They won’t be able to catch me here, she thought fiercely as she scanned around, this time looking for somewhere suitable to pitch her tent and go to ground. I’ll be able to nail them and they won’t even be able to find me to lay a finger on me! But there was more to it than that, she finally admitted to herself as she hunted for a flat spot. The locket had belonged to her birth-mother, and receiving it had raised an unquiet ghost. Somebody had stabbed her, somebody who had never been found. Miriam wouldn’t be able to lay that realization to rest again until she learned what this place had meant to her mother—and why it had killed her.

With four hours to go before sunset, Miriam was acutely aware that she didn’t have any time to waste. The temperature would dip toward frost at night and she planned to be well dug-in first. Planting her backpack at the foot of the big horse chestnut tree, she gathered armfuls of dry leaves and twigs and scattered them across it—nothing that would fool a real woodsman, but enough to render it inconspicuous at a distance. Then she walked back and forth through a hundred-yard radius, pacing out the forest, looking for its edge. That there was an edge came as no surprise: The steep escarpment was in the same place here as on the hiking map of her own world that she’d brought along. Where the ground fell away, there was a breathtaking view of autumnal forest marching down toward a valley floor. The ocean was probably eight to ten miles due east, out of sight beyond hills and dunes, but she had a sense of its presence all the same.

Looking southwest, she saw a thin coil of smoke rising—a settlement of some kind, but small. No roads or telegraph poles marred the valley, which seemed to contain nothing but trees and bushes and the odd clearing. She was alone in the woods, as alone as she’d ever been. She looked up. Thin cirrus stained the blue sky, but there were no jet contrails.

“The area appears to be thinly populated,” she muttered into her dictaphone. “They’re burning something—coal or wood—at the nearest settlement. There are no telegraph poles, roads, or aircraft. The air doesn’t smell of civilization. No noise to speak of, just birds and wind and trees.”

She headed back to her clearing to orient herself, then headed on in the opposite direction, down the gentle slope away from her pack. “Note: Keep an eye open for big wildlife. Bears and stuff.” She patted her right hip pocket nervously. Would the pistol do much more than annoy a bear? She hadn’t expected the place to be quite this desolate. There were no bears, but she ran across a small stream—nearly fell into it, in fact.