“We should probably get moving again,” Jess said. “The worst is still to come.”
Gabriel looked back at her and pressed his forefinger to his lips, then crouched in front of the tangle of branches, beneath which the fallen leaves were merely dusted with snow. A crunch of the detritus drew his attention to the right, where a pair of green eyes stared directly at him. There was Oscar, body pressed flat against the ground, partially concealed by a cluster of thin trunks. His one good ear stood erect.
Gabriel broke off a section of the granola bar and slowly held it out for the cat, which visibly tensed at the movement. He reached deep into the brush. Oscar licked his scarred nose, but held his position.
There was the sound of footsteps approaching from behind.
Gabriel saw the cat’s eyes tick upward, and in one swift motion, Oscar dashed away into the forest.
“Damn it,” Gabriel whispered. He scooted back out of the branches and rose to his feet.
“Is that cat following us?” Jess asked.
“I managed to get him to eat a hot dog out of my hand last night. I thought maybe he’d take some granola bar, but…”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare him off.”
“Hopefully we’ll see him again.”
He was angry she’d startled Oscar to flight, but if she hadn’t done it, he probably would have. After surviving in the wild for so long, the cat had become feral, tapped into his primitive instincts. The idea of catching him was a fool’s proposition.
“We will,” she said, wrapping her arm around his back beneath the rifle.
Gabriel hugged her around the shoulders. Without having said so, he knew she understood what he was trying to do with the cat. He gave her a gentle kiss on the bridge of her nose.
“I suppose we should hit the trail again,” she finally said.
“Yeah,” he said, reluctantly releasing her from his embrace.
He helped her into the backpack and followed her to the edge of the woods toward the path. She turned around and smiled. His heart fluttered. He couldn’t help but wonder what the future might hold for them back in the real world.
***
Just over two hours later, they were both beyond the point of exhaustion, but they were too close to stop now, and in no position to do so regardless. The sharp, snowcapped peak loomed over them from above, a fin of white blowing from the pinnacle. Their zigzagging ascent had brought them to the point where they now had to crawl around tree trunks that grew at bizarre angles from the steep embankment. If a path existed somewhere beneath the snow, they had long since lost it. They had to be close to the hot spring by now. The abrupt transition from forest to bare rock at timberline was perhaps a quarter-mile above them and the satellite image had shown just a hint of water through the overhanging branches.
Gabriel’s heartbeat was racing and his thoughts were a blur. He both hoped to find some sign of his sister and dreaded the possibility at the same time. The urge to turn around was now more pressing than his will to continue on, but one glance back over his shoulder, down what appeared to be a deadfall into the valley now hidden by snow, and he knew he had no choice but to proceed.
The wind shifted and pelted him in the face with ice crystals, and something else…the familiar stench of rotten eggs. Sulfur.
“Do you smell that?” he called to Jess, who was just up the slope to his right. Beyond her was a cloud of mist. No, not mist. It was steam.
She turned at the sound of his voice and he saw the look of recognition on her face. She had seen it too.
They scrabbled over the crest of a stony knoll and stared down into a small crater, at the bottom of which was a pool of murky gray water, barely visible through the swirling steam. Sliding down the slick, granite slope, they stood at the edge of a small pool no more than twelve feet in width and twenty feet long. The smell of salt and dissolved minerals washed over them, something of a cross between a marsh and the ocean. Tiny bubbles rose to the surface, like a pot of water only beginning to boil. Uneven stones lined the bottom, covered with a thick layer of hairy moss. The snow melted in the steam and fell to the spring as droplets of rain.
“How hot do you think it is?” Jess asked.
“Most geothermal springs are between ninety-seven and ninety-nine degrees.”
“Were it not for all the slime on the bottom, I’d climb right in.”
Gabriel thought of the strange bacteria they had found on Nathan’s femur and shuddered at the idea of them crawling all over his skin. He walked around the side, careful not to slide off the uneven rocks into the water. If he did and his boot became soaked, there would be no way to dry it and he’d end up losing his foot to frostbite. He scrutinized the choppy surface and the crevices between the stones beneath for any of the telltale signs of the presence of haloarchaea. Granted, they were making an assumption about the unique microorganism, which appeared to be the same as that which had arrived fossilized on the meteorite from Mars, based largely on the physical resemblance to haloarchaea, but the composition of the celestial rock and the known qualities of the soil on the fourth planet made it a sound correlation. Perhaps this new species didn’t have the same need for ultraviolet protection, and hence wouldn’t necessarily produce the same red-tinged pigments. After all, if they were correct about its origin, Mars was hundreds of thousands of miles farther away from the sun, the source of the radiation. Maybe it simply didn’t need to—
Gabriel stopped and crouched right at the edge. Steam billowed in his face, momentarily warming his cheeks and stinging his eyes. He waved it away and looked deeper into the water. There was a crevice between two jagged rocks, a slash of blackness from which a steady stream of bubbles flowed. And lining the rocks was a thin layer of scarlet, tight lips around the mouth of the geothermal fissure.
“Well, what do you know,” he whispered.
Jess knelt beside him and followed his gaze into the murky water.
“That red stuff,” she said. “That’s what we’re looking for, isn’t it?”
Gabriel nodded. He wished he had some way of excising a sample of the bacterial growth so he could study it up close. It was staggering to think that these microscopic creatures may have originated across space on a planet that hadn’t seen water in eons. If that was indeed where they had been spawned, then how had they managed to survive the journey? The only other example had been fossilized in a chunk of rock. Maybe what they were looking at now was simply a variation of a naturally occurring species of haloarchaea.
“Do you think this is where the mountain lion found Nathan’s bone?” Jess asked.
“It’s possible.” Until that point, he had been specifically looking for the proliferation of microorganisms, and not for human remains. “I didn’t see any other bones right off, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any down there covered in algae.”
They walked a complete circuit of the spring, often stopping and crouching to get a better look at something on the bottom, until they finally returned to where they started.
“Nothing,” Gabriel said. Though disheartening, it was still a relief not to have found any skeletal parts. It allowed them to cling to the grain of hope that somewhere their sisters might still be alive.
***
Gabriel sat on a stone at the edge of the steaming pond and poked a long branch down into the water. He scraped a section of the red growth off of one of the rocks and held it up so he could take a closer look. It was just like any sample of pond scum in texture: slimy, phlegm-like. There were striations, almost as though countless organisms had aggregated into long strands that stuck together to form a sludge. Part of him wanted to believe that these microorganisms had traveled from a distant planet to populate this spring, but they appeared too ordinary. And generally, the answer to any scientific question was the most obvious one. He was probably just staring at an unnamed species of haloarchaea, and nothing more mysterious than that.
Tossing the stick back into the water, he remembered the verse Jess had quoted from the blog. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so; thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Even studying the red rocks in the water now, he had a hard time imagining anyone calling them “stones of fire,” even metaphorically.
He rose and ascended the slope to where Jess stood between two tall pines, staring out over the valley
