“So tell me, why aren’t you waiting until Lezah comes back?” Yamma said, from his spot in the breast pocket of Gae’s simple shirt. He usually enjoyed having an excuse to get out of the apartment, and quite enjoyed having an excuse to ride in Gae’s breast pocket, but still….

“Yamma, I know you weren’t there, but when Lezah talked about it…this isn’t something she or her family wants to dwell on, and I don’t blame her. If we don’t find any evidence, she doesn’t have to know, and she doesn’t have to feel bad. Make sense?”

“Oh, it makes sense. I’m just worried about what will happen if you find something…and she still doesn’t want you to share it.”

Gae trudged through the fields, breathing in the fresh air. “I’m not going to force her, Yamma. If I find something…I’m gonna make sure that she’s okay with it.”

“I know, gok’ma. It’s not you I’m worried about,” he said with a sigh.

Gae absent-mindedly tousled Yamanu’s hair. “I tell you what,” she said. “Let’s see what we find first, and then we’ll worry about whether there’s anything else to be worried about.”

“That’s my girl. Always act first, clean up the mess later.”

“It’s how we started dating, isn’t it?” the face above him said, breaking into a grin.

“It’s a wonderful plan,” Yamma said, laying back against her breast. “I’m totally in favor of it.”
—

Luke hobbled up to the lookout post, leaving his crutches aside for the moment, and stared down at the woman.

“Who is she?” he asked. “Have you seen her before?”

“I was hoping you would know,” Quendra said, frowning down at the tall, tan woman below. She had a knot in the pit of her stomach, one that had formed the second Lun sounded the alarm, and one that had only gotten worse over the past half-hour.

“Sorry,” Luke murmured. “I don’t.”

Quendra looked back for a long moment, and almost growled, “If you’re lying to me….”

“Do you think that’s likely?” Luke said, not taking his eyes off the Titaness. “Honestly, if this was, like, Aisell’s best buddy, do you think I’d lie about that?”

“You wouldn’t want us to know if…if you sent a message.”

“I would,” Luke said. He looked over at Quendra, looked at her hard. “Quendra, what I had you do…it said nothing of where we are. At all. But still, if I gave our position away, somehow, some way…I’d tell you. You’d need to know. And I’d be heading out there to tell this woman that I’d been living off the land, or something stupid like that – anything to get her off the scent.”

He looked back at the beautiful Titaness. She was crawling, as if studying the ground. He couldn’t figure out what her goal was; that worried him. Especially when a horrific thought occurred to him.

“It’s too early. Lezah said we would have ’til next year.”

“What?” Quendra said.

“The farm – they’re having trouble making ends meet. They may have to sell it.”
Quendra looked at Luke like he was spouting jibberish.

“Right, yeah, you guys don’t have money or property rights or anything. Forget that sometimes. Anyhow, Lezah was saying they may have to move, give the farm to someone new, because they can’t provide for everything they need to.”

Quendra frowned. “And what has that to do with us?”

“A lot,” Luke said. “if the wrong people take it over. Forest like this – Lezah said it’s rare on Archavia. Someone might want to take the trees, take the land, build Titan buildings…but I figured I’d contact Aisell long before that. She said it would happen next year, and I can’t imagine she’d be looking to sell it off before the harvest, that’s her last best shot at keeping it.”

“Titans are Titans,” Quendra said, though she did not successfully hide the doubt with which she said it.

Luke didn’t even bother to correct her. Instead, he studied the woman. At long last, he nodded.

“I need to get closer to her,” he said. “I need to figure out what she’s doing.”

“You need to get your head examined,” Quendra said. “That would be reckless even if you weren’t hobbled.”

“I’m serious,” Luke said. “This could mean the life or death of the Tribe, Quendra! We have to know!”

“I’ll talk to the defenders, they….”

“No,” Luke said, looking her dead in the eye. “If she finds me…maybe she takes me back to the farmhouse, maybe she keeps me as a pet…I dunno. But she doesn’t find the Tribe. That’s the most important thing. Besides,” he said gently, “I managed to stay out of sight for a long time on Titan Station. And the pet shop owner was putting out traps. This one doesn’t know I’m here. And if she does…if she is here for me….”

