The forest was eerily silent. He had heard no animal sounds, predator or prey, not even the hooting of some nocturnal bird. Even so, if he went off to search for supplies and his pod, he didn't want to go unarmed. He was vulnerable enough as he was, without his gem or clothes. It wasn't about just him anymore. Tar depended on his success. He had to get his act together.

Besides, maybe he could skewer a rabbit, or something. Not that he had any clue what to do with it after. Could you just hang it over a fire? He doubted that. There was always mention of dressing and the like. Maybe Val or Hyram would be here by then.

That thought cheered him up a little. With a last glance at the twitching and shivering boy, he walked a little way off, studying the broken greenery, peering intently into the shadows. It didn't take long before he found a long, sturdy stick, as thick as his wrist. Both sides broke off into jagged points, and it felt solid in his hands. It was also long enough for him to lean on. Not the best of weapons, but it was a start.

The next thing was fire. He didn't have a flint and steel, but Tarsus' pod crash might help him with that, if he was fast enough. Most of the scatterings of fire had been extinguished quickly. The foliage was too damp for it to catch on firmly and spread, and so was the wood. But only a few, a very short way away from where he left Tarsus, near the edge of the cliff, sheltered under the shattered remains of a tree, glowed the dying flickers of embers. The inside of the tree provided him with that crumbling half-decayed wood pulp. Holding his breath, he lay down on his belly and fed a pinch of wood crumbs to the coals. He didn't dare exhale. This was his only chance, Tar's only chance.

With torturous slowness, the kindling caught, smoked and took over the glow. He fed it some larger slivers until delicate flames flickered up. Fire. He'd done it. He had created a fire! Kindling it was only one part of the problem, sustaining it the other. Most of the surrounding chunks were too wet to feed to the flames, but once stripped of their leaves, the underbrush proved surprisingly dry. Before long, he had a steady fire going. It was far enough away from Tarsus to be safe for a fevered rolling over, but hopefully still close enough to provide some light. It was the best he could do for now.

The fire was mesmerizing. He knew he had to get up, and move, search the woods for supplies, for a life-saving pod for Tarsus, but he found himself sitting on the ground, staring into the flames. The heat made him realize how cold and damp the night had been. Some knots of tension in his muscles relaxed a little as the warmth seeped in. Fire. Mankind's most primal friend. Something so simple and yet so elusive if you didn't have the right skills or tools. He had gotten lucky; he knew that. He had to guard this fire, cherish it, nurture it, for if it was gone and he still hadn't found some flint or steel, they would be doomed.

The feeling that he was being watched came slowly, starting with the lightest prickling between his shoulder blades. When he looked back, there was nothing there, but had he heard a rustling in the bushes? One problem with a fire at night was that it killed his night-vision. Outside the circle of light, the darkness was almost impenetrable now. Animals were afraid of fire, weren't they? He should be safe.

He put another chunk of wood on the fire, drawing his sharp stick a little closer. The feeling of being watched returned. This time, he took care not to make any sudden moves. He turned his head ever so slowly, tightening his grip on the weapon.

There was something there, close to the ground. More scratching, and then a gleaming eye became visible, unblinking against the firelight. It fixed him with a baleful glare, daring him to move.

He didn't. He stayed still, breathing only shallow breaths, waiting to see what would follow. There were a lot of animals he might have expected to see here, but not this. Gleaming white feathers shone even brighter than that eye. It shuffled closer, ruffled its feathers, shaking off tiny droplets of water. It turned his head to one side and then to the other, trying to study him with both eyes. Finally satisfied, it waddled closer to the fire, sat down, tucked its beak in and closed its eyes.

A chicken!

What was a chicken doing here?

Of all deadly predators and jungle-dwelling prey, this was the last creature he had expected to encounter here. A... delicious creature. They were edible, he even had a ready cook-fire! He looked at the fluffy bundle of feathers, sleeping almost within his reach. It would be easy, snapping its neck. Well, easy if you knew how to do that. Did he just have to wring his hands in opposite directions, to twist a chicken's neck? What if it struggled? The thought of having to use his bare hands felt revolting to him. A warm, breathing creature, holding it, making it stop.... No, he couldn't do that. He wasn't that desperate yet. Couldn't he spear it?

