They ate lunch quickly, not wanting to waste too much time. Before long they were travelling through the bush again. Cat asked if she could use the compass and Kass reluctantly gave it up after a quick lesson on how to use it.

“I just keep the needle straight right?” Cat asked. “Piece of cake.”

“Sure but if you divert around a tree you gotta make sure you keep going the same along the same line,” Kass replied.

Kass was dubious but Cat seemed to quickly get the hang of it. She also seemed to be moving faster today than she had yesterday.

Suddenly Cat stopped.

“What?” Kass asked.

“Shh.”

Kass tried to look for whatever the reason Cat had stopped was. Cat nodded to their right. There among the trees, lying on the forest floor was something bright red. They couldn’t quite make it out. Cat tiptoed silently closer, hands at the ready, down by her side. Her fingers twitched. Kass followed softly behind her.

As they approached they realized it was a person. A man lay face down in moss. There was no sign of a pack nearby. The bright red they had seen was his t-shirt.

Cat stopped again and visually searched the area around them. Satisfied that there was no one nearby she got closer to the unconscious man.

Kass held back a bit, waiting, but while she did she also canvassed the rest of the area, keeping an eye out for any sound or movement.

Cat knelt down and grabbed the man by the shoulder and turned him over. It was one of the hikers they’d met yesterday. His front was covered in blood. She felt his pulse. Nothing.

She turned to Kass and shook her head. Kass nodded at something nearby. Cat looked but couldn’t see anything. She gave Kass a puzzled look.

“It’s blood,” Kass mouthed.

Cat looked again and this time she noticed the small droplets, one on the leaf of a plant, another on the root of a tree. She followed them. They seemed to make a path, leading back to wherever the man had been injured.

Cat stopped following the blood trail and returned to the body.

“Do you think she killed him?” Kass whispered, “the woman that was with him?”

Cat frowned and shook her head. She didn’t know. She inspected his wounds.

“He’s been shot,” she told Kass.

Kass walked closer and knelt down next to Cat. Her eyes tracked from the body to the blood drops, then back to Cat.

Cat nodded and grabbed her own pack. They followed the blood drops and broken branches through the trees.

They’d gone a hundred metres when they heard voices speaking loudly somewhere up ahead.

“I think he went this way. I can see blood.”

Cat and Kass shared a look.

“Back to the body,” Cat whispered. “Then we hide.”

They ran swiftly and as silently as they could back through the trees to the body. Looking around Cat spotted a particularly thick spot of vines that hung off a tree. They ducked in behind the vines and hid, watching the body and the forest where the blood trail disappeared.

A few minutes later three men walked into view. They were much older than the hiker had been, older than Cat and Kass as well. Two of them carried rifles. The third had a pistol in a holster at his hip. They wore camouflaged hunting clothing.

“There he is,” one of the men remarked.

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They surrounded the body.

“Is he dead?” another asked.

One of the men poked the body with his foot. “Seems dead.”

“What do we do with him.”

“Leave him here. Who's gonna find him out here?”

The men grumbled in agreement.

“Shall we check his pockets first?”

“You check his pockets, I ain’t touching no dead body.”

One man knelt down and rifled through the guy’s pockets. The other two turned and started walking back the way they came.

“Hurry up Harry, we’re going back to camp. We still gotta decide what we’re gonna do with that damn woman,” one of them yelled back.

Harry grunted and had a last ditch search through the hiker’s top pockets before giving up and chasing after the other two.

Cat and Kass were silent until they were sure the men were well out of earshot.

“We should follow them,” Cat said.

Kass turned to her with her mouth open trying to think of the best response to that.

Before she could think of one Cat explained.

“They have the girl, you heard them.”

Kass was still speechless so Cat left their hiding place and started towards the blood trail, the same way the men had gone. That prompted Kass into action. She ran after Cat.

“We’re not armed, what are we even going to do?” she hissed.

