Aaron's gaze locked with hers for a cold moment, and then slid past. Neither of them was willing or able to speak. Her heart thundered loudly in her ears.
Three skeletons—two human and one canine—lay in a rough circle of flattened grass, as if they had thrashed around crazily, fighting, maybe. Fighting what? Where were their clothes? Could they have come running out naked? Naked but with sandals on... and Joe's hat, but not Linda's woven straw bonnet.
Aaron kicked over a small rock that lay beneath the smaller skeleton:
Linda's, the one with no hat. There was a tiny bloodstain under the rock.
"No blood," Aaron said. "Little spots like this, but no blood! How long since—the attack started?"
"Twenty-eight minutes since we heard the skeeter alarm," Justin said.
Aaron looked around warily, rifle at the ready, but there was nothing to shoot at. "And it was all over before we got here."
Jessica couldn't move her eyes away from the three skeletons. The bones were stripped bare of clothing and of meat, but all were in place, as when an archeologist opens a grave. Nothing had broken or scattered the bones. She picked up Joe's hat and rubbed it in her fingers. Inside the brim it looked etched, or chewed.
Bones stripped of cloth, of meat, of sinew, ready to be mounted for biology class. Eyeless sockets glared up at her. Something gleamed. "Linda's chain," Jessica said. She pointed. A chain of tiny gold links encircled the neck of one of the skeletons. The next thing she knew she was bent over, stomach contracting violently. She felt it squeeze and pump, heard her own gagging sounds as from a distance, as if that other part of her were above the glade, watching as the tall blond woman tried to turn herself inside out. Aaron laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. She very nearly hit him. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. No time for emotions, you sniveling bitch.
"Cadzie," she whispered.
"What?"
"He's got to be here somewhere. Whatever did this was in a feeding frenzy. It wouldn't have taken him somewhere else."
Stripped clean. Plucked bare.
"Where's the other dog?"
"Hope to God it ran away. Ran far enough." They headed toward the mining shack.
Her collar buzzed. It was Justin. "What do you see?"
"It's Linda and Joe and one dog."
Aaron's voice was flat. "We're going over to the processing plant. The... door's open. Still no sign of the baby. Continue to record."
"Be careful," Justin said.
"Right."
Jessica was ahead of him, rifle at the ready. The ground was bare, not even dust. Jessica stopped short and pointed.
"Another small skeleton," Aaron said carefully. "Probably an immature Joey."
Jessica reached the processing plant. The door was open. There was an aroma of burnt plastic within, and an ancient, oily musk. The door creaked on its hinges as she pushed it back.
The interior was deeply shadowed. Slivers of light slanted through holes in the roof. Her breath sounded like slow thunder.
"Nothing," she reported. "There isn't any sign of..." She spun at a sudden clatter behind her. Wind against the corrugated steel door. There was nothing, nothing here at all. She heard Aaron's voice from outside. "You had better come here."
Her heart was a stone in her chest. She went outside, dreading what she was about to find.
Aaron closed the door. Behind it was the skeleton of the missing dog. Next to it was a bundle in a blue blanket. It made a coughing sound, and began to cry.
Jessica watched motionless as a tiny pink fist thrust out of the blanket and waved, more fiercely now, crying, calling for a mother who would never come. "He's alive!" she shouted. She touched the collar button, then changed her mind. Instead she ran to pick up the baby.
Cadzie clutched at her. She dropped his deep blue blanket in the dust and held him at arm's length. Cadzie was furious. Cadzie was—
She hugged him with her left arm so she could touch her collar button.
"Cadzie is alive! Dad, you hear? He isn't even marked!"
"We have found the baby," Aaron said. "He is apparently unharmed."
"Tragon, this is Weyland." Her father's voice, flat and unemotional, came from her collar tab. "Would you repeat that?"
"Yes, sir. We have found the baby. Jessica is holding him. He appears to be alive and unharmed." ‘
"Thank you. Advice."
"Yes, sir."
"Jessica, get the baby into the skeeter and stand by. Aaron, we've got good photographs. Grab anything you think might help us understand this and get out of there."