He looked down. “I promise you, Quendra. I won’t let her hurt the Tribe.”

Quendra looked at him for a good long minute, befoee she shared the barest hint of a smile. “Well, I’m going with you.”

“Quendra….”

“You know their world better than I do, I’ll grant you that. You may see something in what she’s doing that I would not. But I know these woods. And I owe you one,” she said, shooting a glance at the crutches that lay against the wall.

He sighed, then smiled. “All right, Huntress. At least we’re high up. The gate isn’t that far.”

“We’re not going to the gate,” Quendra said. “She’d spot us for sure.”

“There’s another way out?”

“Obviously,” Quendra said. “You don’t think I’ve shown you every exit, do you?”

—

“Any luck?” Gae said, as Yamanu searched near a root. Over an hour they’d been out, and nothing yet. Not that this was any great surprise; she’d be happy to search for the next twenty or thirty hours if it was just her. But she knew Yamma would tire long before that, and she needed his eyes.

“Nothing so far,” he said with a sigh. “You need to get a portable magnetic resonance imager. If there’s anything around, it’s probably buried. It’s been twenty-odd years; for us humans, that’s six or seven generations.”

“Magreses don’t grow on trees,” Gae said, trying to use her pad’s metal scanning ability, and cursing at the interference. “Think it’s hopeless?”

“Actually…maybe not,” Yamma said, noticing something glinting on the ground. He began to dig at it.

“Need help?”

“Yeah, you grab a fingerful of dirt, I’ll lose it…ha!” he said, pulling it loose. It was a bronze broadpoint arrowhead, one that was still attached to a wood shaft. Indeed, even one of the Royal Berry-leaf fletchings was still intact.

Yamma stared at it in a bit of wonder. He had been born a pet, and though he knew wild humans were capable of surviving on their own, he knew no more about them than a Titan would – that is to say, almost nothing at all.

But this…this was clearly a human’s work. Too small to be anything else. He traced the arrowhead carefully; it was still sharp. Whoever had crafted this was as talented as any Titan, and that was for sure.

“What do you have there?” Gae said, straining to see. She got down as close as she could to Yamma, and furrowed her brow. “Is that…a stick of some kind?”

“It’s an arrow,” Yamma said, and Gae squinted, then beamed.

“Oh! Sure it is. Is that a…is that a rock point?”

“It’s metal,” Yamma said. “Copper, maybe, or…or that other one. Not iron….”

“Bronze?” Gae said, shocked. “They made a bronze arrowhead? That’s…I mean, that’s not easy. They’d have to have a…I forget what they called them. I remember my ancient history, though – you have to mix metals to get bronze.”

Gae stood up, and Yamma gazed up the long tower of flesh leading up to her shorts; he could have continued staring up at her all day, but in the back of his mind, something was picking at him; something wasn’t quite right.

Yamma looked at the arrow again, and furrowed his brow. It was in remarkable condition for something that had been here for twenty, thirty years. Very remarkable. He’d read about decomposition just recently; the wood should have disappeared long ago. The leaves definitely should have.

“Gae….”

Suddenly, he heard a sound. Small, faint, below the hearing range of a Titan, to be sure. He looked over to his left, and looked carefully.

Stupid! Quendra thought, freezing in place. When the giantess had risen, she had taken a few steps back, on instinct. (Luke, though grimacing in pain from the exertion, had done no such thing. She was rather surprised at that; he really was unafraid of them.)
She had stepped on a twig, broken it; far too soft for the giantess to hear, but her human captive had. He looked right in their direction, and had Quendra not chosen a knoll thick with vegetation, he would have seen them.

“This is amazing, Yamma. The Tribe that used to live here – they were technologically advanced! I mean, not compared to Titans, but then, we have the whole Local Spur to use – they had these woods, maybe stuff they could take from the farm! If we were in their shoes, I doubt we could do better!”

“Gae, I think we should go,” Yamma said.

“Huh? Yamma, we’re just getting started! We need to….”

“I’m serious, Gae. We need to go. There are…animals.”

