Free The Family Trade by Charles Stross

desolate. There were no bears, but she ran across a small stream—nearly fell into it, in fact.
    There was no sign of an edge to the woods, in whichever direction she went. Nor were there signs of habitation other than the curl of smoke she’d seen. It was four o’clock now. She returned to her clearing, confident that nobody was around, and unstrapped her tent from the backpack. It took half an hour to get the dome tent erected, and another half-hour with the netting and leaves to turn it into something that could be mistaken for a shapeless deadfall. She spent another fifteen minutes returning to the stream to fill her ten-litre water carrier. Another half-hour went on digging a hole nearby, then she took ten minutes to run a rope over a bough and hoist her bag of food out of reach of the ground. Darkness found her lighting her portable gas stove to boil water for her tea. I did it, she thought triumphantly. I didn’t forget anything important! Now all she had to do was make it through tomorrow and the morning of the next day without detection.
    The night grew very cold without a fire, but her sleeping bag was almost oppressively hot with the tent zipped shut. Miriam slept lightly, starting awake at the slightest noise—worried at the possibility of bears or other big animals wandering through her makeshift camp, spooked by the sigh of wind and the patter of a light predawn rainfall. Once she dreamed of wolves howling in the distance. But dawn arrived without misadventure and dragged her bleary-eyed from the tent to squat over the trench she’d remembered to dig the day before. “The Girl Scout training pays off at last,” she dictated with a sardonic drawl.
    A tin of sausages and beans washed down with strong black coffee made a passable breakfast. “Now what?” she asked herself. “Do I wait it out with the camp or go exploring?”
    For a moment, Miriam quailed. The enormity of the wilderness around her was beginning to grind on her nerves, as was the significance of the situation she’d thrown herself into. “I could break a leg here and nobody would ever find me. Or—” Gunfire in the night. “Someone stabbed my mother, and she didn’t come here to escape. There must be a reason why. Mustn’t there?”
    Something about the isolation made her want to chatter, to fill up the oppressive silence. But the words that tumbled out didn’t tell her much, except that she was— Let’s face it. I’m scared. This wasn’t the sensible thing to do, was it? But I haven’t been doing sensible properly since I got myself fired on Monday.
    Unzipping the day pack from her backpack, she filled it with necessities, then set out for the escarpment.
    It was a clear, cold morning, and the wisp of smoke she’d seen yesterday had disappeared. But she knew roughly where she’d seen it, and a careful scan of the horizon with binoculars brought it into focus once more—a pause in the treeline, punctuated by nearly invisible roofs. At a guess, it was about three miles away. She glanced at the sky and chewed on her lower lip: Doable, she decided, still half-unsure that it was the right thing to do. But I’ll go out of my skull if I wait here two days, and Paulie won’t be back until tomorrow. Bearing and range went into her notepad and onto the map, and she blazed a row of slashes on every fifth tree along the ridgeline to help her on the way back. The scarp was too steep to risk on her own, but if she went along the crest of the ridge, she could take the easy route down into the valley.
    Taking the easy route was not, as it happened, entirely safe. About half a mile farther on—half a mile of plodding through leaf mounds, carefully bypassing deadfalls, and keeping a cautious eye open—an unexpected sound made Miriam freeze, her heart in her mouth and ice in her veins. Metal, she thought. That was a metallic noise! Who’s there? She dropped to a squat with her back against a tree as a horse or mule snorted nearby.
    The