The beak is hanging down from a long grey tree branch, a little way behind the fire.

There had been a figure out here, I swear to God that I ain't going full crazy. But he must've slipped into the shadows before I'd even fully unzipped my tent.

I think about calling out: Hey, guy who was somehow alive inside the poison zone and hung this weird fucking thing on a tree outside my tent, how're you doing? Want to come over and share a can of beans? Maybe we can shoot the breeze together for a little and then see if we can't both squeeze into the tent.

But I don't say shit.

There's an uneasy feeling looming over the campsite and it's enough to make me hold my tongue. And the air... even by the fire, it feels cold.

Wrong time of year for cold.

It crosses my mind, although I try not to let the thought stay too long, that the person might not be a person, in the same way the elk hadn't been an elk. It had once been an elk, sure. But it was something else by the time it had found me. Something violent and rotting and wanting me dead.

So instead, I get my Colt, and I wait silent and still, and I just listen. But all I can hear is the occasional crackling of embers as they burn up the last few twigs.

No leaves being crushed underfoot, not as far as I can hear.

No heavy breathing somewhere in the trees. Although, whether that's good or bad, I don't know. Breath means living.

Eventually, I give up waiting. I take the beak from off the branch and shine my torch onto it.

It's a long tube made of leaves, narrow and closed off at one end, hollow and wide at the other. Orange, brown, and black leaves all pressed hard together. Sticky with residue. They're on a careful, delicate framework of twigs -- long ones run down its length, little ones prop it open into its cone-shape.

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Whether it's meant to or not, it reminds me of my dream from a couple of nights ago. Being a baby in a dying town and a man in a plague doctor's mask picking me up and taking me away.

But that's not how it had happened.

The plague had been real, yes. But even then, there had only been thirty or so dead, before the rest of the town was evacuated. Susie's adoptive father, Rupert, a young idealist himself at the time, had been working on behalf of both the US government and the Storm Guards -- long before he'd pressured the two organizations into merging as the bureau.

It had been Rupert and his team that had found me.

They chased every fucking disaster, natural or not, back then. Hoping to be the first to find and claim a Storm Born, like we were some ancient treasure to be dug up, or some piece of land to stick a flag into.

So why was the dream different to what I know happened? What was my mind trying to tell me?

I don't have a fucking clue, but my heart doesn't like it. The way it's racing, it'll wear itself out before the sun rises.

Someone's either been watching me and following me. Or has just been waiting for me. Waiting until I set up camp. Waiting until I fell asleep.

But why didn't they just talk to me? If that's what they wanted to do. Or kill me.

Try to kill me.

Why just leave me this thing?

Almost on queue, something small rolls out of the beak and drops softly onto the ground.

It takes me a few minutes, riffling through dead leaves under my torchlight before I find it.

A marble.

A single round little worthless marble. Must have been stuffed into the tight pointed end inside the beak.

As if my day wasn't weird enough, I'm now holding a marble that looks like a tiny universe between two fingers, shining my torch on it as if it was the sun.

For a while, I sit by the fire, looking at it. Wondering why the fuck there was a beak with a marble in it left for me, the way that a cat might leave a half-eaten rat for an owner.

I swap to the beak, turning it over in my hands as if it might hold a clue to who made it.

Then I make a decision. Might regret it, but I know it's the only way I'll get any sleep tonight.

I toss the beak into the fire and watch it slowly turn black, then crumble to soot, breezing away into the night.

The marble though... Can't say why -- maybe I just want to see it in the daylight -- but I decide to pocket it.

Couple of hours must have passed now since I left my tent, and seeing as nothing else has happened, I decide I'll try to get a few hours more sleep.