“Whatever they do,” Snark remarked, “they’re not going to do it tonight. Those little shaggies, they came out all along this cliff.”
“Not just one place?” Leelson demanded.
“Hell, no. They spurted out from where you were, and from south of me a dozen places. Some of ‘em even came out of that island out there.” She pointed westward, where a stone point jabbed the glowing sky. “Doesn’t matter where they came out, you still got the same problem. You need cover. You need food. You have to put that pregnant woman somewhere safe if you’re going to try to keep her. Right after dark still seems to be a good time to move around. The Rottens haven’t ever come over the camp right after sundown. I keep a kind of chart. When they come, how many, where. Then I try to stay away from the worst places, the worst times.”
All of them were exhausted, but they could not argue with the local expert. They got wearily to their feet; Mitigan put Saluez over his shoulder with surprising gentleness; Lutha was less gentle with Leely; and they went in a weary straggle through the dusk. Before it was completely dark, they arrived at a shallow swale halfway up the slope north of the camp.
Mitigan rolled Saluez under a windrow of dried brush, and Lutha was appointed to keep watch over her and Leely while Snark took the three men down among the buildings. Leelson left her with a lingering stroke along her cheek and the remark that it might take them a while to find everything that was needed.
Lutha didn’t care. She could have slept atop a volcano, so she thought, struggling to stay alert until they returned. The last of the dim purple along the sea horizon was being sucked into a black throat of night. Stars blazed on the moonless sky, like paper lanterns, their light diffused. Strange. Down in the camp small lights moved about, not radiating as one would expect, not making star shapes in her vision, but softened, dampened. She blinked, assumed the air was foggy, or that perhaps her sight was affected by fatigue. Then she realized it was not only sight that was affected but also sound. She shook her head, swallowed, twisted her head from side to side, trying to unplug ears that suddenly weren’t working properly. All sounds were flat, with no resonance. Damped. Someone had lowered a curtain over the world.
Which trembled. Beneath her. Only a little, as though some large creature had taken a step near me. And another. And another yet. Three steps. Something. Something huge enough to make the stone backbone of the ridge tremble like a leaf.
She swiveled her head, silently, scanning the darkness, trying to see something, anything against the sprinkled star field. There … across the camp. To the southeast. On the horizon, the stars winking out, and those above them, and those above them, and those above … By the Great Gauphin, halfway to the zenith, the stars winking out. Something huge close up? Something even bigger far away?
She put her hands over her mouth and breathed quietly. The sound of the sea came as a series of flat slaps, no susurrus, no following hush. The world trembled again. She counted the steps, one, two, three, four. Five, six, seven. Eight, nine. Coming or going?
And then the stars bloomed in heaven and the sound of the sea was there once more, the soft rolling shush of waves on the gravelly beach. Down in the camp, the lamps made sparkling stars of refracted light.
Lutha was wide-awake when they returned laden with blankets, charged solar stoves, and camp lights plus a number of prepacked emergency kits full of food and other necessities.
“Did you hear?” Leelson whispered to her. “Did you feel?”
Snark said, “It’s happened before.”
“How often?” demanded Leelson.
In the light of her lantern they saw the shrug, the twisted mouth, the fear in her eyes. Still, her voice retained its usual offhand manner.
“A few times. Just a few times.”
Deeply troubled, they straggled off again, uphill to a ridge spiked by stone fragments, scraggy as broken teeth, where—so Snark said—a natural dike had fallen. The remnants lay behind the ridge in a tumble of chunks and pillars, like a child’s blocks dumped from their box. Among this rubble were the clefts and shelters Snark had described, places where the hunted could go to ground.