Would have sent you to the pound.”
Aamon laughed gently.
“What was it like,” Kevin asked, “to change like you did?”
“It was … surprising.”
“I bet it was.”
Aamon’s lips rose in a smile. “I knew Affinity brought us into being, but I never imagined what would happen to me in its absence.”
“Were you still … you?” Glenn asked. “Like, inside?”
“I was there,” Aamon said. “Deep down, like a seed. It was hazy sometimes. As if I was watching it all but experiencing it too. I knew what I was and what I had been once.”
“It must have been terrible,” Glenn said.
Aamon went silent. His eyes, with their dark oval slits, locked on Glenn’s across the space between them.
“No,” Aamon said, his voice gentle. “It wasn’t.”
They sat quietly for a time as the sky darkened. Glenn looked down at her side. Kevin was asleep, breathing fitfully, his head resting on the tree bark.
“How is he really?” Glenn asked.
“It’s not infected,” Aamon said. “But he’s lost a lot of blood. I had counted on being on horseback. The walking is making it impossible for the wound to close.”
“How much farther is it to Bethany?”
“With the time we’re making … two days, maybe more.”
There was no way Kevin could walk another two days. Glenn
looked over Aamon’s head out into the forest.
“You said we’d have to go near dangerous places,” Glenn said.
“What if we go through them instead? Would that make things go faster?”
Aamon’s eyes narrowed on the ground. A growl formed in the
back of his throat, but he nodded that it would.
“I can protect you from something like Garen Tom and his men,”
he said. “But there are things in the deeper places that … change you.
Things I’m powerless against.”
Once again, Glenn trembled at the thought of something that could make Aamon Marta afraid. Beside her, Kevin groaned in his sleep. She brushed the back of her hand along his hot forehead then pulled his coat closer around him. The sun had sunk deep into the forest, about to disappear. What choice did she have?
“We rest here tonight, then continue on the faster road in the morning.”
Aamon grunted his agreement and then he looked beyond her,
out into the darkening woods, and began to pray.
Over the next hour, night gathered around Glenn slowly,
deepening and pressing in from every side as if it was searching for a weak point, an entryway. There was a rustle of birds’ wings overhead and Glenn imagined a black flock with silver-tipped wings and dark eyes. The leafless trees, shifting in the cold wind, sounded like whispering voices.
In that dark corner of her memory, Glenn saw her mother’s pale skin and her black eyes and then, behind her, the dark body of some massive looming thing.
Across the camp, Aamon sat, a hulking shadow amongst
shadows.
Could he really have just stumbled upon them all those years ago?
And if he had, then why had her mother disappeared so soon after he recovered? Another coincidence? Glenn doubted it. Could her mother have had some part in the war he mentioned? And if she did, was it possible that Aamon knew where she was now?
Glenn rose up onto her elbow, facing Aamon, those and a
hundred other questions poised on her tongue. Each question would open a door. What Glenn had to ask herself was, did she want to step through them to the other side? If Aamon did know something of where her mother was, then what? Would she follow that trail? Even if it led away from home? Away from her father? Away from 813?
Glenn pressed her open hand into the cold ground, relishing the grit of the dirt, the plain simplicity of it. For whatever reason, her mother had abandoned them. Her father had not. He sat in some Colloquium hospital, broken and alone. If Glenn was going to chase after anyone, free anyone, it would be him, not her.
And if that was true, then maybe some questions were simply better left unasked. Some doors best left closed.
Glenn turned away from Aamon and drew the blanket he had
given them over her and Kevin. She found herself inching closer to
Kevin until their shoulders were a breath from each other. She could feel his chest rising and falling, fast and stilted. She eased her hand across the ground, nestling it underneath his palm. Glenn felt the pulse in his fingertips and imagined funneling her entire self down into that one hand so she could feel surrounded and safe, closed up, locked away.
Home.
This will be over soon, she promised herself, promised him. The bracelet would be destroyed and she’d free her father. And then …
Glenn rolled onto her back. Somewhere out there in the
confusion of stars lay 813. She clasped Kevin’s hand tight in hers, and when exhaustion finally overtook her she dreamed of its distant jungles.
“Glenn …”
Glenn woke with a start to Kevin nudging her in the ribs.
“What do you want, Kapoor?”
“You sleeping?”
Glenn glared at him.
“Okay, look. I have to, uh … pee.”
“So? What do you want me to do about it?”
Kevin nodded out toward the woods.
“Are you serious?”
“Come on, Morgan. I’d do it for you.”
“Get Aamon to go with you.”
Kevin glanced up at the dark mountain of Aamon’s form.
“Right, ’cause that would make it less scary. Just come on. Please.”
As always with Kevin, Glenn knew it would be much easier to just go. “Okay, fine,” she said. “You big baby.”
Glenn whipped the blanket off and stood with a moan. Every inch of her body ached. It didn’t help that the temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees while they were sleeping. Glenn gathered up their blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. Kevin would have to freeze while he peed. Glenn pushed him into the trees, her eyes half closed from exhaustion.
“Huh,” Kevin said as they blundered through the dark. “It just occurred to me that I’ve never actually done this outdoors before. I mean, what kind of world do we live in that peeing out in nature has never