Gae stared down at the tiny person by her shoe. Of course – silly of her not to realize it. He was in danger here; if she started looking in one part of the woods, a kipp could get him, before she could scare it away, and even if it couldn’t…he had every reason to think it could.

No matter. They’d found a piece of the puzzle, and that was enough for today. She could use the arrow to talk TETH into giving her some equipment. She knelt back down and offered him her soft palm. He stepped into it resolutely, barely aware of the sensation of being lifted by her. But as she brought her palm to breast level, he said something that surprised her.

“Actually, gok’ma, put me on your shoulder. Right by your ear.”

That was very unlike Yamma; he quite enjoyed her breasts, and she enjoyed that he enjoyed them. But she looked down at his face, and realized that he was not scared…he was concerned.

She lifted him up a little bit more, and set him on her shoulder. She heard him murmur, almost whisper, right at the edge of her hearing. And she had to fight not to yelp in surprise.

“All right,” she said, turning and walking out. “Well, we’ll save the arrow, anyhow. I think my class will want to see it.”

Luke leaned heavily on his crutches, watching the long legs of the Titaness carry her into the fields. “Well, she isn’t looking to buy the woods,” he said with a sigh of relief.

“What is she looking to do?” Quendra asked.

“Sounds like she’s a teacher, maybe? Doing some archaeology. Looking for human artifacts.”

“What are those?”

“Bits and pieces of your technology. I mean, the Titans obviously know that there used to be humans here. Maybe she thought she’d look to see if you left anything lying around. She found an arrow, and you spooked her pet human, so hopefully that’s the last of her.”

“I don’t know,” Quendra said, following the monstrous figure of the woman with her eyes. “I just hope she doesn’t think about that arrow too much.”

“Huh? Why?”

“It’s one of mine,” she said. “I lost it early this spring. Careless. But if she thinks about it….”

Luke grimaced. “If she thinks about it, she might realize that arrow isn’t 20 years old.”

—

“That arrow isn’t 20 years old, then,” Gae said, as they approached the spot the autoshuttle was to pick them up.

“It probably is only one or two. If that,” Yamma said, softly. “Gae, I think maybe there are humans still there.”

Gae swallowed hard. “Yamma…do you think some of them survived?”

Yamma was quiet. He wanted to just look down his girlfriend’s blouse and ignore what his gut was telling him.

“What’s wrong?” Gae asked, after a while.

“I don’t know. If there are humans there…what happens to them?”

Gae paused for a second herself. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess…I figured they’d stay there, right?”

“You think so?” Yamma said. “If they’re discovered, a tribe of humans, using arrows…you think they’ll be left alone?”

“They’ve lasted so far.”

“Maybe so,” Yamma said. After a moment, he asked, “Are you going to tell Lezah?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see how she’s doing when I see her next. I think she’d love to find out some humans survived, but….”

“But?”

“Between that and Luke disappearing…I probably need more than just the arrow. If I told her that there were humans there and there weren’t…I don’t know, I don’t want to get her hopes up.”

“So we’ll go back?”

“Maybe. I mean…if there are humans there…me tromping in there every few days won’t go unnoticed. And I don’t want to scare them. I’m sure life is scary enough for them as it is.”

Yamma laughed nervously. “Well, don’t look at me, I’m not going in by myself.”

Gae laughed. “No, no – there’s no way I’d let you go into the woods by yourself. You might get hurt, or eaten, or worse – you might meet a pretty human girl who’d steal you away from me.”

Yamma did take the opportunity to look down his girlfriend’s blouse, and he grinned. “Gok’ma…I don’t think there’s anyone alive, human or Titan, who could give me a better view than I’ve got from here.”

Gae laughed out loud, and plucked him from her shoulder; she kissed his bare chest softly, and with her other hand she carefully took the arrow from him. “I’ll hold on to this. I don’t want to get poked. By an arrow.”

With a wink, she dropped Yamma down her shirt, and looked off into the distance at the autocab, which was turning slowly toward them. They’d have to do this very carefully, and that would require a lot of thought…and there would be time for that. But not right now.