Previously: Radek and the rest of Atlantis are trying to find Sheppard and his team (who have been missing since chapter 74). Anna is hanging out on the mainland looking for things that look like ZPM rocks (chapter 68).

Chapter 76. Just Jump.

It had been hours. This was getting tiresome. On mutual agreement, Radek and Lorne had given up looking for the 'gate address. They could say they were working on it all day and have the same thing to show for it whether they actually worked on it or not. Radek was willing to trust Colonel Sheppard and Rodney for this one. There wasn't a lot they could do to help them from here when they couldn't even find where they'd gone.

Elizabeth sent teams to the addresses that Radek had given her, most of them probably right. Maybe.

It was just past lunch now and hunger was as compelling a reason as any to leave the lab. Major Lorne had already left. The mess hall was mostly empty, since others tended to keep more regular lunch hours. The usual workaholic suspects were sitting alone at their tables, hunched over tablets. Radek, tablet under his arm, was ready to join them. Separately. A group of individuals.

Elizabeth was among them.

Her tablet was propped up so she could read it over a small bowl of pasta salad. Radek picked up a sandwich instead of the salad and walked to Elizabeth's table. He put two fingers on the chair opposite her.

"Is this seat taken?"

Elizabeth glanced up, smiled a little, and shook her head. "Go ahead."

Radek took a seat, tilting his head ever so slightly to look at what was on her tablet. To his surprise, it wasn't his unsolvable puzzle about 'gate addresses. It was other information on the Genii. She seemed to be collecting suspects for the kidnapping now.

"Thank you for putting so much effort into trying to track down the right 'gate address."

"It's nothing."

Well, actually, it was a little bit of something. But it was a strangely good time searching through dozens upon dozens of addresses with Lorne. Radek wondered if he had a nearly photographic memory with as many addresses as he could remember. Maybe he would change his mind about Wednesday night poker. Playing against a photographic memory seemed like a bad idea.

"Still… I appreciate it."

"We're all worried," Radek said. "But sometimes I think it's good to take a break, you know? Helps get your mind back together. Get it back, maybe." He frowned at his inept attempt to describe the feeling of working so hard he was losing his mind… and the feeling he'd heard something like that somewhere before.

Yeah. A very long time ago. He never changed.

Elizabeth sighed, nodded, and reluctantly reached to the side of her tablet. Uncertainly, she ran her long, delicate fingers down the side. Pressed the power button. The tablet went dim.

Radek smiled. "Difficult?"

"Impossibly." Elizabeth laughed. Still, she leaned back in her chair, apparently trying to get comfortable with her bowl of pasta salad. "Is that what you're doing right now?"

Radek shrugged. "There isn't much more I can do for Colonel Sheppard's team, so I was going to figure out what to do next."

"What are your options?" Elizabeth asked.

Before Radek could respond, she stabbed her fork into her bowl and shook her head.

"No, no, no, I'm sorry. You probably don't want to talk about work. You've been working all day. I've been working all day."

"I don't mind." Work was pretty important to both of them. It was why they were here, on Atlantis. And since solving the problem of Colonel Sheppard's missing team was looking unattainable, working hard on something else was the next-best option for occupying a racing mind.

He couldn't think of anything else to talk about.

"I don't think you ever told me what it is you do for fun," Elizabeth said.

Radek didn't know how to answer that. Work was fun. That might be why he worked all the time. Although, he did have fun doing other things. "Well, there's chess, of course." He chuckled and shook his head. "You know Higginson?"

Elizabeth nodded tentatively.

"She has an Xbox—a video game system. I do not play, but watching the others is hilarious."

"Oh, so games in social settings are actually alright?" she asked teasingly.

"I'm hardly a hermit." Radek tried not to scowl too obviously about the way he must have been seen by everyone else. Maybe how he saw Elizabeth. He knew she liked to read, and she might have liked dancing… but he wasn't sure. "I play chess tournaments, and I had many pigeon-racing friends back on Earth."

"Pigeon racing!" Never were the words pigeon racing spoken with such sacred mystery. "You owned pigeons? How many?"

"Well…" Radek sighed. He hated explaining this, because he figured he sounded insane every time he did. "I had a small house in the Czech Republic, but it was on the very outside edge of the city. I had enough space to have a loft of my own—the pigeon house, I mean. But pigeons can be very untidy, so I only had about forty."

Elizabeth looked incredibly amused. "Only forty?"

"Yes." Not very many, though he thought he had fairly good birds. They won races and even if they didn't, they made it home practically all the time. "I had a few Belgian birds with impressive bloodlines at one time."

"Oh, is that important?" Elizabeth asked. "I've never known very much about animals."

"Yes, selective breeding, you know."

Selective breeding... No, he should stop there. He'd better not talk about his favorite bird. He swore he knew Gábin from his whole flock even without his tag. Gábin never had any good children, but that bird flew like a champion for all five years Radek had him. He retired Gábin and kept him in his loft because he was friendly to being handled. His sister had Gábin now, though he was quite old.

