‘This is not an accident. If she has been taken, we can shout for her until our throats bleed: she will be unable to answer. And if, as I suspect, she has left us to find the geomancer on her own, she will not want to answer.’ He made his lips into a mean, thin line.
‘Shit,’ said Mary. ‘The ungrateful bitch.’
‘We can’t just assume that,’ said Dalip. His heart was starting to race. Even faster than when he’d been surprised by the sea serpent. ‘We have to try and find her.’
‘Do we?’ Stanislav’s whole face was now set and sour. ‘How?’
Dalip spun around again, knowing what he’d see: the ocean, the estuary, the forest, the distant mountains. They could search from now until … whenever, and not scratch so much as a tiny fraction of this vast wild space.
‘But,’ he objected. ‘We can’t abandon her.’
‘It is decent and noble of you to want to try to find her.’ Stanislav’s voice rumbled deep in his chest. ‘If she had come to harm between the headland and the camp, one of us would have seen or heard something. If she had made it as far as the fire, then she would have met either you or Mary. No. She has abandoned us. Deliberately. You worked with her, Mary.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that. She wasn’t part of our crew. She just tagged on to us after it all went tits up.’ She leaned on the net’s pole. ‘Fuck. What does this mean?’
‘It means we three should talk.’ Despite there being no eavesdroppers, Stanislav beckoned them, and Dalip and Mary moved closer. ‘We are thrown together by an accident of chance, yes? We will have different views and different goals, and there is no reason why we should agree on everything.’
Dalip was still looking around him, wondering what might have happened to Grace, even though he hardly knew her – and it turned out that no one did. Now, she was gone.
‘Concentrate,’ said Stanislav. He pressed his thumb and forefinger together and gestured in Dalip’s face like he was jabbing his point home. ‘We cannot help her, or hinder her. We must consider our own safety.’
‘You want us to form a gang, right?’ said Mary.