“Isn’t it a little funny?”
“No!”
“You’re laughing too!”
“I know!” she moaned. Then she stopped, reaching out a hand. Luke stepped closer, seemingly outside his conscious control, so she touched his arm. “That’s it down there, I think.”
He wasn’t sure how she could see in the dark. Or—wasit dark? With the sun down, darkness had settled over the land, but it still seemed as if he could see in a kind of eerie, monochrome way. Whenever he focused too closely on any specific thing, the darkness washed back in and he was almost blind, but if he kept his eyes moving, he could make out shapes with more clarity than seemed physically possible.
And when he looked down the hill, he saw that she was right. There was some kind of fisherman’s shack down there, cast in shades of gray—not so much like a monochrome photograph as a badly over-corrected image on a computer, sharpened until detail started to be lost.
Luke hissed in pain as he stumbled on a rock, causing the finer notes of his oddly clear night vision to be suddenly lost. He was in total dark for a few staggering steps before that weird clarity reasserted itself and he could sort of see again.
Inga caught his arm. “Luke? Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he murmured. He felt Rogue against his leg, and put a hand down to rest it on the dog’s back. “Ready to sit down, I think.”
“We’re almost there.”
Luke gave up on trying to understand it, because every time he overthought it, it was as if his brain remembered that it was dark and he stopped being able to see. As long as he just let it happen, he was able to pick out enough of the detail in front of him to avoid tripping and falling face-first down the hill.
Getting to the cabin was less a walk down a trail than it was a scramble on a nearly vertical hillside. The cabin clearly wasn’t meant to be approached by land. When they reached a semi-level strip of land halfway down the hill, Luke could see—for certain values of ‘see’—that it was tucked against the hillside so closely that it seemed to grow out of the rocks. A steep, short path led down to the shore, where the ocean was a mirror of reflective starlight, hissing softly with the rise and fall of waves.
“Now let’s just hope nothing else has moved in while we were gone,” Inga said. There was a blink of light and abruptly he could see in a more conventional way, as she was holding a small flashlight and working on a complicated wood-and-iron latch holding the door shut.
“If you have a flashlight, why didn’t you use that earlier?”
She gave him a quick look, brow furrowed. “Can’t you see? I thought all shifters can see at night.”
“Sort of.”
“Oh!” Her lips rounded. “Your feet. I’m sorry, I didn’t think.” Under her straining fingers, the latch abruptly sprang open. “Aha. Dad didn’t want wild animals to be able to get in, but he didn’t have to make it quite this stiff.”
As she opened the door, Luke moved up behind her. He could see nothing inside, just flat black except where the flashlight’s thin beam swept across a dirt floor and wooden bunks.We’re different,he thought. She knew that he could change shape. But for her, it seemed to be as natural as thought. She spoke of it so casually. She had walked with confidence in the dark because she never had second thoughts about it.
Luke was made entirely of second thoughts. Just the idea of giving himself back to the bear, losing himself as he’d nearly lost himself on the iceberg, made him shudder.
“AWK!”
As soon as Inga started to go inside, the doorway was suddenly crowded with thrashing, flapping shapes. “Oh, right, that,” Inga said over the screeching cacophony. Luke felt the flashlight pressed into his hand. “Go on in and take a look around. There should be wood and fire-starting materials. I’m going to try to find a place for these guys so we don’t have to spend the night with them.”
She pushed past him in the narrow space in front of the door, talking aloud to the flapping ... things in the general tone that a person might use for a stubborn farm animal or a stuck bolt. (“Idiot, can’t you see I’m doing it? Settle down and stop that infernal flapping ...”) As her voice receded, Luke felt Rogue bump his leg again. He ducked his head by habit, used to nearly hitting his head on the sill of doors like this one, but it turned out to have room to spare, as if this door had been built to accommodate someone even taller than Luke’s six-two.
Inside, the cabin was a single room, designed for shelter more than comfort. The furnishings were a pair of wooden double bunk beds on opposite sides of the room, and between them, a table with a few wooden chairs. There was an iron stove and, as Inga had said, a pile of neatly stacked wood beside it, with a long-handled barbecue lighter and a box of matches on top of some old magazines.
Rogue lay down beside a bunk, sighed, and put his head on his paws.
“You and me both, boy,” Luke told the dog. His feet had stopped hurting and gone completely numb, which was probably going to be not so fun when feeling started up again.
He had vague recollections of learning to start a fire in Boy Scouts, and he was crumpling magazine pages when Inga came in, carrying her pack at arm’s length, and shut the door firmly behind her.
“If you still have doubts about why I’d rather not have them in here with us tonight, cute as they are, let me direct you to the state of my backpack,” she said. “This is worse than when my brother used it to carry an afternoon’s fishing catch, and it took me weeks to get the smell out that time.”
She leaned the backpack up beside the door and walked around the room, seeming aimless until she came back with a large glass and metal object. “I knew we left a fueled-up lantern here. Hand me one of those matches.”
Light bloomed behind the lantern’s glass. Inga stood on tiptoe to hang it from a hook on the ceiling, evidently meant for the purpose, and Luke was able to get a proper look around the cabin’s interior.
It didn’t really change things a lot from his pinpoint stage-by-stage view in the flashlight’s beam. But he noticed a few things he hadn’t seen before. As well as the furniture, there were shelves on the walls with an assortment of small objects to make a stay in the cabin more comfortable: neatly stacked dishes, books, cans, boxes.
