Page 23 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

“Not on purpose,” said Kade.

“Some,” said Cora. “Especially after I got back from the Trenches. It was dark and cool, and if I sat on one of the benches and closed my eyes, I could pretend I was underwater.”

“That’s what it smells like here,” said Sumi. “Reptile house.”

She wasn’t wrong. There was a primal,primevalsmell hanging in the air, heavy and dense, like someone was wandering around spraying snake-scented perfume directly from the bottle all around them. Antsy blinked.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Does that mean there are big, hungry lizards around here?” asked Emily. “Because I’m really not in the mood to meet a big, hungry lizard. Or a big, well-fed lizard, honestly. If I can just register an anti-lizard position with the court now, that would be a real time-saver.”

“Uh, don’t think that’s gonna work so good, Em,” said Kade, looking down at something by his feet. The others moved to see what he had found.

A footprint, pressed into the earth, talons and toes and the broad spade of the sole all stamped into the soft ground. In a few hundred years, under the right conditions, it wouldbe the sort of fossil track that drew tourists from all over, if this world ever developed tourists. In the here and now, it was half-filled with water, and occupied by a frog that watched them warily, clearly suspicious of their intentions, and yet entirely unafraid.

Kade looked up. “I have always wanted to say this,” he said, and took a deep breath before saying, in a sonorous voice, “Welcome,to Jurassic Park.”

Nothing charged out of the trees to devour them as punishment for his irreverence, thankfully. Emily and Cora laughed. Sumi and Antsy looked unimpressed.

Kade sighed. “No one appreciates the classics anymore,” he said, as they kept walking.

The edge of the jungle loomed closer and closer. “The Doors tend to open near some sort of market or other population center, since the Store mostly uses them to restock things people don’t lose as much,” said Antsy. “So maybe you come out near a bakery, or a sandwich shop, or something, just so we can bring back food for the employees. Food that people lose normally isn’t anything that somebody would want toeat.”

“I don’t see any grocery stores around here,” said Kade.

“So there’s probably fruit or something we can gather in the trees,” said Antsy. “Anything that grabbed Hudson’s cage would probably have run this way to crack it open and eat him, and he could have flown up into the branches.”

“Or something could have gobbled him up,” suggested Sumi. The others turned to look at her with varying degrees of horror and disbelief. Only Kade looked unsurprised, even fond, as if this were exactly what he would expect from her. She shrugged broadly. “What? You were all thinking it. I just put it out into the open where you’d all have to look at it instead of walking along trying not to believe it into being.”

“Sumi…” said Cora.

“Not wanting to look at a thing doesn’t make it not so; it just makes it so the thing can lurk and loom and leap out when you don’t expect it. If you want a life without terrible surprises, you should always look at the worst possible answer until you understand it all the way down to the bottom. Once you can do that, you’ll know what’s coming, even if you’ll never learn to like it.”

They kept walking. Some of the ferns reached to their waists—which meant, in Sumi’s case, that they reached all the way to the top of her arms—making it look like they were wading through an endless river of feathered green. While they still saw the ripples through the brush, those ripples seemed to be avoiding them, making it even more obvious that they were watching the movement of small animals. Despite the lack of ripples close by, the ones only a little farther out were no more frantic than the rest; they were being avoided, not fled from.

“I don’t think anything here is afraid of us,” said Emily. “Why isn’t anything here afraid of us?”

“Because I think Kade may have been right about where we are. I mean, without the venture capitalists perverting the laws of science and nature for the sake of making a few bucks, that is,” said Cora. “I don’t think humans are a thing in this world yet, if they’re ever going to be. I think this is the age of dinosaurs.”

“That would explain the smell,” chirped Sumi.

Emily’s shoulders dipped, face relaxing like she was allowing herself to have a thought that she’d been pushing aside before. “How many worlds that belong entirely to dinosaurs do you think there are?”

“Not too many that we can get to from the Store,” saidAntsy. “They’d have to be safe enough for us to access, and have something—anything—that we could use. Which is why I’m guessing there’s edible fruit somewhere up ahead.”

“That’s what I hoped you would say,” said Emily, and stopped walking. Placing the tips of her pinky fingers side by side in her mouth, she whistled high and shrill, the sound echoing across the green field and into the forest beyond before it faded. Something in the distance roared, a deep, primeval sound that sent shivers up their backs. The rest of them stopped walking in turn, looking at her.

“What was that for?” asked Kade.

“Emily…” said Antsy.

“I think I know what she was doing,” said Cora.

Something in the forest whistled back, just as loud and just as long, and Emily lit up like a birthday cake, eyes so bright there might as well have been candles lit behind them.

“Stephanie,” she said, and broke into a run.

Not wanting to be left behind or to lose track of her in this strange place, her companions ran after her, Cora and Sumi keeping pace with ease, while Kade and Antsy lagged behind. The whistle from the trees came again; Emily was too busy running to whistle back.

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