“Right now we’ve got a job to finish!”

“Let’s find Dr. Asymmetry!”

The conversation spooked the sleeping starlings from their silver birch roost. “Shhhh!” Two hooded men were willfully lost, gripped by the darkest hours of the night, and tangled in the brambled thickets of the mountainside forest.

Little Hood sniffed, long and hard. “Do you spell that pine?” he said, smiling in the darkness.

“Pine smells so clean,” enthused Big Hood.

Twigs snapped between their feet, and the leaf litter rustled with each leg swing—the two unknowns forged blindly ahead.

“Where is the damn lodge?”