The worries that I’d almost confessed to Hindley felt far away from me, now. With the twins and Sylas in front of me, I felt capable.
"Do I get to kill a monster first?" Jordan blurted. I shook my head, already tired from imagining their upcoming requests during our voyage to the mission site.
Jessie's eyes glittered with promise. "We can study the reports and come up with some ideas. Can we have a copy of this?" I nodded and gestured for them to take the stack. I had already made a copy for myself.
"Take it," I told them. "And go get some freaking sleep."
I thanked and dismissed everyone. The twins faded into an energetic conversation about the best way to throw four-legged monsters off balance. Sylas gave me a copy of his list of supplies that he was bringing along for us. The energy in the room was decent, although my head was spinning from the day.
I had concerns… but I would make this team and this mission work.
11
Lyra
The night had fully taken over. Behind me, Sike pulled himself through a narrow opening between two trees. His gear bag, intact, gave him the look of a vampire turtle.
We had survived our fall from the sky, and although I was happy to be with Sike, my mind was on our missing teammates. Bryce had flown us further into the woods instead of away, probably fearing a crash in an inhabited area. Things became wilder at night in the Leftovers, and there were only two of us in the middle of this madness.
“The scanner is sort of working,” Sike offered hopefully. His senses allowed him to miss the scraggly tree roots sticking up from the ground as we walked. He was on monster-watch duty as we moved through the woods, since his eyes were better than mine.
We had landed near one another. Amazingly, the recovered laptop and scanners in Sike’s gear bag had survived the fall. The monster hadn’t appeared again yet, but we were walking cautiously because of its presence in the forest.
"Nobody in range, still," Sike reported from his screen. We had managed to keep some flashlights, which would prove useful in the dying light. I hoped they would work, but we would have to use them sparingly to avoid monsters. It was hard to have confidence in our usual equipment with the interference from the Leftovers.
The moon bathed the woods in a beautiful but uncanny light on the bark and leaves. Thick underbrush forced us onto a rough trail that looked like it had been carved by animals of some kind. I hoped they were more friendly, like our rodents, and not like the invisible beast that had climbed onto our plane. As we pushed forward, though, the roughness of the path fell away into something tidier—almost looking manmade. I frowned and glanced at Sike, who shrugged. The trees had moved before and reacted to our presence around the office building. Could we trust a path created by the heart of the forest? I looked behind us, but the woods hadn't moved at all. I took that as a good sign.
Fine. We'll keep going. We arrived at a meadow as the path ended. It was a perfect clearing for someone to build a house… or perhaps someone already had. A large rectangular impression in the grass implied that something used to exist here but hadn’t in some time. Several regular, mortal trees had fallen in the area around the perimeter of the clearing. The air was tense and slightly humid, but there were no insects flitting about. The silver lining of the Leftovers was a lack of mosquitos.
"This is probably too perfect," I muttered to Sike. “Maybe it’s a trap.” He dropped his bag in the clearing and looked out at the woods with his scanner.
"Well, I'm not registering many creatures in the area. I wonder if the woods moving spooks them," he said. "It doesn't look like there will be much activity tonight. I hope not, at least.”
I nodded numbly, noting that the sky grew darker and darker with every passing minute. We could bunk here for the night. It was better than trying to move forward in the woods, potentially ending up in an area with far more beasts to deal with. I’d managed to grab my gear bag in the madness of the crash, so we had some supplies with us. Sike helped me set up a basic area for us to rest, clearing away stubborn sharp rocks so we could sit. Sike assembled a ring of stones around an area that was sparse with grass, as the dirt made for a perfect place to build a fire. We only used the wood from the fallen mortal trees. As the flames went up, I swore the tree line inched away from the radius of its warmth. We agreed not to use branches from the immortal trees… in case that might involve unseen consequences from the sentient forest.
Never thought I'd have to worry about angering a freaking forest. I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
Memories of my first trip to the Immortal Plane rushed back to me as Sike and I huddled around the fire. I remembered the strangeness of the wilderness affecting me the most. I truly thought I had grown accustomed to weirdness as a general factor in life, but this wasn't the same. Dorian was gone. I hated that more than anything, but there was nothing I could do about it. At least Sike was here with me and was relatively uninjured, apart from a few scrapes and bruises. I’d banged my elbow hard on a tree coming down in the fall, but that was a best-case scenario for a landing like that. I could've caught my leg in one of these wicked moving trees
