. I used to do this all the time, and the guys never found me.” The little hole in which she’d tucked a boxful of handy items years before had grown into something a handspan across and deeper than her fingers. Burrow. Something was living here. She tried to remember just what did live on this island. Nothing venomous, nothing particularly large or dangerous. Except the hunters. She realized she’d forgotten them for a few minutes, here where her safe childhood was so real, and the hunters hardly believable.

On the far side of the briary tangle, lodged in fallen leaves against another standing stone, Bubbles found her box. She blessed her younger self for insisting she wanted a real expedition box, the kind that was supposed to last through anything. She dragged it out of the leaves and scrunched sideways so that Raffa could come up beside her.

“I forgot this the last time we were here,” she said. “We were in a hurry to leave—I was going to St. Eleanor’s for the first time—and by the time I remembered I’d left it, there was no time to go back.” The box had no lock, only an L-shaped catch, now crusted with dirt and time. Bubbles broke a fingernail on it and muttered. Probably nothing in it—a decayed sandwich, some childish bauble—but something drove her to open it.

“Let me try,” said Raffa. Bubbles slid the box over to her, and sucked her bruised fingertip. Raffa had picked up a twig, and used that to prod out the caked dirt around the latch, then spit on it. When she pushed, the latch moved with a minute squeak. “Here,” she said, handing the box back. “You open it—it’s yours.”

Bubbles felt a curious reluctance to open it, as odd as the determination a moment ago to make that latch move. Silly, she thought. There could be nothing really useful in this box—not as useful as the things in the survival packs on the flitter. Just junk that would remind her what a silly child she had been. She struggled for a moment, having forgotten the exact movement it took to pry the lid up—the box had a good seal on it. Then it lay open, a time capsule from her childhood, her forgotten treasures rattling a little from the movement of her hand.

A seashell, one of the purple cone-shaped ones. A bracelet woven of dune-grass—she blushed, remembering who had woven it, and why. A little black blob, smooth all over . . . raked from the fire the time Kell had melted the handle from the frying pan. A single sheet of photocells, ready to be spread in the sunlight again . . . if she had anything to recharge. A bit of faded ribbon . . . she remembered clearly the shade of purple it had been. A whistle, a foil-wrapped ration bar, a tube of first-aid ointment and a packet of bandages, a length of fine fish-line, neatly coiled, with two hooks and a handful of differently shaped sinkers. And the compact silvery locator beacon, with the lanyard still looped through the ring on top.

“Isn’t that a—?” Raffa started to ask.

“Yes. And it will work.” She looked at the charge level on the side; as she’d expected, it had held its charge. . . . The good ones did, and her dad had always provided them with good ones. Besides, she had the photocells to top it up with. “We can get help,” she said, and sat up cheerfully only to ram her head into the nest of thorns close above. Her eyes watered, and she held very still. It was the only way with these island briars: jerk away and she’d lose half her hair and part of her scalp. In the time it took Raffa to work her free, she was able to think why they couldn’t use the locator yet. There would be no easy rescue, any more than easy extrication from the briar.

“But if we could get to Bandon,” she said. “If we could steal their flitter, maybe, while they’re hunting the others . . . this will override anything.”

“There’s more of them on Bandon,” Raffa reminded her. “Hold still, yet. You’ve got a thorn right in your scalp. Do these things leave the husk in?”

“Sometimes, and it festers if they do. Get it all if you can.” She was a little surprised at how deft Raffa’s fingers were, and how calm she was staying. Was this the same Raffa who had seemed an obsessive worrier?

“There,” Raffa said finally. “I don’t think there are any husks, but if you’ll hand me that tube of gunk—thanks—I can put a dab on a few places . . . yes . . . they were bleeding a bit. Keep the flies off, eh?”

“How long has it been?” Bubbles asked, putting everything back in the box and latching it. They had left Petris and the others before noon, and she realized they had better think about where to spend the night. Light came to them between the stones, sideways; the slope below, on the west side of the island, would still be in daylight for awhile, but where would the hunters go? Up here, along the high trail? Along the slopes?

“Should we stay here?” Raffa asked, as if she were seeing the thoughts in Bubbles’s head. “We’re out of sight, but if they have any kind of sensors—”

“I don’t know a better place, not without time to look for it.” Bubbles peeked out the west side of the tangle; they were high enough that she could see out over the lower forest to the sea. The few clouds drifted past, their shadows sliding up the slope like vast hands caressing the trees. “The main thing is to keep well away from Petris and the others. . . . Someone has to get back. . . .”

“Oh . . .” Raffa’s breath came just as Bubbles realized one shadow wasn’t sliding upslope. . . . Small, regular, it moved swiftly against the wind, downslope to the south of them, and then ran along parallel to the ridge.

