I got up and walked across the blackened plain to meet them, Ghosteater by my side. When they saw me coming, they broke into a jog. But despite the hurry, when they reached me, there was an oddly awkward moment where we all just stood there, looking at each other. I was thinking it seemed weird to see people here. I don’t know what they were thinking. Maybe they were amazed I was alive.

Kara broke the silence. “Beth, are you all right?”

It seemed like a bizarre question. There were a dozen ways in which I was and wasn’t all right. I thought about it. In the end, I just said, “Yeah.”

She came forward and took my hand. Her eyes widened. “Jesus, what did this to you?”

Williams studied me with an unreadable expression. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s covered with cuts and puncture wounds. It’s like something bit her all over.”

“Mini-dinosaurs,” I said.

That was greeted with silence.

“We didn’t see anything like that,” Zion finally said.

“They were in the dry forest,” Ghosteater said. “The fire killed them.”

Had I really killed them all? I felt sick.

“Okay, then. Let me just fix those cuts,” Kara said, sounding disturbed.

It was a quick healing. When she was done, I felt a million times better. She even took care of my sunburn. Then we walked back to the river.

Ghosteater declared the huge fish in the river harmless to humans, so the rescue party members bathed. I sat there feeling beyond pathetic for not just swimming across when the plant-dinos were after me. Then again, there were ferns on the other side of the river, too.

Zion built a fire and Williams set up tarps and sleeping bags for the night. Ghosteater fished. We roasted what he caught over the fire.

Eating cooked food was good, but it felt wrong not to have the ’pus there to share it with.

While we ate, night fell. I finally got a comprehensible explanation about Graham’s rock: it was one-half of a “carven strait,” a rare and ancient device used for traveling. They didn’t have to be opened with a working. Instead, they generated their own opening: if someone touched one stone, they’d be transported to wherever the companion happened to be. Apparently the art of making them was lost, and Cordus had been extremely surprised to find a set of them at large.

So although I hadn’t noticed it, there had to be a stone ball in the sea where I arrived that matched the one I’d touched in Justine’s room. Touching the one here would take us back to Cordus’s estate, where Graham’s rock was now.