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  Chapter Four:

  The forest canopy obscured the light of the two moons, and for that Cristaña was grateful. As she stepped out of the tent, her eyes darting about, she noticed with relief that the camp was quiet and still, no doubt due to the strenuous pace Darius had set that day.

  Bless that man, thought Cristaña. It was an unusual thought for her.

  Still, she was cautious as she tiptoed her way through the camp. Every yawn and snore sent her heart hammering in her ribcage.

  As she passed Pamela’s tent, Cristaña slowed, placing each foot carefully in front of the other, careful not to so much as crunch a leaf. If Pamela awoke, it would all be over.

  But she quickly moved past the tent, and soon she was at the edge of camp, and then she was in the forest, wandering away.

  She didn’t feel afraid, although normally she would have. But the expedition had scared away the local wildlife. Only the insects and the dragon-birds remained.

  The dragon-birds…

  A memory flashed across her mind, of the first time they had encountered the dragon-birds. Mabel had been the first person to see one. She had jogged off a little ways from the expedition to use the bathroom, and a few seconds later she had screamed and rushed back to the line, flapping her arms wildly. Following her back, above her by about twenty feet, was one of what everyone had come to call the dragon-birds, though they more closely resembled pterodactyls. About the size of vultures, and with dark red and blue stripes along their wings, they were devilishly fast and fearless, following the expedition with apparent curiosity but moving much too quickly for anyone to capture, though not for lack of trying. One day the expedition had come across a large group of them in a small clearing, and what had transpired had been four fruitless hours of trying to pin the flighty birds down. It had been a ridiculous spectacle. Marie had stood on the sidelines watching it, giggling hysterically.

  Marie…

  Cristaña felt like cold water had washed over her the minute she thought of Marie. The brief amusement she had felt at the recollection vanished, and her stomach felt cold and sick in her gut. Poor Marie. If only the girl had never come. So much better it would have been for her to just stay with her grandmother, go to college, and work through life’s toils like everyone else!

  Cristaña felt a swell of pity and a twinge of guilt, but then she crushed it.

  She couldn’t think that way. She had a job to do.

  After a month of constant travel, Marie started to despair of ever finding intelligent life. True, they were forced to travel at a painfully slow pace, but they had covered so many miles that Marie thought the chances of them running across any version of humanity were becoming increasingly slim. It came as a surprise, therefore, to be proven wrong.

  The horn for halt came around mid-morning. Marie glanced at Cristaña, who looked baffled. Within a few minutes the instructions made it down the line for Marie to go to the head of the procession. She did so, trying to ignore the unwavering stares, and at last she saw Barnabas.

  He looked up when he heard her approach. His expression was strange, like a mixture of suppressed triumph and excitement. “Record this,” he said, gesturing to the ground before him.

  Marie stared at the ground blankly, then up at him. She arched an eyebrow. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  Barnabas looked exasperated. He turned to Darius.

  “It’s a hunting path,” Darius explained coolly. “As in, people have used this path before to hunt.”

  “How do you know animals didn’t make it?” asked Marie, her eyes sweeping the supposed path again. It looked just like the rest of the forest to her. How did they even know it was a path at all?

  “Because of that.” Barnabas pointed, and Marie craned her head.

  He was pointing to a footprint—small, and definitely human. It was so small Marie doubted anyone on the expedition could make it, except for perhaps Mabel. It had to be a child’s footprint. Marie stared at it dumbly. A footprint…A footprint! Humanity! Her mind spun.

  She turned away, dazed. People…at last! Did this mean their marching would finally end? Marie felt giddy.

  Trying not to betray the excitement she felt, she asked, slowly and carefully, so as to prevent her voice from trembling, “How old is it?”

  “A few days.”

  Marie closed her eyes. A few days away from here was a human child, one not from Earth. And perhaps, not too much further… a settlement. People. A whole new civilization. Finally.

  If the days had been painfully slow before, after that they were excruciating. To Marie, it felt like at times the expedition crawled to a stop. Everyone was on high alert. All team members were expected to be on the lookout for anything unusual. Strange sounds, smells—all had to be reported to Barnabas and investigated before the expedition could move.

