"Has to be in one of these trees." Coden waved his arms around him.

A speaker had to be somewhere right next to their camp. Every night, the fake howls disturbed their sleep and scared the children. Layne had to admit that he himself wasn't too comfortable whenever it started – knowing the threat wasn't real didn't help, especially with how realistic and loud it was.

If only it wasn't so dark, they could have found it days ago and finally had a better rest – but the sounds weren't there in daylight, so, they had to choose. And they chose to try both. It just never worked.

"The fucker..." Layne covered his ears when another deafening howl came from somewhere right next to him. Even if, for the most part, he said to have recovered, the noise still gave him a harder time than anyone else. Maybe that's why Alana didn't want him to go look for the source – but at that point, he couldn't trust anyone else to do it better.

Coden jumped by his side. "Somewhere right here, on the left."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he grunted and touched the tree trunk nearest to him in the right direction. It was one of the shorter howls, that time, which he was glad about. It just gave them another hint of where to look.

Coden was touching around the other nearby trees. Layne knew they had to be close – yet they didn't even know what to look for. Was it even in a tree?

"There's something there!" called Coden. Layne rushed by his side and froze. He followed the guy's eyes up the trunk of a tree and there it was – an unnatural, boxy shape near the top, almost hidden by naked branches and twigs.

"A birdhouse?" Layne raised his eyebrows.

"Could be."

"Well there's only one damn reason there'd be a freaking birdhouse here."

"We should check it out in the daytime."

Layne shook his head and gripped on the branches closest to the ground. It was a while since he last went climbing trees – actually, he hasn't done that since he was a child – but the noise had to stop.

"Hey, be careful." Coden stepped aside.

Layne ignored him. He wasn't going to purposely fall off a tree, anyway, so there wasn't any logical reason to be reminded of that.

The first couple of meters were difficult – the branches were sparse and he was constantly conscious about one of them breaking from his weight. However, he quickly picked it up and found himself next to the birdhouse in no time. The thing looked like it'd fall apart from touch, the wood was soft from the rot and Layne had no doubt it housed plenty of tiny creatures.

Another howl confirmed their assumption – the sound came directly from the wooden box.

Layne flinched from the loud noise. "Damn, it's a fucking amplifier at this point."

From lack of response, he guessed that Coden couldn't hear him – or the other way around. It didn't matter, anyway. He slipped his hand inside the wooden box and pulled out the speaker.

"Catch!" he yelled out and dropped the speaker. Coden stretched out his arms, but the device fell right through the gap between his hands and crashed into the ground. "Nice one."

"I couldn't see it in the dark", bleated Coden and stepped on it with a loud crack. "Wasn't my fault."

Layne chuckled to himself, but his voice stuck in his throat. A thin column of smoke rose into the sky not too far from them. It came from the opposite direction to the destroyed village. He wasn't quite sure where the second one, Victor's, was located, but that couldn't be it – way too close.

"Is everything ok?" Coden shouted out from below.

Layne stared at the smoke for a few minutes before slowly shaking his head.

. . .

"Those are probably more survivors!" Alana chirped with her hands pressed to together in front of her chest. It's been a while since Layne saw her so cheerful.

"We don't know that," he retorted. "Might have been someone hunting for us, which is likely, too."

"Don't you think they'd have stopped already?" guessed Iker. "They didn't know how many would have survived, anyway, so they might have better things to do now that winter's so close."

"He knows I'm alive." Layne shook his head with a frown. "Or at least, that I was alive. Come on, it's Victor. Don't expect good from him."

The rest of the adults only shrugged and pointed their eyes to the ground. Layne, himself, wasn't sure what to think anymore. He wanted to go check the place out, yet he didn't doubt he wouldn't even manage to find it without the smoke.

"We can check next night," said Alana. "If there will be smoke coming from the same place, it'll be more likely those are survivors, right?"