He hefted the stick, bringing it as close to the animal as he dared, not trusting his aim. The creature opened a beady eye and blinked. They stared at each other, neither of them moving. Why wouldn't it bolt? Run away while it had a chance?

The chicken clucked, got up and walked over to him and sat down again, snuggling up against his feet. He would have sworn he could hear it sigh in contentment before it fell asleep again. He let his stick drop from his hand. A vegetarian menu then, at least for tonight. His stomach growled in protest, but he pushed it down.

A sneaking, infiltrating chicken, probably spying for the enemy, distracting from his task of searching for his missing pod and the supplies, he thought, smiling against his will, against his better judgment, at the tiny warm body curled up so trustingly against him.

He woke with a start, to find the fire had almost died down again, and the chicken had left him. After feeding the fire, he looked around, only to find it back at the light's edge, watching him intently. It squawked, walked away a few paces, then came back.

It was just a chicken, but he would have sworn it was looking at him, trying to get him to... follow?

"Did Timmy fall down a well again?" he said, choking down an almost hysterical giggle. The chicken didn't answer, which was just as well. He didn't know what he would have done if it had. Being stranded on an empty world was one thing, but having the local food-supply talk to you would have been too much. Still, it truly looked like it wanted him to follow.

Taking up his stick again, he tried to rise to his feet in a stealthy, fluid motion. Instead, he stumbled, pins and needles flooding his legs, his knees cracking with a terrible stiffness. Cursing under his breath, he tried to get his feet under control, walking stiffly in a circle, then remembering the chicken, found it still staring at him with inhuman patience. Was that bird laughing at him? It better not be.

It ducked away again, and this time he followed, parting the leaves with his stick, blinking against the darkness.

The chicken almost seemed to glow in what little light there still was, making the white shape float almost ghost-like over the ground. It might have been eery if it weren't for the occasional encouraging cluck. It stopped, scratching at the ground, clucked a final time, then disappeared between the bushes.

"Wait!" he said, but it was too late. The chicken had disappeared.

This was stupid. He had followed a mindless animal, let it lure him away from the safety of his fire. What had he been thinking? He should have gone out looking for his pod hours ago. The sky above him was still dark, filled with stars he didn't recognize, but he imagined it was a smidgen lighter than before. That may have been the light of his campfire, farther away though. And he had no way to know how long a night in this world would even take. For all he knew, it would be forever. No, he thought, poking at the underbrush with his stick, not forever. There was an abundance of probably green plants here. They wouldn't thrive in darkness.

His stick struck something hard. Not wood. Not stone. A deep hollow sound. Using his make-shift spear to break the twigs apart, he found a dark, large case, overgrown with moss and weeds, half buried in the ground. His heart skipped a beat as he dragged it free, feeling the comfortable heavy weight of it in his hands. It was too heavy to carry in one hand, but he managed to tug it free from the tangle of plants, and then all the way back to his welcoming fire.

For the longest time, he just stared at it, not wanting to open it, not daring to hope. It was a typical military-issue supply case. Sturdy magnesium shell, rugged exterior, almost unbreakable. It had been here for a long time, going by the density of the growths on it, but that was easy to explain. There had to be a massive time difference between this world and that of the Tyrants. One hour there might translate two months, possibly a year here. He had no way to measure it yet. But it was here, and that meant there might be more. He undid the latches and looked inside. The cluck of a chicken made him look back up again, a wide grin plastered on his face.

There was a chicken standing near the fire again, staring at him with its beady eyes. Was it looking smug? Was it even the same chicken?

He looked back at the case. One side was filled with tightly packed rolls of foil. They didn't look like much, but he knew what they were: vacuum-sealed meal bricks. Tasted like cardboard and wallpaper glue, but they were extremely high-density-nutrition emergency meals, and would keep for forever. You could break them into bars for easier distribution, eat them raw, or crumble them into boiling water with whatever vegetables you could find to make a hearty stew. The other side contained a separately packed medical kit. It contained several sterile wrapped hypo-sprays with different color coding, which he guessed might be painkillers, antibiotics. There was a pair of scissors and rolls of bandages.

Food, he thought, and medicine!

He eyed the chicken thoughtfully. Had it really guided him to it? Chickens didn't do that, right? It had to be coincidence. He already knew they dropped the supplies in this area, he was bound to stumble over one of the cases.

