Month 1, Day 1, Afternoon
"Hey, come here, quick!" I didn't wait for an answer, just kept running.
Branches scratched my arms the second I hit the treeline, and for a few seconds I lost all sense of direction, every trunk around me thin and packed close and identical to the last one. Then a sharp crack came from the left, something tearing through brush in a hurry. I cut that way and pushed harder, leaves slapping my face. Then I saw her again. She glanced back, tried to run faster, and her foot caught a root. Went down hard on her knees, rolled to the side, and stayed there, breathing fast.
I slowed before I reached her. Kept my hands open where she could see them. Her shoulders were shaking. Tears ran down her face and dropped straight into the dirt.
"Please," she whispered, voice broken. "Please don't hurt me."
"Hey. Breathe. I'm not gonna hurt you, I just..."
Something slammed into my back before I got the rest of it out.
"Ow."
I turned around. Amina stood there, hand still half-raised, the others right behind her. Daisuke's eyes were huge. Nikita looked more annoyed than anything. Carmen was watching the girl, not me. Cealith hung back a step, lips pressed into a thin line.
"What did you do?" Amina was already moving past me. "Why's she crying?"
"I didn't do anything. She was already crying when I found her, I just..."
Amina wasn't listening anymore. She dropped to a knee in front of the girl, voice gone soft. "Hey. It's okay. You're safe now. Nobody here's gonna hurt you."
The girl tried to scoot away. Amina didn't push it. She waited, then opened her arms, and after a long second the girl leaned into them. Amina pulled her close, one hand smoothing down the back of her head, over and over, and the crying eased off from sharp gasping into something smaller, breath by breath.
"Psst. You're okay," Amina murmured.
She stood with the girl on her hip and turned toward the stream. When she looked at me on the way past, her eyes cut sharp enough that I looked away first.
Back at the water Amina crouched and tilted the girl toward the bank. "Drink a little. Slowly."
The girl hesitated, then leaned down and sipped. After a few mouthfuls she sat back against Amina's shoulder, breathing even now, one fist still knotted in Amina's sleeve.
Amina crossed her arms and looked at me. "Who is she?"
"No idea."
"Then why was she crying when we got here?"
I shrugged. "Found her hiding in a bush while we were drinking. She clocked me looking at her and bolted, so I went after her. That's the whole story."
Amina shook her head. "Jesus. You really don't know how to talk to kids."
She turned back to the girl. "Let's start simple. What's your name?"
Nothing.
"Do you know where your parents are?"
Still nothing.
"Where'd you sleep last night?"
A small shake of the head.
Carmen knelt on the other side, hands folded in her lap. "It's okay if you don't want to talk. You can show us later, if you want."
My hand found something soft and fuzzy in my pocket. The teddy bear. I'd completely forgotten I still had it, and I pulled it out and held it toward her.
"This yours?"
Her whole face changed. She grabbed it with both hands and pulled it straight to her chest, torn seams and missing ear and all, and just held on.
"Mr. Teddy," she whispered, and this time the smile was real.
My face did something I hadn't given it permission to do. I let it.
"Do you know where your camp is?" I asked, softer. "Where your mom and dad were yesterday?"
She gave a small nod, then lifted one arm and pointed deeper into the trees. Not the direction we'd come from. Off at an angle, following the line of the stream.
"Can you show us?" Carmen asked.
Another quiet nod.
"Good," Nikita said. "Let's go."
Amina lifted the girl onto her shoulders, hands steady on her legs. The girl settled there easy, both small fists finding Amina's hair for balance without needing to be shown how. Amina looked pleased about it without making a thing out of it.
"You're not as bad with kids as I thought," she said, glancing at me while she adjusted her grip.
"Thanks? I just gave her back a teddy bear."
"And that was the right move. Don't make me regret the compliment."
We set off along the stream. The water covered up the quiet between us, which helped more than I would've guessed. From her seat on Amina's shoulders the girl watched the trees go by, pointing every so often, and Amina followed wherever she pointed. We crossed a stretch where the water ran shallow over rocks and picked the path back up on the other side.
Carmen drifted over to Amina's other side. "She's so cute. Can I hold her a bit?"
Amina tipped her head. "Sure."
They made the swap carefully. The girl studied Carmen's face up close, then smiled again and patted her cheek, deciding something. Carmen smiled back and bumped foreheads with her, gentle, and the girl giggled and tried to copy it.
"Bro, I wish I was that little girl right now, getting doted on like that by Carmen," Daisuke muttered beside me.
"What?" I shook my head, already hoping I'd forget he'd said it.
The girl looked down at me from Carmen's shoulders.
"Uncle Aleks," she said.
Why is she calling me uncle?
Amina caught my eye and looked, for just a second, almost proud of me.
After a while the trees thinned out and stopped. Sunlight spilled across the far edge of the path, and we stepped out into an open field with thousands of people on it. Even from a distance you could make out the wooden structures they'd already built.
"Looks like everyone's here," Nikita said from behind us. "And here we were wondering where they'd all gone."
The girl brightened, tapped Carmen's shoulder, and pointed straight at me. "Uncle Aleks, we're here."
