“Maybe since morning,” Pia said hoarsely. “They thought he was off with some boys. He ran off from them. They didn’t send anyone back to tell. Pia’s looking in the Camp; but Jin’s out in the hills. Hunting this way. He asked us, Jin; our father askedus. He’s really scared.”

“It’s going to get dark.”

“Our father’s out there, all the same. And he doesn’t know anything. He could fall in a burrow, he could. But I don’t think he’ll quit.”

“For Green.”

“Jin–” She talked only to Jin, because he made up the minds of the rest. “He asked.”

“We’d better go,” Jin said then; so that was it: the others ducked their heads and nodded.

“What do we do with that brother of yours,” Ben asked, assuming they were going too, “if we find him?”

“Hey,” Jane said, “hey, I have to get back to the Camp. You said you’d walk me back to the Camp.”

“ I’llwalk you back,” Pia said with a narrow look. “That trail down’s really bad. A careless body might slip.”

“You’d better watch who you talk to,” Jane said.

“ Azi. That what you reckon, maincamper? Think I’m scared? You watch yourself.”

“Shut up,” Jin said.

“One of you,” said Jane, “has to get me back. I can’t wait around while you track that brother of yours down–I know; I know all about him.”

“We’ll be back. Just wait.”

“He’s gone, don’t you think that? When they go, they go.”

Pia gathered herself up again without a word, started off down the road without a backward look, hot inside; and before she had gotten to the first downslope there was a skittering of pebbles and a following in her wake: the whole troop of her brothers was gathered about her, and the down‑the‑row boys too.

“Wait!” Jane shouted after the lot of them. “Don’t you go off and leave me up here.” And that was satisfaction. They would get her down–later. When they had seen to Green again. A stream of words followed them, words they swore by in the main Camp in the longest string Pia had ever heard. Pia marched down the winding track without looking back, hands in her pockets.

“That Green,” Ben muttered. “Going to do what he likes, that’s what. Going to get to what he wants sooner or later.”

“Quiet,” Jin Younger said, and Ben kept it to himself after that, all the long way down.

It was better going back. In company. Pia began to pant with exhaustion–her tall brothers had long legs and they were fresh on the track, but she kept going, with the stitch back in her side, not wanting to admit her tiredness. Green–as for Green, Ben might be right. She had five brothers and the last was wild; was thirteen, and wandered in the hills.

And those who did that–they went on wandering; or whatever they did, who gave up humankind.

It was the third time…that Green had gone.

“This time,” Pia said out of her thoughts, between gasps for air, “this time I think we have to get him, us. Because I don’t think our father can find him fast enough.”

“This time–” Jin Younger said, walking beside her, themselves out of hearing of the others if he kept his voice low, “this time I think it’s like Ben said.”

He admitted that to her. Not to the others. And it was probably true.

But they kept going all the same, down into the woods the Calibans had grown, among the mounds and the brush in the late afternoon. “Where’s Jin hunting?” Jin Younger asked.

Pia pointed, the direction of the Camp. “From Camp looking toward the river. That’s what he thought–the river.”

“Probably right,” Jin Younger said. “Probably right for sure.” He squatted down, cleared ground with the edge of his hand, took a stick and scratched signs as the others gathered. “I think Mark and I had better find our father: that’s furthest. And Zed and Tam, you go the middle way; Ben, you and Alf go with them and split off where you have to go up to cover the ground; and Nine, you and Pia go direct by the river way. Pia’s got most chance of talking to Green: I want her there where he’s most likely to go. We draw a circle around him and sweep up our father too, before some caliban gets him.”

That was Jin Younger: that was her brother, whose mind worked like that, cool and quick. Pia got up from looking at the pattern and grabbed Nine’s hand–Nine was eighteen, like Zed; and red and gold and freckled all over. They all moved light and quick, and in spite of the prospect in front of them, Pia went with a kind of relief, that she was doing something, that she was not her mother, searching the town because she had to do something, even a hopeless thing, lame as Pia elder was, worn out from Green, aching tired from Green–

Lose him this time, Pia thought, in her heart of hearts. Let him go this time, to be done with it; and no more of that look her parents had, no more of doing everything for Green.

But if they lost him, they had to have tried. It was like that, because he was born under their roof, stranger that he was.

They took the winding course through the brush‑grown mounds, she and Nine, hand in hand, hurried past the gaping darknesses under stones, that were caliban doorways–sometimes saucer‑big eyes watched them, or tongues flicked, from caliban mouths mostly hid in shadow and in brush.

And the way began to be bare and slithery with mud, and tracked with clawed pads of caliban feet, which was a climbway calibans used from the Styx or a brook that fed it. Ariels scurried from their track, whipping their tails in busy haste; and flitters dived in manic profusion from the trees–some into ariel mouths. Pia brushed the flitters off, a frantic slapping at the back of her neck, protecting her collar, and they jogged along singlefile now, slid the last bit down to the flat, well‑trampled riverside, where calibans had flattened tracks hi the reeds of the bogs, and clouds of insects swarmed and darted.

Desolation. No human track disturbed the mud flats.

“We just wait,” Pia said. “He can’t have gotten past us unless he went all the way around the heights to the east.” She squatted down by the edge of the water and dipped up a double handful, poured it over her head and neck, and Nine did the same.

“Why don’t we take a rest?” Nine suggested, and pointed off toward the reeds.

“I think we ought to walk on down the way toward the rocks.”

“Waste of time.”

“Then you go back.”

“I think we could do something better.”

She looked suddenly and narrowly at him. He had that look they had had up there, with Jane. “I think you better forget that.”

He made a grab at her; she slapped his hand and he jerked it back.

“Go after that Jane,” she said, “why don’t you?”

“What’s wrong with you? Afraid?”

“You go find Jane.”

“I like you.”

“You’ve got no sense.” He scared her; her heart was pounding. “Jane and all of you, that’s all nice, isn’t it? But I say no, and you’d better believe no.”

He was bigger than she, by about a third. But there were other things to think of, and one was living next to each other in town; and one was that she always got even. People knew that of Pia Younger; it was important to have people believe that, and she saw to it.

And finally he made a great show of sulking and dusting his hands off. “I’m going back,” he said. “I don’t stay out here for nothing.”

“Sure, you go back,” she said.

“You’re cold,” he said. “I’ll tell how you are.”

“You tell whatever you like; and when you do, I’ll tell plenty too. You make me sound bad, you make my brothers sound the same. We figure like that. You’re three and we’re six. You make up your mind.”

“You’re five now,” he said, and stalked off.

Afterward she found her hands sweating, not sure whether it was because of the sun or her temper or the thought that she could have had Nine, who was not bad for a first; but he was ugly inside, if not out. And lacking that reason, she thought of her mother, and how she had been young before Green started growing up. She thought about babies and the grief her mother had had of them, and that dried the sweat all at once.