“Pup.”

I just about jumped out of my skin, then scrambled around trying to get up.

“I will not hurt you,” the voice said.

Finally I managed to get to my knees. It was hard going — my muscles were cramped from the cold.

I stared into the night, my breath coming in gasps. I couldn’t see whoever’d spoken. There were about a million stars in the sky, but no moon. It was very dark.

I tried twice to speak before I managed to make any sound.

“Who’s there?”

“Ghosteater.”

My mind wrestled with the word, trying to understand. Madisyn’s giant doggie? Here?

“Ghosteater … from Dorf?”

He materialized out of the darkness, silvery coat luminous in the starlight, and walked toward me on his footless legs.

“Did you come here for me?”

Stupid question. Why else would he be here?

“The émigré Cordus sent people. I came too.”

He looked up at the stars and took several deep breaths. Then his golden eyes came back to my face, and he studied me in silence for some time. Finally, he walked up to me, circled like a huge hound, and lay down.

“Lie here,” he said. “I will warm you.”

He’d get no argument from me — I was freezing. I lay down next to him and nestled my back up against his belly, which was soft and very warm. I was still cold, but it was a lot better than before. I fell asleep immediately.

In the morning, Ghosteater used his keen nose to find my jeans and sweater, which had drifted some way downriver. While he was off retrieving them, I searched up and down the river for the ’pus but couldn’t find it.

After Ghosteater returned with my clothes and I laid them out to dry, he gave all my bites a thorough cleaning with his tongue. I had trouble thinking of him as an animal, so it seemed weirdly intimate. I tried to squirm away, but he put a massive foreleg across me and held me down. Then he caught a large fish in the river and watched as I ate it. I felt like a toddler under the eye of a stern parent.

Once I’d pulled my still-damp clothes on, I started to search again for the ’pus.

“What do you seek?”

“I had a tree-octopus with me yesterday. It fell in the river right about here.”

Ghosteater waded into the water, passing his nose delicately over the surface.

“It is dead.”

“You can’t possibly know that!”

The great beast stood in the water, looking up at me in silence. Then he came back to shore and shook himself.

“Scent tells the story. There are great fish in the river. They eat small creatures.”

I stared at him, not wanting to believe it. He just looked back at me, matter of fact, emotionless.

I sat down. All the exultation I’d felt the night before turned to bitterness. I’d managed to save myself from my own idiotic decision to leave the rainforest, but I’d gotten my friend killed. It’d died trying to save me. With all the power it had, no fish could’ve gotten it if it hadn’t depleted itself fighting the plant-dinos.

Ghosteater sat nearby. For a time he watched me in silent interest.

“Big things eat little things,” he said at last. “Big things die. Then little things eat them.”

“It wasn’t just a ‘little thing.’ It was my friend. It sacrificed itself for me. It’s my fault it died.”

He pondered me, tipping his head to the side like a dog. He seemed to find my attachment to the ’pus mysterious and interesting.

“Can you tell if it was male or female?”

Ghosteater thought for a few seconds, seeming to roll the remembered scent over his tongue.

“Female.”

I nodded, feeling empty. I wished I’d known before.

My rescue may have been well in hand, but the next day and a half weren’t pleasant.

I didn’t really understand Ghosteater’s explanation of how Graham’s rock had brought me here. He could speak to me, yes, but communicating complex ideas seemed beyond him. I could only take his word for it that some of Cordus’s people were coming.

I wanted to leave for the coast immediately, but the beast refused. It would take me several days to climb back up the mountain, and we had no way to carry water. Furthermore, my wounds had left me weak and in a lot of pain.

So there we stayed, waiting for the rest of the party to catch up. Ghosteater caught fish. I watched. He ate them. I ate them. He drank water. So did I. I tossed and squirmed, trying to find a way to sit or lie that wasn’t painful. He sat and watched me, always silent unless I asked him something. At night, I curled up against him and tried to stay warm.

On my third day in the valley, I saw Zion, Kara, and Williams coming down the mountain. It was humbling. The walk that had taken me five days had taken them less than three.

I got up and walked across the blackened plain to meet them, Ghosteater by my side. When they saw me coming, they broke into a jog. But despite the hurry, when they reached me, there was an oddly awkward moment where we all just stood there, looking at each other. I was thinking it seemed weird to see people here. I don’t know what they were thinking. Maybe they were amazed I was alive.

Kara broke the silence. “Beth, are you all right?”

It seemed like a bizarre question. There were a dozen ways in which I was and wasn’t all right. I thought about it. In the end, I just said, “Yeah.”

She came forward and took my hand. Her eyes widened. “Jesus, what did this to you?”

Williams studied me with an unreadable expression. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s covered with cuts and puncture wounds. It’s like something bit her all over.”

“Mini-dinosaurs,” I said.

That was greeted with silence.

“We didn’t see anything like that,” Zion finally said.

“They were in the dry forest,” Ghosteater said. “The fire killed them.”

Had I really killed them all? I felt sick.

“Okay, then. Let me just fix those cuts,” Kara said, sounding disturbed.

It was a quick healing. When she was done, I felt a million times better. She even took care of my sunburn. Then we walked back to the river.

Ghosteater declared the huge fish in the river harmless to humans, so the rescue party members bathed. I sat there feeling beyond pathetic for not just swimming across when the plant-dinos were after me. Then again, there were ferns on the other side of the river, too.

