Alison sighed. “If it’s that clever, then it makes no difference what we do. We’re going this way. Follow us if you like, I don’t care.”
She turned and climbed up a steep bank, heading back between the regularly spaced trunks of the pine forest. After a moment’s hesitation, Eva and Katie followed her. When they looked back, they could see the dark shape of Nicolas stamping angrily along behind them.
A warm autumn morning was waking around them. They came upon another logging road and followed it for some distance until a toss of the coin sent them marching across a large area of freshly cleared forest. They made slow progress, jumping over tree stumps and wide water-filled pits. Katie tore her anorak on the sharp edge of a broken branch sticking up from the ground.
“I was lucky,” she muttered. “It could have been my leg.”
“Toss the bloody coin, Alison,” Nicolas said. “Get us out of here.”
“After another ten minutes,” Alison replied grimly.
“Look at those.” Eva changed the subject. “Aren’t they old?”
The tops of a line of electricity pylons could be seen just above the trees ahead of them. They were of an old-fashioned design, constructed of a lattice of weak-looking metal, rather than being formed from an elegant curve of stronger stuff. They looked strangely appropriate in their surroundings, as if they had grown there naturally.
They entered a patch of older woodland. The trees here were not planted in such good order. Oaks and sycamores fought for space, while tangles of glossy rhododendrons had infiltrated the forest clearings where trees had fallen. The land began to slope downward; they could peer out through the trees to see a valley cutting through the land before them.
“Let’s stop for a moment,” Eva called. She halted and began to pull off her anorak. Alison and Nicolas did the same.
“It’s too hot now that the sun is up,” she explained. “I’m thirsty, too. How much water do we have left?”
Nicolas was carrying the group’s entire supply in a couple of two-liter milk containers tucked into his shoulder bag. He unzipped it and checked.
“Just over a bottle’s worth. We weren’t expecting to be wandering around here in the woods for so long, were we? I thought there was nowhere in the country that was more than five minutes from a burger restaurant.”
He gazed at Eva, silently pleading with her to help. Eva felt as if she should say something. Katie wouldn’t, Nicolas wouldn’t be listened to. It was down to her.
“Alison?” she said.
“What?” Alison stood with hands on hips, gazing out over the valley.
Eva tied the anorak around her waist.
“This walking is exhausting. I know we need to evade the Watcher, but it will do us no good if we die of thirst in this forest.”
“Yes?” said Alison.
Eva sighed. Alison wasn’t being very helpful.
She pressed on. “Well, we’re spending a lot of time walking across very rough terrain. It’s exhausting. I think we should think a little bit less about randomness, and a little more about putting some distance between us and the Center. We must be barely two kilometers from the place as the crow flies.”
Alison reached up and brushed some hair from her face. “So what are you suggesting?” she asked. Eva noted that she did not sound entirely unhappy at this suggestion; Alison must be hating this as much as the rest of them. Eva took a step closer to her.
“Look. We’ve come to the valley now. Why don’t we toss the coin to decide which way to go? Cross it, go back, or head up or down the valley itself? Once we’ve made that decision, we choose the best possible path. We don’t change direction until another path suggests itself.”
Alison sighed. “It’s cutting down options.”
“I know. But we’re exhausted. A good leader knows when to cut her losses and change the plan.”
“I’m not the leader,” insisted Alison, but she smiled a little as she said it.
The coin sent them scrambling down to the floor of the valley. The going was easier than it had been, but still not without difficulties. They slid down earth slopes, clutching at branches to slow themselves, or stumbled down the hill at a half run from trunk to trunk, grabbing at them to stop themselves plunging down too fast. At one point Katie stumbled and slid about thirty meters on her side before finally coming to a halt. Alison screamed; Nicolas and Eva watched how pale her face got. When they came to Katie, she was clutching her arm and crying. There was blood on the tattered arm of her anorak and they now realized why she had not taken it off in the warmth of the morning. Her arm had been more badly injured than they had thought when she had tripped on the broken branch earlier.
“We’ve got to get that seen to,” Nicolas said grimly.
“I’ll be okay,” Katie whimpered.
“If you’re sure.” Alison gazed down the slope. “Not much further.”
“She’s not okay,” Nicolas said.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Look,” Eva said, pointing upward, forestalling another argument.
Three airplanes flew overhead, their white contrails forming a triangle high above.
“They’re too high to see us,” Alison said dismissively. She began to scramble downward again.
“We wouldn’t see them if they were stealth planes,” Nicolas said. He looked at Katie. “Do you want a hand?”
“I’ll be okay,” she said, and moved slowly down the hill again.
They scrambled further down. Just as they were nearing the bottom, they came up against a wall of rhododendrons. Tangled brown branches and glossy green leaves choked the bottom of the valley, completely blocking their path.
“We’re trapped,” Nicolas said flatly. “There’s no way through that.”
Katie gazed at the tangled mass of vegetation in silence. Her eyes were filling with tears.
“We’ll never get back up that hill,” Eva whispered.
Alison turned to face them, her face resolute.
“We’ll carry on downwards,” she said. “There’s bound to be a way through.”
They trudged disconsolately downward, feeling thoroughly miserable. The sun had risen high enough to shine in their faces, making them hot and bad-tempered. Tree roots lay hidden beneath the brown debris of the forest floor, tripping them or sending them slipping toward the crowded green bushes below. On the far side of the valley the old pylons they had seen earlier marched downward, too. Eva looked at the cables that looped down and up, down and up as they were passed from arm to arm.
“There’s no end to this,” Nicolas muttered angrily.
Just when they thought the rhododendrons would never end, a path revealed itself.
They stood gasping beside the sudden gap in the glossy green barrier, sweat dripping from their faces and trickling down their backs. Walking along the steep slope was extremely tiring; their water was almost finished.
Nicolas shook his head in resignation. “It’s found us, hasn’t it? It knows where we are.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Alison said stubbornly.
The path was formed by a tall ash tree that had fallen, giving them a walkway over the tangled bushes it had crushed. Katie and Eva glanced at each other, and Katie shook her head almost imperceptibly.
Alison picked her way forward through the cage of broken branches and kicked the trunk.
“It looks natural enough to me. The roots could have been washed away by all the rain we’ve been having lately. Trees fall over all the time.”
“Does it make any difference?” Nicolas asked. “Whether it was an accident or arranged by the Watcher, we
