When she finally saw water, it was one of the larger pools. Someone had repaired the dam—she assumed it was the prisoners—and raised it enough so that the pool looked to be waist-deep. Its surface was littered with fallen leaves and twigs. She started toward it, then waved Raffa back to cover. It looked safe and deserted, but . . . she noticed something glinting at the upper end of the pool. Warily, she worked her way toward it, trying to keep to thicker growth. A foil packet with one end torn off, that’s all, discarded by some careless hunter. It could have held rations, candy, a damp wipe to clean with. She relaxed, then saw the first dead amphib, turning slowly in the pool, its legs extended. Another lay by the stream; with a growing sense of horror she realized that the “floating leaves” were in fact a mass of dead amphibs, insects, fish. She backed away, her hands to her mouth.
“What?” said Raffa, from behind her.
“Poison. They’ve poisoned the stream.” And if this stream, then all the streams—and if the streams, probably the springs as well. After horror, anger. This was her place, her childhood, and she had spent hours lying belly-down beside one stream or another, watching the brilliant red—and-gold amphibs, the speckled fish, the brilliant blue and green butterflies that came to drink.
“The . . . I can’t even find words bad enough. . . .” She had used all the bad words she knew for common things like escorts who got drunk and threw up on her, or girlfriends who told someone else her secrets—she hadn’t known there was something worse to save curses for. “How could they—?” How could anyone destroy so carelessly . . . anyone past childhood, that is.
“It would be hard to hide, in an autopsy,” Raffa said thoughtfully. Bubbles almost hated her at that moment. Of course it wasn’t her island. She had never seen it as Bubbles remembered it. “What I mean is,” Raffa went on, “it’s probably meant to put us to sleep or something. The . . . the other things are accidents.”
“That’s what’s worst,” Bubbles said. “They have a reason to kill us. A bad one, but a reason. To kill all these, just by accident, as a sort of by-product—”
“We shouldn’t stay here. They’d check this pretty often, I’d guess.”
“Right. Upstream, then.” They might have someone stationed upstream, too, but she had to know if they’d poisoned it all. She had to. She wondered when they’d done it—the day before, dropping packets from the flitter? Landing at each small stream? Or had someone been walking the forest that night, someone who might have walked past them as they slept, not seeing them? She shivered; it would do no good to think of that. As she walked, what Raffa said began to make sense. The same things had different effects on humans and animals—she knew that. A drug to make them sleepy might have killed the amphibs by accident, or . . . didn’t the fish need to swim for their gills to work? So if they drowsed and didn’t swim, they’d die just from that . . . but she was still angry. She felt decades older than the day before, than even the night before.
Upstream, as anywhere, grew steeper and narrower. They came to another pool, with its scum of dead amphibs and fish; she had seen nothing alive along the banks of the rivulet. Beyond that, the stream forked. To the left, poisoned water gurgled pleasantly in its narrow bed. To the right was the waist-high ledge that formed a miniature waterfall in the wet season. A damp patch of mud in the hollow above it was the only sign that a creek had ever flowed there.
“That way,” Bubbles said, heaving herself up and over the rock ledge. “We can’t take any water from that stream, and there might be a spring up here they didn’t notice.”
“You don’t know for sure?” Raffa asked, as she sat on the ledge and swung her legs up.
“No . . . my favorite places were the eastern ravine, where I could watch the sunrise, and my bramble. And our camp was on the eastern shore, south of where we crashed. Sometimes we had three or four main camps, depending on how many cousins showed up. Kev and Burlin used to set traps and things up at this end of the ridge—then they’d sit there and snigger.”
“Urgh. I wouldn’t have wanted to have them along.”
“Well . . . Silvia finally told on Burlin, and that was the end of them. But somehow he always made Buttons and me feel like it was our fault. If we’d had a more exciting island, he wouldn’t have gotten into mischief.”
“Like Stanley, my cousin that always blamed his pony for everything. But he brought it back with whip welts once, and my Aunt Katy wouldn’t put up with that.”
They followed the dry creekbed upstream, careful not to step in any drying mud. Bubbles looked for any sign that the hunters had been there, but the few scuffmarks could as well have been those of desperate prisoners. Her breath came short; it was hard to climb the steepening slope, and she realized they were close under the ridge. The creekbed turned suddenly, leading them into a narrow cleft roofed with trees; it closed around them, and Raffa exclaimed over the ferns draping the walls. Ahead, the cleft ended in a sheer wall hung with shaggy ferns and vines. At the foot of it, the ground seemed damp, but there was no spring.
“Well,” Bubbles said, a little blankly. “That’s it. No water here.” She sat down; her legs had suddenly given out, and her eyes burned, though she could not cry.
Raffa crouched beside her. “We’re hidden, at least. If we stay quiet, and they don’t find our trail. They can’t come on us from behind.”
Bubbles nodded, but could not speak past the lump of misery in her throat. She set her rifle carefully to one side, away from the damp spot, and pushed the knapsack straps off her shoulder.
“We should eat something,” Raffa said. “We never did have breakfast.”
“Not without water,” Bubbles said. “At least, that’s what the books say.” But at the mention of food, her stomach cramped and rumbled. She felt she could eat three meals at once.
“We have some water,” Raffa said. “And what about tropical fruits and things? They have water in them.”
“I . . . haven’t seen any. It’s the wrong season, or the prisoners have eaten them, or something. . . .” Bubbles leaned back against the ferny rock, careless of insects. Her eyes sagged shut.
“Come on—you can’t give up!”
“I can rest,” Bubbles said, not opening her eyes. “Just a little while.” She wasn’t sure what she felt, except exhaustion and hunger, and right now she didn’t care if a whole troop of hunters came up the creek.
“All right,” Raffa said, “but I’m not giving up.” Bubbles heard Raffa move around her, and the scrape of Raffa’s pack on the pebbles. “Although a soft place to rest my aching back may be a good idea. Aahhh—” That relaxed sigh ended in a yelp, quickly muffled. Bubbles opened her eyes. Raffa lay on her back, covered with ferns to the waist; she seemed to have fallen into the rock. The mass of ferns and vines had hung over some opening like a shaggy curtain. From the muffled splutters, she was trying to say something. Bubbles grabbed her feet and pulled.