"In the wild, they grow as soon as they sense their prey. It works out good for them � they can sneak up in their innocent little ball forms and then become monsters in perfect position for a surprise attack. Not many creatures can outrun a six-meter puffan, even if the monsters aren't fast. When they're tamed and domesticated, they only change when they're given food as permission. They let the people they trust hunt for them, and morph to eat after the kill's been made. Spike couldn't survive on her own in the wild," Tuck was explaining to me. I'd watched with a sick fascination as my teammate's sweet little pet expanded at an alarming rate, her skin stretching with natural ease as she grew, until her head was among the leaves. Her face and teeth were every bit as grotesque as the stories made them out to be. Her body was a dark and furry green, and she grew a lashing tail that tapered to a dull point. She stood on four of her six massive legs, and each of her clawed feet was as long as my body. I'd stood well back, quaking from fear and revulsion but unable to turn away even when Tuck pulled me, as she bloodily and violently rendered the animals and devoured the pieces hide, bones, and all. And then she shrank back down with same astonishing speed, glanced around, and fell quietly asleep.

We were also resting near our fire, after our first real meal. We'd caught a hopper, a small, large-eared mammal not indigenous to Skye but brought by the Colossus from another planet. Spike, once again her happy, round, small self, was sleeping in the shade after gorily consuming the three caipa. (I'd hoped to get my arrows back, but Spike ate them.) Tuck and I had washed off in the river after killing the hopper, and were now almost dry. I was finally getting my rest.

And Tuck was finally talking freely, even if it was only about the eating habits of puffans. Though I'd always considered myself a solitary type of person at Mission Training, I'd missed the contact with others since I'd left. No missioneer will ever be surrounded by friends, but having someone as sour and antisocial as Tuck for one's only companion could grind anyone's nerves. I was glad he finally seemed to be warming up a little.

Don't trust matters to be as easy as they look, I warned myself. The incident with the caipa had taught me that. And Tuck was very unpredictable.

"Will we walk any more today?" I asked after Tuck had finished answering my puffan questions.

"Yup," Tuck nodded grimly. "As soon as we're all dried off we're out of here."

"How long will it take us to reach Baron land?"

"Days, at best. And even longer once we reach their territory to get to the prison. And that's if we take a few shortcuts."

"Shortcuts?" I asked. "I thought we were taking the quickest route possible."

"Uh, no. That would mean marching straight through the battlegrounds. This way it's more distance, less pain. I didn't think you'd mind."

"No complaints here."

"You might not be so happy about the shortcuts, though," Tuck said cautiously.

"Great," I groaned. "Oh well. I don't have any choice, right?"

Tuck chuckled. "Of course you do. We're equals, remember?"

"Oh yeah." I sighed. "Well in that case...I'm right behind you."

Tuck grinned. "I hoped you'd say that. Are you dry yet?"

"It starts," I grumbled, pulling myself to my feet. I'd actually been dried off for a while. I wondered privately if Tuck had, too. "You have to carry Spike."

"Deal," Tuck smiled. He slung his pack onto his back, then stooped to pick up the sleeping monster. It took effort. Spike was no larger, but her mass was now much greater. "Let's make some distance before it gets dark."

So the long and boring walk continued. We got out of the forest and back into the grass, where we could keep following the river. The only thing to break the monotony was Tuck's constant complaining about the heavy load.

"What was I thinking? I should have let that third caipa get away."

"Were those caipas eating berries or boulders when we caught them?"

"I'm never going to feed you again, you stupid ball of lard!"

"Can't I just put her on the ground and kick her along? She'd roll."

At that point I decided to relieve Tuck of his burden for a while, for both of their sakes. Spike was even heavier that I'd imagined she'd be.

"Not for long," I warned Tuck.

As it turned out, I got lucky. Sort of. We started hearing voices up ahead, and soon we saw activity. It was a ship, just as Tuck had predicted. There weren't just two drowning Barons here. There must have been thirty or forty. If they saw us, we were dead. We put Spike in a relatively safe place at the edge of the forest, and moved closer to investigate.

We decided to move through the forest to get closer. The motion of the tall grass would make us too easy for them to spot. We tried to be as silent as possible. Luckily, the Barons all remained close to the river.

"Looks like they ran into something on the bottom. Next time they won't stray so close to the edges of the river. Bad luck for them," Tuck observed.

"It must have been really big to have taken down a ship that size," I responded.

Tuck nodded in agreement. "The thing's a wreck. I'm surprised they're even bothering to save it."

"It must be an important ship for them to send a rescue crew this far into Col territory," I pointed out.

"Yeah..."

We watched for a while more, as divers went down with and without equipment and most came up empty-handed. The broken fragments of the ship that hadn't yet sunk were floating away. We saw a tent-like structure set up across the riverbank, and still bodies in a pile under it. Apparently several Barons had been killed in the crash.

"Something doesn't make sense here," I muttered.

Tuck looked over at me and nodded. "They should never have gotten so close to the side as to hit a boulder. The Barons may be...they're not stupid. There shouldn't have been fatalities, at least not that many. And no one should have fled down the river into our ground, terrified."

"Why are there so many divers?" I wondered. "They have two guys on the shore working minimal equipment, and about forty in the river."

