Hunting Party

Chapter Fourteen

“Well, well . . . hello, darlin’.” It was not a voice she wanted to hear, that confident male purr. “A gal could get hurt, wanderin’ around in the dark like you are. . . . You better let me give you a hand.” A blot of nearer darkness rose from the trees and moved toward her, boots scraping on the rock; she could see a narrow gleam that might be starlight on the barrel of his weapon.

“No . . .” She hadn’t meant to say anything, but fear left no room for the breath in her lungs.

“C’mon, hon,” he said. She couldn’t tell quite how far away he was—two meters? Three? “Wasn’t that your flitter crashed on the other side of the island? Your dad sent us out to find you. . . .” For a moment relief washed over her, but she couldn’t believe in it. Still, if he thought she didn’t know, he might not kill her right away. And if he thought she was alone, if he hadn’t seen Raffa, perhaps Raffa could still get away.

“You’re . . . one of the outrange patrols?” she asked. A confident chuckle came from him.

“That’s right, hon. And you’re gonna be fine, now. Just come along with me. . . .”

For the third time that night, Bubbles heard death close by. This time she heard the bullet smack into him an instant before the loud crack from upslope, where Raffa was. The impact threw him back, to land with a crash in the low vegetation of the slope. A few loose rocks clattered on downhill. Bubbles doubled up, retching. It was too much. She had little in her stomach to lose, but wanted none of it. She could hear Raffa coming down, much faster than she had, with the aid of the goggles.

“Are you all right?” Raffa’s voice, from near the fallen hunter.

“Y-yes.” Her body gave a final convulsive heave, then allowed her to lift her head. “I . . . didn’t know you knew how to shoot.”

“My Aunt Katy. She made us learn. Gave prizes.” From the sound of it, Raffa was fighting her own nausea. Bubbles felt shaky and ashamed of herself. She was supposed to be the leader here, and she’d fallen apart. She forced herself to stand, to stumble the few strides in the dark to where Raffa bent over the dying man.

“I thought they died quicker,” she said, trying for the calm tone of earlier. “They do on the action cubes.” The man’s breathing sounded horrible, bubbly and uneven. She was glad she couldn’t see his face.

“Here.” Raffa pushed a set of goggles into her hands. “Now we can both see. And we’ll take his weapons and comunit.” She spoke hurriedly and roughly, her voice slightly shaky. “I saw him, after you started down. I didn’t dare call. . . .”

“Right,” Bubbles said.

“I kept wanting you to go more to the right. Give me space. I was so scared—” For a moment they clung to each other, shaking, wanting to cry but knowing they had no time. “Got to go,” Raffa said finally, pushing away. “They’ll be coming.”

Bubbles stood, staggering a little from the weight added to her original pack. They each had two rifles now, and a needler, and a comunit, and more knives than they could possibly use. If they could get some of this back to Petris . . . but they couldn’t. Quickly, careless for the moment of the noise, they got themselves into the forest below.

Once or twice, in childhood, they had tried skulking around in the woods at night. With torches, of course. They’d given it up, except for raids along the beach, after someone—she couldn’t remember who—had broken an ankle while trying to climb the ridge in a cross-island overnight race. They’d had to call for help, and the adults had been scathing about children who didn’t have enough sense to stay off slippery rocks in the dark. Buttons, the acknowledged boss of the campsites, had forbidden night wandering, and they’d mostly obeyed. Bubbles hadn’t minded, because she preferred to sleep at night rather than nap in the daytime.

Now, with the night goggles on, she was glad of the covering darkness. She could see well enough to avoid hanging creepers, thornbushes, and other hazards; she knew from her time on the open slope that no one without night goggles could see her. Of course the others had them . . . but so did she.

Soon she slowed, and began listening again. She stopped completely for a moment. Her stomach growled loudly, reminding her it was empty. She heard Raffa scrabbling in her knapsack, then a faint metallic rasp and a gurgle. Water. She realized how thirsty she herself was, and took off her own knapsack, trying for silence. Where was the noisy wind when you needed it? The water eased her throat and washed away the foul taste of her nausea. Now she was hungry. She tapped Raffa’s arm, and when she leaned closer murmured to her. “Eat now—while walking.” She could see Raffa’s nod as clearly as if it were daylight.