  In between investigating the rotten smells emanating from various kitchens, Barnabas spent much of his time rushing up and down the expedition line, issuing various instructions that often contradicted each other:

  “Pamela, make sure Guard Troop 6 stays in the back. That’s very important!”

  “Darius, Guard Troop 6 must stay in the front no matter what!”

  When he wasn’t issuing orders, he was deep in consultation with his advisors, who lectured him on all the possible ways the “others” might present themselves and what he should do in each scenario.

  All of this Marie watched in bemusement. It’s not like he can possibly prepare for all possibilities. We have no idea what we’re up against. Another thought would occur to her almost immediately afterward: And shouldn’t he have already received this training anyway?

  As for Marie herself, she spent her days in a state of constant nervousness. Her thoughts buzzed through her head every which way; she was full of so many questions she could barely make sense of them. What were these people like? Why hadn’t they run across them yet? What had they been doing so deep in the woods? Why had they only found the child’s footprint? Every time the horn for halt sounded, her heart leapt to her throat. Is this it? Have we met people? With each rest, each stop for the night, each false alarm, Marie only grew tenser, until she thought she would make herself sick with anticipation.

  Marie wasn’t sure how she expected the group to first run across humans, but she knew she never would have predicted the manner in which they did.

  After days of ignoring her, on a warm, sunny afternoon, Barnabas finally remembered Marie’s existence. During the fifth halt of the day, word traveled down the line that Barnabas wanted Marie to join him at the front. She went, and he explained to her the activities of the past few days, going over what had occurred in all his consultations, his plans for greeting the others, etcetera. She was listening intently, her eyes trained on his face, when he froze. He stared at something over her shoulder, his face ashen.

  Marie turned.

  Standing about twenty feet away from them, directly in their path, was a man. A young man, tall—maybe six feet. Black hair coiled down to wide shoulders. Beneath dark eyebrows, dark eyes stared at them, the expression in them both curious and cautious. He was dressed in long black robes, underneath which rippled a layer of muscles. Marie’s heart fluttered.

  Barnabas cleared his throat and stepped forward. The man’s eyes immediately fixed on him.

  “Um, hello,” said Barnabas, twisting his hands together.

  The man didn’t move, only watched Barnabas carefully.

  Barnabas turned. “Darius, find Simon! Languages are his territory.”

  Barnabas turned back to the man, who raised an eyebrow. “I am Barnabas,” he said slowly and loudly, motioning to himself. “I lead this group. We are a peaceful expedition.”

  He glanced back again. “Pamela, have the soldiers lower their machine guns!”

  He returned his attention to the stranger. “If you could, perhaps,” he said slowly, “Take me to your leader.”

  Marie watched him with amusement. From t
he way the man’s eyes slid blankly over Barnabas’s face while Barnabas was talking, she was sure he had no idea what Barnabas was saying. At the same time, she figured it was probably Barnabas’s tone that mattered. And right then his tone screamed of nervousness.

  The man must have sensed it, for his eyes finally flickered with an emotion: amusement. His lips curled into a slightly sardonic smile, and he stepped forward, his arms spread apart. Barnabas appeared startled, but he seemed to understand the man was trying to show he meant no harm. He stopped only a few feet away from Barnabas, and at last he put his hands to his chest.

  “Rheidan.” He motioned to himself again. “Rheidan.”

  Barnabas smiled shakily. “Barnabas.”

  “Barnabas,” the man murmured, and he tilted his head slightly, searching Barnabas’s face. At last he must have found something he liked, for he stepped back, smiling. He turned his face to the forest. “Kar-pah-tín!”

  At first nothing happened, and the expedition members, Marie included, stared around in anticipatory silence as an eerie stillness fell on the forest. Then men started appearing, soldiers, dressed like gladiators in ancient Rome. They had appeared out of nowhere, almost as if they had been a part of the forest itself. They held bows and arrows but did not notch them, and instead looked at the group with mischievous grins on their faces.

  Barnabas stared at them in astonishment, and Marie couldn’t help but do the same. Beside her Pamela looked thunderstruck, as if she could not possibly comprehend how so many men had snuck up on them undetected. At seeing the look on her face, Marie couldn’t help it: she laughed, and seeing her laugh, the man named Rheidan winked at her.

