Chapter 51 - 50 — The First Watch II
There was no falling.
For one instant there was nothing under my boots and nothing in my ears and no weight anywhere in my body, and I did not have time to be frightened of it.
Then there was wet earth.
My knees took it, and my whole body reported at once that it had gone from stone to soil and had not been consulted.
The smell hit before my eyes adjusted.
Everything poisonous was gone. No metal at the back of the throat, no wet chemical burn under the filter.
Instead: cold soil, rotting leaf, bark, and something resinous underneath it all, sharp and green and clean enough that I pulled the filter seal loose without thinking and got a lungful of actual air.
I looked up.
Trees.
Enormous ones, trunks wider than a car is long, packed close enough that their crowns had grown into each other overhead and made a ceiling out of themselves.
What daylight came through arrived in separate shafts rather than as light, so the forest floor was a patchwork of pale columns and deep green-black.
Ferns to the knee. Mist standing between the trunks in flat layers, not moving.
And quiet. After four hours in a cavern with twenty people breathing through filters, the quiet went into my ears like pressure.
I counted before I did anything else.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Six including me.
---
"Where’s the rest?"
Clara Vogel said it, turning a full circle with her weapon still up.
Gideon was already at my shoulder, and his hand had come up and closed once on my upper arm, checking that I was standing, before he let go.
"Rook."
"You’re intact."
"I’m fine."
The others were fanning out. Not far. Four or five metres each, keeping everyone in sight, looking between the trunks for anything with a shape.
"CAPTAIN."
Erik Lind had the biggest voice of the six of us and he put all of it into the trees.
"RENARD. MERIDIAN. SOUND OFF."
The forest took it.
That is the only way I can describe what happened to that shout. It went out between the trunks and it came back thinner and later and slightly wrong, bent by distance and wood, and then it was gone, and there was nothing.
We tried again. All six, at once.
Nothing.
Erik went on longer than the rest of us, shouting until his voice tore in the middle of the word and he had to stop and cough into his own elbow.
We walked two hundred metres and did it again.
Nothing.
No answering shout. No Ability light through the canopy. No sound at all of fourteen armed people moving anywhere within a kilometre.
Four hours ago I had been standing in a formation thirty metres deep with a Tank in front of me and a healer behind me and ranged cover above both.
Now there were six of us in a wood, and the wood went on in every direction, and it had swallowed the sound of us like a coat dropped on a bell.
---
"He said stay close," Gideon said.
"He is not here."
"He is extremely here. He has a telephone and an opinion, and both of them will still exist when we get out." He was scanning the treeline while he said it, not looking at me. "Four metres, Nolan. That is all I am asking."
"I stood a hundred metres from you in the crystal chamber."
"You did, and there were nineteen other people between us, and now there are four." He glanced across. "Are you going to be difficult about this?"
"Probably."
Something happened at the corner of his mouth and got put away.
"Your father did warn me."
---
Declan O’Rourke was the one who stopped shouting first.
"We’re wasting throat." He said it flatly, wiping his palm down his thigh. "Nobody is in earshot. If they were, they’d have answered the first one."
"So we stand here?" Clara said.
"No. That’s my point. Standing here is the only thing worse than walking." He turned and looked at the way the ground rose slightly to the north.
"There’ll be tracks, or a path, or *something* the layer wants us to follow. Fourteen people came down somewhere. We find the ground they landed on, we find them."
Ewan Calder nodded straight away. "Better than shouting until something else hears us."
That landed on everybody. Erik stopped rubbing his throat.
It was the sensible suggestion. I want that noted, because I have gone back over that clearing more times than is good for me, and there was nothing in it.
Declan said the obvious correct thing in a reasonable voice and five people agreed with him, and I was part of the five.
---
Before we moved, I looked at them properly for the first time.
Declan O’Rourke, mid-thirties, a spear across his back and the sort of build that comes from doing something rather than lifting for it.
Ewan Calder, older, quiet, a straight sword and a habit of putting his hand flat on a tree before he passed it, feeling the bark.
Erik Lind, loud, broad, already reorganising his own kit.
Clara Vogel, thin and fast-looking, two short blades, and the only one who had not stopped moving her eyes since we landed.
All four went through Meridian’s screening. Whatever that process is, it took the applications of everybody in the region who wanted a place on a Gate that had already eaten two teams, and it chose these people.
And Cormac was not among them.
That was the first warm thing I had felt since I woke up in my own bed pressing my ribs, and it arrived in my chest like a swallow of something hot.
Wherever the floor had sent that man, it had sent him somewhere.
Someone else would die.
—
We walked for six hours.
Gideon took a forward position with Erik rather than putting himself between me and the scenery, which I noticed and did not comment on.
Clara cut a strip of bark off a trunk every three or four hundred metres, always at the same height, always on the same side.
Twice we came back to check and found our own marks where we expected them, and the relief that produced in five adults was disproportionate.
We found tracks. Something with a splayed four-toed foot, sunk deep into wet soil, the middle toe longer than the others. The impressions were as long as my forearm.
Ewan crouched over one for a long time with his fingers spread beside it for scale and then stood up without saying what he thought.
Later there were claw marks four metres up a trunk, four parallel gouges through the bark and into the wood beneath, weathered grey at the edges.
Once we crossed a patch where the ferns had been flattened over about eight metres and something dark had gone into the soil and dried there.
The forest itself worked on me the whole time.
Wet leaves came up on my boots and stayed there, building until I had to scrape them off on a root. Branches went across my shoulder plate with a sound like somebody dragging a fingernail along it.
Water fell out of the canopy in single fat drops long after anything had disturbed it, and one of them went down the back of my collar and made my whole spine flinch.
And whenever we stopped, the insects came up. Not near us. All around us, a wide dry rattle from every direction at once, and the moment we started walking again it cut out.
Six hours. Nothing had attacked us.
By the fourth hour that had stopped being lucky.
Something lives here. Something with a foot the length of my forearm and the reach to put four grooves into a tree above head height. And it had watched us walk through its house all afternoon.