“Eyes down,” Bubbles said, taking her own advice. Now that it was upwind, they could hear the faint whine of the flitter. Surely the briar was thick enough—old, tangled, too dense for anyone to see through. But every freckle of light suggested it was as porous as a fishing net. She felt sure she had something shiny on her back, something that would glitter—she should take it off. But her arms had no strength; she lay, hardly breathing, trembling.

The flitter’s shadow passed over them, as if a cold hand lay on her back, and went somewhere else. She could hear the whine moving north, she thought, toward the tip of the island, but she dared not move.

“So,” Raffa said, hardly louder than a breath. “They’re here. And it’s not a game.”

“No.” Immediately below them, on the west slope, the rock nubbins were only sparsely covered. . . . They couldn’t count on reaching the cover below without being seen. They would have to stay here until the flitter landed somewhere. What if it didn’t? It had not occurred to her that the hunters might well keep someone aloft, especially in this emergency.

“How come people in entertainment cubes never need a bathroom?” asked Raffa.

“Mmm. You’re right.” Now that Raffa had brought it up, she felt the same desperate need. “We can’t leave cover now,” she said. She wriggled toward the north side of the briar, where its canopy lay along a lower stub of gray stone. Just beyond that was another hollow; she could see into it by risking another hair-pulling match with the briar’s canopy. This one had no handy roof; a small tree had died and collapsed, and the vines that covered it matted the ground.

“We should’ve found a place before we came in here,” Raffa said.

“You’re right,” Bubbles said, squeezing onward around the briar’s central stem and root complex. In the northeast corner of their thorny shelter, she found what she remembered, a niche in the big stone between them and the trail. Here the briar, reaching for light, lifted enough to allow someone to sit upright. And below was the other refinement of her childhood hiding place, a standard expedition one-man composting latrine unit, carefully dug into the soil. Her parents had been, she’d thought then, ridiculously fussy about pollution; one summer they’d all been yanked back to all-day lessons at the Big House for two weeks just because one set of cousins had dug a real latrine in a spurt of enthusiasm for historical authenticity. They had all had to memorize the list of diseases they could have given themselves, and the life cycles of innumerable disgusting parasites, before they could come back. They could have all the prefab units they wanted, her father had said, but they must use them. She scrabbled at the lid, said a brief prayer to some nameless deity that none of the more agile crawlers had gotten into it, and pulled it open. “But here,” she said triumphantly. “All the comforts of home, more or less. Deodorizing, too.” Since she was in place, she took the first turn, and felt much better. Raffa followed her, gave a sigh of relief, and latched the lid back down.

“Now if you could just excavate us a cave right here . . .”

“Nope. I tried hard enough, but it’s solid stone below a few inches of leaf-drift. And I think we’d better get what rest we can. Just at dusk we could move downslope, if we’re careful.”

Bubbles had not really expected to sleep, cramped under the briar in the hot, sweaty dimness, but she woke at the crunch of footsteps somewhere nearby. It was completely dark, and for a moment she could not think where she was. Then she remembered. The hand on her ankle, a grip hard enough to pinch, must be Raffa’s hand. She reached back and touched it, and Raffa gripped her hand instead. Her breath seemed trapped in her lungs. The footsteps came nearer, not hurrying. Panic clogged her ears with her own heartbeat; she could not tell how far away the sound was. A voice murmured something she could not distinguish. A faint crackle followed; her mind raced, suggesting that the crackle was a comunit, which meant the footsteps were a hunter’s. I knew that already, she argued back at her mind. Raffa’s fingers in hers were cold; she shivered, but forced herself to lie still. Another crunch, a boot on the rough path beyond the stone. She heard a scrape and a soft curse as someone found the space between the stones too narrow. Something shook that side of the briar, as if the hunter had taken a stick to it; the branches squeaked overhead. Raffa’s fingers tightened suddenly. Could she see something from her side of the briar? But the footsteps went away, the faint scrunching growing fainter. Raffa’s fingers relaxed but did not pull away.

Her breath came out all at once; she felt dizzy and faint even lying down. What if she’d been asleep . . . and dreaming . . . and had snored? Her first school roommates said she snored. Just when she thought it might be safe to murmur something to Raffa, she heard another sound. Not nearly so loud as the first, as if the feet wore something softer than boots. Three steps, a pause. Four, and another pause. Two . . . whoever it was was now just outside the cleft they’d come through. Bubbles held herself rigidly still, trying not to breathe.

Then the crack of a weapon echoed along the stones, and the person nearest them gave a soft cry. Bubbles heard the slither and thump as he fell, and the ragged breathing louder than the stifled moans. The other footsteps came back at a run and paused; even from behind the rock, Bubbles could see the glow of light as the hunter turned on a torch.

“Got one,” he said, this time loud enough for Bubbles to hear; she assumed he was talking into his comunit. “By the tattoo, it’s one of the preeves.” The comunit crackled and muttered back to him. “Right,” he said. “I’ll bring the IDs. No sign of the others.” Bubbles heard the click as he shut the comunit cover, and then a grunt and thump as if he bent to set down his weapon and lean over the body.

