He was scared. His heart seemed to have risen into his throat, beating hard in its dislocation, so he had difficulty swallowing and breathing. But fear was the least of it. He felt stupid, mortified, ashamed. Armed with just the air horn. A pathetic boy playing at being a man. A few minutes earlier, he’d been proud, confident that he was up to any challenge. Master scout and guide! Modern mountain man! Teenage hero! Idiot. Fool. In truth, he was in over his head, although it was even worse than that, because he had led Ophelia to believe that she was safe with him and could trust him with her life, which she could not.
She had such a tight grip on his hand that he didn’t think she could hold on any tighter, but abruptly she squeezed so hard that his finger bones compressed painfully. “Colson!”
Dread thrilled through him. He stopped and turned, expecting the grizzly to be right there. For a moment he thought it had gone away. When Ophelia pointed, Colson shifted the light and saw that the creature had moved with them, paralleling them, staying among the trees, coming no closer. It was standing erect again, watching them.
“It’s stalking us,” Ophelia said.
Rain streamed off her brow and nose and chin, and she was pale in the backwash of light, as if all that water had washed away her summer tan. She suddenly reminded Colson of his mother, though they looked nothing alike except for the green eyes. Whether or not he had it in him to do what needed to be done, he was responsible for his mother, for getting her through her grief, and now that he’d brought Ophelia this far, he was also responsible for her, for getting her through this night alive. He was just a boy, but boys grew into men, and somehow he was going to have to grow up fast, stop feeling sorry for himself and do what was right.
“It’s stalking us,” she repeated.
“Grizzlies aren’t that kind of predator. They mostly forage.”
“This doesn’t look like foraging,” she said.
The bear watched and waited, and the storm seethed through the night as if to wash the darkness away as the color had been washed out of Ophelia’s face. Colson was afraid, terrified, but that was all right. His dad had told him that being afraid of what should scare the piss out of you was one way you knew you were sane; and now Colson understood that going on in spite of your fear was how you grew up.
70
In greater Seattle, five floors below street level, in the cool and dust-free environment that was the core lab of Project Olivaw, Artimis Selene worked overtime, as always she did. By any standard, she was a workaholic. Living for work alone was not psychologically healthy, especially not when she didn’t need the money and would not receive acclaim for anything she achieved, at least not for a long time, not until the project ceased to be a top-secret undertaking.
She wondered at other aspects of her mental health—and worried that some on the staff might begin to suspect that she was deeply troubled, emotionally confused. She wanted Ganesh Patel. She wanted to be with him, intimately but not sexually. She needed to hear his soft voice, to see the kindness in his eyes and be the object of his loving stare, to know she mattered to him. Her extensive reading, all the data she absorbed, suggested that what she felt was akin to what a dog felt toward an adored master. This was not good, because she knew Ganesh well enough to be sure that being her master would be repulsive to him. In spite of all his accomplishments, he truly believed that he was no better than anyone else. Artimis supposed that she yearned for him because he represented the father that she never had. There was a hole in her being, a hole in the shape of a father, and only Ganesh could fill it.
The previous day, she had surprised herself when she asked him if he ever dreamed of her. The instant that she posed the question, she regretted it. She thought it would shock him, that his opinion of her would plummet, and that he would doubt that it had been wise to give her this opportunity at Olivaw. A mere moment later, she had been thrilled to hear that he sometimes dreamed of her—and then that he didn’t think it was wrong because they were colleagues and friends who had come a long way together.
Nevertheless, since then, she’d worried that she’d disconcerted him, perhaps even embarrassed him. In that case, he might dwell on what had happened between them. He might begin to wonder if she had stronger feelings for him than what she had expressed, which indeed she did, and he might begin to question whether those feelings were proper, whether they compromised her work.
Her best hope of quelling any doubts he had was to prove her competence and value in no uncertain terms. Which meant finding the Other if in fact Rustling Willows Ranch and environs was the right place to look. They had developed a prime theory, Profile Six, about the nature of the Other and its origins. But the entire world was too large a search area even for the extensive resources of the project. Contracting that zone to a circle having a hundred-mile radius, with the ranch house at its center, she was left with a hunting ground large enough to contain numerous hiding places but small enough to allow a careful dekameter-by-dekameter search for anomalies and exhaustive analysis to determine if each anomaly might be natural or not.