Once we were properly inside it, people surrounded us on every side. This had grown into something closer to a town than a camp. Shelters stood everywhere, built from branches leaned together and packed with leaves and pine, crude wooden tents in uneven rows that somehow all still stood upright. So many of them already finished that I couldn't work out how anyone had built this fast.
New ones went up while I watched. Groups dragging wood, propping frames, layering leaves across a roof, everyone moving with somewhere to be, and every few minutes another hut stood finished that hadn't existed a minute earlier.
Off to the right, orcs, elves, and humans worked together on something built entirely out of logs. I couldn't decide what surprised me more, the speed or where they'd even found logs that size out here.
To the left, a knot of dwarves stood around a campfire, dozens of people lined up in front of them. Cealith and I drifted closer, curious enough to find out what for.
The dwarves were handing something out. We stepped up to an older woman near the front of the line to ask.
"Excuse me. We have a question," Cealith said.
"I'm not giving you any of my meat! Been standing here forever." She rounded on us, sharp, one hand coming up between us and the fire.
"If you want some, get in the back like everyone else!"
"Sorry," Cealith said, already pale. I just stood there. Fair enough, she was hungry, probably been standing there a while. Still didn't need to bite our heads off for asking. Though now that I thought about it, I wouldn't say no to a piece of that meat myself.
Wait. Did she just say meat? I made a beeline for the fire. They were actually grilling meat right there, out in the open, and I had no idea how I'd missed it walking up. A dozen questions lined up behind each other in my head, but the one that mattered was where they'd even gotten it.
My stomach growled loud enough that I actually clutched at it. Fair, honestly. It had been way too long since anything warm had gone into me. I knew exactly what I was doing next. Walked straight to the back of the line and stood there.
"What are you doing, Aleks?" Cealith asked.
"I'm hungry."
"We don't have time for this. We need to find this girl's parents."
"But I just need one bite, I..."
He didn't give me a chance to finish. Grabbed my collar and hauled me back toward the others.
We could see them from a distance, the only ones standing around doing absolutely nothing in the middle of the road, looking completely lost. Something about that got to me a little.
"Ah, there you are," Carmen said when she spotted us.
"We were just about to go look for Uncle Aleks and Grandpa," the girl on Carmen's shoulders announced.
"Grandpa?" Daisuke asked, standing between Carmen and Nikita.
The girl pointed at Cealith. "He's a grandpa, right? Grandpas have white hair."
"Pfff." Daisuke clapped a hand over his mouth, already losing the fight to hold it in. One look at Cealith's face and that was it, he lost completely, laughing so hard he grabbed Nikita's shoulder just to stay standing.
Cealith froze, staring at him, clearly out of ideas for how to respond.
Then Amina joined in, laughing just as hard.
"You too?" Cealith sounded genuinely miserable about it.
"No. I mean, yes, but not because of you," she managed between gasps, barely able to breathe. "It's just... the way this idiot laughs is too damn funny."
"Hey!" Daisuke barked.
A moment later Cealith cracked and started laughing too. I went next, then Carmen, and finally even Nikita.
All of us lost it at once, until a different laugh cut straight over the top of everyone else's. The girl, still up on Carmen's shoulders. Hearing her laugh cut through all of it, and for a second nobody said anything, just listened.
Then a voice rang out over the crowd from somewhere to our right, loud and sharp enough that the girl went stiff in Carmen's arms.
"Mei!"
Her head snapped toward the sound. Her eyes filled with tears again.
"Mei!" A second voice, closer now.
Two people shoved through the crowd, a man and a woman, both hollow-eyed, moving too fast for how exhausted they looked. The woman's hair had come half out of its tie, and the man's hands were scraped raw and caked in dirt. Neither of them so much as glanced at anyone else in that whole field.
They ran. When they reached us, both dropped to their knees in the dirt at the same moment. Carmen crouched fast and let the girl slide down off her shoulders. The girl hit them at a dead run, arms already out, and didn't slow down at all.
"Where were you? Where did you go? We thought..." The woman couldn't get the rest of it out.
"Looked all night for you," the man said, voice cracking. "We were so scared something had happened."
The girl pressed her face into her mother's shoulder and lifted the bear with one hand.
"I got lost in the forest," she said.
Both of them were laughing and crying at once, the sound of it all tangled together. The man kissed the top of her head, and the woman kept kissing her cheek, over and over, not stopping.
Still wrapped up in both of them, she pointed at us through the crush of arms. "But Uncle Aleks and his friends brought me back here to you."
Both parents looked up. Their eyes landed on me first, because of the uncle thing, and I had no idea what face to make, so I settled for something neutral that probably looked stupid.
"Thank you." The man got to his feet and bowed his head. "We don't have anything to give you."
"You don't need to give us anything," I said. "It's fine."
"Make sure she keeps Mr. Teddy close," Amina said, softer than I'd ever heard her talk to anyone our age. "And make sure she stays close to you."
"We will," the woman said, both arms locked around the girl, not loosening at all.
Carmen rested a hand on the girl's hair for one last second, then stepped back. Daisuke tried to look cool about the whole thing and failed. Cealith gave a single nod without saying anything. Nikita stood at the back, looking up at the sky, giving away nothing at all.
The man squeezed my hand, quick and strong.
"Thank you," he said again.