They had the survival rations from the flitter, tubes of thick goo that tasted of fat, sugar, and salt. Bubbles swallowed half of hers at once, and tucked the rest into her pocket. She started off again more slowly, trying to remember how the land went on this side of the island. How far south were they, and how near was the swamp? Should they start back north, and hope to work into the more rugged terrain along the north shore?

Nothing moved in the woods around them. She remembered, from those childhood visits, flocks of birds and many small animals—lizards, some nonvenomous snakes, land crabs. Once she’d been frightened by a tortoise big enough to sit on; she’d thought it was a shiny brown rock. There was less undergrowth than she remembered, and she found it easy to walk between the trees. The slope flattened beneath her feet; the forest rose higher overhead, and even with night goggles she couldn’t see that much. Whenever she stopped to listen, her legs trembled; she knew they needed to rest.

Raffa tapped her shoulder. Bubbles leaned close to her, and Raffa said, “I think I hear water.”

Bubbles tried to filter out the sigh of the breeze in the leaves . . . yes. A rhythmic rush and silence . . . waves breaking, but gently, in this little wind. “You’re right,” she said quietly. “And they might have someone on the beach—it’s narrow here.” Now which way, south or north? Her mind was clogged by exhaustion and fear. She had started out hoping to find her old hiding place, and then thought of Kell’s cave, wherever that was . . . but now . . . she wished she knew just where they were, and how far it was to someplace else.

“I’d vote north,” Raffa said, as if she’d asked. “Away from their camp.” For a moment Bubbles wanted to protest; they had weapons themselves, now, and night gear. They were as dangerous as the hunters. But they weren’t, really: they were untrained girls, and very tired. Staying as far from the hunters’ camp as possible made sense.

“Good idea,” Bubbles said, and turned right, away from the beach. They walked slowly, as quietly as they could manage, stopping every few minutes to look around them. The walk took on a dreamlike character—the eerie landscape in the night goggles, that looked like something meant to be scary but done on a low budget, the silence, their exhaustion that forced concentration on the simplest movements. When a great tree loomed up that Bubbles remembered from her childhood trips, she moved into the dense shadow of its massive bole and stopped.

“We’ve got to rest,” she said, “while one of us can stay awake to watch. You sleep first.”

“Right.” Raffa’s vague shape folded up to sit against the tree. Bubbles leaned, but did not sit. If she sat, she would sleep. She could not be scared enough to stay awake, not now. She fished the rest of the ration stick out of her pocket and ate it, and drank more water. Her legs ached; the pack straps seemed to burn along her shoulders, but she was afraid to take the pack off. What if they had to run for it?

She realized then that she hadn’t even checked to see if the rifle she carried was loaded. She fumbled at it. It wasn’t exactly like the one she’d been taught to use, and she couldn’t find the little doohickey—it had a name, but she’d never learned it—to release the clip. She found something sticking out of the stock, and pushed it, and a line of red sprang across the space under the tree to another tree trunk. The rifle hummed; desperately she pushed the knob this way and that until it moved and the light disappeared and the hum ceased. She stared around, sure that someone must have seen that red light, but nothing moved and no sound disturbed her. After awhile, her heart quit trying to climb out her mouth, and she tried to think what that had been. Firearms were not her hobby; she had learned to shoot only because of the elphoose hunts. Her father had insisted she must learn.

Red light. A hum. Red light made her think of the vidcams in the drama department . . . range finders . . . so it might be a range finder. And the hum . . . like the hum of the automatic focus adjustments. She felt carefully along the entire stock. A tiny flap covered a socket—pins inside—a connection for some computer attachment? She found three more buttons or knobs, and left them alone. The scope . . . she lifted the rifle to her shoulder and tried to peer through it, but the goggles interfered. After a quick look around, she slipped them off and looked through the scope. It gave a brighter image than the goggles, in crisp grays rather than smudged greenish yellow. Her finger found knobs on the scope, too. . . . She left them alone, and put her goggles back on.

