There were other shapes, but he couldn’t make sense of them. Strange geometric forms, like huge scaffolding assemblies or bamboo towers, jutted up from the forest here and there. The light was too poor to offer any detail about them. Even their distances were hard to gauge. Travis looked down and saw the footings of one of the structures right below. Its complex form rose into the darkness just behind his position.
The only other shape he could resolve was something very tall and narrow, and solid in appearance, standing on the horizon at least a mile away. Its height was imposing even at that distance: it towered above the trees, easily five times their height. He focused on it but could perceive no detail beyond its bulk and rough size. He thought of an enormous smokestack rising from a factory complex. The problem was that there was no smoke, and no factory, either, unless all its lights were shut off.
He saw movement in his peripheral vision and then Bethany was there, leaning into the darkness beside him. He edged over a few inches to give her room.
For a moment they just stood there in silence, side by side. They listened to the night. Travis looked at the moon again and judged that it was higher than when he’d first seen it. The crescent was very narrow, which meant the sun couldn’t be far below the horizon. Dawn was no more than an hour away, though there was no hint of it yet.
“I’ve never seen any place this dark,” Bethany said. “There’s not the least bit of light pollution on the horizon. We’d have to be over a hundred miles from even a mid-sized town for it to look like this. But at the same time it’s a place where people have built large structures, whatever these are. And whatever that is.” She waved a hand to indicate the towering form in the distance. “It has to be forty stories tall. Maybe taller.” She was quiet for a moment and then she turned to him. “Where the hell are we?”
Travis had no answer. He had a vague notion that it could be a military installation, built in remote wilderness out of concern for public safety or—more likely—secrecy. But why would an alien-made device just happen to show them a place like that? Why would it show them any place in particular, as opposed to some random location? Even if the place on the other side were some fixed distance and direction from here, it should still be someplace purely random. Simple probability said they should be looking out at the ocean right now, or a wide-open prairie, or an arctic tundra, or a city street with a McDonalds and a Starbucks and half a dozen stoplights.
“I don’t know,” Travis said.
Bethany started to speak, but before she could, a high-pitched cry rose from the trees right below them. Bethany flinched hard and grabbed onto his arm. Travis was glad for that: it masked the fact that his own muscles had tensed pretty damn hard.
He grew calm at once, recognizing the sound: a wolf’s howl. As it died away Travis cocked his head and listened. He heard the clatter of running footsteps as the pack went by right beneath their position. Their claws scrabbled on ground that sounded unusually hard. Stone, he’d have guessed—if a forest could grow from stone.
A hundred yards off, the wolves stopped and howled again, first one and then another. Seconds passed, and then a series of answering cries resonated from the trees half a mile away. The nearer set of wolves had just begun to respond when a new sound erupted somewhere between the packs, silencing both of them. Bethany didn’t exactly flinch, but Travis felt her body shudder. He felt his own blood go cold, and wasn’t surprised that it did. He was biologically wired to fear this sound, courtesy of a long chain of ancestors who’d survived to pass on their genes. It was the guttural bass wave of a lion’s roar.
A lion. Among wolves. In a temperate forest far enough north that it felt like late fall during the month of August.
“Okay: Where the hell are we? is the wrong question,” Bethany said. “Where the fuck are we?”
Ten minutes later the first glow of dawn came to the horizon. Five minutes after that there was enough light to show them everything. They saw what the scaffoldlike things around them really were. And they recognized the towering shape on the horizon. They’d seen it in movies and on television all their lives.
They knew exactly where they were.
And they knew that where really was the wrong question to ask.
Chapter Ten
Travis paced at the windows on the west side of the room. The drapes were open again. There was no reason to keep them closed now—the place on the other side of the opening had its own daylight, though it was dulled by cloud cover that’d come in with the dawn.
Travis wondered how Paige and the others had first reacted to what the cylinders did. They were long familiar with Breach technology. They’d been dealing with it for years. Maybe it hadn’t been hard for them to get their minds around what was beyond the open circle.
It was hard for Travis.