Running Wild

He found it after a few seconds, a narrow rectangular entry with a rusted metal door hanging crooked from one hinge. A trail of trampled grasses and footprints in the dirt led from the door to a spot on the northern side of the room where the ivy hung in a curtain too thick to be natural.
That had to be it.
Heart racing, Lynx crossed to the place where the tracks vanished behind the vines. He stood to one side, his knife in a battle-ready grip, held his breath and listened. Somewhere in the humid green dimness, an insect or small animal scuttled through the weeds. Beyond the veil of ivy, nothing moved.
Lynx let out his breath in a slow, silent stream. He took a moment to calm and center his mind, then crouched and peered through the straggling ends of the vines. He saw nothing but blackness. With a swift glance over his shoulder, he stood and slipped through the hanging greenery, his back to the wall and his knife ready in his hand.
At first, the darkness remained unrelieved, but he could feel the empty space around him. A large space, too large for a single, simple room. He waited. After a moment, his eyes caught a vague pale gold light flickering somewhere far off. It wasn’t much, but once his vision adjusted, the light grew strong enough for him to pick out a hallway that ran straight away from the wall for about ten or twelve paces then dove down a set of steep steps. The light—as well as the sense of a vast, open area—came from somewhere at the bottom.
Lynx stood there, chewing his bottom lip and thinking hard. The Great Mother Herself couldn’t talk him into going down those steps. The hallway led only in that direction, so the nomad gang had to have gone that way, and Lynx didn’t particularly want to fight them alone. But he needed to know whether a nest or a simple camp lay at the bottom of the stairs. The sooner, the better. He wanted to get back to his Brothers and get out of this place. Their time was short. He could feel it.
Moving with a silence born of a lifetime’s skill, Lynx eased a few paces down the hall toward the top of the stairs. As he drew closer, the faint light picked out words carved into the wall at the point where it began to slope down into the ground.
Words. Writing, at the top of what Lynx felt more surely with every passing second was the nest.
Excitement raced through Lynx’s blood, making his heart pound. Great Mother, the nomads can write.
He shook off the thought as soon as it struck him. The edges of the words looked dull and rounded, as if they’d been there for a long time. As if they’d been etched into the ancient wall by someone from the old world.
Lynx stared, wishing with all his heart Rabbit was still alive. He’d been one of the handful of Pack Brothers who could read. Lynx himself knew a few individual letters, thanks to Rabbit’s relentless attempts to teach him, but that was all. He’d never learned to tell one word from another.
He crouched and gazed down the steps as far as he could see. Nothing moved. He turned to peer over his shoulder. The muted, dappled sunlight from the room behind him remained undisturbed. As far as he could tell, nothing human stirred anywhere nearby except himself. He saw nothing, heard nothing.
Why, then, did the skin at his nape prickle and his shoulders grow tense? He didn’t understand it, but now wasn’t the time to start questioning his instincts. With one final, longing look at the letters on the wall—the first one was a “Q”, he felt certain—he hurried toward the tumble of ivy between himself and the exit.
He peered through a gap in the greenery. The room beyond lay empty, but something seemed wrong. The air felt brittle, as if some sound had disturbed it just seconds before and he’d missed it.
His knife at the ready and all his senses on alert, he slipped past the vines and into the tremendous room, keeping his back to the wall. Something stirred at the base of the tree. Lynx stilled. Focused. A second later he found it and cursed himself for an idiot. A nomad crouched in the weeds at the tree’s roots, staring out the window, one hand planted on the ground and the other curled around the handle of a long metal knife.