Something flared in her pocket, a small blinking light that the goggles made into a white beacon. Without goggles—through her pocket—it was hardly visible. The comunit she’d taken from the first hunter . . . blinking a two-three sequence. When she looked at Raffa, asleep against the tree, her pocket too winked, this one in a two-two sequence. She had not thought they might be locators, but now it seemed obvious. If she didn’t reply, with some code she could not know, the hunters would know where to look. . . . They might know anyway.

“Raffa!” She kept her voice low, but Raffa woke instantly.

“What?” she asked.

“We have to get rid of them—if we leave them here, that’s too close—we don’t know how long it will take—” She felt like crying . . . she was so tired, she hadn’t had any sleep, and it was too much. Raffa hugged her.

“We’ll throw them in the water. Let ’em think we tried to swim for it.”

“But they might be on the beach!” She could hear the incipient hysteria in her own voice. Raffa’s hand tightened on her arm.

“We’re alive and two of them are dead. Two unarmed, untrained society girls, against trained hunters with night gear, and who has the weapons now? We’re going to stay alive, and they’re ALL going to be dead, and no you’re not going to have hysterics now. Take a deep breath.”

Bubbles took a deep breath; her ribs ached. “Right. Sorry.”

“No problem—I got some sleep, and you didn’t. Now . . . let’s get to the shore, and if someone’s there we’ll blow him away.”

“I can’t even tell if thisthing is loaded,” Bubbles said softly. “I tried to find out and got something that made a red light and hummed at me.”

“Really? Sounds like a Maseter range finder to me. Here—let me check your status.” Raffa took the rifle, did something Bubbles couldn’t follow in the dimness, and handed it back. “Full clip, round in the chamber. When you pull that trigger, you’ll shoot something.”

“Let’s go, then.” Bubbles angled left, toward the shore. As she remembered, the big tree had been only a couple of hundred meters from the water. She noticed, after a few minutes, that the blinking lights on the comunits had died. It gave her no comfort. . . . A missed signal would rouse them to search, she was sure. At least they had thick cover to the very edge of the beach.

As they neared the water, the night goggles had more light to work with, and brightened once more. At the same time, the undergrowth increased, as it always had near the forest edge, though it was not so thick that they needed to go out of their way. By the time Bubbles peered through the last screen of bushes and vines, she could see up and down the narrow beach at least a hundred meters in each direction. She saw no one . . . although someone could have been hidden in the undergrowth, as they were. A gentle swell out to sea produced small lapping waves that slipped up and back like the strokes of a massage, rolling the little pebbles that made up the beach here so that they clicked and whispered.

“How deep is it?” Raffa asked. “Any chance the things will be too deep for them to find?”

“It’s a steep drop-off,” Bubbles said. “We used to beach the sailboats on this side of the island sometimes. Give me that one—” Raffa handed over the comunit and Bubbles took another look up and down the beach. Nothing. She shrugged out of her knapsack and left it with Raffa, then moved slowly out of the cover, expecting any moment to hear another shot. The pebbles crunched under her shoes; she thought of wading in a little way, but remembered the times she’d slipped and fallen here. She didn’t need to be sopping wet, not on top of everything else.

“Throw it!” muttered Raffa from behind her. Right. As if she were good at throwing. She felt like an idiot as she cocked her arm and threw the first comunit as far into the sea as she could. It wasn’t, she thought, all that far; it landed with a juicy splash. With the next she tried harder, and achieved an even noisier splash—it must have been spinning—and no more distance. She found the two uphill steps back to the treeline almost impossible . . . but the impossible, she was discovering, didn’t even take longer. It was just harder.

“A little farther,” Raffa said, “and it’s your turn to rest. Just get back from the edge.”

But they actually walked another half hour, by Raffa’s watch, before finding another place Bubbles remembered, where a rib of the central ridge ran all the way to the water. From there around the northern end, the island had no beach, but a vertical wall of stone.

