Between The Crystals

Ch 14 The Jungle Shard

Merryl returned from porting Andre and his group out for their morning trip and told Grant, "We had to go to the second location. Another group beat us to the first place."

He frowned and made a note of that. "Some villages are starting to send people out earlier."

"If we go out much earlier, we'll be there at the break of dawn," I reminded him. "We can't see as well, and the predators are still out. There are a few locations where the sun rises earlier, but there isn't much difference."

Grant had a huge map of the world in his office; alas, it showed the old world, not our current desert-besieged one. No one knew the current layout of the continents. Lions should be in Africa, but the sun rose there only a handful of hours after ours did. Our sunrise matched the one in the places with coyotes and moose, which should be North America, or possibly Russia.

Yet, I'd never seen the snow depicted in the magazine pictures, nor located a lake so big a hunter couldn't shoot an arrow across it, and those should have been present in both locations. No one had ever found the ocean, and rumor said it had disappeared. The desert reigned.

Thankfully, most animals remained in their traditional habitat, which made it easier to predict what we might encounter. It wasn't always a rule though. The only rule was that the Saursunes could appear anywhere.

Grant sighed glumly. "I know. But if we don't start going out earlier, we'll encounter more groups and have to settle for less favorable places."

"Less favorable" meant not enough food or being too close to a Saursune farm or field. Once again, we were forced to pick between starvation or risking attack from animals or Saursunes.

"I'm heading out before someone beats me to my usual spot," Merryl said, jogging toward the crystal as her group converged on her.

Pointing a thumb over my shoulder at her, I asked, "She gets to bounce?"

"She has to stay beside the crystal for ten hours," Grant reminded me.

"Point taken. That would drive me insane." I grabbed a couple of tightly-wrapped carry nets out of a nearby basket and stuck the fist-sized bundles in my pockets. "Where am I heading?"

The lack of hunters or gatherers meant I wasn't taking a group out, which only left a handful of options.

He opened his book and pulled a crystal shard out of his pocket. "I hate to send you out again, but—"

"It's easier for me to remember them," I finished.

My tendency to remember a crystal or shard instead of a location made it possible for me to port there reliably, even years later. Others usually found it easier to memorize locations, but memory became hazy during the long years while the shard grew, and they often ended up porting to more familiar areas by mistake. Then they had to hike to the crystal a second time and hope their notes were good enough to find it. A few crystals had never been found.

He nodded. "Try writing in the dirt too. That trick already helped Ariel differentiate those three mountain fields she kept mixing up."

"I wonder if we can port to a similar location if we knew the words someone else wrote in the dirt?"

Grant was already ahead of me. "Doesn't work. Derek never visited the higher location, but even when he visualized a similar field and used the words for the high one, he still appeared at the other field."

So much for that idle hope. The porters still had to visit each crystal in order to return there, presuming their memory was good enough.

"Speaking of the mountains, can you port to the Grapefruit Grove crystal and plant that shard farther down the slope? Maybe see if you can find a creek or a spot with a fair bit of wildlife."