“All right,” Ethan Serbin said. “It’s not your choice. I remember being deployed in more than a few places that weren’t my choice either. And in a survival scenario, Connor? You think it’ll be your choice if a plane goes down? Will that be anybody’s choice?”
Jace shook his head.
“So we work with what we have,” Ethan continued. “That’s true with the elements, the weather, supplies, all of it. Certainly, it’s true with your companions. You work with who you have. Not friends yet? Fine. Maybe you will be. Maybe not. But one thing we can’t tolerate-because in a different situation it could get us killed-is disrespect. You keep disrespecting Marco, then how’s he going to look at you when you need him? When you’ve got a broken leg and need him to haul your butt out of here? You think you’re going to wish you’d shown him a little more respect then, a little more courtesy?”
Jace shrugged, trying to look sullen and unimpressed.
“I think you will,” Ethan said. “And when the two of you work together to get all of our firewood tonight, him for his language, you for disrespect, maybe you’ll consider that.”
“Maybe,” Jace said, still trying to show just enough attitude to get by. Ethan looked at him for a long time, and then he turned away.
The rest of them were all watching Jace, and Jace knew the look in their eyes and knew what it meant. He had seen it on Wayne Potter’s face enough times. He was a target now, not just of the men from the quarry, but of the boys he was supposed to spend the summer with. All because he couldn’t remember his own fake name.
“All right,” Ethan Serbin said, “time for somebody to tell me where we are.”
Ethan would do this often enough, stop abruptly and challenge their awareness of the land around them, but this time Jace had the sense that he was doing it to draw the attention of the others away from him, as if Ethan, too, knew that trouble was brewing.
“No maps, no compasses,” Ethan said. “Tell me which way we’re facing.”
They were facing a mountain. Behind them was a mountain. To their left and right, more mountains. Which direction? This should be easy enough. Jace looked for the sun-was it rising or descending? That would tell him east or west.
“What are you doing, Connor?” Ethan asked.
“Nothing.”
“What were you looking at?” Ethan said patiently.
“The sun.”
“Why?”
Jace shrugged again, still not willing to give up the attitude, and Ethan looked disappointed but didn’t press him.
“Connor’s instinct is the right one,” he said.
“Good little Boy Scout,” Marco whispered.
Yes, it would get bad from here.
“The sky will reorient us when we’re lost,” Ethan was saying. “At night, you’ll use the stars, and during the day, the sun. But right now, I suspect Connor is a little confused. Because where is the sun, guys?”
“Straight up,” Drew said.
“Exactly. We know that it rises in the east and sets in the west, so those times of day are easy. But right now? High noon? How do we know which way we’re facing?”
Nobody had an answer.
“The shadows will tell us,” Ethan said. He lifted his hiking stick, a thin pole with telescoping sections to change the length, and drove the tip into the dirt so that it was sticking straight up out of the ground. “Drew, grab a stone and mark the shadow. The very end of it, the tip.”
Drew dropped a flat stone where the shadow faded into dust.
“Two things we know are always true,” Ethan said. “The sun will rise in the east, and it will set in the west. You could be having the worst day of your life, everything about the world might have just imploded on you, but, boys, the sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. And an object placed in the sun is going to make a shadow. You each have a shadow right now.”
Jace felt an uneasy chill. No, they didn’t each have just one shadow right now. Jace had his own, and he also had two others. They were out there somewhere in the world, and they intended to catch him.
“In the Northern Hemisphere, that means that shadows move clockwise,” Ethan said. “So give the sun just a little time. We’re going to wait on that shadow to move.”
They stood around and sipped some water and waited on the shadow to move. Eventually it crept away from the stone and found the dusty earth beside it. Ethan ate some trail mix and stared at the ground patiently while everyone else fidgeted or gave up and sat down. Jace stayed on his feet, watching the shadow.
“Okay,” Ethan said at last. “Drew, mark it again, with another stone.”
Drew laid a second stone beside the first. They were nearly touching. Ethan pulled his hiking pole from the dirt and laid it across the stones, then knelt and withdrew a long-bladed knife from its sheath on his belt. He laid the knife across the hiking stick so that the tip of its blade was at right angles to the hiking stick.
“Take a look now,” he said. “What does this setup look like to you?”
“A compass,” Ty said. “Four points, four different directions.”
Ethan nodded in approval. “And we know what about the sun? It will never lie to us about what?”
“How it’s moving,” Ty said. “East to west.”
“Exactly. We watched it move just a little bit, not enough to tell us much if we’d just stared up at it, but by using the shadows, we have one stone marking the general east, and another marking the general west. Those directions give us the others, of course. So somebody tell us which way we are facing.”
“North,” Jace said. The knife blade pointed north.
“You got it. Now, this is hardly as precise as a compass, but it will give you the cardinal directions. And if you ever put your stick in the ground and don’t see a shadow at all, that means the sun is due south. You might not see the shadow, but it is still telling you the directions.”
They began hiking again, and the incident with Marco was gone from Jace’s mind; he was hiking along and thinking of the men from the quarry and comparing what he remembered of them with what he knew of Ethan Serbin. He thought that if anyone had a good chance against those two, it was probably Ethan. The problem, as Jace saw it, was simply a matter of numbers: two against one. The odds would be in his hunters’ favor if they came. But maybe out here in his element, Ethan Serbin was good enough that it evened the odds. Maybe he’d see them coming, be aware of them before they were aware of him, and that would turn things in Ethan’s favor. If it came to that-and Jace had been promised that it wouldn’t-he felt that he should probably tell Ethan who he was. His only instruction was to be Connor, but if the men from the quarry arrived, instructions wouldn’t matter. He’d need to be part of the team then, he’d need to help Ethan work with-
When Jace’s feet went out from under him, he had his head up and his hands gripping the pack straps. He wasn’t prepared, and he fell forward onto the rocks, a little cry coming out, not from pain but from surprise. By the time Ethan and the others looked back, he was already down, and nobody up front had seen what had happened: Marco had tripped him.
“You all right?” Ethan said.
“Yes.” Jace was back on his feet, brushing the dirt off and trying to show no pain. It hadn’t been a bad fall, and ordinarily he would have been able to catch himself without really going down, but the weight of the pack was new and threw off his balance, so he’d landed hard. There was a warm wet pulse below his knee that had to be blood. His ripstop pants hadn’t torn, though, so the bleeding was hidden from Ethan’s eyes.
“What happened?”
Ethan was already looking past him, back to those kids in the rear of the line, Marco and Raymond and Drew.