“You know how to find Lapse.”
He made no reply, he just stood there
with his arms folded, staring right back at him.
“You found Sister, and Steven. I
know that wasn't a coincidence. Please, you must tell me!” Still
there was no answer.
“Corsair, you don't understand”
Pack begged. “Since Lapse left I haven't been myself. The things
that used to bring me joy hold nothing for me now. I tried to
content myself to my daily routine, but once I allowed myself to hope
she might return, I couldn't think of anything else. I cannot go on
like this!”
Corsair merely shook his head. Just
then, Sister arrived. She walked towards them and wrapped her paw
around Corsair's shoulders, and they turned and started to walk away,
leaving him all alone.
“Is that it, then? As long as you
have Sister you don't care about anyone else?” He clenched his
paws. If Corsair heard him, he paid him no heed.
“How can you be so selfish? ANSWER
ME!” Pack lunged at him, but his paws struck only air, and he
sprawled forward face-first onto the cold, wet ground.
“Are you all right?” a high-pitched
female voice asked him.
“No, I'm not”, he spoke into the
ground. “I haven't been since you've been gone.”
“Be careful, it's slippery.” The
voice said again. “Come on.” She helped him to his feet. It
was not Lapse, but a short woman in beige shorts and a red
short-sleeved shirt.
“Did you see which way they went?”
He asked her.
“No, if I had, we wouldn't have to
look for the others.”
“But you do know how to find them?”
“Well of course, we just have to look
carefully. They want to be found, no one wants to hide forever.”
Pack looked about. They were in a
wooded area, densely populated with trees and bushes. The ground was
covered with fallen leaves, and they were wet, particularly where he
had laid on the ground. There was a shiny patch behind him where he
must have slipped. “Another mirage... ” He thought to himself,
stroking his chin. They were becoming distressingly frequent.
The girl was staring at him, waiting
for him to do something. He still had a job to do, there was no
choice but to play along for now.
“Let's get going, then”, he said,
dusting himself off, and they were on their way.
“So why are you trying to find
them?”, he asked her.
“I was chosen, one person has to
search to play the game.”
“I should have been the one to
search.” he told her. “I've been looking for someone.”
She laughed. “That explains why you
were trying to hide on the ground. You didn't even try to get away.”
He put his hands on his hips: “The
ground's a good place to hide if you don't look down.”
“If I hadn't looked down I'd have
tripped over you.”
“That'd have given me a chance to get
away. I'd be gone before you knew I wasn't a rock.”
The little woman giggled. Pack also
heard a stifled laugh from a nearby bush. “Aha!” he said,
peering over the bush where a woman was huddled down, “found you!”
“I can't believe I was found by a
rock”, she said, joining them.
A short time later their entourage
consisted of about a dozen people, most of whom chose poor hiding
spots or couldn't keep from talking amongst themselves. “We're
almost done”, said the stranger, as they approached the fence at
the edge of the forest.
There was a rustling sound. Pack
looked about, but didn't see anyone. Then he remembered his own
advice from earlier: “Up there!” he said, pointing to a man in a
tree above them.
“You know you're not supposed to
climb trees!”, cried the stranger, annoyed.
He stuck his tongue out at her and
climbed down. “Fine.”
“That must be the last one.” Pack
said.
“No, there's still one more we
haven't found yet.”
“But that's impossible, we've looked
everywhere. There's nowhere left they could be.”
“You must be new to this game”, she
laughed, “We're only looking here right now. If they moved while
we were searching they could be anywhere.”
Pack scratched his head: “They could
be moving? I never considered that...”
“We'll have to split up”, said the
stranger, “Everyone go a different way.”
“If I split up from the stranger I'll
never find the missing person”, Pack thought to himself. He let
her get a short distance ahead and followed her back through the
forest.
“Why are you following me?” She
asked, quickly noticing him.
“Just in case our missing person is
following behind you”, he said, thinking quickly.
“If he walks as loud as you, I'd have
found him ages ago.” He supposed his feet were crunching the
leaves below rather loudly. He tried to walk a little softer as he
kept his eyes peeled for anyone else in the forest.
Just as soon as the crunching sound
died down the silence was broken by an enormously loud ringing
echoing all throughout the forest.
“Oh no, we're out of time!” The
stranger started to run in the direction of the sound. “We have to
get back!”
“What happens now? Where's the other
person?” Pack yelled, running after her.
“They got away”, the stranger
yelled back, still running, “But there's always next time!”
Pack glanced behind him as he ran. The
forest was disappearing before his eyes, quickly being replaced by a
black void that was gradually gaining on him. “Hurry!” she
yelled.
He started to turn back around, but his
foot caught on something, and he felt his legs go out from under him.
He landed on the ground in a heap, facing the encroaching darkness.
As it closed in on him, his heart stopped. A lithe, graceful figure
with scraggly brown fur was walking through the empty void towards
him. It was Lapse.
“Pack”, she called to him, in a
strained voice, “I've been looking for you for so long, trapped out
here, in the darkness.”
Something about her appearance was very
odd. Her body was surrounded by a faint glow and she didn't seem to
be wholly there. But the sight of her after all this time was too
much, he was completely frozen in place.
She called to him again, her paws
outstretched: “Please, come with me, Pack. Come to my arms. I've
missed you so much. Out here, we can be together.” The blackness
was almost touching him now, but still he couldn't look away.
“Lapse”, he called back to her,
mustering all of his strength, “sing your song for me. I've missed
it so much.”
“Come to my arms.” She repeated,
ignoring him. “It's so cold out here, and I'm so lonely.”
“I thought so”, he said, pulling
his foot back from the darkness just in time, and forcing himself to
stand and run. “Only in my mind could it ever be that easy.”
