The Thing That Follows

In the camp, Ryder had begun to change everything that could still be changed.

There were no more standard patrols. There were no more two-man pairings; he ordered them tripled, where the numbers allowed, with the third man trailing at a fixed distance and watching the other two as much as the surrounding trees. There were no more assumptions of safety inside the perimeter. There were no more dawn details for any soldier whose pair had not slept within reach of him through the night. He drew up the new orders himself, in his own hand, and he did not soften them when he read them out to the assembled platoon, because there was nothing in the situation that benefited from being made to sound smaller than it was.

Pairs at the absolute minimum. Threes when we can spare it. Eyes on each other at all times. If you see your pair stop walking, you grab his arm and you keep walking him forward. If you see him stop talking, you say his name. If he doesn't answer, you say it again. If he doesn't answer the second time, you signal. No exceptions, no pride, no decisions made on your own about what you can handle. The day we lose discipline is the day we lose people. We are not losing more people.

The platoon obeyed. Even the soldiers who had not yet seen, with their own eyes, what an empty body looked like — the ones who had still been talking themselves into believing that the men in the medical tent were something explicable, fevered, brain-touched by some fungus the foresters had warned them about — even those men obeyed without a second's hesitation. Ryder watched their faces as he gave the orders, and he saw, in every one of them, the small private decision being made beneath the discipline. They did not all believe what was happening. They all believed him. That was the thing rank was for.

The forest had changed again. Not visually, not physically; the trees were still trees, the path was still the path. The change was in behavior. The forest had begun, very slightly, to react.

Branches shifted in a wind that had no other consequences. The shadows under the larger trees lingered into morning long past the angle of light that should have driven them off, and the lingering was uneven — patches of shadow held, others did not, and there was no rhyme to which patches stayed. Most disturbingly, sound itself had begun to behave incorrectly. Ryder noticed it on the third morning of the new orders, in a moment that was, in itself, almost trivial. A soldier passing through the camp had caught a tin cup against the corner of his pack and dropped it, and the cup had hit the ground in the small space between two tents, and the sound the cup had made was not the sound a cup makes.

It had not echoed. That was the thing. It had not even reached the far edge of the camp. The sound of metal on packed earth had simply… stopped, two paces from where the cup had landed, as if the air itself had absorbed it.

Ryder stood watching the cup for a long time. The soldier who had dropped it picked it up, apologized, and walked on, and Ryder did not stop him. He did not want to make of the cup more than the cup was. He simply added the observation to the small list he was now keeping, and he understood, in the way a man understands when he has stopped denying the thing his hands have been telling him for days, that the camp was no longer a place that obeyed the ordinary rules of what could be heard, and that the soldiers in it were going to begin to notice in their own time, regardless of whether he wanted them to.

That afternoon he did not have to wait.

A pair came back from the western perimeter and did not break formation when they reached the cookfire, which was unusual; pairs at the end of a watch broke the moment they reached the cookfire, because that was how the body told itself that the watch was over. These two stood in front of him at attention, and the older of the two waited until he had been given leave to speak before he spoke, and even then he kept his voice low.

Sir. With respect. It's following us.

Ryder set down the report book he had been holding. He stood up. He gestured for the second soldier to talk if he had something to add, and the second soldier was a younger man and had clearly been waiting for permission.

Ryder did not dismiss them. He did not, even by reflex, frame his face into the polite tolerance an officer wears when a soldier reports something that cannot be true. He took the report seriously, in front of them, because the first kindness he could do for either of them was to refuse to make them ashamed of what they had felt. He told them to write what they had described and to give the writing to him directly, and he told them not to repeat the description aloud in the camp until he had decided how to handle it. He thanked them for the report. He let them go.

He stood in the cooking smoke after they had gone, and he turned the words over.

With us. Not behind, not in front. With. The thing in Shadowglade was not approaching the patrols. It was accompanying them. It was learning the rhythm of their march by walking inside it, the way a student walks inside the gait of a teacher in order to understand what the gait is doing. It had not engaged. It had not, by any honest reading, even drawn near enough to be considered hostile. It was studying their space from the inside of it.

He did not sleep that night. He made it look as if he had given the order to stand down, and he made his rounds with the false steadiness of an officer who intends to lie down soon, and then he sat through the watches in his command tent with the lamp turned low and his own breath measured against the quiet of the camp.

Sometime between the second and third watches, he felt it.

It was not a sound. It was not a movement. It was not, in any way he could have written into the report book, a presence — there was nothing in the tent with him, and he had not, for the duration of that long hour, let his eyes leave the doorway. What he felt was simpler. He felt recognition. For the small fraction of a moment, somewhere in the green country outside his canvas wall, something had taken note of him. It had registered him by name — not by the syllables of his name, but by the shape of whatever a person was on the level his name belonged to — and it had paused, and it had considered him, and then it had moved on.

He sat very still until the feeling went.

It did not return.

He did not, in the morning, write the experience in his report. He did not, in his next dispatch to Raven, mention it. There was no language for it. There was only the thing the moment had taught him, and the thing the moment had taught him was that the entity he was tracking had also, in the same span of days, been tracking him. He had been seen. The seeing had been mutual. The hand he had been describing, whose work he had been measuring, was attached to a mind, and the mind had begun to know his face.

He stood at his perimeter at dawn and looked into the trees, and for the first time he understood what the older privates had meant when they had described the thing as with them, because he could feel it again now — distant, unfocused, but no longer indifferent — and he could feel that it was, in some small and patient way, paying attention to him personally.

He did not turn his eyes away from the forest. He did not break the contact. He let it know, by holding his ground, that he had felt the looking and had not flinched from it.

It was, on his side, the closest thing to a first move he could afford to make.