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"Mostly."

Jade gave me a look. "There were mitigating circumstances."

"What circumstances?"

"They were very small and cute."

I looked ahead before she could see the smile she nearly pulled from me. Normal conversation was harder for her than an argument about field procedure. Give Jade a danger and she moved toward it with both hands ready. Ask what she enjoyed and she stumbled over the answer.

The first broken reeds lay across the channel twenty minutes from camp. Jade crouched on the bank and followed the snapped stems with her eyes. There were too many to have been damaged by the current, and every stalk had broken at roughly the same height, leaving a flattened path through the flooded grass.

"Something large passed through here," she said.

"Recently?"

She touched the pale split in one stem. "The inside hasn't darkened. Sometime after midnight, perhaps."

Several paces downstream, more reeds had been flattened in the opposite direction. Together they formed part of a broad circle around the higher ground where we had established camp.

"This wasn't one crossing," Jade said.

"What was it?"

"A boundary route."

The next sign appeared on a waterwood tree. Long strips of bark had been scraped from the trunk above the height of my shoulder, leaving four deep grooves in the exposed wood. A blue-grey scale clung near one of them, thick as a knife blade and iridescent beneath the green light.

"You recognize it," I said.

"I have a possibility."

"Which is?"

"Not one I want to announce until I'm certain."

We continued more slowly. The jungle quieted as the channel widened. Small creatures had been calling from the canopy throughout the patrol, but those sounds thinned until only dripping leaves and the muted press of the current remained. Even the fish had disappeared from the shallows.

Strips of bark had been woven between several low branches, while others disappeared beneath the water. The exposed wood still bled sap.

The surface lifted in one broad line, settled and then rose again several paces closer to us. Jade stopped, her attention turning inward in the way I had begun to recognize.

"What do you feel?"

"Something." Her voice fell almost too low to hear. "I can feel the pressure of the life beneath us, but I can't reach inside it. One to the left, another beyond the roots and at least three farther out."

The water bulged near a stand of reeds. Nothing broke the surface, but the swell traveled against the current before vanishing beneath the trees.

Jade opened her eyes. "They have large heartbeats."

"How many?"

"At least six adults, perhaps more. There's another concentration ahead, dozens of smaller heartbeats, but they aren't moving."

I drew my shield magic close enough to feel it gather beneath my skin. "Can you identify them?"

"Not from here."

"We don't need to go closer."