She looked from the plane to Benny and back again, and there was such fury in her eyes that he made sure he wasn’t in easy swinging range of her bokken. “You’re crazy,” she barked. “Of course it’s the one we saw.”

“No, it isn’t, and keep your voice down.” Benny came and stood beside her. “Look at it, Nix. This thing’s been here for at least a year. Probably more.”

“How would you know?”

Nix’s harshness was beginning to grate on him, and he snapped back.

“Open your eyes,” he said, his own tone growing sharp. He pointed to the small trees that had poked through the bottom of the trench. “Look at those saplings. Come on—they’re at least a year old. At least that, and maybe older. Some of them look two years old.”

“They’re saplings, Benny. Saplings bend. They could have bent over and sprung back up.”

“No way. They’d have been snapped off. Look, there are bigger trees that were torn right out of the ground.”

It was true; the dead trunks of a hundred small pine trees lay in the trench, their limbs snapped, roots torn out of the sandy soil. Many of them were ripped completely apart, and there were dried sticks that could easily have been saplings that were killed during the crash. Benny pulled a few up and brought them over to Nix.

“See?” he said. “These were the saplings the plane hit. Those others could never have survived this big freaking thing crashing down on them.”

“So what?” she demanded. Somehow, with her voice lowered to a whisper, she sounded even angrier and more annoyed with him. “Since when are you an expert on plant growth?”

“I’m not an expert, Nix, but I’m not stupid, either.”

Nix started to say something, then thought better of it and instead said, “It could have crashed after we saw it. That’s eight months. You don’t know how fast juniper saplings grow, Benny. These could be only eight months old.”

“Maybe,” Benny conceded, “but I doubt it.”

They moved forward together, cautiously, eyes searching the dead flying machine.

They were so riveted by the plane that they did not look into the surrounding woods and so did not see the dead zoms sprawled twenty yards down a crooked game trail; or the two bloody spots where a pair of reapers had died from Lilah’s savage attack. Their bodies were gone, and bloody footprints trailed away into the shrubs.