Then—“Got one too,” said the other man, in a harsh voice thick with pain. The hunter squealed, then gasped, and Bubbles heard the fall of another heavy body, the thrashing of limbs, the rattle and clatter of equipment banging on the rocks. The light went out. Then silence, but for a final few noisy gasps.

For the first time in her life, Bubbles envied those of her friends who had a religion: they would have had some deity to swear to, or at, or on. “We can’t stay here,” she said quietly. Her voice surprised her; it sounded as calm as if she were in her mother’s drawing room discussing the weather.

“He touched me,” Raffa said. Her voice, too, was quiet. “With a stick or something, when he prodded the briar.”

“We have to go,” Bubbles said. “They’ll send someone.” Through the gap in the stones, the smell of blood and something worse rolled as if on a stream of water. Her stomach churned.

“How can we? We can’t see anything. . . .”

“We have to. It won’t be so dark out from under this briar. Turn around and let me get past.”

“You’re not going that way?” The calm seeped out of Raffa’s voice, leaving honest fear behind.

“I want his weapons,” Bubbles said. “And his comunit, and his night goggles.”

“But then they’ll know someone came after,” Raffla said. Bubbles paused. She hadn’t thought of that. As it was, they might assume that what it looked like was indeed what happened—a victim not quite dead who killed his careless killer. If she took anything, they’d know someone else had been there. But it didn’t matter.

“They know we’re here,” she said. “They’re going to hunt until they find us. His things will give us a better chance. You stay here—we’ll go downhill afterwards.”

Out from under the briar, starlight gave a faint glow to the standing stones; in the distance, the sea glittered. Bubbles paused in the gap between the stones, listening. She could hear nothing. When she peeked out, she could see the tangle of dark forms that must be the two men’s bodies. Quickly, before fear could overwhelm her again, she forced herself to move out onto the path. Her foot slipped, and when she put her hand down it was into warm, wet, stinking slime. She choked down her nausea, and wiped her hand on the nearest body. They were dead; it didn’t matter now. She fumbled at the bodies, expecting every moment the shot that would kill her, the hiss of gas that would paralyze her.

The bodies were still warm; she hated the feel of the skin, the stiffening texture of it, as she felt around for the hunter’s night gear. Goggles around his neck, on a thong—he would have dropped them before lighting his torch. They felt wet—blood? She cut the thong with her knife, and felt around for the torch. She risked a quick flash of it. The goggles were covered with blood, which she cleaned off with the dead hunter’s shirt-tail. There was the comunit which she scooped up, and there the man’s rifle with its targeting beam. Her own hands were covered with blood, and one foot would leave bloody footprints until it dried. She flicked off the torch, and called softly to Raffa.

“Come on out—if I go back through, I’ll leave a trail. . . . We’ll leave the main trail farther down, and have this hidey-hole again later if we need it. Bring my box.” She put the comunit in her shirt pocket.

A cautious rustle, and Raffa came out with both knapsacks. Bubbles handed her the rifle, and put on the night goggles. Now she could see well enough without the torch to finish rummaging in the dead hunter’s pack. He had carried a backup weapon with a removable stock in his pack; she took that and his needler, and the dead preeve’s knife. Unfortunately the hunter had not carried an extra set of night goggles. Finally, she did her best to clean her bloodiest hand and foot, so they’d leave no more traces than necessary.

Then she led Raffa southward down the trail. Neither of them questioned who should lead; it was her island, and her duty to protect Raffa if she could. There had been a series of parallel trails down the west side of the ridge, long ago; as she recalled, you could go down almost anywhere. She ducked between another pair of standing stones, and fought through a tangle of vines, and then found the next gap downhill. To her enhanced vision, the broken slope below was empty of anything but crumbling rock and low scrub; Raffa, behind her, said, “How is it?”

For answer, Bubbles passed her the goggles; she felt suddenly blind when she took them off. “See for yourself. Pick a route, stay low, and don’t hurry. We’ve got to be quiet.”

“You need these.” Raffa passed the goggles back; Bubbles pushed them away.

“It’s your turn, and I’m supposed to know this place. I’ll go first; then you can find me. Not too close.” Her eyes were adjusting; she squeezed them tightly a moment or two, and when she opened them found she could just make out the larger rocks. Slowly, carefully, she edged downward, placing each foot with precision so that she could test the ground before putting her weight on it. She remembered reading her brother’s service manual on this sort of thing; she had found it funny. She had imagined the dapper George crawling about in the dark counting his steps on zigzags and getting dust on his impeccable trousers, or slithering on his stomach. And here she was . . . wishing she knew if crouching was enough, if she should be down flat, crawling, if the zigging and zagging from one rock to another was actually doing any good, or only taking longer. A pebble rolled out from under her foot with a faint clatter. She froze. She could hear nothing now but her own pulse beating. She took another step down, and another. The black line of trees rose toward her, welcoming.