"How does racing work, then?" Elizabeth asked.

"For the people who had their own lofts, like me, you take your birds away to the starting point. You let them go, and you hope they fly home. You decide who wins by finding how far the bird had to fly between the starting point and the loft, and how long it took to get there."

"That's amazing…" Elizabeth said.

Radek tried not to laugh at how completely interested she sounded. "They go fast for being so small."

"It's incredible they find their way home."

"Sometimes over a thousand kilometers," Radek said.

Elizabeth shook her head in amazement. "What a hobby."

"It is a little silly… but pigeons make good pets, too."

Elizabeth suddenly stood up. "Let's go see them."

Radek grinned up at her, even though it was a little sad. She was so desperate to get her mind off their missing team of heroes, she wanted to go see the pigeons. With him. "You want to see the pigeons…?" As far as he knew, he was the only one to visit the pigeons for the sake of visiting the pigeons. Not solely to feed them or take their eggs…

"I'm sure it's good for getting your mind back." Elizabeth gave him a beautiful smile as she picked up her tablet. "Are our pigeons nice?"

Radek chuckled and followed Elizabeth out of the mess hall. He hadn't gotten to eat hardly any of his sandwich… but that was alright. "A few of them let me pick them up. I think they know I bring them bread."

Elizabeth picked up a package of crackers as they left. "I've never even touched a bird before."

"If you give them crackers, they will love you," Radek offered.

"Good." Elizabeth stepped into the transporter and waited for him to follow her. "I guess pigeons are good for those days when you need something to appreciate you or to listen to what you have to say."

Radek watched the door open on the empty hallway before them, debating his next words. He didn't have anything to lose. He could talk to the pigeons if it turned out poorly.

"Well," he said as he stepped out into the hallway after her, "you also know where my lab is."

#

The rest of the traps were, like Iskaan said they would be, empty. They were nets on the forest floor, rigged with a pulley system to snatch animals up off the ground and hold them until Iskaan or someone else could come along, take the animals down, and kill them. It seemed a bit more dangerous for the person checking the traps, but much easier to save most of the animal for eating or… well, whatever else they did with them.

The nets were also easier to drag back to the settlement.

Iskaan grudgingly agreed that Jinto could come with them to the fields, at Anna's slightly disapproving glare when he seemed to be considering saying no.

There was no harm in letting Jinto come along… At least, not physically. Not unless Jinto was rude, then Iskaan might hurt him. Or maybe Anna would. He was getting pretty annoying.

Jinto stayed mostly quiet on the hike to the fields, though. Maybe he was considering just how difficult a hike it was for him, as well. Anna was mostly pleased with her ability to keep up with Iskaan. Iskaan said it was a mountain, and he didn't lie. It didn't look all that steep standing at the bottom, but on the way up her legs burned and her lungs gasped for breath.

Iskaan paused his hike on a boulder, and looked down at a river cutting a path between the two peaks. "Take a second and look," he said.

It was nice of him to disguise a break as a moment to enjoy the scenery. Even Jinto plopped down on the ground beside her to look at the valley of trees they'd just left behind.

"Where's the settlement?" Anna asked, squinting.

Iskaan pointed toward the mountain next to them. "It's behind this mountain. You can't see it from here. We won't be able to see it for the rest of the trip… unless we wanted to keep going up the mountain to the ring path."

"What's that?" Anna asked.

"Just the path that goes around the top of the mountain. Only hunters use it to get to the other side." Iskaan waited for a few more minutes while everyone caught their breaths. "Is everybody ready?"

Jinto jumped up and ran up the path.

Iskaan offered Anna a hand up.

"Sorry I'm so slow…" Anna sighed. Slow and uncoordinated. She was basically like a small baby, and Iskaan had to teach her how to walk.

Iskaan waved away her apology, though. "Don't think that we run from place to place like Jinto's doing right now. A hunter doesn't waste energy like that. Quick bursts of speed can save your life, but no one ever runs up a mountain like that."

"I guess that makes sense." Anna laughed a little as Jinto ran out of sight.

The fields were just at the top of the mountain, though Anna would never have guessed it was there. The mountains still rose beyond and higher toward the clouds, but this little area flattened out to form a plateau in the mountain's side. A pond rippled in the breeze, and the space was littered with orange crystals that looked like a thousand tiny ZPMs.

Anna went to the nearest stump of crystals and picked one up. "Do you know what they're for?"

"What they're for?" Iskaan repeated. He also picked up a clump of crystal and turned it in his hands.

"In the stories," Anna answered. "What the gods grew them for. Did they eat them or…?"

"Oh." Iskaan put his crystal down and picked up a handful of tiny pieces. He laughed, maybe at Anna's suggestion that the gods might eat the crystals… but, then, he was talking about gods. "No, they used them to build their cities. I always wondered what those cities might look like."

Anna held her crystal up to the sun. "Very orange."

