Her head swam with images she didn't recognize. Pictures played across her mind. She could see the dinocreatures hauling away the dead to some unknown area of this cavern.
She opened her eyes.
The dinocreatures were stooped over their fallen comrades, collecting the bodies and trucking them away. The other set of feet turned and walked the opposite way.
What had just happened?
Mick pointed at the second set of feet.
Julia shook her head. They couldn't do it quietly. Not now. Not with those things running around already pissed off that we killed some of their friends.
But Mick wanted to follow the second figure.
His face implored her.
She frowned and then finally nodded. She held up ten fingers — ten minutes before he had to come back.
The rest of them would wait.
Was it safe here?
Julia didn't know. She didn't think what Mick was doing was safe either, but he was hard to control. Besides, as reluctant as she was to admit it, they needed some reliable information about these…things.
And Mick was the one best suited to finding out what was happening. He could move quieter than anyone else. He had the training after all.
Julia just hoped he'd come back.
Because she couldn't stand losing another member of her team.
Especially Mick.
While Julia sat there waiting for Mick, she tried to reason out what had happened to her head when it had suddenly filled with all sorts of images. And then she'd opened her eyes and seen the dinocreatures doing exactly what the images had shown.
Had she somehow stumbled onto a form of telepathy? Was that how they communicated? She didn't think the dinocreatures could be capable of it, especially considering they still chirped and growled. That seemed to be their favorite means of communicating.
But what about the second set of feet Mick had seen? She hadn't heard anything from them. Nor had she seen a tail.
Two races of creatures down here? She felt like she was in the land that time forgot or some other adventure story. It didn't make sense, after all. How could science explain an entire ecosystem contained within a mountain in the middle of one the coldest places on earth?
Was she missing something? Undoubtedly. They all were.
She hoped Mick would report back and say he'd found something.
She glanced around and saw Wilkins sweating under the canopy of leaves he'd found for himself. She couldn't see Nung or Darren but could hear someone breathing heavily.
She realized how labored her own breathing had become, especially since the introduction of so much stress over the creatures.
Another balmy breeze sifted through the leaves, bending them and adding more noise to their area. For the first time, Julia also heard the whine of insects. A mosquito landed near her face and she brushed it away without thinking.
Bugs, too?
She shook her head and wondered how much National Geographic would pay for a scoop like this: Shangri-La at the bottom of the world.
Insane.
One of the guys must have been battling a lot of the mosquitoes. They'd obviously sensed the heat from their bodies and carbon dioxide in the air. Julia found herself swatting more of them than she cared to.
Wilkins sat close by, unfazed by them.
He glanced at her and smiled.
Julia leaned closer. "Aren't the bugs biting you?"
He frowned. "What bugs?"
Julia swatted at another one. "These bugs! They've been dive-bombing me on the hunt for blood for about fifteen minutes now."
Wilkins' face clouded. "Julia, I don't see any bugs over there."
"What?" She swatted at another one. Damn, it was big! "I just nearly got one of them. You can't see them?"
"No."
She frowned. The last time this had happened, they'd been back in the tunnel fighting of a hoard of dinocreatures. But that had been a hologram. A trick to get Havel.
Was this another hologram?
And if so, who was the intended target this time?
Julia glanced at Wilkins again. "Check on the others."
He nodded and slithered off through the underbrush. At once, Julia's mosquitoes vanished.
Gone.
She glanced at her arms, but found no signs they'd been able to bite her. No red marks scarred her arms. No itchiness.
Nothing.
What sort of technology could these creatures have that would enable them to project holograms of anything they wanted, wherever they wanted? The realization of what they might be scared Julia.
And she didn't want to think about it anymore.
Wilkins came back. "Darren's gone."
Julia shook her head. "Dammit!" She paused. "Nung?"
"Right here," came the voice to her left.
"Okay," said Julia. "I want us bunched up nice and tight. I want us in each other's eyesight all the time. I'm not losing any more of my team."
Nung squirmed his way through the bushes and Sat close by. Julia could smell the air tinged with body odor. It might have been her own, she concluded. Judging by how extreme the conditions they'd undergone had been, anyone would be hard-pressed to not be exuding a bit of pungent odor.
"Where's Mick?"
Julia faced Nung. "He spotted another type of creature."
"Another type-?" Nung's face fell. "Wonderful."