Layne gave her a short nod but bit on his lip at the same time. He wasn't even sure he'd be able to pinpoint the exact location he saw it last night, even if seeing it again. The darn forest just looked the same to him at the time.

Even if those were other survivors, he didn't manage to get as excited about it as everyone else. He glanced at the children, sitting a few meters away from them, sharing two thin blankets with holes all over them. They didn't complain about being hungry, unlike children in Eumain would after only a few hours without snacks, but he knew better than assume silence meant they were ok.

His own energy supply was diminishing. He chose to move as little as possible – but it wasn't possible, most of the time. They always had to keep on a lookout. For other people – friends or enemies, for whatever they could use to fill their bellies or fight against the chilly weather. The temperature dropped every day – but at least days were better than nights. He didn't get much sleep, anyway, and neither did anyone else.

He knew that the whole surviving situation would be meaningless if they didn't do anything to establish it soon, but all the other adults strayed away from the topic. Alana has become the leader of their small group, and he didn't mind that. She did put the wellbeing of others as her priority.

Though he did know that hiding in the forest and looking for scraps of food wasn't going to work for much longer.

. . .

Layne sat in the same tree, even higher than the last time, and scanned the forest. Nothing. No smoke, no trace of people – nothing out of the ordinary. No stars, even - only the sky, covered in thick, dark clouds. It hasn't rained since they were camping out in the forest – that was the only good thing about it, too. At the very least, they weren't soaking wet in the cold.

The damned clouds didn't promise it to stay that way, though.

Alana hung out on the ground. She wasn't great at climbing trees, she said. He didn't care, he insisted she'd come with him not for her athleticism, anyway.

Fifteen, thirty more minutes and his fingers began stinging.

He leapt down. "Nothing."

Alana turned around and stayed silent for a while. "Maybe they decided not to build a fire tonight. Maybe yesterday they had an extreme circumstance..."

"You should stop expecting the best. There are people trying to get us killed, we don't know where they are and if they don't kill us, starvation or hypothermia will."

The woman didn't answer. Layne was about to say something else when he heard her sob.

"Oh come on," he muttered. "We're all upset, Alana. We're dying, but you're supposed to be the 'leader', so can we at least have a conversation?"

"Conversation about what?" she exploded. "I know that we're fucking dying, Layne! Do you have any freaking suggestions on how to change that?"

"Well, maybe if we worried about the people trying to kill us part at least a little more instead of pretending it doesn't exist..." Layne lowered his voice to counter hers. It worked. She stopped yelling, at least.

"So what, should we be on a run now or something? Until we run directly into them because the Land is not actually infinite?"

"Or we could do something to stop the people trying to kill us situation whatsoever."

"You mean-"

"Fighting back, yeah." He rolled his eyes and leant against the tree behind him.

"Getting more people hurt? Great solution, Layne. Terrific. Would have expected nothing else from you."

"Says the woman who pushed her husband into the well."

His words were met with silence. He pushed away the thought of an apologise and kept staring directly into the dark figure that was Alana. Her face wasn't visible in the night but she did not make a sound, thus he pretended that she wasn't crying, at least in his head.

"You know that's the only way," he insisted. "If you want to protect the children – and ourselves – and any other possible survivors."

"How do you even expect us to fight back?" Alana's voice was interrupted with sobbing. "We have four children on our hands, five starving adults, of which only one might have been capable of doing anything like that if he wasn't weak from that."

"Two-"

"Don't pretend you've fully recovered, Layne, we can see otherwise. Oh, and your clash with Victor went well the last time."

"I was taken by surprise," he defended himself, as useless as it was. "I don't believe everyone helping him now really believe in the shit he's telling them, anyway. There must be a few people there just trying to survive, themselves. Maybe they'd help us."

"So, you expect us to just go straight to the people trying to hunt us down and murder us in hopes a few of them might be a little open to the idea not to do that?"

"Yeah." Layne shrugged. "Maybe. At least it's not starvation or hypothermia."