"So we're near the food store," Turk said, and Dr. Dvali ran recklessly a few yards ahead, where the remains of the storefront were vaguely visible behind a picket of alien growths.

The quake hadn't spared this part of the mall, and if the others had taken shelter here they might be dead.

This was so obvious it didn't need saying. Dr. Dvali wanted to start digging immediately—futile as that might be, the three of them versus a few tons of debris—but Turk said, "Let's circle around back first.

The structure looks maybe a little more intact back that way."

Dvali stood slump-shouldered at the brink of the rubble field a moment longer, and for the first time Lise felt a degree of sympathy for him.

All night, all morning, Lise had been imagining the women and Isaac huddled in some safe place; the group would be reunited, and then she and Turk could set out for some safe harbor even if the mad Fourths insisted on staying here in Freakland. That was her best-case scenario.

Now it looked like that might not happen. The story might end tragically. There might be no way to escape from the dark forest. Maybe, she thought, for Isaac and the women, the story was already over.

* * * * *

The rear of the mall seemed at first glance more intact than the front, but that was only because the concrete loading bays had been left undamaged by the quake. Structurally, everything was a mess. Lise felt heartsick, and Dr. Dvali seemed to be suppressing tears.

It was Turk who continued to pick his way along the border of the rubble field with grim determination, and it was Turk who finally turned and held up his palm in a stop-here gesture and said quietly, "Listen."

Lise stood still. She heard the usual flutterings of the forest, to which she had almost grown accustomed.

The wind was up, and the luminous globes made their muted wooden music. But beneath that? Faintly?

A sound like scratching, a sound like digging.

Dvali said, "They're alive! They must be!"

"Let's not rush to judgment," Turk said. "Follow me and try to keep quiet."

Dvali was Fourth enough to suppress his surge of renewed optimism. The three of them walked within an arm's length of one another, Turk up front, following the sound. The digging-scratching sound grew more clearly audible with each step, and Lise's own optimism began to falter. There was something not right about that sound. The relentless gentle rhythm of it, somehow too patient to be completely human…

Then Turk made his halt gesture again and beckoned them forward to look.