When they lay down—this time neither could stand—Bubbles fell asleep at once. She had expected to have frightening dreams, but she woke with no memory of them. When she opened her eyes, she could see Raffa curled into a tidy ball, catlike; her rifle lay across her sleeping hand. Bubbles yawned, stretched, and rubbed the hipbone that had been on the bottom. Her back never hurt after sleeping on the ground, but a hipbone always complained. She had tried all the tricks she’d read about, back in her camping days, and none of them worked. She sat up; Raffa opened one eye and said, “Don’t tell me it’s morning.”

“It’s morning.” Unless they’d slept all day, and she didn’t feel that rested. Besides, the light was brighter; the leaves overhead began to look green, not black. She stretched again, arching her back, then rolled to her feet. Nothing stirred but the leaves overhead, as the dawn breeze strengthened. Her shoulders were stiff and sore from the pack straps. Raffa yawned, and groaned a little, stretching.

“I hate morning,” Raffa said. Then her eyes came open all the way, and she sat up. “It’s real.”

“What?” Bubbles knew what, but she wasn’t sure she believed it yet.

“Us. Here. Last night.” Raffa was staring at her own hands. “Blood.”

“Yeah.” Bubbles had already seen the disgusting mess on her own hands. And she’d eaten something held in them. “I guess we should’ve washed off when we got to the beach.” Her slacks were filthy too, and she could smell her own sour smell. Raffa looked as bad, her dark hair in lank dirty strings and the knees of her slacks black with dried blood and dirt.

“They won’t have to see us,” Raffa said. “They could track us by smell. Without dogs.”

“Then we’ll get clean.” Bubbles had no idea how they would get clean. They certainly could not light a fire and boil a pot of water for washing. For that matter, she needed to think where the nearest drinking water might be. She picked up her knapsack and got it on, wincing as her shoulders complained. “Come on,” she said. “It won’t help us to sit here and wish.”

Raffa stood, shook herself, brushed at the stains, and finally picked up her knapsack and weapons. “I know, I know. What’s the boys’ regimental motto? ‘Onward to glory’ or something equally unreasonable?” She got the knapsack onto one shoulder and grunted. “This thing weighs twice what it did yesterday. And don’t scold me; I’m getting my complaints out of the way all at once, early, before they can bother you. You notice I didn’t complain last night.”

“Right. You complain in the morning, and I’ll complain at midnight or whenever it was I went bonkers, and between us that’ll cover the whole day.”

“And leave us time to survive, evade the hunters, kill them all, and save everyone. Tally-ho.” Raffa started off, then looked back. “By the way, where are we going now?”

“Water, I thought,” Bubbles said. “Water first, then someplace to hide.”

“Like last time,” Raffa said, but with a grin. “A hiding place convenient to a trail so that we can get weapons and supplies from dead hunters.”

For all the banter, they went warily enough once they started. Without talking about it, they began to move apart, so they could just see each other, and take alternate pauses for listening and looking backwards. Nothing disturbed them but the silence, which the wind in the leaves overhead seemed to emphasize. The sky lightened; Bubbles knew that it was now full day, though they were walking in the shadow of the ridge. The slope began to fall away under their feet, and Bubbles turned right, inland; she remembered that there was another, smaller stream in a ravine between the last hill on the main ridge, and the outlier hill at the north end of the island. It rose from a spring on the ridge, and over the years the children had made a series of wading and splashing pools along its path to the sea. Between them, the stream was no more than ankle-deep except after a rainstorm, but they might find enough water in one of the pools to wash their clothes. Even if all the dams had fallen apart since the last campers, there should be enough loose handy stones to let them build one up again. It wouldn’t take long.

When she finally saw water, it was one of the larger pools. Someone had repaired the dam—she assumed it was the prisoners—and raised it enough so that the pool looked to be waist-deep. Its surface was littered with fallen leaves and twigs. She started toward it, then waved Raffa back to cover. It looked safe and deserted, but . . . she noticed something glinting at the upper end of the pool. Warily, she worked her way toward it, trying to keep to thicker growth. A foil packet with one end torn off, that’s all, discarded by some careless hunter. It could have held rations, candy, a damp wipe to clean with. She relaxed, then saw the first dead amphib, turning slowly in the pool, its legs extended. Another lay by the stream; with a growing sense of horror she realized that the “floating leaves” were in fact a mass of dead amphibs, insects, fish. She backed away, her hands to her mouth.

