Book Three of the Travelers (12 page)

T
he class arrived at the wilderness preserve early the next morning and disembarked from the bus. As soon as they had unloaded their packs full of gear, the bus sped away.

Patrick had realized that a field trip to the preserve was actually the perfect answer. First, by bringing his class in the guise of an “educational field trip,” he would be granted access to the park so that he could recover the stolen book. But even more important, he would have the entire class with him. He hoped that during the course of the field trip, he would be able to figure out who had been to the park before, and that would tell him who had stolen the book. Besides, it would be a nice break for the rest of the students to have some time outside. Often people grew so accustomed to the pace of daily life underground that they stopped coming above the surface to enjoy the beauty to behold there. As far as Patrick was concerned, reminding his students of life up here was a helpful lesson for them.

“Okay, everyone,” Patrick said as soon as each of his students had shouldered their packs. “I want you to listen carefully.” The group was huddled in the chilly morning air next to a small wooden shelter at the edge of the road. “We spend most of our time underground. Some of you might feel a little uncomfortable with all the open space. That's okay. In fact, it's a good thing. You need to stay sharp here. This is a wilderness preserve. Em, I asked you to do a little research. Would you be so kind as to tell us about the animals that live here?”

Em stepped forward, brushed her short blond hair back from her forehead. “The preserve contains eleven cougars, nine black bears, and two wolf packs. All these animals are capable of killing and eating humans. As a general rule they will stay away from a group of people. But wolves and cougars, in particular, have no problem attacking and killing individual humans. Four years ago, a doctoral student was killed and eaten by a cougar. All they found was her pinkie finger.”

A chorus of voices murmured surprise and excitement.

“In addition,” Patrick added, “we'll be crossing a number of streams. The forecast today is for pop-up thunderstorms. A small stream can suddenly turn into a flash flood. There are several high promontories that—”

“What's a promontory?” one of the students, a boy named Roger, said.

“A cliff,” Jay Oh said, rolling his eyes.

“Hey, everybody here isn't a genius!” Roger said.

“Two boys snuck in here last year and fell off some
high rocks,” Patrick added. “I wouldn't even call it a cliff. It was only four meters high. But one of the boys died before help arrived.”

“Any other cool fatalities here?” Jay said.

Patrick frowned at him. “Look, you can joke all you want. But this is not your snug little tunnel back home. There are an enormous number of things that can go wrong here. Hypothermia, lightning, trees falling on you, slipping and falling, animal attacks, I mean the list goes on and on. So don't get separated from the group. And when I ask you to do something, do it.” He knew the likelihood of any real danger to the kids was minute as long as they were careful and followed common sense, but he figured the more he scared them, the safer bet that the students would indeed take care.

“Dr. Discipline!” Jay said.

“We've got comms, though, right?” Em said, holding up her silver communicator.

“Sure, of course. You've all got your comms. We can track all of you with them. If you run into trouble or get separated from the group, give me a shout on the comm, and I'll come find you.”

“So…remind me, why are we doing this?” a student named Shana asked. She was a tall, athletic girl who, if anything, was even more rebellious than Jay Oh.

“Education,” Patrick said.

Shana looked at Jay and made a face. Jay laughed.

“All right, let's go,” Patrick said.

 

Twenty minutes later it began to rain.

Shana looked up incredulously at the sky. “Wow,”
she said, holding out her hands, letting the fat drops smack against her hands. “It feels funny doesn't it?”

It wasn't that the kids had never been aboveground. But very few people spent much time outside. And if they did, they certainly didn't stand around in the rain. She stared up at the angry sky. Wet drops of rain splashed onto her face. Then she began to look fearful. “Are we going to get struck by lightning?”

“Highly unlikely,” Patrick said. “There are two trails. The short trail goes over that ridge over there.” He pointed at a large hill topped by bare rock. “I was planning on taking the short trail. But I think you're right. It wouldn't be much fun if we got struck by lightning. We'll take the long trail. We should be okay.”

“You sure?” Jay Oh said, a note of challenge in his voice.

“Sure,” Patrick said. He wished he felt as sure as he sounded, though. He was an experienced hiker, but thunderstorms still scared him. The boiling clouds above the group looked like a cauldron of gray fire.

The novelty of the rain wore off quickly. Soon it was just uncomfortable and cold. The students grumbled as they filed down the path through the ancient trees.

“Why can't we go back?” Shana said.

“Yeah!” said Roger. “This stinks.”

“The bus won't be back until nightfall,” Patrick said. “We'd just be standing there in the rain.”

The grumbling continued as the rain continued to fall.

“How did people stand it before we lived underground?” one of the students said.

“People were different back then,” said another student. “They didn't feel things the way we do.”

“Not true,” Patrick said. “They just had to endure things we don't.” He lifted the collar of his coat. It only served to funnel more rain down his neck. He decided to try distracting the kids. “Anyone care to name some things our ancestors had to put up with that we do not?”

“Cancer,” said Em.

“Sunburn,” said Roger.

“Heat and cold.”

“War.”

“Crime.”

“Good,” Patrick said. “Anything else?”

Patrick continued to ply them with questions, but after a while the group sank into a glum silence, refusing to answer.

Finally Shana said, “I'm done.”

“Look, Shana—,” Patrick said.

“Nope. Forget it. I'm going back. I'm getting on the comm and calling for an air taxi.”

She pulled her comm off her belt, frowned, shook the comm. “Crud!” she said. “There's something wrong with my comm.”

“Shana!”

But Patrick's headstrong student refused to listen. She simply turned and walked back down the sodden trail, talking angrily to her comm.

“Shana, you get back here right now, or you'll be repeating this class!” he shouted. He hated teachers who threatened things all the time. But he simply couldn't have
kids wandering around in the woods by themselves.

