Back in the front room, he set the tablet PC down and plugged it in. Yul's camera had worked out okay, although there wasn't a hell of a lot to see. He'd come out in a forested area, with nothing but trees in all directions, and spent the next hours stooging around semi-aimlessly without ever coming across open ground. The weather station telemetry told its own story, though. Sixty degrees Fahrenheit had been the daytime peak temperature, and towards nightfall it dipped towards freezing.
Huw poked at the other instrument readings. The scanner drew a blank; nobody was transmitting, at least on any wavelength known to the sophisticated software-directed radio he'd acquired from a friend who was still working at the Media Lab. The compact air sampler wouldn't tell him much until he could send it for analysis-much as he might want one, nobody was selling a backpack-sized mass spectroscope. He poked at the video, tripping it into fast-forward.
Trees. More trees. Elena hadn't been wrong about the tree surplus.
"Oh you have
Huw hit the pause button, backed up a few frames, and zoomed in. Yul had been looking at the ground, which lay on a gentle slope. There were trees everywhere, but for once there was a view of the ground the trees were growing in. For the most part it was a brownish carpet of dead pine-needles and ferns, interspersed with the few hardy plants that could grow in the shadow of the coniferous forest- but the gray-black chunks of rocky material off to one side told a different story. Huw blinked in surprise, then glanced away, his mind churning with possibilities. Then he bounced forward through the next half hour of Hulius's perambulations, looking for other signs. Finally, he put the laptop down, stood up, and went back into the hall.
"Yul?" he called.
"Hello?" A door opened, somewhere upstairs.
"Why didn't you tell me about the ruins, Yul?"
Hulius appeared at the top of the staircase, wearing a towel around his waist, long blond hair hanging damply: "what ruins?"
"The black stones in the forest. Those ruins."
"What stones-" Yul looked blank for a moment, then his expression cleared. "Oh,
"Are they-" Huw lugged at his hair distractedly. "Lightning Child! Do I have to explain everything in words of one syllable? Where's Elena?"
"She's in the-hey, what's up?"
"What's so special about asphalt?" Hulius asked, hitching up his towel as he came downstairs.
"What's so special? Well, maybe it means there was a civilization there not so long ago!" Nervous energy had Huw bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. "Think, bro. If there was a civilization there, what else does it mean?"
"There were people there?" Hulius perked up. "Hey, I think that rates at least a bottle of wine..."
"We're going back over, tomorrow," Huw said bluntly. "I'll e-mail a report to the duke tonight. Then we're going to double-check on that road and see where it leads."
The small house hunkered a short way back from the sidewalk, one of a row of houses in an area that wasn't exactly cheap-nowhere in Boston was cheap-but that had once been affordable for ordinary working people. Brilliana knew it quite well. She'd been watching it discreetly for over an hour, and she was pretty sure that nobody was home and, more important, nobody else was watching it. Which suited her just line, because if it was under surveillance what she was about to do would quite possibly get her killed.
Swallowing to clear her over-dry mouth, Brill opened the car door and stepped out into the hot summer sunlight. She slung the oversized leather handbag on her left shoulder, discreetly checking that she could get a hand into it in a hurry, then let the door of the rental car swing shut. The key was in the ignition: the risk of someone stealing the car was, in her view, minor compared to the risk of not being able to get away fast if things went wrong.
