9The suns continue to rise as we move out through the jungle, in scattered packs bound loosely by eyeshot at first, then later in a single ragged file as the slower ones realize the going will be easier if they simply follow in the footsteps of the ones that went before them. Spicy, floral aromas twine through the thick air, so much headier than what I’m used to smelling at the academy, and the understory of the forest is strange mix of shadow and light, the darker recesses broken by Avelaine’s yellow-white and Evelaine’s rose gold flickering through the canopy at the oddest of times.

Though I linked my map to the others, still I take the lead, switching regularly between my map and my chit compass as I try to keep us on course. Not that holding a consistent bearing is easy in a place like the Rainforest, where hanging vines, fallen debris, thick brush, and trees—lots and lots of trees—continually force us off track. I detour around obstacles as necessary, careful to set us back on the right path after every deviation, and hope my fledgling orienteering skills will be enough to see us through, Jovan’s over-the-shoulder navigation notwithstanding.

Three hours into the trek, I’m starting to despair of us ever getting to the bunker in the allotted time frame. Already, everyone’s hungry, tired, and complaining of blisters. In the short time we’ve been walking, we’ve been forced to make two larger-than-average detours and halt four times for hygiene breaks. At one point, we lost three students off the end of the group. Luckily, they were close enough for us to locate them by their chits, after which Mercury rigged up a clever program to sync everyone’s chits together into a basic network that would allow us to keep tabs on each other, more or less. If anyone wanders out of range, the network will immediately alert us, allowing us to find the straggler before they get too far away.

“We should just leave ’em behind,” I mutter as yet another alert forces us to halt for the third time in forty-five minutes.. “If they can’t learn to hold it, they can find their own way to the bunker.”

“What was that?” Mercury asks as he scans the network.

I sigh. “Nothing.”

We make slightly better time in the afternoon. Though we’re still hungry, tired, and blistered, we’ve grown a bit more adept at navigating the difficult terrain. Well, sort of, I amend as I swipe a vine out of my way only to have it grab onto my arm with a slew of nearly invisible barbs. Truth be told, we’re about as agile as a herd of elephants and twice as loud. Jovan swipes at every third piece of vegetation with some ridiculously huge knife I can only assume he stole from the roamer garage in a fit of macho bullslag, Djen’s heels are continually sinking into the muddy soil, and the rest of us are pretty much blundering into every little shrub, hole, and fallen tree we can find. Only Vida seems to be doing all right, picking her way through the maze of plant life with a grace and intuition the rest of us clearly lack.

I watch her from a distance as I pull another few barbs out of my arm. Hair adorned with violet blossoms and humming softly to herself, she looks decidedly less tired and blistered than the rest of us. Less bug-bitten too, for that matter. Hmm. I scowl and slap at some sort of mosquito-wasp hybrid on my arm.

By mid-evening, we’ve managed to reach a medium-size brook trickling through a stand of palms, the first of a dozen landmarks I highlighted on my holo map. While the others collapse on the surrounding rocks, dipping blistered feet and washing dirty faces, I go hunting for a GPS skylight. To my dismay, it turns out we’ve strayed half a klick off course, hitting the stream significantly downriver from where we were meant to. So much for my orienteering skills, though I suppose I should just be glad we found the stream at all. I also find multiple messages from various admin and teaching personnel at the academy.

My fingers waver slightly in the air, eyes fixed on those new links, though I don’t open them. I don’t need to. I already know what they are: messages asking me where I am, telling me everything’s sat, to come back to school, that they have an evacuation plan. All lies told by squatter filth, bait to draw me straight into the hands of the enemy. I delete the messages with one snap of my fingers. I’m about to head back to camp when I see some of those violet flowers Vida was wearing in her hair, clumped on a low-hanging branch. I decide to try a little experiment. Plucking a few, I tuck them into the frizzy strands around my bun before heading back to the others.

Back at the brook, I run my hands through the water for a few minutes. There’s a rash forming over my palms—similar to the one I got after my first trek into the forest all those days ago—and I swish my hands in the running water in an attempt to soothe them. Not that the action does much good. Even in the water, my hands still itch like crazy. I’ll just have to wait a couple of days for the rash to go away on its own.

Dropping down on a moss-covered rock nearby, I calculate our progress. We’re behind schedule—I’d hoped to get another two klicks in before we stopped for the day—but we’re still within the acceptable parameters for making it to the bunker. As long as we keep our afternoon pace during tomorrow’s trek, we should make it on time.

Relaxing back on the boulder, I close the map and deactivate my chit. I’m reaching for my water bottle when a familiar voice interrupts.

“Hungry?”