“What?” said Raffa, from behind her.

“Poison. They’ve poisoned the stream.” And if this stream, then all the streams—and if the streams, probably the springs as well. After horror, anger. This was her place, her childhood, and she had spent hours lying belly-down beside one stream or another, watching the brilliant red—and-gold amphibs, the speckled fish, the brilliant blue and green butterflies that came to drink.

“The . . . I can’t even find words bad enough. . . .” She had used all the bad words she knew for common things like escorts who got drunk and threw up on her, or girlfriends who told someone else her secrets—she hadn’t known there was something worse to save curses for. “How could they—?” How could anyone destroy so carelessly . . . anyone past childhood, that is.

“It would be hard to hide, in an autopsy,” Raffa said thoughtfully. Bubbles almost hated her at that moment. Of course it wasn’t her island. She had never seen it as Bubbles remembered it. “What I mean is,” Raffa went on, “it’s probably meant to put us to sleep or something. The . . . the other things are accidents.”

“That’s what’s worst,” Bubbles said. “They have a reason to kill us. A bad one, but a reason. To kill all these, just by accident, as a sort of by-product—”

“We shouldn’t stay here. They’d check this pretty often, I’d guess.”

“Right. Upstream, then.” They might have someone stationed upstream, too, but she had to know if they’d poisoned it all. She had to. She wondered when they’d done it—the day before, dropping packets from the flitter? Landing at each small stream? Or had someone been walking the forest that night, someone who might have walked past them as they slept, not seeing them? She shivered; it would do no good to think of that. As she walked, what Raffa said began to make sense. The same things had different effects on humans and animals—she knew that. A drug to make them sleepy might have killed the amphibs by accident, or . . . didn’t the fish need to swim for their gills to work? So if they drowsed and didn’t swim, they’d die just from that . . . but she was still angry. She felt decades older than the day before, than even the night before.

Upstream, as anywhere, grew steeper and narrower. They came to another pool, with its scum of dead amphibs and fish; she had seen nothing alive along the banks of the rivulet. Beyond that, the stream forked. To the left, poisoned water gurgled pleasantly in its narrow bed. To the right was the waist-high ledge that formed a miniature waterfall in the wet season. A damp patch of mud in the hollow above it was the only sign that a creek had ever flowed there.

“That way,” Bubbles said, heaving herself up and over the rock ledge. “We can’t take any water from that stream, and there might be a spring up here they didn’t notice.”

“You don’t know for sure?” Raffa asked, as she sat on the ledge and swung her legs up.

“No . . . my favorite places were the eastern ravine, where I could watch the sunrise, and my bramble. And our camp was on the eastern shore, south of where we crashed. Sometimes we had three or four main camps, depending on how many cousins showed up. Kev and Burlin used to set traps and things up at this end of the ridge—then they’d sit there and snigger.”

“Urgh. I wouldn’t have wanted to have them along.”

“Well . . . Silvia finally told on Burlin, and that was the end of them. But somehow he always made Buttons and me feel like it was our fault. If we’d had a more exciting island, he wouldn’t have gotten into mischief.”

“Like Stanley, my cousin that always blamed his pony for everything. But he brought it back with whip welts once, and my Aunt Katy wouldn’t put up with that.”

They followed the dry creekbed upstream, careful not to step in any drying mud. Bubbles looked for any sign that the hunters had been there, but the few scuffmarks could as well have been those of desperate prisoners. Her breath came short; it was hard to climb the steepening slope, and she realized they were close under the ridge. The creekbed turned suddenly, leading them into a narrow cleft roofed with trees; it closed around them, and Raffa exclaimed over the ferns draping the walls. Ahead, the cleft ended in a sheer wall hung with shaggy ferns and vines. At the foot of it, the ground seemed damp, but there was no spring.

“Well,” Bubbles said, a little blankly. “That’s it. No water here.” She sat down; her legs had suddenly given out, and her eyes burned, though she could not cry.