  The fact that no one could do more than introduce themselves greatly hindered communication. Rheidan and his soldiers, who seemed to number somewhere in the forties or fifties, assembled near the head of the column and did their best to communicate using hand-motions. Simon Ramsden, the language guru, buzzed around taking notes of everything the strangers said, but Rheidan kept on shooting him annoyed looks, enough that Barnabas finally murmured for him to back off.

  As for Marie…she just stood to the side, watching the proceedings. Once again, she felt completely out of place. She wanted to be there, yet at the same time, she had nothing to do. While Pamela and Darius had leapt into action, issuing instructions to everyone that breathed, Marie had just stood there, for the most part ignored by her fellows. Pamela had briefly hissed at Marie to “stay there!” before bounding off, but Darius hadn’t even deigned to glance at her as he ran about.

  Marie felt a familiar prickle on the back of her neck: someone was watching her. She peered around. Rheidan studied her carefully. At meeting her gaze, a small smile curled the corner of his mouth. Startled, Marie glanced away, her eyes diving to the ground. A flush worked its way up her cheeks. He had a nice smile. She glanced up again. Rheidan had returned his attention to Barnabas, but something in his stance told Marie he was amused.

  That irritated her. She huffed, returning her attention to the other men, where she realized, to her consternation, that Rheidan was not the only one looking at her curiously. Several of the men, at least ten, shot periodic glances her way. Marie turned bright red. She wasn’t sure she was receiving so much attention because she looked out of place, or because they hadn’t seen a woman in weeks. Either way, the attention was discomforting. She tried to stick it out, but after another ten minutes, she had gone from uncomfortable to creeped out. Giving the men a long suspicious stare, she whirled around and returned to her place in line.

  The group camped where they were for the night. Rheidan’s men filtered through the camp, looking like curious, overgrown children, running their hands over the rollers, murmuring exclamations of “Java-Nor!” every time they saw something extraordinary. Down at the mess hall, the men peeked into the tent, peering over everyone’s shoulders and into their food cartons. Raymond let one man taste his meal—some demented version of spaghetti—which made the man shudder and back away, much to Raymond’s amusement and Bernard’s irritation.

  “I wonder what they eat at night,” Dustin commented longingly.

  Outside around the campfires the men watched avidly as a few of the more musically-inclined expedition members struck up various tunes. The myriad of songs, mixed with some booing, echoed discordantly in the night air. Marie stopped to watch one group—two men and one woman singing a horribly off-key version of Hotel California, with a gaggle of Rheidan’s men watching them, apparently on the verge of laughter.

  At last Marie meandered away from them, heading nowhere in particular. It was much too early to go to bed, and she was too excited to fall asleep anyway. Her thoughts were so confused and excited, and jumping around so erratically, that she didn’t even know what she was feeling, whether she was anxious or thrilled or both. She had the sense that she was watching history unfold, and it overwhelmed her, sending tingles up her spine and down her arms and legs. To gather her senses, she forced herself to focus on the present. She couldn’t allow herself to think of the implications of all that was happening, or she might not be able to function at all.

  She forced herself instead to take note of her surroundings, and as she walked, she noticed for the first time the sheer number of guards marching through the camp, machine guns slung over their shoulders. A pair approached the campfire she had just left, slowing down as they examined Rheidan’s men, then continuing on, their bodies tense. Marie frowned as she watched them. She supposed she should have expected Barnabas to heighten security tonight, but she wouldn’t have expected him to be so obvious about it.

  Barnabas…

  Marie wheeled around and headed back through the aisle of tents, her shoes sliding on the wet patches of grass. A few people glanced at her as she strode past, but Marie had learned to ignore such looks. She kept her head down and her eyes straight ahead.

  Three of Rheidan’s men stood outside Barnabas’s tent. Marie slowed as she approached, eyeing them. The two parties stared at each other for a moment. Marie smiled awkwardly and leaned against one of the poles supporting the tent. She could hear very little from inside, but Barnabas had told her the other day he would attempt to explain things through pictures if language proved to be a problem.