No clothes, yet. And no water.

The strange, long words on the hypo-sprays were unreadable to him. He wasn't a doctor; he had no idea what they meant. But one he recognized. A bright blue one. He was sure he had seen that used as an anti-biotic, once. Was he sure enough to bet another man's life on that? Dared he take the risk, and potentially waste a limited, valuable resource? He looked at the young man who lay still on the wooden slab, too still. A quick check told him the kid still had a pulse, but was also burning up with a fever.

He still didn't have water yet, and he desperately needed it, both for Tarsus to drink and to clean the wounds. There was a small bottle of alcohol and an even smaller one of iodine, but those wouldn't be enough.

Patrick hesitated, looked at the chicken again, then with a sigh broke the seal of one spray, and before he could get any second thoughts, pressed it against Tarsus' neck.

Hypo-sprays were amazing things. Gone were the days of clumsy hypodermic needles, and having to have any medical knowledge to apply them. Modern medicine had made them obsolete. He did not know how these magical, wonderful things worked, but work they did. You pressed them against your skin, pressed the button and voilá, dose administered. Now, if they only could write the contents in normal human English, that would be awesome.

He touched Tarsus' forehead again. No change. Well, that was to be expected. Nevertheless, with drugs like these, there might have been an immediate reaction, like the instant obliterating of the infection most spectacularly. Or a lightning strike. Anything, really.

"I'm sorry, kid," he said, and when Tarsus mumbled something through cracked lips, he took his hand and held it.

The boy shouldn't have been there. He and his twin, Shard, were starry-eyed orphans, looking for a crew to belong to. And that had all been fun and games as long as they were just talking about things having to be better than they were. That all changed when they tried to actually do something.

Patrick had tried to make them leave when things got hairy, but they refused. Shard had seen it all as a game, an opportunity for fame and glory, and Tarsus would do anything his brother did, striving to be better.

Their sibling rivalry had always been a good-natured one, but this time, he feared, it had gone too far. He could see no way for Tar to get out of this alive and well, not really. As for Shard... He hoped that kid made it out in time. It hadn't looked good, as far as he could remember, but then again, both Shard and Tar had been there, together. Where one went, the other followed close behind, that's how it had always been.

He fed another branch to the fire. It spat and fizzed like an angry cat, smoke billowing up as the soaking wet bark tried to hold out against the hungry flames before it had to give way.

Wet. There was water here. Going by what he had seen and felt, there had to be plenty. The ground was muddy, the leaves wet and the air was humid, even at night. There had to be frequent rains. He had no way to find out if the rainwater was suitable for drinking, but if he could make a fireproof bowl or something, he might boil it and use it.

Ha, look at him, planning bushcraft! He, a first-class city-man, who had only seen trees in sterile, carefully planned and planted nurseries. But he had read books. How hard could it be? He had made a fire, after all.

Looking at the smoke again, he frowned. One thing he read was that smoke showed up fairly visible against a night sky. Well, the glow of a fire would do that too, especially with him being up here on top of a cliff and all. Every human in that valley below would have seen his fire and know there was someone here. That might be good. There had to be others of his crew. They couldn't all have been tossed out of their pods and left to die. But there might be others as well, people who may not be as friendly. Too late to think about that now.

Speaking of pods... Tarsus was the second person he knew about who had been flung from his pod. That wasn't supposed to happen. Transport pods were even more magical than hypo-sprays. Once sealed properly, they would stand up against anything, survive anything.

That lake of bubbling lava appeared in his mind's eye, and he had to wonder if it could to survive even that. Maybe. Maybe not. He was glad he hadn't been the one to test that first hand.

Point was: the pods shouldn't have broken open on any impact. That was what they were specifically designed to do. The only way he could see that happen not once, but twice, was through a severe malfunction. Or, whispered a sudden small voice in his mind, through sabotage. The thought sent an ice cold shiver down his spine.

Sabotage. No, that was unthinkable. Valerie and Hyram had been preparing the pods themselves. They must have looked over most of them, if not all, but especially his. There was no way they could have missed tampering. Then again, there was that chaos at the end. There were so many people flooding the room, terrified people, desperately trying to a pod, to safety. Who knew what harm they might have done. That didn't make him feel any more confident about the survival possibilities for his friends. Were their pods compromised as well? He had somehow survived the crash, but look at poor Tarsus! And although he had seen several pods leave right before him, there seemed to be nobody here.