Raffa crouched beside her. “We’re hidden, at least. If we stay quiet, and they don’t find our trail. They can’t come on us from behind.”

Bubbles nodded, but could not speak past the lump of misery in her throat. She set her rifle carefully to one side, away from the damp spot, and pushed the knapsack straps off her shoulder.

“We should eat something,” Raffa said. “We never did have breakfast.”

“Not without water,” Bubbles said. “At least, that’s what the books say.” But at the mention of food, her stomach cramped and rumbled. She felt she could eat three meals at once.

“We have some water,” Raffa said. “And what about tropical fruits and things? They have water in them.”

“I . . . haven’t seen any. It’s the wrong season, or the prisoners have eaten them, or something. . . .” Bubbles leaned back against the ferny rock, careless of insects. Her eyes sagged shut.

“Come on—you can’t give up!”

“I can rest,” Bubbles said, not opening her eyes. “Just a little while.” She wasn’t sure what she felt, except exhaustion and hunger, and right now she didn’t care if a whole troop of hunters came up the creek.

“All right,” Raffa said, “but I’m not giving up.” Bubbles heard Raffa move around her, and the scrape of Raffa’s pack on the pebbles. “Although a soft place to rest my aching back may be a good idea. Aahhh—” That relaxed sigh ended in a yelp, quickly muffled. Bubbles opened her eyes. Raffa lay on her back, covered with ferns to the waist; she seemed to have fallen into the rock. The mass of ferns and vines had hung over some opening like a shaggy curtain. From the muffled splutters, she was trying to say something. Bubbles grabbed her feet and pulled.

“Are you all right? Need help?”

Raffa undulated, snakelike, and slithered out on her back, spitting dirt out of her mouth. “It’s a wonder I didn’t crack my skull.”

“What is it, a hollow or something?”

“A hollow, yes. A cave!”

“Cave?”

“Yes. And I heard water dripping. Come on. . . .” Raffa grabbed her knapsack and started to shove it through the curtain of ferns.

“Wait—they’d know we went in.” Bubbles looked at the broken fronds of fern where she had been resting, the bruised moss. If someone came this way—and they probably would—they’d start looking harder. And they wouldn’t miss a cave, she was sure.

“We’ll make it look like we rested here, and then went somewhere else,” Raffa said. “Come on—shove your pack in, and the rifles. It’s the best chance we’ve seen yet.”

Bubbles shrugged and complied. She didn’t have any better idea, and if Raffa had found water inside the cave, surely it hadn’t been poisoned. She hoped. Raffa went in with their things, and reported that she’d found plenty of room; they could both hide there, with their gear. She crawled back out, as Bubbles lifted the vines cautiously.

“Now for disguise,” Raffa said. “A few footprints going in both directions, just in here where we got careless because we figured no one would have tracked us further back. We sat here and rested—that’s the squashed ferns on your side. Actually they may not know there are two of us, so why don’t I make all the footprints?”

“Because we might both have left them somewhere else,” Bubbles said. “If we were going to leave here, which way would we go? Back up the ridge, I think—we came here looking for water, didn’t find any, and started up to find a spring. . . .” Together, they edged back out of the narrow cleft, and cautiously made a few scuffmarks up a steeper slope. Since they had been careful not to make prints on the way in (and didn’t see any) they walked back normally.

The hanging ferns and vines looked undisturbed, Bubbles noticed, even after Raffa had been through twice. Raffa went first, and then Bubbles slid in backwards. They had left marks, sliding in; it looked like someone had dragged bodies over the ground. She was trying to think what to do about it when she heard a shot, from high overhead, and then another. She didn’t try to see who it was, or if they’d seen. . . . She jerked backwards under the matted vines and tried not to breathe. Raffa’s hand closed on her arm, almost as tightly as the night before. Had it been only one night?

Although it was near midday, inside the cave she could see very little. The thick vines shut out nearly all the light, and it was cool and damp. She lay on level stone thinly coated with damp mud. She could hear the musical plink and plonk of water dripping into deep water, somewhere behind her in the dark. A cold drop hit the back of her neck, and she jumped.

