Something flared in her pocket, a small blinking light that the goggles made into a white beacon. Without goggles—through her pocket—it was hardly visible. The comunit she’d taken from the first hunter . . . blinking a two-three sequence. When she looked at Raffa, asleep against the tree, her pocket too winked, this one in a two-two sequence. She had not thought they might be locators, but now it seemed obvious. If she didn’t reply, with some code she could not know, the hunters would know where to look. . . . They might know anyway.
“Raffa!” She kept her voice low, but Raffa woke instantly.
“What?” she asked.
“We have to get rid of them—if we leave them here, that’s too close—we don’t know how long it will take—” She felt like crying . . . she was so tired, she hadn’t had any sleep, and it was too much. Raffa hugged her.
“We’ll throw them in the water. Let ’em think we tried to swim for it.”
“But they might be on the beach!” She could hear the incipient hysteria in her own voice. Raffa’s hand tightened on her arm.
“We’re alive and two of them are dead. Two unarmed, untrained society girls, against trained hunters with night gear, and who has the weapons now? We’re going to stay alive, and they’re ALL going to be dead, and no you’re not going to have hysterics now. Take a deep breath.”
Bubbles took a deep breath; her ribs ached. “Right. Sorry.”
“No problem—I got some sleep, and you didn’t. Now . . . let’s get to the shore, and if someone’s there we’ll blow him away.”
“I can’t even tell if thisthing is loaded,” Bubbles said softly. “I tried to find out and got something that made a red light and hummed at me.”
“Really? Sounds like a Maseter range finder to me. Here—let me check your status.” Raffa took the rifle, did something Bubbles couldn’t follow in the dimness, and handed it back. “Full clip, round in the chamber. When you pull that trigger, you’ll shoot something.”
“Let’s go, then.” Bubbles angled left, toward the shore. As she remembered, the big tree had been only a couple of hundred meters from the water. She noticed, after a few minutes, that the blinking lights on the comunits had died. It gave her no comfort. . . . A missed signal would rouse them to search, she was sure. At least they had thick cover to the very edge of the beach.
As they neared the water, the night goggles had more light to work with, and brightened once more. At the same time, the undergrowth increased, as it always had near the forest edge, though it was not so thick that they needed to go out of their way. By the time Bubbles peered through the last screen of bushes and vines, she could see up and down the narrow beach at least a hundred meters in each direction. She saw no one . . . although someone could have been hidden in the undergrowth, as they were. A gentle swell out to sea produced small lapping waves that slipped up and back like the strokes of a massage, rolling the little pebbles that made up the beach here so that they clicked and whispered.
“How deep is it?” Raffa asked. “Any chance the things will be too deep for them to find?”
“It’s a steep drop-off,” Bubbles said. “We used to beach the sailboats on this side of the island sometimes. Give me that one—” Raffa handed over the comunit and Bubbles took another look up and down the beach. Nothing. She shrugged out of her knapsack and left it with Raffa, then moved slowly out of the cover, expecting any moment to hear another shot. The pebbles crunched under her shoes; she thought of wading in a little way, but remembered the times she’d slipped and fallen here. She didn’t need to be sopping wet, not on top of everything else.
“Throw it!” muttered Raffa from behind her. Right. As if she were good at throwing. She felt like an idiot as she cocked her arm and threw the first comunit as far into the sea as she could. It wasn’t, she thought, all that far; it landed with a juicy splash. With the next she tried harder, and achieved an even noisier splash—it must have been spinning—and no more distance. She found the two uphill steps back to the treeline almost impossible . . . but the impossible, she was discovering, didn’t even take longer. It was just harder.
“A little farther,” Raffa said, “and it’s your turn to rest. Just get back from the edge.”
But they actually walked another half hour, by Raffa’s watch, before finding another place Bubbles remembered, where a rib of the central ridge ran all the way to the water. From there around the northern end, the island had no beach, but a vertical wall of stone.
When they lay down—this time neither could stand—Bubbles fell asleep at once. She had expected to have frightening dreams, but she woke with no memory of them. When she opened her eyes, she could see Raffa curled into a tidy ball, catlike; her rifle lay across her sleeping hand. Bubbles yawned, stretched, and rubbed the hipbone that had been on the bottom. Her back never hurt after sleeping on the ground, but a hipbone always complained. She had tried all the tricks she’d read about, back in her camping days, and none of them worked. She sat up; Raffa opened one eye and said, “Don’t tell me it’s morning.”
“It’s morning.” Unless they’d slept all day, and she didn’t feel that rested. Besides, the light was brighter; the leaves overhead began to look green, not black. She stretched again, arching her back, then rolled to her feet. Nothing stirred but the leaves overhead, as the dawn breeze strengthened. Her shoulders were stiff and sore from the pack straps. Raffa yawned, and groaned a little, stretching.
“I hate morning,” Raffa said. Then her eyes came open all the way, and she sat up. “It’s real.”
“What?” Bubbles knew what, but she wasn’t sure she believed it yet.
“Us. Here. Last night.” Raffa was staring at her own hands. “Blood.”
“Yeah.” Bubbles had already seen the disgusting mess on her own hands. And she’d eaten something held in them. “I guess we should’ve washed off when we got to the beach.” Her slacks were filthy too, and she could smell her own sour smell. Raffa looked as bad, her dark hair in lank dirty strings and the knees of her slacks black with dried blood and dirt.
“They won’t have to see us,” Raffa said. “They could track us by smell. Without dogs.”
“Then we’ll get clean.” Bubbles had no idea how they would get clean. They certainly could not light a fire and boil a pot of water for washing. For that matter, she needed to think where the nearest drinking water might be. She picked up her knapsack and got it on, wincing as her shoulders complained. “Come on,” she said. “It won’t help us to sit here and wish.”
Raffa stood, shook herself, brushed at the stains, and finally picked up her knapsack and weapons. “I know, I know. What’s the boys’ regimental motto? ‘Onward to glory’ or something equally unreasonable?” She got the knapsack onto one shoulder and grunted. “This thing weighs twice what it did yesterday. And don’t scold me; I’m getting my complaints out of the way all at once, early, before they can bother you. You notice I didn’t complain last night.”
“Right. You complain in the morning, and I’ll complain at midnight or whenever it was I went bonkers, and between us that’ll cover the whole day.”
“And leave us time to survive, evade the hunters, kill them all, and save everyone. Tally-ho.” Raffa started off, then looked back. “By the way, where are we going now?”
“Water, I thought,” Bubbles said. “Water first, then someplace to hide.”
“Like last time,” Raffa said, but with a grin. “A hiding place convenient to a trail so that we can get weapons and supplies from dead hunters.”
For all the banter, they went warily enough once they started. Without talking about it, they began to move apart, so they could just see each other, and take alternate pauses for listening and looking backwards. Nothing disturbed them but the silence, which the wind in the leaves overhead seemed to emphasize. The sky lightened; Bubbles knew that it was now full day, though they were walking in the shadow of the ridge. The slope began to fall away under their feet, and Bubbles turned right, inland; she remembered that there was another, smaller stream in a ravine between the last hill on the main ridge, and the outlier hill at the north end of the island. It rose from a spring on the ridge, and over the years the children had made a series of wading and splashing pools along its path to the sea. Between them, the stream was no more than ankle-deep except after a rainstorm, but they might find enough water in one of the pools to wash their clothes. Even if all the dams had fallen apart since the last campers, there should be enough loose handy stones to let them build one up again. It wouldn’t take long.