“Are you sure?” Bea asked. “A dinosaur would … you know. Eat us. The slavers are trying to take us alive.”

“You guys haven’t seen predators yet,” Cade said to the group. “And some of you haven’t seen the slavers. I’m the only one who has experienced both. Trust me, the slavers aren’t better.”

Quintus held up a hand. “I was in the jungles for a long time,” he said haltingly. “Slavers are … worse.

Yoshi nodded slowly. “Okay, so where do we camp?” he asked.

Cade rubbed his eyes, looking at the map. “First place we stop is Benjamin Church’s prison ship,” he said. “We can get there by nightfall if we walk there directly. The Romans took longer because they did not do that.”

“They didn’t?” Bea asked.

“No, they were searching for remnants. Based on the time stamps of each remnant discovery, I’m guessing they would explore one area after another thoroughly, setting up camp in appropriate locations and ranging out during the day. I doubt they would have come across so many remnants if they’d traveled in a straight line.”

He traced the route with his finger. “Next, we hit the Leifsbudir. That’s the first-ever settlement in North America, made by the Vikings.”

“Wasn’t that Columbus?” Amber asked.

“Nope,” Cade said, somewhat pleased he could share one of his favorite pieces of trivia. “I mean, he was an idiot who just got lost on his way to India. The Vikings settled in Newfoundland, or Vinland, as they called it, in the year 1000.”

“Nerd,” Scott muttered.

“Not to mention the Roman ships they found wrecked in Brazil,” Cade said, then held up his hands as the others began to speak all at once. “Anyway, hopefully there’s a hut of some kind there we can shelter in.”

He grinned, looking at the map again. “Okay, so then we head for the tombs from there. We’d have to shelter in them overnight, explore them and all that. Better take some torches with us to be safe.”

“Wait,” Amber said. “Didn’t you say we would walk five miles a day last time?” She pointed at the tombs. “This is almost thirty miles. That’s six days there, six days back.”

Cade nodded. “I was thinking about that earlier. I massively underestimated how fast we could travel before. The jungles aren’t so overgrown. We walked between Hueitapalan and the Sea Dragon in around an hour. That’s about a mile, right? If we walk ten hours a day, we’d make it there in three days. That’s two sleeps there, two sleeps back, plus one sleep at the tombs. It works.”

Amber grimaced. “Those jungles had been burned. And who’s to say we won’t run into a swamp or heavy bush?”

Cade hugged her close and felt her relax in his arms. “We won’t know until we do it,” he said. “I just know we have to try.”

CHAPTER

35

Cade realized his problem only when they returned to the storeroom. In the heat of the moment, alone with his contenders, he had been thinking in the old way. Where all decisions were their own.