Zion built a fire and Williams set up tarps and sleeping bags for the night. Ghosteater fished. We roasted what he caught over the fire.

Eating cooked food was good, but it felt wrong not to have the ’pus there to share it with.

While we ate, night fell. I finally got a comprehensible explanation about Graham’s rock: it was one-half of a “carven strait,” a rare and ancient device used for traveling. They didn’t have to be opened with a working. Instead, they generated their own opening: if someone touched one stone, they’d be transported to wherever the companion happened to be. Apparently the art of making them was lost, and Cordus had been extremely surprised to find a set of them at large.

So although I hadn’t noticed it, there had to be a stone ball in the sea where I arrived that matched the one I’d touched in Justine’s room. Touching the one here would take us back to Cordus’s estate, where Graham’s rock was now.

After these explanations, an uncomfortable silence fell. No doubt they wanted to know what had happened to me, but I didn’t want to talk about it, especially not about the fire. Kara asked me a few questions, and I answered monosyllabically. When she persisted, I just got up and walked away, tossing them some lame excuse about stretching my legs.

I kept going a ways, well out of the circle of firelight. When I finally stopped, I looked up at the stars. There were so many of them. The Milky Way stretched across the sky in a blaze of white light, mottled with red and gold and swirls of darkness. I didn’t recognize any constellations.

I could taste soot at the back of my throat. The wind blew the stuff all over the place.

I had done this. I’d come to some little corner of the S-Em. I’d found Octoworld, Miniworld, and Fernworld, and I’d destroyed at least two of the three. I’d made a generous friend and gotten her killed.

At the same time, I’d survived. I’d survived what Graham did to me, and I’d survived my own bad choices.

The wind found the holes in my sweater, chilling me.

Eventually, Kara came looking for me, and I went back to the fire.

Everyone except Ghosteater crawled into a sleeping bag. No one said anything.

Climbing back up the mountain took almost two days because everyone had to stick to the slower pace I set. As we finally crested the summit, I was terribly afraid I would find the tree-’puses’ rainforest burned as well, but it was intact. The fire damage stopped abruptly as we walked into the rain: there were blackened earth and torched trunks on one side of an invisible line, lush ferns and towering trees on the other.

“Is there a barrier, here?”

“Yes,” Ghosteater said.

I wondered why we could go through it but the fire couldn’t. I didn’t ask, though. If I raised the subject, it’d invite questions.

We stopped for the night shortly afterwards. The forest was too dense and wet to build a fire, so we huddled under the tarps, eating dried meat and fruit. Once everyone was settled in their sleeping bags, I slipped away into the darkening forest and found a ’pus. I coaxed it into my lap and then explained what had happened to the one I’d carried with me — that she’d saved my life, and that I knew it was my fault she was dead, and that I was sorry.

The ’pus stared back at me, its strange oblong pupil reminding me of my friend’s. Not surprisingly, it didn’t respond. I had no idea if it understood me.

When I was done talking, I sat there for a long while, stroking the ’pus and feeling strange. Part of the feeling was sadness, and part of it was remorse. But there was also a striking sense of having been changed in ways I couldn’t understand. I was at a loss.

Eventually I got up to head back to camp. Oddly, the ’pus wanted to come with me. When I got in my sleeping bag, it settled on a root near my face.

I woke up several times during the night, and each time it was still there.

In the morning, it was gone.

A day and a half later, we reached the shore.

Williams led us out to the point where rocks and water met. We waded into the gentle waves until Ghosteater indicated the strait was beneath us. I looked down. The water was clear, but it was impossible to pick the stone ball out of the rocky seabed. As I watched, Ghosteater dove down, kicking vigorously to reach the bottom. We all watched as he touched a certain place with his nose, then disappeared. The water tossed violently as it filled the space he’d occupied, and I lost sight of the spot he’d touched.

“Ryder,” Williams said. “Go.”

Taking a deep breath, I bent down to the place I thought the strait was and began feeling around with my hands. On the third try, I must’ve touched it because I found myself sprawled on the tile floor of a windowless room beside a stone ball — the matching strait, the one Graham had been carrying.

“Move away,” Ghosteater said from the corner.

I scrambled over to the wall and waited while the others appeared one by one.

Once everyone was there, I thanked them for coming to get me.

“Sure,” Kara said, “no problem.”

Zion shrugged. “Not like we had a choice, right?”

Ghosteater cocked his head and stared at me.

Williams said nothing — just grabbed a towel from the pile that had been left in the corner and walked out.

“Don’t mind them,” Kara said. “They’re assholes. It’s not your fault you ended up there.”

“It is your fault we had to go so far to find you,” Zion said, toweling her hair. “Next time, stay put.”

Her words stung. I felt defensive, even though I’d been berating myself for that exact mistake.

“I didn’t know if anyone would come for me. Or if Graham or Lord Limu might be the one who came, if anyone did.”

“Exactly,” Kara said staunchly. “I would’ve been on the move, too.”

Zion rolled her eyes and left.

Kara and I dried off, then stood there awkwardly.

“Well,” she said, “we’d better go find Lord Cordus. I mean, you’d better go find him. Hopefully he won’t need to talk to me.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

She gave me a pained smile and left. Ghosteater slid out behind her, leaving me alone in the quiet room. The carven strait sat on the floor, shining dully. It was a profoundly anticlimactic ending to ten days of wonder, terror, and pain.