In the urgency with Kyle, Mara had little time to wonder why the crew had disappeared. She focused only on the fact that they were gone. She had not liked them before, and she liked them even less now. Maybe they would come back; she hoped so, for Kyle’s sake, although she was in no position to count on it. But Tom alone had helped her, and for that reason he was the one she let herself hate. He had been a waste of her respect. And now here she was, alone. Gathering random plants just for something to do.

She sat and looked at the birch. The trees grew up, not out, and so the grove towered, a cathedral of white trunks and a high ceiling of leaves. There were ferns, something like ivy carpeting the earth. The yellow dandelions had long since gone to puff.

A strange feeling came over Mara, a sense of almost-understanding, and she froze to hold her mind in place, trying to follow the thought. What did it mean, if Tom cared about her? Or if he cared about being the kind of person who might. The kind of person who wouldn’t just abandon a girl.

Her eyes swept the grove. It looked normal. She tried to remember what they had talked about, meeting here, but even at the time she had not really paid attention. Then her eye lit on the mushroom tree, the cluster of conks that rose like steps up the trunk, and she felt herself stand and walk toward them.

Each mushroom was the size of half a plate, with a brown top and a tan belly. One of them had fallen from the tree and lay at its base.

No, it hadn’t fallen. Conks didn’t fall.

She turned it over. It was hard but springy, like old wood. The words scratched in the belly were scraggly but clear:

JUST IN CASE

And beneath them, an arrow. When she put the conk back where it had been, she saw that it pointed at the fallen log.

Mara went to the log and looked around it. It seemed normal enough, but now she saw a line of smooth dirt at the base, dirt that should be covered with grass and leaves.

Weeks ago she could have picked up the log by one end, simply lifted and moved it, but not anymore. She kicked it hard and hurt her foot. When she pushed against it, her sandals slid and she fell to the ground on her knees. Finally she found a strong fallen branch and, with leverage, was able to budge the trunk. Beetles and centipedes scurried off to better homes.

There it was, shiny, right underneath where she’d been sitting. Tom’s gun. She opened the chamber and found it loaded.

When Mara got back to camp, Bullfrog eyed up the gun.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Crew camp,” she said. “Under one of the cots. We must have missed it.”

Bullfrog looked at her for a while. “Well,” he said finally. “Glad you found it.”