“I’m here,” said her brother. “Keep going in a straight line. It looks okay.”
“Good. We need to keep going in a straight line.” Eva whispered the instruction to the others and they walked on in silence. Nicolas kept glancing nervously back toward the dark outline of the Center. Katie gazed at the sky; Alison walked on with an expression of grim determination. She didn’t seem happy.
“Something’s up with her. Watch her, Eva. Whoah! Stop. Just ahead of you. Can you see it?”
“Stop!” called Eva. The group froze. Ahead of them a faint ghost hung on the night air. Almost invisibly thin lines criss-crossed the space at the edge of the tree line.
“Motion sensors,” Katie whispered, “but so old. You’d have to cross the beam to sound the alarm. Why not just use radar? It’s a lot harder to detect. Why these old light beams?”
“I don’t know,” Alison muttered. “Come on, let’s go around them.”
They walked along the perimeter of the trees for some distance, conscious of the blank windows of the Center to their left. It was easy to believe they were being watched. They quickly came to the circle of limes. Eva’s brother spoke.
“It’s clear here. There’s a path right through the wood that will take you to the main road.”
“This way,” Eva said. “It’s clear.”
“This isn’t right,” said Nicolas. “Weren’t we supposed to be traveling at random? We should be tossing the coin, not listening to her brother.”
They all looked toward the dim outline of Katie. Her whispered reply was loud in the silence of the dew- muffled night.
“It can’t be helped. Better to be a little predictable at the beginning than to be caught before we even start.”
“Good point,” said Alison. “Eva, you go first. We may as well make use of your brother while he’s still here.”
She fumbled in a pocket for a moment, then pressed something into Eva’s hand.
“You’d better use this,” she said.
It was a flashlight. Eva turned it on and a circle of light appeared on the damp leaf mold covering the ground before her. Pale, heart-shaped lime leaves were scattered all around. Autumn was coming.
“Take a handful of leaves,” said her brother. “It may be enough to remember me by.”
Eva bent to scoop some leaves from the ground, dipping her head into the rich smell of the wet forest floor. Nearby, the dark trunk of a lime rose into the black sky, an untidy collection of young twigs sprouting from its base. She took hold of one and bent and twisted it until it snapped, and then folded it up into a springy circle that could be stashed in one of the large pockets in her anorak.
“Have you finished yet?” Alison hissed angrily.
“Yes. Let’s go.”
They pushed their way on into the darkness of the woods, Eva leading the way, picking out the path with the flashlight, Alison just behind her, then Nicolas and Katie bringing up the rear. The wood was silent and incredibly dark. Eva, like most people, had lived all her life taking streetlights for granted. To have her vision reduced to a circle of light, to a picture of low roots with traffic-blown litter wrapped around them, to thin branches reaching out to snag her face, and to a shifting pattern of darkness where the light could not reach-this was almost too frightening.
“We should have reached the road by now,” whispered Alison. “I think we’re lost.”
“No, this is right,” whispered Eva.
“In that case, why can’t we hear the traffic?” Alison snapped.
“I don’t know.” That had been worrying her, too.
“It’s the woods,” Katie murmured. “They muffle the sound.”
“Good point,” said Eva, although she was sure she detected a note of uncertainty in Katie’s voice. She pushed her hand into her pocket to feel the lime twig.
“What do you think?” she asked, but there was no reply. Her brother had gone. She almost turned around at that point, but just then there was a sudden blaze of light before them and a roar of noise that sent a wind dancing through the surrounding twigs and branches.
“Shit!”
Eva didn’t know who had shouted; she rather thought it might have been her. She felt incredibly relieved and foolish at the same time when she realized that she had just seen a truck rushing past on the main road before her. There was another whoosh as three cars zoomed past in rapid succession.
“I think we’ve found the road,” she whispered, then started to giggle.
The four of them clustered at the edge of the forest, just hidden from the occasional traffic that roared past in a blaze of lights, their nerves jangled. Alison held her coin in one hand.
“Okay, heads we go straight on into the woods on the other side, tails we take the road. We’ll toss again for left and right if appropriate. Fair enough?”
“Yes,” Nicolas said.
“No,” said Katie. “That choice favors the road unduly. If it’s heads, we should toss again to see whether we go forward or back.”
“Go back? But that’s ridiculous,” Nicolas spluttered.
“If we are going to try to fool the Watcher, we have to follow the coin,” said Alison. “Every time we ignore the toss, we’re allowing our personalities to shine through, and the Watcher can read our personalities. We need to hide them from it as much as we can.”
“Alison is right.” Katie gulped, then continued quickly, almost without pause. “Anything that we decide for ourselves can be deduced by the Watcher. It set the motion sensor at the edge of the wood in case we came this way. Who knows what else may have picked us up? If it can guess our next move, it may set more traps. We have to try to be unpredictable. If the coin says go back, we go back.”
She gasped for air. They all waited a moment for her to get her breath back, then Alison spoke.
“Okay, you heard Katie. Are we agreed?” she asked.
“Agreed,” said Nicolas, after a moment’s hesitation.
“Agreed,” said Eva.
A truck rushed past, sending old burger wrappers spinning around them in a gust of apple-scented fumes. Alison tossed the coin as silence slowly resettled on the wood.
“Heads,” she called. “Okay, we’re not going to follow the road. So, heads we go forwards, tails we go back.”
In the dim light, Eva could just see Nicolas’ silhouette shake its head slowly.
Alison spun the coin again. “Heads again. Okay, straight across the road and down into the deeper woods.”
“This is stupid,” Nicolas said. “What can we do in there? We can’t travel very fast and we’ll get lost. In a couple of hours they’ll be out with IR detectors looking for us. They’ll have us back at the Center in time for lunch.”
Alison sighed deeply. “Nicolas, I thought we agreed?”
Nicolas was obstinate. “So what? It’s stupid. We should head along the road, lose ourselves in a town.”
Eva pushed a hand in her pocket and began to fiddle with the springy piece of twig. She was tempted to just turn around and walk back to the Center. What was she doing, out here in the middle of the night with a bunch of loonies tossing coins to see where they were going? She could be back at the Center, receiving help while she talked to the ghost of her brother. She laughed a little at the absurdity of the thought.
Katie was speaking now, trying to be reasonable, but her voice sounded high-pitched and nervous.
“Nicolas, how do you know we would lose ourselves in a town? If the Watcher expects us to go there, it will have senses already waiting. We may think that we have escaped, but all the time the Watcher could be leading us closer to itself. There may be an empty building with a loose board over the window inviting us inside. Or maybe we’ll see a truck just ahead all parked up for the night with the back open, waiting for us to stow away inside it. How do we know it wouldn’t be a trap?”
Nicolas sighed, exasperated.
