The bird tipped its head to watch her awkward approach. It had color and shape now, a bundle of reddish-brown feathers with a bright black eye, but there was still something unusual about it, something not quite complete.
"Didn't think I would ever get there," the bird said suddenly.
"Get where?" Renie asked. "Who are you? What is this place?"
"We walked for a long time," the bird chirped sadly. "Didn't think I would ever. . . ." It suddenly stood and fluttered its wings as if about to fly. Renie's heart sank, but the bird merely settled back on the branch. "Didn't think I would ever get there," it observed again. "Mama said it would take a while. We walked for a long time,"
"Walked where? Can you talk to me? Hello?" Renie took a slow step closer and lowered her voice. "I don't mean you any harm. Please talk to me."
The bird looked at her again, then suddenly leaped from the branch and flashed away down the hillside. "Didn't think I would. . . ." it called shrilly before it disappeared into the mist.
"Jesus Mercy!" Renie sank down onto the stony ground, close to tears. She had traded a place beside the ghost-river for nothing except an exhausting run and a cold, foggy hillside; she would need a long rest before she could manage the climb back up. "Jesus Mercy."
It was only when her chin bumped against her chest and she jerked her head upright that she realized she had fallen asleep—whether for seconds or minutes, she could not tell, but the misty landscape seemed distinctly darker now, the shadows deeper in the folds of the hillside, sky shaded from pearl to a stormy gray. Renie staggered to her feet, keenly aware of the chilly winds ranging the slope and of her own skimpy clothing. She shivered, cursing quietly but miserably at the thought of spending a night in the open. She and her companions had been spoiled by the room-temperature ambience of the unfinished land.
She clambered a short way back up the hill, then stood to have a look around before the light began to fail. The fog that clung to the ground had mounted higher. Her friends could have passed only a stone's throw away while she slept without noticing her.
When she turned her head, she thought she could hear the river not too far away, invisible in some fold of the hill. She began to move sideways along the hillside toward the sound, leaning into the angle of the slope as her feet searched for solid earth. She could at least be grateful, since she had no shoes, that the hill was more soft dirt than sharp stones.
The river remained elusive. In fact, she couldn't see anything that looked like the low, rolling country she had just left.
Lost. And it's getting dark fast.
She had paused to catch her breath on a shelf of rock when she heard the strange sound. The wind had died, but a thin howl still skirled along the hilltop above her, a kind of drawn-out bubbling whistle. The skin at the back of Renie's neck tightened. When a second wailing noise arose from a spot ahead of her and distinctly farther down the slope, her unease curdled into fear. The first voice seemed to hear it and reply, keening and gobbling like some sort of underwater hyena, and Renie's heart stuttered in her chest.
There was no time to analyze—she knew only that she did not want to be caught between whatever these two things were. She turned and scrambled back across the hillside, missing footholds in the diminishing light so that twice she came very close to a long and perhaps mortal fall.
Just move, keep moving. . . . She had a strange and inexplicable certainty that whatever entities moaned along the slopes above and behind her were not just making noise for its own sake, but were hunting for . . . something. For Renie herself, if she was extremely unlucky. Or perhaps for anything warm that moved, which wasn't a lot better.
The chill wind numbed her skin, enabling her to ignore the countless scratches and bumps of her awkward clamber, but she could feel the cold sucking the strength out of her as well and knew she could not keep up such a pace for long. The cry of the thing on the hilltop seemed farther away now, but the answering moan was at least as loud as before if not louder; Renie chanced a look back and then wished she hadn't. Something pale was moving along the hillside as though following her tracks.
Barely visible through the murk, it flapped and billowed like a man in a bedsheet, but seemed larger than that and much more terrifyingly alien. Unstable shadows moved across its ghostly surface—a horrible suggestion of a face, swimming in and out of focus. As she stared, transfixed, a dark uneven hole opened in the middle of the features to emit the mournful, bubbling cry. As the thing on top of the hill responded, farther away but not by any means far enough for her to head upslope, Renie bolted forward along the hillside, sacrificing caution for speed. The sound of the pursuers filled her with icy dread. Anything, even tumbling to her death down the hill, would be better than being caught by such pale, formless things.
She nearly got her wish when she plunged her foot through a mat of fallen branches that she thought was solid ground. She lost her balance, swung her arms for a moment, then fell and began to roll. Only sheer luck saved her—a tree, bent almost double by years of wind and gnarled as an old man's hand, stood right in her path. As she freed herself from the tangling branches, scratched bloody in a dozen places, another throbbing cry floated up, but it sounded more distant now.
A moment's fierce joy at the idea that she had rolled so far down was suddenly dashed when she realized that this noise came from below her—a third hunter. In confirmation, two more calls echoed from the slope above her head, rising in pitch as though they sensed the end of their run, their quarry's failing strength.
Renie crouched, gasping shallowly, full of useless, terrified thoughts. They had surrounded her—perhaps from pure brute instinct, perhaps because they had planned to do so from the start. She was caught between them now: already she thought she could see the nearest, a wan, deathly shape only a little thicker than the mist, bobbing leglessly along the slope like a jellyfish in an ocean current, moving slowly but inexorably toward her. Her heart was thumping like a high-speed rhythm track.
She realized she was clutching at the lighter and pulled it out of her thin garment. It was useless, but even so she was desperate to hear a voice, any voice. She suddenly couldn't imagine what danger she had thought so great that she had avoided using it before.
"Hello, M–Martine, a–a–anyone?" Fear was taking her breath; she could barely speak. "Is someone listening? Please, answer me?" Silence—even the spectral searchers had fallen still. As she tried the command sequence again, all Renie could see was swirling mist, gray tree-shadows. "Martine? I heard you before—can you hear me now?"
The voice that came back was diminished but surprisingly clear, so much so that Renie felt a moment of pointless hope, as though her friends might only be a few meters distant, might suddenly come rushing out of the fog to rescue her. "Renie? Is that you? Renie? We hear you. Talk to us."
"Jesus Mercy," Renie said quietly. "It's you, Martine." She struggled for composure—it was almost certain her friends could do nothing for her now. She must tell them what she could, tell them what she had seen and experienced, "We never left the mountain," she began. "We woke up and you were gone. We're in what must be the White Ocean the others talked about. But I've lost !Xabbu and Sam and now I'm lost, too."
". . . Can't understand you very well," Martine replied. "Where are you exactly?"
She was nowhere. She was in the realms of terror. She had to force herself to remember what she had thought about so long. "I think . . . oh, God, I think we're in the heart of the system." The tears started again. "But I'm in trouble—bad trouble. . . !"