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half an hour ago. Don't worry about it. Flynn,
Jesse. Jesse, Flynn. Good friend of ours, who finally got away to
join us."
     
    Flynn nodded.
"My mom broke her ankle," he explained. "I was helping look after
her so she can stay off it as much as possible. But she's doing
much better now, and her boyfriend's off work for the next week or
so and he's going to stay with her. They might be just as happy to
have me out of the house for a couple of days. So, I packed up
clothes, food, and entertainment, and here I am. These guys have
been telling me how they met you." He looked Jesse over
measuringly. "I bet my clothes would fit you, if you want to get
cleaned up. After sleeping that long and then being up for a day, I
know how bad I'd want to get into something clean."
     
    More than a
bit startled, Jesse could only nod. He had no idea how long he'd
been wearing these clothes even before he woke up by the side of
the road, and pretty soon they were going to take on a life of
their own. "That would be amazing."
     
    "Cool. C'mon,
I'll show you where the stream is." Flynn got up, and scooped up a
bulging blue-grey canvas backpack; he dumped the last of the water
from the pail, and brought it, too. "Back in a bit. Dia, you be
good, no sneaking after us."
     
    "I would never
think of it," Deanna said primly. "Such a thought would never cross
my mind. Well, unless it was someone I knew wouldn't mind." She
yelped as Bane ran a fingernail along the bottom of one of her bare
feet, and jerked her foot out of reach. "Beast."
     
    Flynn rolled
his eyes, and gave Jesse an expectant look.
     
    The redhead
led Jesse into the forest, choosing a route that showed signs of
already having been in use, and helping Jesse avoid nasty traps
like prickly things slashing at bare skin and tree branches that
wanted to behead him.
     
    "They're my
best friends in all the world," Flynn said finally, when they were
some distance away, "but they've been living up here in the middle
of nowhere their whole lives, and they really don't have much of a
concept of life outside of here. We're admittedly a bit
isolationist, we try to limit contact with the rest of the world.
If you have any questions, I'd be the one to ask—I'm the most
likely to be able to translate things into normal terms of
reference."
     
    "Why you?"
     
    "Because my
mom and I, until I was about eleven or so, lived in Scarborough. My
mom was a very young single mother whose family disowned her
because she wouldn't give me up for adoption after she was raped,
less than a year after coming to Canada." He shrugged. "We're here
and both very happy with life now, but I do remember. And I don't
get offended at all easily."
     
    "So why do you
try to avoid everyone?" Jesse asked cautiously, wondering whether
he was going to find out they belonged to some weird cult and were
going to try to recruit him.
     
    Flynn glanced
back at him. "Look at the rest of the world. War, Famine,
Pestilence and Conquest are still here and as destructive as
ever—those are the four horsemen from the Christian Book of
Revelations. Haven, the village we live in, has been here for a
couple of hundred years. We're on protected land right now, it
belongs to the township and can't be used for logging or mining or
building. There are folks from Haven who work really hard to try to
fix things outside of here, but meanwhile, we have a good place to
live. It's not Paradise, and it wouldn't suit everyone, but it
works for us."
     
    The Bible
reference made Jesse flinch reflexively, but a heartbeat later, the
phrasing struck him as odd. Did that mean they didn't consider
themselves Christian? And "fix things" could mean just about
anything, given that Jesse had met people who thought the only way
to "fix things" was to bomb everyone back to the Stone Age and
start over, and others equally certain that if everyone just tried
to act like happy little 1950s TV families with proper church
morals, that would "fix things." He mulled that