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paths with his eyes closed and he enjoyed the feeling of invisibility that his night cloak gave him as his feet found their way across the weathered planks sunk into the sand. Silently Oskar padded along and soon the gentle peep-peep of waterbirds digging for worms on the marsh told him that he was very nearly there.
    It was then, above the peepings, that Oskar became aware of a strange sound – a hoarse, breathy panting. He stopped dead. Knowing that, like many PathFinders, his skin and red hair had a sheen at night, Oskar pulled up the hood of his cloak; then he crouched down into the sandy darkness and listened.
    Oskar could read the land like Tod could read the sea. He felt a few grains of sand skitter down; he heard the crackle of the dry dune grasses somewhere above him and he sensed the vibrations of large but light-footed creatures. Oskar reckoned that they were walking on all fours and, from the hesitant way they were moving, it seemed to him that they were unsure where to go.
    The creatures drew to a halt and Oskar realised that they were almost directly above him. He froze. He suspected that the merest twitch of a muscle would get him noticed – and there was something about these creatures that made Oskar very certain that being noticed by them was the last thing he wanted to happen.
    Click-clicker-click .
    A low series of clicks were coming from the top of the dune. Oskar listened, recognising three distinct tones flicking in and out of what seemed to be some kind of discussion. He suppressed a shiver. The clicks were so foreign, so inhumanly mechanical, that they scared a very ancient part of his being. But what frightened Oskar most was something much more recent – the memory of a late-night conversation he had overheard between his parents not long after Ferdie had gone. “Jonas, I’m telling you, I heard clicks ,” he remembered his mother saying. “Like this –” Oskar’s mother had made rapid clicking noises with her tongue. “I thought it was one of Oskie’s mechanical toys. You know how Ferdie liked – no, no, likes – to borrow Oskie’s stuff. Oh, if only I’d gone in to see what it was. If only  …”
    Click . Click-clicker-click .
    Oskar went cold. He knew that just a few feet above him were the creatures that had taken Ferdie.
    Click-click-clicker-click .
    And now they were back. Who had they come for this time?
    Clicker-click .
    He remembered Aunt Mitza’s parting instruction: “Say goodbye, Oskar Sarn. Say goodbye .”
    Oskar knew the answer: they had come for Tod.

The Race
    C lick-click-clicker-click .
    Oskar felt a rising terror. He decided that the only way to stop the panic was to see what was above him. The reality could be no worse than the images that were filling his head. Very slowly, Oskar looked up – and wished he hadn’t.
    Oskar’s night vision showed him far more than he wished to see. Three beings, with wide, flat heads like those of a giant snake, stood at the top of the dune. Taller than a man, whip-thin yet muscular and as eerily white as deep-sea denizens that had never seen the light, they were half crouched on two powerful back legs; their smaller front legs – which had almost human hands – were off the ground, giving them an air of indecision. Their big heads were nodding in time with their click-clicker-click s and a sudden dart of a forked black tongue, glistening with slime, made Oskar’s mouth go dry with fear.
    Oskar recognised the creatures at once as Garmin. There was a drawing of them in one of his favourite books, Magykal, Mystikal and Mythikal Creatures: Facts . He was shocked. He had no idea Garmin actually existed.
    Clicker-click . Clicker-click .
    But the Garmin were as real as he was. Oskar could see the page in his book as though it were in front of him:
     
    Garmin
    Predator. Extruder. Non-venomous. Nocturnal. Cave-dwelling.
    Covering: White skin. Minimal hair.
     
    Oskar took a little comfort from “non-venomous”, but that was