shakes in her voice. “Listen to me. Okay? You can’t be up here now.
You have to take a step back, for me. Just a little one.”
Margaret didn’t say anything. She didn’t move.
“Margaret …” Glenn said, softening. “I know … I know it seems like things are all messed up right now, but you need some time.
Things will get back to the way they were before this all happened.
23
Okay? Things will be fine.”
Margaret shook her head.
“Of course they will!” Glenn said, fighting the rising gusts of wind. “Look, your parents are down below. And your brother. Why don’t we go sit in front of the fire. We’ll get you something to eat and we’ll all talk. We’ll talk all night if you want, until things are better.
Then tomorrow you guys will head home and this will all be over.
Would you like that? Margaret? Things will be back the way they were.”
Margaret turned so that her profile was etched across the starry night behind her.
“You can’t make a tree not a tree,” she said. “You can’t take it back.”
Glenn swallowed hard. Her heart was racing now, but she had to keep calm. She took a half step, slow, and reached out to the girl.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But take a step back and we’ll get you on the road home.”
There was a gust of wind and Margaret’s hair snapped like a flag.
Her eyes were dark and huge and clear.
“There is no road home.”
Glenn made a grab for Margaret’s shoulder, but the girl took a single step forward and it was as if the darkness and the earth below reached up, desperate to snatch her away.
Margaret didn’t make a sound as she fell.
As the night deepened, the cold and the wind took Glenn in both hands and shook, but she didn’t leave her place at the edge of the cliff.
She imagined she was an outcropping of rock or a lone growth of mountain pine, twisted and hard, invisible amongst the others.
The moon led the stars down into the horizon, and then the first watery traces of sunlight spread across the mountains. At some point that morning, Margaret’s parents and brother appeared on the cliff behind her. They stood there a long time, their ragged clothes flapping in the wind. Their bodies gray and indistinct, like ghostly smudges on a pane of glass.
Glenn told them what Margaret had done, then turned away and watched the sun rise. They said nothing. Eventually, there was a sound behind her like dry leaves skittering across the rock and they were gone.
There was a flash of green as the sun crested the forest in the distance and for a moment Glenn imagined she was on 813, millions of miles away from the Magisterium and the Colloquium. Alone in the quiet. Her heart longed for it, missing another distant place she had never been.
As the sun crept up into the mountains, a winding path, lighter gray than the rock around it, shone. And at the vanishing end of her vision sat a jumble of small red-roofed buildings.
Glenn shook her head, disgusted with herself at the thought.
Whatever else Kevin said, she knew he was right about that. The idea that she could destroy the bracelet and they would all waltz into their old life was a fantasy. Go back to school? To the Academy? Free her father? It was laughable. Sturges would never allow it.
Bethany was a small collection of buildings and streets, and on the other side of it, towering like a dark green castle wall, was the edge of the border forest. She could be in Bethany by that afternoon; walking straight through it and coming out the other side would be the work of a few minutes. And then …
Glenn pulled her sleeve aside, exposing the dull gray of the bracelet. It was true that Sturges would never give Glenn her old life back. But maybe she could purchase it.
The pieces of a plan began to snap together. The bracelet for her life. After all, who was she protecting? Her mother? A monster who had abandoned her years ago? Kevin, who was so transformed she barely recognized him anymore?
Glenn’s heart ached at the thought of him. But no matter what else Aamon had done, no matter who he had been, he had been lying to her this whole time. Without him her mother never would have left, never would have become what she was now. Glenn had to face it. Just like Kevin and her mother, Hopkins was gone, swallowed up by the Magisterium.
Glenn forced herself up and stood teetering at the edge of the cliff, the wind lashing her, the jagged rocks and endless land sprawled out below.
The words were like hands reaching up from a grave to pull her down, just as they had pulled down her mother and father and Kevin and Aamon and Margaret. Glenn turned away from the edge and crossed the windswept stone.
Glenn traveled throughout the morning and into a bright and cold afternoon, the red of Bethany growing steadily in her eye. Every step was near agony to a body that had spent years sitting in chairs with a tablet in hand, but she pushed on to a drumbeat formed from Margaret’s last words. When Glenn thought she couldn’t walk anymore, defiance pushed her forward.
When she reached Bethany’s outskirts, she stopped and peered down a road that wound away to her right, disappearing into the town.
Despite the size of the place, it was as quiet as a grave. No voices. No sounds of movement or work. This was supposed to be an industrial town — a blacksmithing town, Aamon had said. Why was it so quiet?
One possibility was that one of the various forces that were searching for her — Merrin’s, the Magistra’s, or the Colloquium’s -
had come and cleared the place out and were lying in wait for her.
Either that or the townspeople had heard of the armies converging on their town and fled.
Nervous anticipation buzzed inside Glenn. Above the rooftops sat the beginning of the forest border. Home lay on the other side, only hours away now. The silence seemed to intensify as she followed the narrow dirt road past abandoned buildings. Here and there she found an open door looking into an empty room, but most of the buildings were closed up tight. Their windows were like empty eye sockets.
Glenn quickened her pace, triumph dancing in her chest.
But then she turned a corner and saw the first body.
From a distance, Glenn mistook it for an animal, but as she drew closer, she saw it was a man. He was dressed in simple
homespun-looking clothes, rough pants, and a fur-lined leather coat.
His arms and legs were outstretched. A silver knife, its length splattered with blood, lay on the ground, inches from his open hand.
Glenn approached slowly. He was old, fifty at least, with thinning gray hair and a round, heavily lined face —
