“Are you all right? Need help?”
Raffa undulated, snakelike, and slithered out on her back, spitting dirt out of her mouth. “It’s a wonder I didn’t crack my skull.”
“What is it, a hollow or something?”
“A hollow, yes. A cave!”
“Cave?”
“Yes. And I heard water dripping. Come on. . . .” Raffa grabbed her knapsack and started to shove it through the curtain of ferns.
“Wait—they’d know we went in.” Bubbles looked at the broken fronds of fern where she had been resting, the bruised moss. If someone came this way—and they probably would—they’d start looking harder. And they wouldn’t miss a cave, she was sure.
“We’ll make it look like we rested here, and then went somewhere else,” Raffa said. “Come on—shove your pack in, and the rifles. It’s the best chance we’ve seen yet.”
Bubbles shrugged and complied. She didn’t have any better idea, and if Raffa had found water inside the cave, surely it hadn’t been poisoned. She hoped. Raffa went in with their things, and reported that she’d found plenty of room; they could both hide there, with their gear. She crawled back out, as Bubbles lifted the vines cautiously.
“Now for disguise,” Raffa said. “A few footprints going in both directions, just in here where we got careless because we figured no one would have tracked us further back. We sat here and rested—that’s the squashed ferns on your side. Actually they may not know there are two of us, so why don’t I make all the footprints?”
“Because we might both have left them somewhere else,” Bubbles said. “If we were going to leave here, which way would we go? Back up the ridge, I think—we came here looking for water, didn’t find any, and started up to find a spring. . . .” Together, they edged back out of the narrow cleft, and cautiously made a few scuffmarks up a steeper slope. Since they had been careful not to make prints on the way in (and didn’t see any) they walked back normally.
The hanging ferns and vines looked undisturbed, Bubbles noticed, even after Raffa had been through twice. Raffa went first, and then Bubbles slid in backwards. They had left marks, sliding in; it looked like someone had dragged bodies over the ground. She was trying to think what to do about it when she heard a shot, from high overhead, and then another. She didn’t try to see who it was, or if they’d seen. . . . She jerked backwards under the matted vines and tried not to breathe. Raffa’s hand closed on her arm, almost as tightly as the night before. Had it been only one night?
Although it was near midday, inside the cave she could see very little. The thick vines shut out nearly all the light, and it was cool and damp. She lay on level stone thinly coated with damp mud. She could hear the musical plink and plonk of water dripping into deep water, somewhere behind her in the dark. A cold drop hit the back of her neck, and she jumped.
“We should get back from the opening,” Raffa said quietly. “Just in case they find it.”
“Let’s try the night goggles.” Bubbles fished hers out and put them on. The nearer part of the cave appeared in shadowy blurs, with stabbing brilliance coming from the entrance. Several meters behind them, a black level surface had to be the water they’d heard. To the left, the cave’s inner wall dove directly into the water, but on the right, their flat ledge extended around a buttress and out of sight. Overhead, even the night goggles could not define the roof; when Bubbles reached up, she felt nothing.
Slowly, Raffa got to her knees and crawled away to the right. Bubbles followed, backing up at first so that she could watch the entrance. She had never been one for caves; she had not expected that the light would fade so fast. She slipped the goggles up; the blackness pressed on her face, as if it would invade her skull. Shuddering, she put the goggles back on, and stared at the faint glow from the entrance as if to remember it forever.
“They shot somebody!” George grabbed Ronnie’s arm. Ronnie shook it off.
“They shot at somebody,” he said. “You don’t know they hit anyone.”
“But the girls are up there—you know that.”
He knew that; he could close his eyes and see Raffa’s face, smell her hair. “They’re in the ravine. They’re in cover somewhere. And the hunters wouldn’t shoot the girls right off. . . .” He wished he hadn’t said it; that thought was no better.
“If Bubbles tried to fight—she’s kind of wild sometimes.”
“Petris sent one of the preeves up to the high trail, he said. Could have been that. And the hunter might’ve missed. And we can’t even be sure where the shot came from.” Although he was sure enough: high on the ridge, south of them. That put it too close to the girls, entirely too close. The hunters were supposed to come this way, and fall into the trap he and George had spent the afternoon constructing. They were just off one of the larger trails, that angled up and over the gap between the main ridge and the outlying northern hill.
Time had gone rubbery; he did not want to trust George’s watch. His had not survived the crash. George’s could have been damaged. He was aware that not trusting a watch was as silly and dangerous as not trusting the instruments in an aircraft; he knew he’d had a concussion. But time felt wrong; the glowing digits seemed to hang forever or race past. A vague irritation seized him: he had had the concussion, he shouldn’t be having to calm George.
Another shot, more distant. His shoulders twitched. He had thought during Petris’s briefing that he understood exactly where everyone would be, at least to start with. Now he found he could not remember who might be southward on the ridge, or on the west side. . . . He felt sick and sleepy both, and kept wanting to yawn.
“We ought to go find out,” George said. “That’s got to be somewhere near them. . . .”
“And if we go crashing up there we’ll just lead the hunters to them.” Ronnie tried to sound soothing, but even to him his voice seemed lusterless and whiny. “Petris said stay here, and we should stay here.”
“He’s not even an officer,” George said, but he didn’t move.
Ronnie stiffened in the midst of a yawn. A rhythmic noise flicked the edge of his hearing. Like someone walking, but walking with an intentionally odd gait. A few steps, a pause: a few more steps, a pause. The sound of steps—the swish of leaves, the soft pad of foot—varied in number but not duration. Despite his fear, Ronnie grinned to himself. They’d been warned about that mistake. . . . He’d done it himself, counting to himself as he tried to move stealthily, he’d put four or five or three steps into the same interval, thus making the sound as periodic as a pendulum. This person varied his pause intervals, but not the walking ones. Ronnie reached out to touch George in case he hadn’t heard. The walker might come within reach, if they were lucky.
Ronnie’s mind drifted. It had been, he thought, an impossibly bad day, and it had started far too early. Yet he didn’t feel as bad as he should; he knew that, and knew, in some distant corner of his mind, that it had something to do with the bump on his head. He wasn’t tracking right; he wasn’t feeling what he should feel, whatever that was. The long, hot afternoon after the girls left, when Petris tried to figure out what to do with them, where to put them, when the others tested Petris’s command, wanting to kill them, wanting to leave them anywhere and get away safely themselves. . . . It had been hell, but a hell from which he felt somewhat remote. As long as he didn’t have to talk, as long as he didn’t have to do anything, the others could do what they wanted.
Chapter Fifteen