The Big Dark Sky (81)

Although Asher Optime hadn’t intimidated Ophelia enough to break her spirit, the giant bear brought her instantly to the brink of blind terror. “Oh God, God, oh God.”

The beast looked clumsy and slow. Not so. It could move faster than they could, be on them in seconds, and claw them to the ground.

Yeah, all right, maybe so, but these bears fed on plants, roots, fruit, insects, small mammals, fish. They didn’t go after deer, the way cougars did, and they didn’t regularly kill people. Of course, if they were startled or challenged, they became aggressive, in which case they could take you apart quicker than you could say Hannibal Lecter.

Startled or challenged or maybe sick.

This monster should have taken shelter from the storm. That’s what bears did. The fact that it was here might mean something was wrong with it, a disease or a brain tumor or a condition that made it more dangerous than usual.

The storm shook the night and the bear watched them as if they, in their stillness amid chaos, were the only points of interest.

From a jacket pocket, Colson drew a small pressurized can, the Attwood signal horn he carried on expeditions with his father.

“No,” Ophelia said, and he knew she feared that the noise would anger the grizzly.

In the past, a painfully loud blast from this Klaxon had chased off coyotes and bobcats and once a smaller brown bear. But he and his dad never encountered a grizzly or a mountain lion, which might not be as easily spooked into flight. For a worst-case scenario, his father carried the shotgun loaded with slugs—which was now in Optime’s possession.

Lacking a weapon, Colson hesitated to use the air horn. He held it ready, his thumb on the discharge button, the wet can slippery in his grip, but he took Ophelia’s hand to keep her close. “Shout if it starts toward us.” He turned his attention to the trail once more, moving with her in tow, slowed by the misery of the storm as well as by the need both to avoid placing a foot wrong as they moved toward the western ridge and to be alert for an attack from behind.

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.