Chapter Twenty-One

A PROFOUND TRANSFORMATION reshaped our party. In a matter of minutes, we’d gone from cheerful and exuberant to fearful and quiet. The mood held and, if anything, grew worse as the day wore on.

Dr. Wu had taken to reciting a passage from Psalms. Clutching a little silver cross, she repeated again and again, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”

Kayleigh wrapped an arm around her, assuring. “We’ll be okay, Michelle. These guys are the best; they’ll keep us safe.”

This had quieted her for a bit, but before long, she was back to praying.

The professor seemed to find his courage in equal proportions to his ire being raised, for he spoke for the first time in hours. “Lady, do you mind? How about a little more ‘leadeth me to green pastures’ and a little less ‘valley of the shadow of death,’ huh?”

“Come on, people,” Caspersen interceded. “Let’s just keep moving.”

We did. And the deeper we went, the more another feature of the forest played against us—the humidity. In the mountains and even the foothills, the air had been relatively dry. But here, the longer we traveled, the more humid it seemed to get. And no wonder. The canopy of foliage overhead admitted very little light, so whatever moisture had accumulated just remained.

It was cold, too, like a damp, rainy autumn day on earth. Except there was no rain, and the sun shone brightly above the trees. As I traveled among the mosses and ferns underfoot to the sound of aerial chatter, cold sweat poured down my back, making me shiver against the chill.

The professor’s addled state no longer surprised me. My own nerve was faltering, and I’d been in my share of battles and life-and-death situations. But to blunder into a situation full of unknowns—quite possibly walking, as Michelle put it, into the valley of the shadow of death—against an unknown force? If I was getting the heebie-jeebies, I couldn’t imagine what the civilians were going through. And their ability to keep their cool as well as they had impressed the hell out of me. Kayleigh, in particular, handled herself with extraordinary calm and worked hard to allay Michelle’s fears. Isaac Kimutai exuded a similar calm. And while the others were jumpy, they seemed to take heart from the better example of their peers.

Matt, meanwhile, took his role as gunner’s assistant deadly seriously, practically treading on Caspersen’s heels, he followed so closely behind her. I had the thought that if she drew up suddenly, he’d crash into her and send us all toppling over like dominoes.

The image crept into my mind’s eye, and I laughed aloud. I guessed the creepy-ass voices were getting to me after all.

Caspersen glanced back at me questioningly, and I flushed.

“Nothing. Just…thought of a joke.”

“A joke? Good. I think we could use a joke right about now. Why don’t you tell us?”

The geologists groaned as of one impulse, and I stalled. I figured the imagery would be hard to explain, and I didn’t want anyone thinking I was still talking shit about Matt. “Now? Oh, no. It’s probably not that funny anyway.”

“Probably,” the professor agreed.

“Come on,” Caspersen prodded. “Give it a shot.”

“Oh. Um.” My mind was racing. My humor tended to spring from a more organic process, arising in response to the circumstance rather than being drawn from some mental archive. Still, I knew a few groaners. “Well…uh…why did the chicken cross the road?”

More grumbling ensued, but Caspersen pushed on doggedly. “I don’t know, why?”

“How the hell should I know? I don’t speak chicken.”

I think the whole party groaned, except for myself. And I had to force a half laugh.

“You might want to stick to the soldiering,” the professor declared through his nose.

“I’ve got one,” Kayleigh cut in. “What do you get if you cross a donkey with an octopus?”

“Something with a better sense of humor than Captain Johnson, probably,” the professor said.

“What?”

“An Octokey? A donkopus?” Matt threw out.

“It’s definitely gonna be smarter than Mr. Law,” the professor said.

“A visit from the ethics committee and an immediate revocation of funds.”

This got a few chuckles, mostly from the scientists. The professor rolled his eyes.

“All right, your turn, Tracie,” Kayleigh prodded.

Matt sounded an agreement, and I joined in. It felt right she should be put on the spot, after I had been.

“Okay.” Her posture was as controlled as it had ever been, and her eyes scanned the trees as she talked. But her tone was relaxed, congenial even.

The joke was an Ole and Sven story, which, near as I could tell, seemed to be an upper Midwest–specific subset of usually bad jokes featuring Scandinavian characters getting themselves into some kind of trouble. This one was an argument between the two friends about Sven’s truck not working due to water in the carburetor—the punchline being that Ole had driven it into a lake, thereby getting water into the carburetor. Caspersen affected accents and everything, and though the joke wasn’t very funny, her performance did elicit a few chuckles.

Matt busted a gut, which was probably more than it deserved. But I laughed, too, if only because of how much Caspersen seemed to relish the telling. And it seemed apropos; she would tell a Norwegian joke, of course.

“Well, that’s it,” the professor said with a sigh. “If they get us, whatever the hell’s out there, they’re probably doing the world a favor.”