Shana didn't even look back.

“Wait at the shelter, young lady,” he shouted. “I'll deal with you when we get back!”

Shana disappeared around the bend.

Patrick pulled out his comm so he could track Shana. But strangely, his comm wasn't working right either.
SIGNAL STRENGTH ZERO
read the display. He'd never even
seen
a message like that on a comm before. Something must have happened to the satellite uplink. Underground there were low-frequency radio transmitters in every room and tunnel. But aboveground comms had to rely on satellite relays. If something happened to the satellite connection…

“That's strange,” he said.

“You didn't hear?” Jay Oh said with an odd little smile. “Sunspots. It's messing up all aboveground communications satellites right now.” He waved his comm in the air. “Mine's been offline since we left Manhattan.”

Patrick felt a knot of fear in his gut. This was not good.

“Guess we all have to go back, huh?” Roger said hopefully.

Patrick clamped his jaw shut. “No. She can go back and wait in the shelter until we get there.”

“Oh, because the rest of us are just
loving
standing out in the rain,” Roger said.

Jay Oh eyed Patrick with a cryptic smile on his face, as though he were watching an interesting science experiment.

“What are you grinning at?” Patrick said, snapping
uncharacteristically at the boy. He turned and began walking down the trail. “Let's move!”

 

The mood of the class worsened with every stride.
Am I doing the right thing?
Patrick kept thinking. The book might not even be in the cave. It might be a decoy signal. The thief might have found it and hidden it there. It might be anything.

And even if it really was in the cave, was it worth the risk to the students just to find it?

Oh, don't be ridiculous. It's not really dangerous. It's just uncomfortable.
Kids today had it ridiculously easy, he reminded himself. A little discomfort would do them good, and he knew he could keep them safe.

As they continued to thread their way through the canopy of massive trees, Patrick tried to keep a close eye on the students to see if any of them showed any familiarity with the terrain. If the thief was among them, eventually he or she would likely give themselves away. But the students just plodded along listlessly, staring at the ground.

The rain continued for most of the morning. It was late spring and the temperature was relatively mild. But some of the students, used to the constant seventy-two-degree air underground, were starting to shiver.

“Why aren't we there yet?” Roger said. “I thought you said—”

“We took the longer trail to stay off that exposed ridge,” Patrick said. “I guess it's taking a little longer than I thought.”

But Patrick was worrying a little now too. It seemed it was taking a good bit longer than he'd expected. The
trail had split several times. He had been confident each time that he'd taken the correct route. But now he wasn't so sure.

He had thought about bringing a map printed on plastic paper, but then he'd decided not to. The comm would work fine. Now that he was here, he found the tiny screen was hard to read. And without the satellite uplink to give them directions, he was beginning to suspect that he'd taken a wrong turn. Even the long trail was only supposed to have been eight kilometers. Surely they had traveled farther than that by now.

At around eleven thirty the rain finally ended, and the sun burst out from behind the clouds. As a shaft of warm light hit them, the students broke into a ragged cheer.

“See?” Patrick said. “This isn't so bad, huh?”

He decided now that they had a little good news, maybe he'd better break the bad news to them.

“That said, without the satellite uplink, I think I may have, uh…”

There was a loud groan from the group.

“You're saying we're
lost
?” one of the students said.

“We're not lost. We just…went a little out of the way,” he said. He pointed to the gentle incline rising up from the trail. “Jay and Em, I want you guys to climb up this hill. Look around in all directions until you spot a small lake. That's where we're heading. We'll just figure out a way to get there. Okay?”

Jay and Em shrugged, looked at each other, then began trudging up the hill.

As he watched them go, Patrick studied Jay carefully.
Did he show any signs of having been here before? As far as Patrick could tell, he was basically a good kid. But he was also one of those people who resisted authority at every turn. Plus, he was one of the brightest students Patrick had ever had. Whoever had stolen the books had also done some very high-level trickery on the computer to hide what he'd done. Most of the students in the class just didn't seem to have the mental horsepower to do what this thief had done.

His gaze shifted to Em. She might well have been even smarter than Jay. But she wasn't a rebel. He just didn't see her as the type to destroy irreplaceable historical artifacts.

Patrick sighed. If either Em or Jay had been here before, they showed no sign of it.

“What do you think, guys?” Patrick said. “Lunch break?”

 

While the students perched themselves on a fallen log and began pulling out their lunches, Patrick pulled out his comm again. It was still not working correctly. Then, for a moment, the satellite link strengthened, and he could see the route they should have taken on the tiny map. They were about two kilometers off the trail. There had been a fork, and he'd taken the wrong path. He remembered it clearly and saw his mistake now. Fortunately, it would be easy to get back.

He quickly checked the tracer to see if he could tell where Shana was. He was glad to see that the tiny red circle representing her location showed up brightly on the map. But then—to his dismay—he realized that she
wasn't anywhere close to the shelter by the road. Instead, she was on completely the wrong trail. He zoomed in on her location. The trail she was on, he noticed, actually put her closer to the cave than Patrick and the rest of the class were. He frowned. Why hadn't she gone back to the shelter? Was she lost? This whole thing was going from bad to worse. Then he noticed shading on the area where Shana was apparently hiking. He could just make out an overlay on the shaded area that read
WOLF PACK RANGE. DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT SUPERVISION
.

This was not good. Wolves were actually the most effective predators on the American continent. A wolf pack could take down a lone human without even breaking a sweat.

As he was staring at the tiny screen, the red circle wavered and disappeared.
DOWNLINK FAILED. SIGNAL STRENGTH ZERO
.

Patrick swallowed.

“Em!” he yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Jay! Guys! Get back down here. Now!”

There was no answer.