Jake's grandmother stood with him near the eastern rope.
Two hundred people milled around the gathering field in the early morning cold, packs on their backs, breath visible, the energy of months compressed into the last few minutes before seven. Someone had put up folding tables with volunteers checking names. A man near the front was carrying a wooden crate he refused to explain to anyone who asked. Most of them were seventeen or eighteen. Jake had turned fifteen in the spring.
Jake's grandmother had cried the night before and decided this morning she was going to be practical.
"You have the list," she said.
"I have the list."
"The water purification tablets are in the front pocket."
"I know."
"You'll lose track of them if you put them anywhere else."
"Gran."
She looked at him. He looked back. She was sixty-three and had raised him since he was four and had not, in all that time, found a way to make him do something he'd decided not to do.
"Two years," she said. "You'd have gone with the rest of them."
Jake didn't answer.
She had been making that argument since the spring and it had never once worked.
"Your father," she started.
"I know."
"I was going to say — your father may not be who you're expecting."
"I'm not expecting anything. I don't know him."
"I know you don't." She fixed the strap of his pack, which didn't need fixing. "That's what I mean."
He let her fix it. She straightened his collar and stood back with the expression she'd worn when he was seven and decided to climb the water tower, except this time she wasn't going to call anyone.
"I'll be careful," he said.
She watched him.
"I'll try to be careful," he said.
She was looking straight at him when she said it. "There he is." She squeezed his arm once, hard, and let go.
The portal opened at seven.
A shimmer in the air over the field — vertical, deliberate, a faint green-tinged light on the other side. The field emptied toward it. Some ran. Jake walked at a normal pace and didn't look back.
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
Rain on soil, and something sweet underneath it he had no name for. The portal closed behind him and there was just the forest.
The trees were enormous. Their trunks rose straight and dark and vanished into a canopy so dense it had become its own ceiling, a second sky made of leaves and branches so thick the real sky above it was rumor. The air below was perfectly still. No wind. No movement. Roots spread outward across the ground in every direction, each one wider than Jake was tall, moss covering all of it in an unbroken deep green that softened every edge and filled every gap until the ground itself looked alive and breathing slowly.
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Light came down in amber pieces. Shafts of it, widely spaced, falling through gaps in the canopy and landing on the moss in bright warm circles. Between the shafts the air was green and dim and dense with the particular stillness of centuries.
Jake stood in it. He'd pictured the arrival differently — crowds, noise, some kind of orientation. Instead there was this. A forest that was older than anything he'd ever stood inside, and the total absence of anyone to tell him what to do with that.
He picked a direction and started walking.
His feet found the roots and followed them. The ground was the roots — wood and moss layered over each other until the original soil was somewhere far below. He scrambled over ridges, dropped into gaps, his hands catching bark that was dry and warm and grooved deep enough to put his fingers into.
He kept stopping. A root system that arched over the ground taller than he was, the space underneath it dark and dry and perfectly enclosed. A nest in the far corner — leaves pressed flat in a rough circle. He crouched, studied it, and left it alone.
He found a stream in a low gully — dark water over dark stones, the moss growing right to the waterline. He used a purification tablet, refilled his bottle, sat on a root and ate half a bar. A large insect landed on his knee and stayed there through most of the bar. He watched it go.
The light shifted as the day wore on. The amber shafts moved through the canopy in long slow sweeps, each one warm on his face for a moment before the shade took over. The shadows between the oldest trunks deepened. He started checking those spaces before he passed them. His feet found a rhythm on the roots. His breathing had settled. The ache in his legs from the first hour was gone. He was getting used to it — the scale, the quiet, the green weight of the air.
He was stepping over a root, eyes on his footing, when the creature came out of the dark to his left.
No warning. Weight and speed, slamming into his side and driving him into the root. He went down with it on top of him — black feathers, a hot animal smell, pressure across his back. He got a hand free and shoved. His palm hit something solid that didn't move. The creature's head snapped toward his arm and he pulled it back, jaws closing on air close enough that he felt it.
He got his back against the root. The creature was between him and everywhere — low to the ground, long, feathers flat against its body. Pale gold eyes. It adjusted its angle one step at a time, stopping between each one.
Jake drew his knife.
The creature shifted. He threw himself sideways across the root as it lunged, felt its body go over him, scrambled to get on top — and his Vincu came up. His forearms blazed. A hard involuntary flash off his skin that lit the undergrowth white.
The creature seized, blinded. Jake drove the knife down with both hands.
It took longer than he expected. When it was over he sat back on his heels in the moss with blood on his jacket.
He'd practiced his Vincu since it came in — alone, no guidance, working out what it would and wouldn't do. It had never done that. Whatever threshold the real thing crossed that practice hadn't, he'd found it.
Jake laughed. Genuine, a little ragged. He sat there until it passed, then wiped his knife on the moss and stood up. His hands were shaking. He watched them until they stopped, which took longer than the fight had.
The forest took the creature back. By the time he glanced over his shoulder the moss and undergrowth had already started the long process of making it part of the floor. A bird landed on the nearest root, considered Jake, considered the body. It had priorities and Jake wasn't one of them.
The smell reached him before anything he could see.
Something wrong underneath the damp green of the air. He slowed. The undergrowth ahead was broken across a wide area. He picked his way closer and saw the tent first, half-collapsed, then the pack on the ground beside it turned out and mostly emptied, and then the person.
He stopped at the edge of it.
Young. Maybe not much older than him. The camp had been picked through — not ransacked, sorted. The things still on the ground were the things someone had decided weren't worth taking.
He went through what was left. A coil of rope. Two energy bars under a root. A small folding tool. He took it all.
The light bled out as he walked. The forest's sounds changed with it — the birds going quiet in stages, slower things taking their place in the undergrowth. He found a wide root to put his back against and stopped for the night. Ate one of the bars. Didn't make a fire.
He sat with his knife across his knee. The creature he could make sense of. An animal doing what animals did, and his Vincu had done something new, and the whole thing had been frightening and then sort of funny.
The camp was different. The pack gone through item by item by someone who'd had all the time they wanted. They were somewhere in this forest. That was the part that wouldn't settle.
He watched the dark between the roots. Above him the canopy was black, the amber light long gone, and the forest sat around him the way it had sat for millennia — enormous and ancient and completely absorbed in itself.
The animals were probably the smaller problem.