Building cities with the crystals could have been a metaphor, though. A city of an advanced civilization needed power to operate. The Ancients probably couldn't build cities without them. Certainly couldn't run cities without them. She tucked the crystal under her arm and looked around.

"They're all around here," she observed.

They covered the ground, poking up from the dirt, hiding behind trees. A few very large ones emerged from the pond. The one Anna held under her arm was too small to be a ZPM, but it was still fairly large. She didn't know what she was going to do with it when she got back to Atlantis. Maybe sneak into the geology lab and run an analysis on the composition… and then compare it with a ZPM?

"There are even more in a cave back in the mountain," Iskaan answered. "Some societies think of them as being very valuable commodities, but they're mostly just for decoration."

"So not very useful…" Anna mumbled. Of course, she was pretty sure that ancient civilizations had no idea how good gold or copper were at conducting electricity. They were just shiny. Like these crystals were just shiny.

Iskaan shrugged. "Not really. Want to see the cave?"

They walked back to the cave. It went back further than Anna wanted to go, though Jinto explored back beyond the dim light to where Iskaan and Anna couldn't see him. She was inexplicably worried until he emerged with a very large piece of crystal in both of his arms. He put it down and they all looked at it like it was the most amazing crystal since all the other crystals they passed outside.

They shared a flat cake Iskaan brought, and decided to go back down the mountain through the gorge.

The entrance to the gorge was a steep cliff face that Jinto scrambled down easily like he was a little mountain goat. Iskaan took it in a single leap, caught Anna's crystal when she threw it to him, and then held his hands out to catch her, too.

"I'm here if you fall," he said.

Anna looked for the footholds that Jinto so easily found, but didn't see them. She sighed and backed down the cliff, her white fingers gripping the edge of the rocks. She was very glad she hadn't been born into a hunter/gatherer society. She probably would have died in infancy.

Slowly, one foot and one hand at a time, she picked her way down.

"Anna," Iskaan said after she'd been at it for a while.

"What?" Anna hugged the wall close and looked for somewhere to put her hand.

He chuckled. "Just jump."

"That's okay." Anna had to admit that had a certain appeal since she couldn't get a good grip because her hands were sweating. "I'm almost there."

"No, I mean, you are there. You're less than a foot away from the ground."

Anna looked down, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment. She slid down, none too gracefully, to the rocks beneath and whipped around to face him. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" she demanded, picking up her crystal from beside his feet.

"You were concentrating so hard. I didn't want to interrupt." He tilted his head and stared at her. Anna never noticed before just now how dark his eyes were. Dark brown and rich. Like chocolate. "It was cute."

"Interrupt me next time," she snapped and started to stomp down the path to the river after Jinto.

Iskaan stepped in her way.

Anna's heart leaped into her throat. She wasn't sure what he was going to do but… he was close, with only the orange crystal between them. He put his hands on the crystal. His fingers brushed against hers.

"Let me carry it for you?"

She took her hands off the crystal a little too quickly. "Okay…" she said quietly. "Um… thanks."

They started down the path together after Jinto. Anna made a comment now and again about how pretty it was down here, just to fill the awkward silence that had settled between them. It really was pretty, since all the leaves on the trees blocked out the hot summer sun. She could hear the river below, lazily pouring over pebbles and around rocks. Birds chirped and squirrels chattered.

And Iskaan was walking next to her. He wasn't saying anything, but that was probably a good thing. She was afraid of what he might say if he opened his mouth.

"Oh, Iskaan…" Jinto said, his tone falling in what sounded like disappointment or confusion. "The path is blocked ahead."

"By what?" Iskaan called back.

"A tree fell across."

They went a few more feet and saw that Jinto was right. An enormous oak-like tree and been uprooted from the mountain above, and fell down into the gorge. The trunk was something like redwood-thick and the branches were spiny. With a diameter so wide, Anna wondered if the tree had been here when the Ancients were… It looked much too wide for them to get over it, and there wasn't enough space under it for either Anna or Iskaan, though Jinto may have been able to squeeze through.

"What now?" Anna asked, looking up at the sky. It was well after lunch now, and she didn't really want to miss dinner. She was already a little hungry after the flat cake. "Do we go back?"

"We can go down and cross the river." Jinto pointed down a steep embankment ending in river rocks. Reeds played in the gentle water below. "We can cross at the shallows once we get to the valley."

Iskaan nodded his approval. "That seems like a good idea. Anna?"

Anna shrugged. "You two know the way. Not me."

Iskaan smiled and started down the embankment, turning back to help Anna down. Jinto just leaped like a deer, off roots and rocks, and straight into the water.

Anna reached for Iskaan's hand and took a step but there wasn't a step to take. Her foot twisted off a root and into the dirt and she went tumbling head first down the embankment.

Banging, crashing, and smashing her way down, she rolled over the river rocks before finally coming to a stop in the river.

Anna blinked once.

Just once.

Next time: Saw that coming. Saw that coming from a mile away.