In other circumstances, it would have been a pleasant afternoon’s hike up the ravine. Bubbles found it hard to remember the danger; the lower forest smelled as fresh as she remembered, and then the scramble up the rocks took her breath away. A clear rivulet still splashed from pool to pool, and red and gold amphibians still hurled themselves into the water as she came near, with agitated squeaks. A few rocks had moved in seasonal floods—she recognized one boulder by an odd inclusion, now upside down from where it had been—but most of the trail was familiar.
Higher on the slope, a breeze stirred, lifting the hair on the back of her head as it rose from the forest canopy below. She could see more of the sky, now, and smell the sea as well as the rock and flowers. Raffa, behind her, scuffed her feet in the dirt but said nothing. Bubbles was glad. She wanted to combine the old memories, once thrust away as too childish, with the present experience. Finally she stopped, winded, on a broad flat outcrop where the ravine angled south, away from the shore. Looking back she could see nothing but billows of green concealing the shape of the land itself. Raffa, panting, dropped to the rock and lifted the hair from her neck.
“You did this every year?” she asked, after a moment.
“Most years, for awhile. When my Uncle Gene would come, and bring the cousins. . . . I suppose, really, Mother wanted us out of the main house, away from more important visitors. All of us together could be noisy.” She grinned down at Raffa. “When we camped over here, we’d divide in two groups, at least, and play hunting games. Stuff we’d read about or seen on the old cubes—”
“We used to go to my Aunt Katy’s house and ride up in the hills,” Raffa said. “On Negaire—no pretty islands there.”
Bubbles shivered. “Ugh. Cold and wet all year round, isn’t it? You didn’t camp out, surely?”
Raffa nodded. “Better than in this heat. We pretended to be steppe nomads and so forth, but mostly we lived in caves. There was a big one, very handy, about a day’s ride away, and another smaller one on the other side of the hill. We painted monsters on the walls; one of my cousins tried to paint us, but he couldn’t draw.”
“Cave.” Bubbles glowered at the water. “I wish I knew if Kell told the truth. He said it was big enough for all of us, but he wouldn’t share it, the pig. He’s like that still, loves secrets and won’t share. There’s no place else as good, if it’s real.”
“You’re sure you have no idea where it is?”
“Only where it isn’t. We did look, but we never found it in the likely places—up here, or in the valley between this hill and the next. And knowing where not to look still leaves a lot of island. Why—you think we should look?”
“If we found it, we’d be a lot safer than hiding under a rock,” Raffa pointed out. “And we’d better be going; we certainly aren’t safe sitting here chatting.”
“We’ll climb straight over the spine,” Bubbles said, leading the way up the narrowing ravine. “I hope the old trail along the crest is still there. It has a few hidey-holes I know about.”
Along the spine of the island, the rock outcrops formed stout pillars, two to three meters tall, in ragged rows that wobbled along parallel to the crest like rotting teeth. Between the rows, the hollows were unevenly filled with soil and overgrown with thorny vines and bushes. A winding thread of trail had been hacked clear at the very crest; Bubbles could not tell if it had been cut by hunters or hunted. It didn’t really matter. They would have to get off it quickly, because the hunters certainly knew about it.
She counted the pillars. If only she could remember the pattern . . . three tall ones, a short, two talls and then two—three?—short ones . . . there. She squeezed between two of the shorter rocks—had she been that much thinner five years ago, or had the rocks shifted?—and then crouched to wiggle beneath the huge briar that lay over what had always been her own special hiding place. The hooked thorns scraped on her knapsack as she slithered further in, her nose hardly off the dark, dank-smelling soil. It hadn’t felt this small the last time. . . . She called back to Raffa. “You have to go under this thing—you can’t go through it with anything short of power tools.”
“Give me a steppe pony any day,” Raffa said, but she gave only one muffled yelp when the thorns caught her hair, and slithered very efficiently for someone who often pretended disdain for physical exertion. “Do you want me to do anything about the way we came in?”
“Nope.” Bubbles edged past the cluster of woody stems and felt around the far side of it. She had had a little hole there, once, with a box in it, but she couldn’t see. It was dark under the briar’s canopy after the brilliant sunlight on the trail, a warm brown gloom lightened by freckles of sun.
“As much as we’ve shaken it, the outer branches will go back down. I used to do this all the time, and the guys never found me.” The little hole in which she’d tucked a boxful of handy items years before had grown into something a handspan across and deeper than her fingers. Burrow. Something was living here. She tried to remember just what did live on this island. Nothing venomous, nothing particularly large or dangerous. Except the hunters. She realized she’d forgotten them for a few minutes, here where her safe childhood was so real, and the hunters hardly believable.
On the far side of the briary tangle, lodged in fallen leaves against another standing stone, Bubbles found her box. She blessed her younger self for insisting she wanted a real expedition box, the kind that was supposed to last through anything. She dragged it out of the leaves and scrunched sideways so that Raffa could come up beside her.
“I forgot this the last time we were here,” she said. “We were in a hurry to leave—I was going to St. Eleanor’s for the first time—and by the time I remembered I’d left it, there was no time to go back.” The box had no lock, only an L-shaped catch, now crusted with dirt and time. Bubbles broke a fingernail on it and muttered. Probably nothing in it—a decayed sandwich, some childish bauble—but something drove her to open it.
“Let me try,” said Raffa. Bubbles slid the box over to her, and sucked her bruised fingertip. Raffa had picked up a twig, and used that to prod out the caked dirt around the latch, then spit on it. When she pushed, the latch moved with a minute squeak. “Here,” she said, handing the box back. “You open it—it’s yours.”
Bubbles felt a curious reluctance to open it, as odd as the determination a moment ago to make that latch move. Silly, she thought. There could be nothing really useful in this box—not as useful as the things in the survival packs on the flitter. Just junk that would remind her what a silly child she had been. She struggled for a moment, having forgotten the exact movement it took to pry the lid up—the box had a good seal on it. Then it lay open, a time capsule from her childhood, her forgotten treasures rattling a little from the movement of her hand.
A seashell, one of the purple cone-shaped ones. A bracelet woven of dune-grass—she blushed, remembering who had woven it, and why. A little black blob, smooth all over . . . raked from the fire the time Kell had melted the handle from the frying pan. A single sheet of photocells, ready to be spread in the sunlight again . . . if she had anything to recharge. A bit of faded ribbon . . . she remembered clearly the shade of purple it had been. A whistle, a foil-wrapped ration bar, a tube of first-aid ointment and a packet of bandages, a length of fine fish-line, neatly coiled, with two hooks and a handful of differently shaped sinkers. And the compact silvery locator beacon, with the lanyard still looped through the ring on top.