“Not let them kill some innocent hiker,” Cat replied as if it were the most obvious thing.

Kass glanced down at the dead body. “We don’t know why they shot him. Since when are you so heroic?”

“Since they’re in the same bush we are, shooting people.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” Kass suggested but she sounded doubtful. “We should just head out and tell the cops.”

Cat snorted. “The cops are useless, and what about the girl, and Indi?”

“One of us could go out, the other to Indi. And we don’t know if that guys partner is still alive. They might be talking about her body.”

“All the more reason to check.”

Kass hesitated. “What are we gonna do when we get there? At least let’s make a plan first. There’s three of them and two of us.”

“I’ve seen you fight, you could take down one of them if you had the drop on him,” Cat told Kass.

“They’re armed,” Kass replied. “And that still leaves two.”

Cat nodded and paused to think for a moment.

“We’ll distract them, separate them, ambush them, and grab the guns. Look, once we find their camp one of us can stay there out of sight. The other lures them into the forest and then hides. If they leave the camp unguarded then no problem, we just grab the girl and run. If you get one on his own then ambush him.”

“They’ll know we’re here.”

“So?”

“They’ll come looking for us and the girl. I think one of us should hike out and phone the cops while the other goes and takes Indi her sunscreen.”

Cat rolled her eyes. She had no faith in cops at all. Kass on the other hand, was a lawyer, and worked with cops on a daily basis. Most of her life revolved around trusting the legal system, these days anyway. Kass hadn’t always been like that based on what little Cat knew of Kass’s time in the north. Her history however, was unlikely to make her easier to convince.

“By the time they get here she might already be dead,” Cat objected.

“She might already be dead anyway.”

“All the more reason to check it out. We can sneak up on their camp have a look. Then at least we’ll know where it is too.”

Kass seemed to think it over. After a moment she nodded. “Fine.”

They walked slowly through the bush, keeping an eye out for any sign of people up ahead. They’d been walking for about ten minutes when they noticed some shapes moving through the trees. Up ahead lay a small clearing and a campsite. They ducked behind a tree each and watched the campsite. There were indeed only three men that they could see, the same three that had been looking for the other hiker. Cat was relieved. They could deal with three, and if they’d all left the campsite before then it was probably easy enough to lure then away again.

“I can’t see a girl,” Kass whispered.

“Let’s sneak around the other side.”

They circled the camp, double checking numbers and looking for the missing girl. They found her tied up against a tree on the far side of camp. She was close enough to the rest of the forest that it might be possible to cut her loose, as long at as the men weren’t watching at the time. Right now they were on the other side of the clearing huddled in a circle and seemed to be debating fiercely.

Cat took her pack off and quickly covered it in leaves.

“What are you doing?” Kass whispered.

Cat grabbed her machete from the side of her pack.

“That’s way too big,” Kass hissed with a nervous glance in the direction of the campsite. “Look how tight those ropes are tied. Use your smaller knife.”

Cat rolled her eyes but retrieved her regular flick knife from her pack. She didn’t set the machete down, rather she tied it quickly to her hip as backup.

As Cat crept closer Kass did the same thing Cat had done with her pack and covered it in branches. She also added a few more to Cat’s pack so they were completely hidden. Just in case. Then she hid herself behind another tree and waited for Cat to cut the girl loose.

“Hey,” Cat whispered as she got closer to the girl. She didn’t want to surprise her by just grabbing her hands and then having her yell out and draw the attention of the men.

Alana strained her head to see. “Who’s there?”

“We met earlier in the forest. I’m here to rescue you,” Cat whispered as she grabbed the Alana’s hands in order to reach the rope. She started cutting away at it. Kass had been right, the larger knife would have been harder to maneuver. Cat kept all her knives regularly sharpened so it took only a second for her to cut through the rope, longer to pull them off the girl. She was just unwinding the last strand when a man’s voice cut through the clearing.

“Oi, what do you think you’re doing?”