Mario hobbles over to me, a meal pak in her outstretched hand. My stomach growls at the thought of food, and I slowly take it. “Thanks. Where’d you get it anyway?”

“It was Kieran, actually. He had the foresight to grab a whole bag of field rations from the roamer garage before we left. Good thing too, since everyone assumed we were headed for the spaceport, so nobody packed much more than a few snacks.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to mention the meal bars and ration paks in my emergency bag, but something holds me back. Instead, I offer her the pak back. “I’m not really that hungry. You eat it.”

Mario drops down on the ground beside me and shakes her head. “Take it. Everyone else has had at least one already, and they didn’t do nearly as much work as you getting us here. You deserve it.”

As far as I’m concerned, you deserve to rot in hell.

The pak crunches in my fist as Michael’s voice echoes in my head, cold and cruel. Taking a breath, I force myself to ease my grip, tracing the silvery letters across the packet with my fingertips. No doubt he’d also say I deserve to starve.

And maybe he’d be right.

I don’t open the pak, just sit on the rock and watch the others. There’s a girl crying quietly under a tree and a boy who looks practically catatonic, but otherwise, everyone seems to be holding up well under the circumstances. Eating and napping are the primary activities this evening; however, Jovan and a few of the guys are cooling off by horsing around in the river, and some of the girls have arranged a backrub circle to massage each other’s aching shoulders. Vida is instructing some freshman students about preparing the meal paks.

“. . . have to rehydrate it,” her voice comes wafting across the brook. “No, you can’t rehydrate it with water directly from the stream! Are you completely oxygen-deprived? Rainwater is safer. And you should use these,” she commands, plucking a plant with a spongelike flower the size of her fist from the bank. “They’re natural filters; they’ll leach out any contaminants in the water. Just pour it thr—no, not like that! Like this . . .”

Mario and I exchange a glance. “At least somebody’s doing what they do best,” she comments wryly, and I grin, taken in by the gentle camaraderie in her voice. For a moment, it’s almost like we’re on a school outing, with a nature hike in the morning, followed by an afternoon picnic at the nearby creek. Except that there are no teachers, no lessons to learn, no scouting the local flora and fauna.

No going back.

Reality falls back over us like a cloudburst, drenching our spirits in mere seconds. Mario’s face falls, and she looks away into the forest.

“I don’t want to die out here.”

Her quiet confession sends a chill over me. I rub my arms, only now noticing how dark it’s gotten since I first sat down. Avelaine is heading to bed, leaving distant Evelaine to light our way for the next few hours before she, too, sleeps. Fear spikes through me at the thought of spending another night in the forest while who knows what nightmares lurk in the dark around us.

I stare out into the jungle at my unknown enemy, and my spine stiffens, cold fear morphing into equally cold determination. “You won’t,” I tell Mario fiercely. “We won’t. Not if I can help it.”

Mario smiles. “I believe in you.”

My chest tightens. Not I believe you, but I believe in you. The last person to put their faith in me like that was Lia. Would she consider her faith well spent? I guess I’ll never know.

Half-light barely amounts to quarter-light in the Rainforest, though the night vision in my lenses helps somewhat—with my sight, anyway. Nothing can help with the deepening sounds coming from the forest just beyond our doorstep. The innocent cacophony of chirps and squawks, screeches and howls that we became accustomed to during the day fade away, replaced by a much quieter medley of hisses and purrs, rustles and cries. Of wind under wings and the soft pad of paws against the dirt beneath our feet.

We huddle together in a tight group twenty meters south of the stream. Unlike last night, we assign shifts to keep watch, though what exactly our watchers are supposed to do if they actually see anything is questionable. Scream and wet their pants, I suppose.

Staring out into the brush, I grip the haft of Jovan’s hooked knife and privately admit that his macho bullslag was perhaps not as bullslag as I thought. Something moves in the trees to my left, and I sidle closer to Vida, also on watch a short distance away.

“Something’s out there,” I quietly intone, never taking my eyes off the brush.

“Mm-hm.”

“What do you think it is?”

Vida shrugs a shoulder. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

My eyes flick to her. “Is it?”

She doesn’t answer at first, her profile an expressionless mask in the gloom, and then she deliberately turns and looks me full in the face. “It’s not the creatures you hear out there that should worry you.”

“No?” I arch an eyebrow, heart quickening in spite of myself. “Then what should I be worried about?”

Vida smiles, the smallest quirk of her lip revealing a single pearly white tooth shining green through the night vision filter on my lenses.

“You should worry about the ones you can’t hear.”

Whether she means ghouls or some other creature entirely, I don’t know. All I know is that hours after I’ve completed my watch and retired with the others, still I lie awake, listening, for the sound of the strike I’ll never hear coming.