Time difference.

Yeah, that might play a role. He didn't know how that worked. All he knew that the farther away a world was, the more time moved differently. One minute at home might mean a day or a month here. People may have arrived weeks before him, or even years. He had no way to tell.

For now, he had to reconcile himself with the fact that he was all alone here. Apart from Tarsus here.

The chicken that had snuck up on him and had settled itself against him while he had been lost in thought raised its head and let out an offended squawk. He patted it absentmindedly. And the chicken, of course.

The ground rose up to smack him in the face. He lay there, looking up at the dirt, wondering why he had decided to go to sleep. No, that wasn't right. The ground had... jumped.

What the hell had just happened?

He came unsteadily to his feet, looking around. The fire was still there, some burning pieces scattered around, but the core was still sound. And with the overall dampness, he wasn't afraid of the fire spreading.

Tarsus had fallen off his slab. Patrick could see the kid's mouth move, but there was no sound, apart from a high ringing in his ears. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but it didn't work. From Tar's face, he suspected it to be cries of pain.

Pain!

He should have given him painkillers!

He took an unsteady step towards the case that had spilled some of its contents, then stopped. His head kept spinning, his vision doubling as he saw two fires, one next to him, the other fading in and out, a little way off.

No, not double vision. Actual fire!

Something had struck the ground hard enough to cause a minor earthquake. He grabbed his make-shift spear and went in the fire's direction, unsteady at first, but gaining his balance as he walked. The chicken, he noticed from the corner of his eye, sat up in a tree, glaring down at him as if he was personally responsible for the disturbance of its sleep.

He went as fast as he could, while still remembering those dreadful thorns on the berry bushes, and hoping he wouldn't encounter any again in the dark. Those thorns were potentially lethal, as long as he didn't get better protection for his feet and legs.

He had to get to the site of the crash before the flames went out. It couldn't be far away, and it had to be roughly on the same level as he was.

There. The air was thick with a foul smoke and his eyes teared up immediately. He had no way to protect his airways from this, so he plodded on, trying to breathe as shallowly as he could. He should have brought bandages for this, he thought, but it was too late now.

There was a small clearing, made of broken ground, littered with smashed up smoldering trees. In the center of it all stood a glowing red cylinder, emanating waves of heat.

Another pod!

This one looked intact, but he hoped its heat insulation was as good as they claimed it to be. Being inside when that failed would probably be very unhealthy.

He carefully moved around it, scanning the ground for hidden embers. He couldn't use any burns to his feet, no matter how badly he wanted to see who was in the pod. The shell was mostly opaque, darkening, as it cooled, to a sooty black, but somehow he could still discern the features of the man inside. Hyram. It was Hyram!

But as he came a close as he dared, he thought there was something wrong with his face. It might be a trick of the light. It had to be. Nobody should really have a dent in his skull like that one.

The damp cool air hissed as it met the red hot metal. Patrick wanted to run to it, open it, check the poor man inside, but he knew that was probably the most stupid thing to do. Not only would he grill his hands on that metal if he touched it right now, but the transport pod was a medical marvel. If Hyram's injuries were as bad as they looked at this distance, that pod was the only thing keeping him alive, and his only chance at a life, maybe, later on. If the man were still alive. That was the question.

He thought of Tarsus, fevered, infected and broken, who desperately needed a pod as well, and who, with access to a pod, probably had a better, faster chance at recovery. Tarsus or Hyram, was that the question now? Who to save? The brash, hopeful youngster, or the hardened veteran who had been his best friend his entire life? What kind of choice was that?

Not, he thought, a decision he could make at this moment, even if he wanted to. He couldn't open the pod yet. He had to wait for it to reach a safe temperature, and that would take a few minutes, maybe hours. He didn't want to leave the pod here, unattended, left for anyone or anything to find, but he had no way to take it with him. The pods could be directed to float wherever you wanted, but without a control tablet, he had to enter the instructions on the pod itself. If that still worked.

He would find it again, now he knew where it was. It was time to return to his fire.