Meg nodded. She didn’t look happy, which made him unhappy, but sometimes you couldn’t share a carcass—or information—if you wanted your own pack to have enough to eat.

“Steve and Jerry are waiting for you,” she said.

He wanted to press his lips to her skin, but he didn’t think she would let him right now, so he walked out to join the other males.

“She’s going to want to buy toilet paper for every person she’s met, isn’t she?” Steve asked as he opened the back door and got in, leaving the front passenger seat for Simon.

“She can’t.” What was this obsession with toilet paper?

After a moment, Jerry said, “Where to?”

Simon directed him to the road and the turn toward the Crowgard’s part of the Courtyard—which meant passing the new sign. He smelled fear, but neither man said anything.

“The information you received that makes you think a big storm is coming,” Steve said. “You didn’t get that from Meg, did you?”

Simon shook his head. “From Jean.”

“Gods above and below.”

He could hear Steve trying to steady his breath. “Simon, Jean is...”

Simon hesitated, thinking of what he’d just said to Meg about keeping information within the pack. But he’d already told Steve and Jerry that a storm was coming. He didn’t feel easy about telling them more, but he removed the letter from his pocket and handed it to Steve. “Her brain is sick. That’s not why she sees what she sees, but maybe it’s the reason she chooses to remember what she sees.”

“Gods,” Steve said again after he read the letter. “All right, we’ll purchase what we can afford.”

“Buy what you can get. The Courtyard has money. We’ll pay for it. You’d better buy what you can for the River Road Community too.”

“Yeah, all right.” Steve handed back the letter. “One thing the ‘Meg, the Trailblazer’ e-mails have done for us is provided us with an expanded network of Intuit settlements. We’ve started a second list of what each settlement makes and what it wants to buy. The village council already decided to purchase as much as we could from our own.”

“Send that list to Meg and Vlad, since Meg doesn’t remember to check e-mail.” He pointed. “Pull up at the bridge. That’s the lake Meg wants you to see.”

“The campus doesn’t have a lake, but there is a creek that runs through that land. I think we could find a spot that could be opened up to make a natural swimming hole,” Steve said. “We’ll take another look when we get back to the island.”

They drove back to the Market Square, letting Simon out when they reached the access way.

“By the way,” he said as he opened the door. “Can Sledgeman’s Freight haul livestock?”