  Marie bit her lip and glanced back at the warriors. They stared at her unabashedly, and Marie couldn’t blame them for it. She had to be more interesting than the tent flap.

  That didn’t make it any less awkward. Or less scary. They were big, hulking men with bulging muscles, and they the scars to prove they’d fought in a few battles. Her heart thumped nervously

  “So…” she said slowly, swallowing. One of them arched an eyebrow. She pointed to herself. “Marie.”

  The men smirked but said nothing. Marie flushed. What if a woman introducing herself was considered forward in this world? She didn’t want to leave the wrong impression. She shifted uncomfortably. The awkward silence seemed to stretch on into the night, but it probably only lasted thirty or so minutes. Someone ruffled papers inside, and a hand shoved the tent flap aside. Marie turned expectantly, but the hand didn’t belong to Barnabas.

  Rheidan paused as he ducked out of the tent, then straightened slowly, his eyes on her. An inscrutable expression crossed his face. “Leitu non ig-kai?” he murmured.

  Marie was abruptly aware of the stray strand of hair falling across her face, and she tucked it back behind her ear impatiently. She met his eyes, trying not to blush. “Barnabas?” She pointed to the tent.

  He smiled in response, and Marie cautiously pulled back the tent flap. “Barnabas?”

  She saw him crouched over a piece of parchment. His head shot up upon hearing his name, and he practically beamed. “Marie!” He bounded off the ground, striding toward her. “I was about to send someone to look for you! Figured you should hear about all this!”

  “Yes, I did too.”

  Barnabas turned to Rheidan. “Marie,” he introduced, pointing to Marie.

 
; Rheidan inclined his head. “Marie,” he repeated.

  “And I’m sure you’ve heard, Marie, that this is Rheidan. He’s obviously in charge of these men here. I have so much to tell you, so much!” He looped his arm around her shoulder, as he was prone to do, and after a quick bow to Rheidan, pulled her outside and down through the line of tents.

  Marie wondered at his eagerness. Earlier today he had been ashen, and now he practically bubbled with excitement. He’s probably relieved they didn’t start shooting at us.

  “Now, I am sure you have many questions, and I’ll try to answer them to the best of my ability. Fire away.” He glanced at her expectantly.

  “Okay then,” said Marie, blinking. He really was in a strange mood. “Um…what were you two doing in there?”

  He answered promptly, as if reciting a definition, which Marie thought was strange, “I was attempting to explain who we are, where we come from, that sort of thing.”

  Marie arched an eyebrow. “And did you learn anything about them?”

  He frowned. “Well, you must understand, communication is limited, especially since Rheidan doesn’t seem to like Simon.” He sighed. “Which is disappointing, seeing as Simon’s the one trained to communicate with other people.”

  Marie arched the other eyebrow.

  “So, to answer your question,” he said, getting the hint, “Not really. All I understand is that they want us to follow them tomorrow and that Rheidan is their leader. That’s it.”

  “Will we follow them?”

  “As safely as possible.”

  They stopped. Marie considered him. For someone who had several hours to communicate with someone, Barnabas seemed to have learned very little. And he had said there was ‘much’ he wanted to tell her. But then again, maybe he considered what he had learned ‘much.’ There was a language barrier. Finally she nodded, deciding to trust him. He beamed and turned to head back to his tent.

  “Barnabas!” she called after him.

  He glanced back.

  “Promise to keep me updated!”

  He smiled. “You have my word, Miss Nettleson.” He turned to leave again.

  “And Barnabas!”

  “Yes?”

  She motioned around. “These soldiers stalking about the camp…you’re not exactly sending a comforting message. You might as well stamp ‘We-don’t-trust-you’ on all of our foreheads. It would probably be better if they were less obvious. Just a thought.”

  He nodded briefly before leaving. Marie headed back to tent 12, her mind swimming. People. They were making progress at last. But who were these people? How did they live? What were they like? What did they believe? She frowned. And why had they so easily welcomed the expedition? All of the sudden, Marie felt very tired.

  She laid down in her bag, but even as tired as she was, it took her a long time to fall asleep. When she did, she dreamed restless dreams—dreams of towering trees, thundering horses, and screaming crowds.