“We should get back from the opening,” Raffa said quietly. “Just in case they find it.”

“Let’s try the night goggles.” Bubbles fished hers out and put them on. The nearer part of the cave appeared in shadowy blurs, with stabbing brilliance coming from the entrance. Several meters behind them, a black level surface had to be the water they’d heard. To the left, the cave’s inner wall dove directly into the water, but on the right, their flat ledge extended around a buttress and out of sight. Overhead, even the night goggles could not define the roof; when Bubbles reached up, she felt nothing.

Slowly, Raffa got to her knees and crawled away to the right. Bubbles followed, backing up at first so that she could watch the entrance. She had never been one for caves; she had not expected that the light would fade so fast. She slipped the goggles up; the blackness pressed on her face, as if it would invade her skull. Shuddering, she put the goggles back on, and stared at the faint glow from the entrance as if to remember it forever.

“They shot somebody!” George grabbed Ronnie’s arm. Ronnie shook it off.

“They shot at somebody,” he said. “You don’t know they hit anyone.”

“But the girls are up there—you know that.”

He knew that; he could close his eyes and see Raffa’s face, smell her hair. “They’re in the ravine. They’re in cover somewhere. And the hunters wouldn’t shoot the girls right off. . . .” He wished he hadn’t said it; that thought was no better.

“If Bubbles tried to fight—she’s kind of wild sometimes.”

“Petris sent one of the preeves up to the high trail, he said. Could have been that. And the hunter might’ve missed. And we can’t even be sure where the shot came from.” Although he was sure enough: high on the ridge, south of them. That put it too close to the girls, entirely too close. The hunters were supposed to come this way, and fall into the trap he and George had spent the afternoon constructing. They were just off one of the larger trails, that angled up and over the gap between the main ridge and the outlying northern hill.

Time had gone rubbery; he did not want to trust George’s watch. His had not survived the crash. George’s could have been damaged. He was aware that not trusting a watch was as silly and dangerous as not trusting the instruments in an aircraft; he knew he’d had a concussion. But time felt wrong; the glowing digits seemed to hang forever or race past. A vague irritation seized him: he had had the concussion, he shouldn’t be having to calm George.

Another shot, more distant. His shoulders twitched. He had thought during Petris’s briefing that he understood exactly where everyone would be, at least to start with. Now he found he could not remember who might be southward on the ridge, or on the west side. . . . He felt sick and sleepy both, and kept wanting to yawn.

“We ought to go find out,” George said. “That’s got to be somewhere near them. . . .”

“And if we go crashing up there we’ll just lead the hunters to them.” Ronnie tried to sound soothing, but even to him his voice seemed lusterless and whiny. “Petris said stay here, and we should stay here.”

“He’s not even an officer,” George said, but he didn’t move.

Ronnie stiffened in the midst of a yawn. A rhythmic noise flicked the edge of his hearing. Like someone walking, but walking with an intentionally odd gait. A few steps, a pause: a few more steps, a pause. The sound of steps—the swish of leaves, the soft pad of foot—varied in number but not duration. Despite his fear, Ronnie grinned to himself. They’d been warned about that mistake. . . . He’d done it himself, counting to himself as he tried to move stealthily, he’d put four or five or three steps into the same interval, thus making the sound as periodic as a pendulum. This person varied his pause intervals, but not the walking ones. Ronnie reached out to touch George in case he hadn’t heard. The walker might come within reach, if they were lucky.

Ronnie’s mind drifted. It had been, he thought, an impossibly bad day, and it had started far too early. Yet he didn’t feel as bad as he should; he knew that, and knew, in some distant corner of his mind, that it had something to do with the bump on his head. He wasn’t tracking right; he wasn’t feeling what he should feel, whatever that was. The long, hot afternoon after the girls left, when Petris tried to figure out what to do with them, where to put them, when the others tested Petris’s command, wanting to kill them, wanting to leave them anywhere and get away safely themselves. . . . It had been hell, but a hell from which he felt somewhat remote. As long as he didn’t have to talk, as long as he didn’t have to do anything, the others could do what they wanted.