"Sounds good to me." Aaron nudged Jessica. "Go to the skeeter. I'll cover you," he said. "Get inside and close the doors."
She nodded vigorously. She wanted to run, but she was afraid she would drop Cadzie. It felt good to be in the familiar skeeter seat.
"Justin, do you see anything?" Aaron asked.
"Nothing on either side of the pass."
"Then I'll chance gathering the bodies," Aaron said. "But I don't get it. Something hit this camp. Fast and hard. Killed everything. Except a baby. It couldn't find a child wrapped in a blanket."
"Maybe it wasn't hungry by the time it got to Cadzie."
"No, that's not it," Aaron said. "It stripped a dog next to him, right down to the bones."
"Aaron, this is Zack. We think you should get out of there. You can gather evidence later."
"Agreed." Aaron ran across the dry ground to the skeeter and leaned in. "Give me five minutes, Jessica. Freeze Zack---I've got something important to do."
Chapter 13
EVACUATION
A monster fearful and hideous, vast and eyeless.
VIRGIL, Aeneid
Carey Lou was afraid. There was something wrong, and no one would talk about it. They were all calm. Too calm, so calm that their very lack of emotional expression terrified him.
Each skeeter could carry three children and one adult pilot, and under three guards, the children were escorted back up. Carey Lou was in the third group, and maybe six times he asked the same question. "What's wrong? Is something wrong?" And received no answer. Finally Aaron Tragon, big Aaron, his buddy, looked at him, his eyes like glass. Carey Lou almost felt afraid in that moment. Not of grendels or of some other bogey being out in the jungle, but of Aaron himself.
That, of course, was crazy.
So he asked no more questions as they carried load after load of children back up the mountain, and when it was his turn he didn't question, had run out of questions, and wanted only to squeeze into his seat, and make himself small.
Justin piloted the skeeter, for which Carey Lou was grateful. Whatever was going on, Justin knew about it. He could tell in the rigid set of his shoulders.
The skeeter spiraled into the air. Ordinarily he loved flying. But this time there was no joy. There was nothing but fear.
Why won't they tell us...
What's wrong...
They circled Robor. There were two pairs of guards on each side, facing away from the craft, grendel guns at the ready.
Their expressions just about froze his heart.
He had thought that Robor looked funny, almost comical. A big grendel. A big dragon, the biggest that ever lived. But there was nothing funny about it now. They landed behind the two guards, and were immediately whisked into Robor's shadow by Jessica, who looked almost as pale and emotionless as Justin.
Again he was struck with the contrast. Jessica and Justin looked scared. Aaron looked... intrigued?
They ushered him up the gangplank, and into the hold, and he went to the nearest knot of kids and lowered his voice, asking, "Does anyone know what's going on?"
He found Heather, who tried to smile in memory of a magic evening. She looked as frightened as he felt. "Something's wrong," she whispered. "Somebody's dead."
Carey Lou went to the front window and pressed his palms against the glass. Who? Who was dead...
He remembered who had stayed behind. With her baby. The room swam.
"What in the hell was it? I won't believe in invisible grendels!" Cadmann squeezed his eyes shut, and massaged his temples with stiff fingers. There was a monster of a headache coming on. They'd seen every kind of grendel, and he was far too close to believing in this one, too.
There was a numb sensation in his chest, something spreading as if he had been struck there. He wanted to scream, to foam, to throw something . ...o do anything but sit here and wait. Wait as they received sketchy video broadcasts of skeeters relaying children back to the Robor. Wait, and pray to a half-forgotten God. "Not everything on this freezing planet is a grendel," Cadmann said, tasting the thought. It felt right: real. "We don't have any idea of what's really here. We've got to stop acting like grendels are the be-all and end-all of lethality."
Hendrick grabbed his arm. "What in the hell are you talking about?"
"We've been afraid of grendels," Cadmann said. "To that extent, we've probably blinded ourselves to what is actually out there... over there. We never went and looked for ourselves, and I think that the grendels became a kind of bogeyman." The screens showed Robor taking off now, safe. Safe from what lived in the ground.