Tuck didn't answer me, just watched the divers go up and down. Then he said slowly, "I wonder what that ship was carrying."

I looked at him. "You think the divers are searching for lost cargo?"

No answer.

"They wouldn't send in reinforcements for that," I pointed out. "What could be that valuable on a military ship heading into enemy territory?"

"Weapons."

"A ship full of weapons?" I asked. It was possible, but..."Forty divers brought over from Baron bases just to rescue knives and swords? I'm surprised the Baron authorities didn't make the ship's crew recover them themselves for being so careless."

"I think most of the ship's crew was dead. Maybe all but those two guys we ran into," Tuck spoke slowly.

I was reading something from the tone of his voice. Uneasiness? Fear?

"What aren't you telling me?" I asked carefully.

"I don't think they hit a boulder."

"What? Then what did they hit?" I was growing impatient.

"I...I think the ship was carrying explosive weapons."

"Explosive weapons?" My breath caught and I felt my heart sink. There had been one terrible incident with explosive weapons that I'd heard about. The story alone had been enough to instill an unreasonable fear in me.

"Think about it, Bryt. How could reinforcements have gotten here so quickly? They're footsoldiers who were going to attack with the explosives. Half of them anyway; I'm sure others went back to report the disaster. How could any boulder have done this amount of damage? That ship wasn't smashed; it was exploded. By the very weapons it was carrying."

I shuddered. Explosive weapons. To me, the word "explosive" was synonymous with the word "death."

"Think we should get out of here?" I asked shakily, not wanting to be anywhere near explosive weapons, even if the Barons were diving for them.

"Yeah. They lost control of one � at least one � and who knows how many more they have over there. Let's not stick around to find out."

We began moving quickly back through the forest toward the place we'd left Spike, sleeping peacefully. I was overcome by an irrational worry that she wouldn't be there when we returned. I was relieved to see her just as we'd left her.

"How much longer will she sleep?" I asked nervously as Tuck picked her up.

"Another day, maybe a little more."

Life is always full of surprises, I reminded myself grimly.

We walked past the wreck deeper into the forest than we'd come, since we weren't doing any spying this time.

"Did your Captains ever tell you anything about explosive weapons, Bryt?" I didn't like the snide tone with which Tuck spoke the word "Captains," but I knew he was just trying to hide how shaken he actually was.

"Captain Gill told us about one battle," I said. "It was a tragedy � one of our greatest defeats ever." I hesitated, and Tuck nodded for me to go on. "The story is that far to the west, past the Great Dome Battlefield, a small force of Barons attacked a large Colossan army, going out to battle on the Dome. Our forces had no trouble pushing them back, even though the Barons had the advantage of higher ground. There were just too many of us." I looked down at the irony. "When our soldiers found themselves in a valley, they braced themselves for an attack � it seemed like it could be a trap. But no one came for them. The small Baron force retreated further. Our army didn't understand why they'd attacked in the first place." I took a deep breath. "Then the valley exploded. There were four different blasts, the story goes. And everything was fire. There were lots of details � halves of people blown away, people cooking from life to death, a soldier without a face, blood and organs littering the ground � I'm sure it gets a lot worse, but the soldiers couldn't describe it all, or wouldn't. Only twenty out of almost five hundred ever crawled out of that valley, to the sound of fire crackling, their dying battlemates moaning, and jubilant Barons shouting with joy at the success of their new weapon. And only seven survived the journey back to a Col base to tell the story." I shuddered, done talking.

After a long pause, Tuck said, "Yeah, that sounds a lot like the story we heard." Then he sighed. "I guess you should know the purpose of the mission to which you've been assigned."

I let that sink in for a moment, then asked timidly, "What?"

"The Barons," Tuck began, "have discovered two substances that, when in their pure form are heated together, explode violently. It was a mission team like ours who discovered this and brought the information back. Since then, our spies have gained us some knowledge of how the chemicals are reduced to their pure form and powdered, and how much powder will create how large an explosion. But we still don't know what they are. That's why it's our mission to find their source, find whatever cave or mine the Barons get them from, and try to bring some back to be studied."

"It's our mission to find the explosives that make up explosive weapons?" My voice got screechier with every word.

"Shh," Tuck warned, but not harshly. "First we have to get our Captain and teammate out of prison."

I would have laughed, except that this was for real. This was how it was going to be? This was what being a missioneer was like?

For once, Tuck seemed to read my mind. "And you thought the marching was bad," he said, smiling shakily. Then he turned away, looked down at Spike in his arms, shook his head, and quickly whispered, "And I just wish Shay was here."

I thought that was what he said anyway � I couldn't hear it well. I wasn't supposed to hear it, but I wished "Shay" were here, too. We were breaking our Captain out of a prison so he that could lead us to a mine or a cave where we'd try to find chemicals that could, in all likelihood, blow us up, and we were now moving as quickly as possible off course through a darkening forest away from an enemy ship that had already blown up and could blow up again at any time, and our only protection was a third of a meter tall, weighed fifty kilograms, and would be fast asleep for the next twenty five hours, at least. And I'd been upset when I'd thought I wasn't graduating. Then I smiled to myself. This was actually so crazy it was almost fun. I was glad I'd graduated.