*

WE MADE CAMP before sunset. We found enough fallen wood for a fire—our first since landing on Kepler-186f—but it took some time to get it lit because the wood was soaked. Even after it ignited, it emitted a slow, smoky flame that wasn’t very hot and didn’t cast much light. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and a little fire was better than none. It meant we wouldn’t be sleeping on the cold, dank forest floor, surrounded by unknown creatures in absolute darkness.

Caspersen doubled the watch that night and pulled Connor and Russell into the pool. She took the first shift, and Matt sat it with her. My turn came next, and in a few minutes, Matt lay sound asleep, snoring away.

Caspersen lay still, too, but her breathing did not relax; she stayed awake throughout my shift and was still awake as I drifted off afterward.

My watch had proved uneventful, which, in its own way, was something of an event. I didn’t notice at first, but it struck me about halfway through my shift that the sounds seemed to have quieted and almost disappeared. I still heard a faint hoot in the night air every once in a while. But the constant chatter had gone.

I pondered this, my mind a whirl of uneasy apprehensions as I drifted off to sleep. But I slept well, and the night passed quickly. Before I knew it, Caspersen was rousing us for another day’s march. She kept the fire burning as we ate, though the billows of smoke choked us all, and extinguished it before we set out.

The forest remained dim. It wasn’t as impenetrably dark as it had been during the night, but I couldn’t see the sun. I didn’t even know for sure what manner of day it was. It could as easily have been bright and sunny as gray and overcast. But as we walked, a thin mist rose along the ground, and a pronounced chill settled in the air. I had the unhappy sensation we were in for another rainstorm.

Caspersen had the same idea, and she tasked Granges and Cohen with setting up the rain shelter should the first sign of rain appear. In the meantime, we kept walking, the sounds of high-pitched chatter following us as we went.

We made the river by midday, and still the rain had not come. The scientists barely noticed the heavy growth of plant life here. Even Dr. Kimutai, who had expressed so much interest in seeing what life had congregated around the river, displayed only the mildest curiosity. We were all anxious to get to the ship as soon as possible.

Still, Caspersen’s confidence seemed to have worn off a bit. We all looked a little like hunted animals, but not nearly so much as the day before. Even the professor seemed to have relaxed. He hadn’t snapped at anyone since breakfast.

Since the rain still hadn’t shown up, we pushed on until the dimness started turning dark, and still, we hadn’t had a drop of rain.

We pitched the rain shelter just in case and built a fire a ways away. It wasn’t until I saw Caspersen’s satisfied smile and inquired as to its cause, that I noticed what she’d already figured out—the voices had disappeared, again.

“They’re in the trees,” she said quietly. “The smoke…they pull back when it reaches them.”

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “But when the fire’s out…it sounds like they’re all around us, in every direction.”

“They probably are,” she nodded. “Up there. That’s why we can’t pinpoint them, and we can’t see them. There’s nowhere for them to be, down here. But you could hide an army up there, and you’d never see it from the ground. They sound like they’re everywhere because they are.” She smiled again. “But they don’t like smoke.”

“You think they’re friendly? Or hostile?”

She shrugged. “They haven’t moved on us, but they’re definitely monitoring. Depending on what they are, they could be afraid. We might be bigger; we might be something they haven’t seen before. Who knows? Or they could be neutral. Until we find one of them, we’re stumbling blind in the dark. We don’t know what kind of animal we’re dealing with, what kind of intelligence and capabilities. It could be the thing that tried to take Dr. Kimutai; it could be something else.”

I nodded. “But we know it doesn’t like smoke, anyway.”

“Yes. And if it is the thing that went for Kim…” She smiled again. “It doesn’t like guns either.”

*

THE NIGHT RAN long but proved uneventful. A heavy fog rolled in around the base of the trees until the whole world had been blanketed in eerie whitish-gray. Still, the rain did not come.

We didn’t have a droplet of downfall that night or the next morning. We went on for several hours until midafternoon. Then, without so much as a boom of thunder for warning, the downpour began.

The tent was up in a matter of minutes, and we were able to keep the equipment mostly dry. As for us? Well, that was a different story. The packs had gone under the tarp as soon as the storm started, but we’d been soaked through by time everything was tied off.

And then the hours of waiting began, with cascades of water pouring down from above. The earth underfoot turned to muck and then mud. Before long, we were in great puddles.

It was a cold rain, too, one of those bone-chilling downpours in October or November back home when it was about two degrees too warm for snow. People always seemed to envision hell as a place of heat and fire. I suspect those people had never spent a night huddled in icy mud, or those stories might have had a different setting altogether.

There was a single source of comfort amidst all this misery. The rain seemed to drive our chirping friends away, or else to drown the sound of their songs out under the constant splat-splat-splat. Either way, no one missed them.