He blinked at the sunlight streaming in through the front window. How had it gotten to be morning? His mouth tasted of cobwebs and dust, but his head was clear. “Gaah.” There was no point pretending to sleep.
Someone was singing as he wandered through into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. It was Elena: she’d found the stash of kitchenware and was filling the coffee maker, warbling one of the more salacious passages of a famous saga to herself with—to Huw—a deeply annoying air of smug satisfaction.
“Humph.” He rummaged in the cupboard for a glass but came up with a chipped coffee mug instead. Rinsing it under the cold water tap, he asked, “Ready to face the day?”
“Oh yes!” She trilled, closing up the machine. She turned and grinned at him impishly. “It’s a wonderful day to explore a new world, don’t you think?”
“Just as long as we don’t leave our bones there.” Huw took a gulp of the slightly brackish tap water. “Yuck.”
“He’s still getting dressed—” She remembered herself and flushed. “He’ll be down in a minute.”
“Good.” Huw pressed his lips together to keep from laughing.
“What are we going to do today?” she asked, eyes widening slightly.
“Hmm. Depends.”
“I was thinking about doing breakfast,” rumbled Hulius, from the doorway.
“That—” Huw brightened “—sounds like a great idea. Got to wait for the duke’s say-so before we continue, anyway,” he added. “Breakfast first, then we can get ready for a camping trip.”
Huw drove into town carefully, hunting for the diner he’d spotted the day before. He steered the youngsters to a booth at the back before ordering a huge breakfast—fried eggs, bacon, half a ton of hash browns, fried tomatoes, and a large mug of coffee. “Go on, pig out,” he told Elena and Hulius, “you’re going to be sorry you didn’t later.”
“Why should I?” asked Elena, as the waitress ambled off towards the kitchen. “I’ll be sorry if I’m fat and ugly before my wedding night!”
Huw glanced at his brother: Yul was studiously silent, but Huw could just about read his mind.
“Oh!” She glared at him. “Men!” Yul winked at him, then froze as the waitress reappeared with a jug of coffee. “No sense of humor,” she humphed.
“Okay, so we’re humor-impaired” Huw started on his hash browns. “Listen, we—” he paused until the waitress was out of earshot “—it depends what orders we receive, alright? It’s possible his grace will tell me to sit tight until he can send a support team…but I don’t think it’s likely. From what I can gather, we’re shorthanded everywhere and anyone who isn’t essential is being pulled in for the corvee, supporting security operations, or running interference. So my best bet is, he’ll read my report and say ‘carry on.’ But until I get confirmation of that, we’re not going across.”
Elena stabbed viciously at her solitary fried egg. “To what end are we going?”
“To see if that stuff Yul found really is the remains of a roadbed. To look around and get some idea of the vegetation, so I can brief a real tree doctor when we’ve got time to talk to one. To plant a weather station and seismograph. To very quietly see if there’s any sign of inhabitation. To boldly go where no Clan explorer has gone before. Is that enough to start with?”
“Eh.” Yul paused with his coffee mug raised. “That’s a lot to bite off.”
“That’s why all three of us are going, this time.” Huw took another mouthful. “And we’re all taking full packs instead of piggybacking. That ties us down for an hour, minimum, if we run into trouble, but going by your first trip, there didn’t seem to be anybody home. We might have wildlife trouble, bears or wolves, but that shouldn’t be enough to require an immediate withdrawal. So unless the duke says ‘no,’ we’re going camping.”
They managed to finish their breakfast without discussing any other matters of import. Unfortunately for Huw, this created a zone of silence that Elena felt compelled to fill with enthusiastic chirping about Christina Aguilera and friends, which Hulius punctuated with nods and grunts of such transparently self-serving attentiveness that Huw began to darkly consider purchasing a dog collar and leash to present to his brother’s new keeper.
Back at the rented house, Huw got down to the serious job of redistributing their packs and making sure everything they’d need found a niche in one rucksack or another. It didn’t take long to put everything together: what took time was double-checking, asking
“Okay, wait in the yard,” said Huw. He walked back inside and reset the burglar alarm. “Got your lockets?” This time there was no need for the flash card, no need to keep all their hands free for emergencies. “On my mark: three, two, one…”
The world shifted color, from harsh sunlight on brown-parched grass to overcast pine-needle green. Huw glanced round. A moment earlier he’d been sweating into his open three-layer North Face jacket: the chill hit him like a punch in the ribs and a slap in the face. There were trees everywhere. Elena stepped out from behind a waist-high tangle of brush and dead branches and looked at him. A moment later Hulius popped into place, his heavy pack looming over his head like an astronaut’s oxygen supply. “All clear?” Huw asked, ignoring the pounding in his temples.
“Yup.” Yul hefted the meter-long spike with the black box of the radio beacon on top, and rammed it into the ground.
“It looks like it’s going to rain,” Elena complained, looking up at the overcast just visible between the treetops. “And it’s cold.”
Huw zipped his jacket up, then slid his pack onto the ground carefully. “Yul, you have the watch. Elena, if you could start unpacking the tent?” He unhooked the scanner from his telemetry belt and set it running, hunting through megahertz for the proverbial needle in a thunderstorm, then began to unpack the weather station.
“I have the watch, bro.” Yul’s backpack thudded heavily as it landed in a mat of ferns, followed by the metallic clack as he chambered a round in his hunting rifle. “No bear’s going to sneak up on you without my permission.”
“I’m so glad.” Huw squinted at the scanner, then nodded. “Okay, nothing on the air. Radio check. Elena?”
“Oh, what? You want—the radio?”
“Go ahead.”
Elena reached into her jacket pocket and produced a walkie-talkie. “Can you hear me?”
Huw winced and turned down the volume. “I hear you. Your turn, Yul—” Another minute of cross-checks and he was happy. “Okay. Got radio, got weather station, acquired the beacon. Let’s get the tent up.”
The tent was a tunnel model, with two domed compartments separated by a central awning, for which Huw had a feeling he was going to be grateful. Elena had already unrolled it: between them they managed to nail the spikes in and pull it erect without too much swearing, although the tunnel ended up bulging in at one side where it wrapped around an inconveniently placed trunk.
Huw crossed the clearing then, stretching as high as he could, slashed a strip of bark away from the trunk of the tree nearest the spike. Then he turned to Yul. “Where was that chunk of asphalt?”
“That way, dude.” Hulius gestured down the gentle slope. The trees blocked the line of sight within a hundred meters. “Want to go check it out?”
“You know it.” Huw’s stomach rumbled.
It was quiet in the forest, much too quiet. After a minute, Huw realized what he was missing: the omnipresent creaking of the insect chorus, cicadas and hopping things of one kind or another. Occasionally a bird would cry out, a harsh cawing of crows or the
