Having passed through the tunnel back to the keep, they lit their firepit and flash roasted select slices from the tail tip. Soon, they were sitting around the fire, hungry chewing precluding any conversation. The only noise was the soft groans of relief as they filled their bellies. It had been their first taste of meat in a long time.

“You sure this is going to work?” Yoshi finally said, mumbling through a mouthful of sauropod flesh.

He nodded to the structure that they had spent almost as long building as they had digging the trap. A wooden shed, rough and ready as a shed could be, with walls of logs and mud, and a roof of branches, sealed with woven palm leaves and sackcloth from their bedding. Who would have known just how important Amber’s axe would end up being? None of this would have been possible without it.

The smokehouse was smaller than Cade would have liked. But it would have to do.

“Let’s get cutting,” Cade said.

Now the most grueling work of all began. Freshly sharpened swords hacked at the steaming meat, slicing strips to be hung on the horizontal poles affixed within their rickety shed.

Cade himself worked on the great, clawed foot that Grace had succeeded in detaching. He was careful not to nick his blade on the enormous leg bones within. To hold up such weight, they must have been strong as steel.

It looked for all the world like an elephant’s foot, with the same leathery skin and longer claws. Cade was just glad that the herd of sauropods that had stumbled across their path was of the smaller variety.

They worked into the night. Fat was transferred to buckets, to be kept in the cool of the baths below the keep. It was to be rendered later, and their main source of energy—without carbohydrates to fuel them, they were in sore need of it. It would be their cooking oil, their butter, their soup and sauce.

Only when they were done did they light a fire within the shed itself, using green leaves to produce the most smoke, and stop the fire from spreading to the shed itself.

Cade knew only the theory of what they were doing—that the smoke would dehydrate the meat to the point of preservation, making a dinosaur jerky that would last for months.

When the fire was lit, and the smoke billowed into the shed, the group fell where they lay. But not Cade. He sat and stared at the sputtering flames, his face blackened, arms bloodied to the elbows.

Survival was one thing. But he knew that soon, the Codex would speak again. And the game … would start once more.

CHAPTER

3

The Codex had been silent since the battle with the alpha. But the timer … it ticked away, just as it had before. Two months had passed already, with no sign of the drone waking.

There was a week to go. Cade had decided to focus on survival and ignore the dark cloud of dread that filled his nightmares.