Next to Ike, the strongest was Troy, the forensics kid, who'd probably been watching Sesame Street at the time Ike was battling his Himalayan peaks. He did a fine job trying to be Ike-like, solicitous and useful. But he was wearing down, too. Sometimes Ike posted him at the front, a place of trust, his way of honoring the boy. Ali decided the best help she could be was to walk with Twiggs, whom everyone else wanted to hogtie and leave. From the moment he woke, the man whined and begged and committed petty thefts. The microbotanist was a born panhandler. Only Ali could deal with him. She treated him like a teenage novitiate with pimples. When Pia or Chelsea marveled at her patience, Ali explained that if it wasn't Twiggs, it would be someone else. She had never seen a tribe without a scapegoat.
Their tents were history. They slept on thin sleeping pads as a pretense of their former civilization. Only three of them had sleeping bags, because the three pounds of weight had proven too much for the rest. When the temperature cooled, they pressed together and draped the bags over their collective body. Ike rarely slept with them. Usually he took his shotgun and wandered away, returning in the morning.
On one such morning, before Ike came in from his night patrolling, Ali woke and walked down to the sea to clean her face. A boggy mist had come in off the water, but she could see to place her feet on the phosphorescent sand. Just as she was about to skirt a large boulder, she heard noises.
The sounds were delicate and bony. Instantly she knew this was not English, probably not human. She listened more keenly, then gently worked ahead several more steps to the flank of the boulder and kept herself hidden.
There seemed to be two figures down there. In silence she listened to the voices murmur and click and slowly dial her into a different horizon of existence. There was no question they were hadals.
She was breathless. One sounded little different from the water lightly lapping against the shore. The other was less joined at the vowels, more cut and dried at the edges of his word strings. They sounded polite or old. She stepped from around the rock to see them.
There weren't two, but three. One was a gargoyle similar to those that Shoat and Ike had killed. It was perched upon the very skin of the water, hands flat, while its wings fanned languidly up and down. The other two appeared to be amphibians, or close to it, like fishermen who have no memory but the sea, half man, half fish. One lay on his side on the sand, feet in the water, while the other drifted in repose. They had the sleek heads and large eyes of seals, but with sharpened teeth. Their flesh was slick and white, with small black hairs fletching their backs.
She had been afraid they would flee. Abruptly she was afraid they would not.
One of the amphibians stirred and twisted to see her, showing his thick pizzle. It was erect. He'd been stroking himself, she realized. The gargoyle flexed his mouth like a baboon, and the dental arcade looked vicious.
'Oh,' Ali said foolishly.
What had she been thinking, to come here alone?
They watched her with the composure of philosophers in a glen. One of the
amphibians went ahead and finished his thought in their soft language, still looking at her.
Ali considered running back to the group. She set one foot behind her to turn and go. The gargoyle cut the briefest of side glances at her.
'Don't move,' muttered Ike.
He was hunkered on top of the boulder to her left, balanced on the balls of his feet. The pistol in one hand hung relaxed.
The hadals didn't speak anymore. They had that peculiar Oriental ease with long silences. The one went on stroking himself with apelike bemusement, not at all self-conscious or purposeful. There was nothing to hear but the water licking sand, and the skin sound of the one fondling himself.
After a while, the gargoyle cast one more glance at Ali, then pushed forward against the water's surface and departed on slow wings, never rising more than a few inches above the sea. He diagonaled into the mist and was gone.
By the time Ali brought her attention back to the amphibians, one had vanished. The last one – the masturbator – reached a state of boredom and quit. He slid below the water, and it was as if he had been drawn into a mouth. The lips of the sea sealed over him.
'Did that really happen?' Ali asked in a low voice. Her heart was pounding. She started forward to verify the handprints in the sand, to confirm the reality.
'Don't go near that water,' Ike warned her. 'He's waiting for you.'
'He's still there?' Her Zen hadals, lurking? But they were so pacific.
'You want to back up, please. You're making me nervous, Sister.'
'Ike,' she suddenly bubbled, 'you can understand them?'
'Not a word. Not these.'
'There are others?'
'I keep telling you, we're not alone.'
'But to actually see them...'
'Ali, we've been passing among them the whole time.'
'Ones like those?'
'And ones you don't want to know about.'
'But they looked so peaceful. Like three poets.' Ike tsk'ed.
'Then why didn't they attack us?' she said.
'I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out. It's almost like they knew me.' He hesitated. 'Or you.'
Branch lagged, weary.
He kept cutting their trail, but their spoor wandered, or else he did. It was likely him, he knew. Insect bites had made him sick, and the best thing would be to find a burrow and wait until the fever passed. With so much human presence around, he didn't trust the burrowing, though.
To stop would be to attract predators from many miles around. If one found him convalescing in a cubbyhole, it would be all over. And so Branch kept on his feet.
A lifetime of wounds hampered his pace. Delirium sapped his attention. He felt very old. It seemed as though he'd been voyaging since the beginning of time.
He came to a narrow sinkhole with a skinny rivulet trickling down. Rifle across his back, Branch roped into the abyss. At the bottom, he pulled the line and coiled it and moved on. He was new to this region, but was not a neophyte.
He came upon a woman's skeleton. Her long black hair lay by the skull, which was unusual, because it made good cordage when braided. That it had been left told him there were many more such humans available. That was good. Predators would be less prone to hunt him.
Through the day, Branch found more evidence of humans: whole skeletons, ribs, a footprint, a dried patch of urine, or the distinctive smell of H. sapiens in hadal dung. Someone had scratched his name on the wall, along with a date. One date from only two weeks before gave him hope.
Then he found the blubbery pile of survival suits, of which a number had been speared or hacked. To a hadal, the neoprene suits would seem like supernatural skins or even live animals. He rummaged through the pile and dressed in one that was whole and fit.
Shortly afterward, Branch found the rolls of paper with Ali's maps. He raced through them in chronological order. At the end, someone else's hand had scrawled in Walker's treachery at the sea, and the group's dispersal. It all came together for him, why this band had become separated and vulnerable, why Ike was nowhere to be found among them. Branch saw now where he needed to go, that subterranean sea. From there he might find more signs. Ali's chronicle made perfect sense to him. He took the maps and went on.
A day later, Branch realized he was being stalked.
He could actually smell them on the airstream, and that disturbed him. It meant they had to be close, for his nose was not keen. Ike would have sensed them long before. Again he felt old.
He had the same two choices every animal does, fight or flight. Branch ran.
Three hours later he reached the river. He saw the trail leading along the water, but it was too late for