The darkness was still coming, but he was pulling away from it now,
and when he glanced back, the figure was no longer there. The sky
had gone dark, and he was completely out of breath. “I'll find
you, and bring you back for real”, he told himself, pushing himself
onward. He could see his ship, just past the fence up ahead. Just
as the last of the forest disappeared behind him, he dove into the
frigid water and grabbed the end of the ladder. Pulling himself out
of the water, only then did he allow himself a moment's rest.
“If she had started to sing, I would
have gone to her” he thought, panting from his ordeal. “Thank
goodness I never really understood that music stuff.”
Still dripping wet and out of breath,
Pack pulled himself over the railing with some difficulty and fumbled
about for a towel. Several members of his crew were standing nearby,
gawking at him. “Get back to your business”, he barked at them.
“I'll be delivering the address soon.” They scattered quickly,
and he buried his face in his towel as he walked towards his cabin.
After spending a fair while grooming
his fur and straightening his whiskers, he delivered a brief address
to his crew. His mind was elsewhere, though As his crew filed out,
he stopped Survey on his way back to the crow's nest: “Keep an eye
out for the Journey”, he told him. “I have some business with
captain Corsair.”
There was no sign of him that evening,
but luckily no further distractions troubled him the next morning.
“Perhaps it is that I am on guard that keeps them away”, he
thought, as he returned early from his assignment. “I must remain
vigilant”.
In any case, he was thankful for the
peace of mind it afforded him. He spent most of the evening thinking
about what he would say, and his patience was rewarded when Survey
finally spotted Corsair's ship on the horizon. Not wanting their
conversation to be overhead by his crew, he sent them off to their
duties as Corsair crossed over to his ship.
“Pack, old friend, is everything
going well?”
Corsair greeted him cheerfully, but
Pack's manner was all business: “I need to know how you found
Steven.”
Corsair shrugged. “I already told
you, my search turned up nothing, so I was on my way back to the rest
of you. Then I ran into him one morning by pure happenstance.”
“But we all searched for ages and
found nothing. And I was sure I had a good lead on how to find
Steven, but... you must have known something, there's just no way
that could have been a coincidence!”
Corsair sighed. “This is about
Lapse, isn't it?”
“Don't change the subject!”
“It really was just dumb luck. I
didn't even recognize Steven until he happened to mention Michelle's
name. Sister and Sabre will tell you the same thing.”
“Dumb luck finds you too often,
Corsair. You found Sister, too, are you going to tell me that was
luck as well? There's clearly something more going on here.”
“And no one wants to understand it
more than I do. That's the truth, really.” His voice sounded
sincere, though Pack still did not believe him.
“Fine” he said, angrily, and
stormed back to into his cabin, leaving a distressed Corsair to
return to his ship on his own.
“That fool still doesn't trust me!”
he pounded his paw on his desk. “Does he truly think I'm that
useless?”
He took a deep breath and sat down in
his chair. Being angry wouldn't help him figure out how to find
Lapse. He put his paws on his temples and tried to collect his
thoughts. “If Corsair figured this out, then so can I.”
Pack tried to recollect the events of
their search for Steven. He had wanted to remain where they were,
but Corsair had wanted to search elsewhere, and Sister had gone after
him. And then, somehow they had found Steven. Something else must
have happened, he knew, but he had no idea what it was. He sighed
and leaned back in his chair, stumped.
Something from earlier that morning
came back to him: “They want to be found”, the stranger had said.
“No one wants to hide forever.” He rubbed his head. “If you
want to be found, Lapse, why can't I find you?”
His mind wandered, he thought of
holding her, and how she had pounced into his arms from the railing
that night. Standing there, against the starry sky, she had looked
so...
“There's a secret
message for you in the stars... They need to tell you something
important...”
Pack snapped back to his senses: The
star charts! Corsair had wanted to see them just before he went off
to find Steven. He must have seen something in them that told him
where to go!
He rushed off to find Quill, who was
still alternating between looking up at the sky and jotting down
notes, as usual. “I need to see the charts!”, he said, urgently.
“Go ahead”, Quill gestured to the
large stack of papers beside him. Pack spread out a number of charts
in front of him.
“He wanted to know where we had all
been, so he could find out where we hadn't searched yet... But what
are the odds that the one place we happened to look last would be the
right one?”
Pack ran his paw along the chart, just
like Sister had done when they were all together, aimlessly tracing
several possible routes. On another chart, he began to trace another
path with his other paw. Accidentally, he bumped one paw into the
other in the middle.
“Wait.” he said, smiling slightly.
“What if the goal wasn't to find out where we hadn't been?” He
crossed his arms one over the other, and drew a spiralling pattern,
uncrossing his arms without bringing his paws together, then lifted
them off the chart. “Two ships could cross the same area but never
meet as long as they kept moving. If one chose their route
carefully, they could have avoided meeting any of us.”
“Sir?” Quill looked up at him.
“I want you to keep very close track
over our route for the next little while. Make sure you keep track
of exactly where we've been.”
“As you say”, he shrugged as Pack
walked back to his cabin.
“I'm onto your game, Corsair”, he
rubbed his paws together as he sat alone in his cabin. “It's just
like in that silly game – a moving target is much harder to find
than a stationary one, because you can look everywhere and not find
it.” Perhaps last morning's ordeal had been useful after all.
He decided not to tell anyone what he
had figured out, because he he knew they would be afraid. But he was
not - He had long suspected that their fear of the Black Ship was
purely superstition, and this confirmed his beliefs. Finally, things
were starting to make sense.
“I hope Lapse is all right, and I
hope I'll find her soon”, he said, solemnly. This time he felt more
confident that his wish would come true.
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