Have they gathered her bones? he asked himself. God. I hope they gathered her bones. But of course they would. Jessica would insist and Aaron would have done it. Thank God Aaron was there.
He felt numb. Doors were slamming in his mind, and behind them raged fear and grief.
If he wasn't careful, a door might creak open. Behind one of them was Linda's birth. Such a small, wrinkled, bulbous thing she had been. And his first touch, his first scent of her... she would have been a breech birth, but for the prenatal diagnostics, and God...
He slammed that door in his mind, and the one with invisible grendels behind it too. Pure horror fantasy. You'd have to be crazy... Came up, hearing the hubbub in the room...
... and then sank down again, fighting as his eyes grew hot, and then flooded, all of his efforts to keep his tears under control as futile as their attempts to tame this fucking planet.
It was no good. None of it was any good, and he had to leave the control room, which had grown crowded.
The news had to have reached every corner of the camp by now. Razelle Weyland would be flying in from the lumber preserves, and her brother Michael from over at the slope camp. People were looking at him with an emotion in their faces that he had never seen there before: Pity. Shock. They wanted to touch him, to comfort him, but with every step he felt the shields sliding down, even as the shields around his heart crumbled.
The images were coming so fast, too fast, as if there were twenty years of tension, twenty years of fear stored up inside of him, and now that it had clawed free and claimed his youngest, there was nothing to hold back the pain anymore, and then...
He saw her, running up to him. Linda was just a baby, and her round and shining face, the diapers bunched up between her chubby thighs, her little chubby arms outstretched to him, her smile stretching that round little face. Her eyes so blue, her mother's eyes.
He held out his hands to her, stretched out his arms. Stretched his arms across the table, his fists closed hard on the edge, his good ear pressed flat against wood, eyelids like tiny fists closed hard around red-hot embers.
The trip back to the island was subdued. The children were wrapped in blankets. Some of them cried. All knew, by now, what had happened to Linda and Joe.
Jessica came to sit next to him. Justin looked at her, and she felt the oddest sensation from him. Almost as if he were a stranger, rather than her brother. His eyes weren't hot, or cold. They were just eyes. Black holes, gathering data.
Justin's hand strayed over and over again to his pistol, palm resting on it as if death might follow them into the air, come aboard Robor and follow them back to Camelot.
"Where were you?" he asked quietly.
"You know where," she said.
"Pranksters," he said.
"Justin-even if I had been there, right there, I couldn't have done anything."
"Of course."
"Justin-she was my sister too! Don't shut me out. Please."
"She shouldn't have been there alone."
"She was not alone. She was with Joe!"
"You're right. You're right." He wiped his hand over his face. And for the first time that she could remember, Jessica hadn't the slightest idea what was going on behind her brother's eyes. Was he blaming her? Himself? Imagining what he was going to say to Father? Was he thinking of the bones in the hold, all that remained of their baby sister?
She reached out to him, touched him gently on his shoulder, and was absurdly happy when he didn't brush her hand away.
Aaron came up behind her. "Jessica," he said, "I need to talk to you."
She was torn between Justin and Aaron for a moment. Then she smiled almost apologetically, and said, "I'll be right back."
Justin's gaze slid coldly from Jessica to Aaron and back again, and then he nodded, so shallowly that it was almost no motion at all. And then, in some way that she couldn't completely explain, Jessica knew what Justin was thinking.
And feeling.
She knew it, but couldn't quite make the thought rise up to consciousness. That might have hurt a little too much.
The entire colony was on the beach as Robor floated into the bay. Cadmann drew his coat collar up around his jaw. The cold seemed more piercing somehow, as the mist rolling in off the ocean penetrated coat and shirt and skin. Around him, radios crackled. A dozen rifles were held in crossed arms.
Perhaps Death is aboard the Robor, he could almost hear them thinking. It was what he wondered. It was the fear that had lurked just beneath the surface of their loves and growths and actions, every day for twenty years. And now it had come home to roost.