The team's search patterns turned up nothing.  Exhausted, they stopped for a few hours' rest before they would continue with a night-sweep.

Lunk couldn't seem to stop himself from repeating the same thing over and over: "What coulda happened to 'em?"

"I don't know where else to look," Lancer admitted tiredly.  "Our best hope is that they just - show up."  He ran his fingers through his long purple hair.

Lunk sat down next to him, leaning against the same boulder in the firelight.  He gnawed noisily on a drumstick that they had scavenged from Wolff's supply depot.  "I suppose that's all we can do."

He looked to where Rook was curled up, a lithe form in a blanket.  There was only a single stray curl of strawberry-blond hair showing, brilliant in the firelight.  "Isn't she even worried about them?  How can she sleep at a time like this?"

Without turning over, she said, "I can't sleep, if you sit there blabbing and gorging yourself all night.  How can you eat at a time like this?"

Lunk wore a hurt look. Lancer told him in a whisper, "The real reason she's awake is because she's worried, too, Lunk."

Rook lay watching the moon, listening to Lunk complain about how spooky it all was.  After riding as a loner for so long, she was feeling again that special torment that she had promised herself she would always avoid - fear that harm had come to a loved one; an all-consuming concern for people who had become, though she had never meant to let it happen, family.