“It was a woman crying. She sounded desperate, afraid, maybe hurt, I’m not sure. She sounded—” But I cut myself off, pressing my lips together.
“She sounded?” he prompts, leaning back against a tree.
“She sounded like me,” I finish, realizing how the words sound—even worse than I’d expected.
He’s silent for a while, scanning the forest. “Right,” he says after a few moments, pushing off from the tree and leaning down to retrieve his pack. “If there was someone here last night—”
He pauses a moment, as if expecting me to say something. I want to interrupt, insist I heard what I heard, but something keeps me quiet. I’ve lost the right, if I ever had it, to protest his declarations. I’d die out here if it weren’t for him.
When I remain silent, he continues. “At any rate, she’s gone now. We need to keep moving. How are your feet?”
Maybe I did invent her. The admission, even to myself, causes an uneasy tension to settle throughout my shoulders. But I have no choice. If he’s decided it’s time to move on, then I have to move on with him. The worst part is that I have to admit that he’s right. There’s no sign of anyone here, no trampled earth, not even a snapped twig to show that someone passed by.
“They’re fine,” I mumble, despite the throb from the matching blisters on my heels at the reminder.
“Once we’re out onto the plains, we can find a place to rest, stop a little earlier today. Neither of us is going to have much stamina after such an interrupted night.”
I know he means that I won’t have much stamina. My jaw tightens in protest, and for an instant I want to retort. But then my ears fill with the memory of a cat’s hunting snarl, and I smell the burning fur and the blood and I close my eyes.
The voice was moving toward the plains, which is the direction Tarver proposes to hike in order to reach the wreck. Perhaps if we just start moving, we’ll be able to track down whomever I heard.
“Fine.”
Silence from Tarver, which stretches long enough that I’m forced to open my eyes again. He’s watching me with an odd expression on his face, one I can’t read—his eyes aren’t quite on mine. With a start, I realize I’m still wearing the jacket he wrapped around my shoulders last night.
When I start to scramble out of it, struggling with the way the material swallows up my hands, he’s roused from whatever trance he’d been in. “No,” he says abruptly. “Keep it for now.”
Then he turns his back and moves out, sure in the knowledge that I’ll follow.
What else can I do?
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a tiny, unbidden voice whispers, Would you actually want to do anything else?
The pace seems easier today. Perhaps he’s being gentler on me, but I suspect I’m growing accustomed to walking.
We make better time on the flat ground of the plains, pausing only to choke down a ration bar each. I choke, anyway; Tarver tucks in as though it’s a three-course steak dinner.
He calls a halt again after another hour and a half of walking, looking around the plains in each direction. Behind us the forest is a smear of gray-green on a ridge, dropping down into the broad, golden expanse of the plain. I’ve never seen anything so immense as this, such a vast sweep of empty land. The creek we’ve been following fans out into a network of silvery streams, marking the small dips in the land. They’re all narrow enough to jump across, but large enough that Tarver can dip the canteen into them, filling it up and letting the water filter do its work. The wind ripples the grass of the plains in waves, for all the world like the oceans I’ve seen on the HV. On the far side of all this are the mountains that stand between us and the Icarus.
But we don’t see any signs of life. No rescue craft roaring overhead, no colony traffic crisscrossing the sky the way the streams divide the plain. I can’t understand why there aren’t colonies here. Where is everyone? Neither of us says a word about it, but I know it can’t have escaped him.
Tarver makes camp more quickly than he did the night before, and it takes me a few moments to realize why—he hasn’t dug a fire pit this time. No wood on the plains for a real fire. Why hadn’t I thought about that? Until I leaned against him last night, I was halfway to freezing, even with a fire close at hand. And after shoving him away so quickly this morning, I can’t rely on his warmth again. I shiver, my mind on the miserable night ahead.