Shadows Cast by Stars

reaches our ears, and then, the forest goes still. Rain drops onto tree, onto leaf, onto fallen body. No one moves.

Henry Crawford stands, slowly, and speaks. “Tom, Ron, Cedar-go chase it down. It won’t be far.”

Cedar catches my eye as he jumps up. His face is flushed with excitement as he follows the older men off into the underbrush.

Madda touches my arm. “You okay?”

I nod and brush the last of the sparks away from my eyes.

“Good,” she says. “We’ve got work to do.”

I start to take a step after her, but my feet won’t move. Sparks return to float around my face while beneath my feet, the earth shudders. Breathe, I tell myself. Just breathe. The sparks recede. The shuddering stops.

Madda frowns at me but doesn’t say anything. What is there to say?

We step out of our hiding place to find an arm waving at us, except it’s dangling from a cedar branch. The owner of the arm is nowhere to be seen.

Madda kneels. A man lies in the rich humus, his head cradled by bracken. He has two arms, so the one in the cedar isn’t his, though a livid burn crisscrosses his chest.

Madda touches my hand. “I need my medicine bag. It’s in the top of my pack.”

I bound away. Medicine bag, medicine bag, I must find her medicine bag. I repeat the words to stave off the sparks that chase after me. Their drone fills my ears, making it hard for me to think.

The pack sits in the mud, half open. I root through the top for the bundle that contains Madda’s most potent medicines. Why doesn’t she have it with her? She always carries it with her. And then I see it poking out from under the pack. I seize it and I’m back at her side within a few quick strides.

The rain has stopped. Mist descends, wrapping the forest in a shroud. Men walk back and forth, half-ghosted, carrying the wounded closer to Madda. She still sits beside the man with the burn, stroking his brow, and she doesn’t look up when I approach. I open the medicine kit. She waves her hand at me, as if I should know what she needs, but I don’t. This man is dying. Nothing will stop that now.

She reaches across, retrieving a bottle herself. WATER HEMLOCK, the label reads. And then I know. Madda doesn’t mean to heal this man. She means to ease his passing.

“Hold on, Ben. Open your mouth,” she says. “This might be a little bitter, but it will kill the pain.”

I turn away, but Madda yanks me back. “Get over here,” she hisses. “You’re a healer. Act like one.”

So I kneel next to Madda, remembering the day she told me I’d face difficult decisions, that there’d be times when I’d have to do things I’d rather not.

Yes, she told me, but maybe deep down I didn’t believe her.

But I’m here now, with a dying man beside me and none of that-what I believed, what I wanted, what choice I made-matters. If it were me lying there, what would I want? I’d want someone to stay with me, to talk to me, to take my hand and wait until I left this world. So I do that. I pick up the man’s dirty hand and cradle it in my own. Madda nods and walks off to find her next patient.

The man stares at me with vacant brown eyes. He’s about my father’s age. His hand is ice-cold. I have to force myself not to shiver. He has no shade. “Cassandra,” he says. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. And yours is Ben?”

“Yep. Never got a chance to know you. I’m sorry about that.” His eyes flutter closed as his breath rattles in his chest. “So much I never got to do.”

I don’t know what to say, so I sing “Alouette,” like my father used to sing to Paul and me when we were little, and smooth Ben’s hair away from his eyes. Death is coming. I can feel its arrival, this raven that walks the spirit world with a black mask and a cape of rattles. I can hear him dancing, shaking his cape.

Ben clenches my hand. “I’m not long for this world. I hear the Great Spirit calling my name.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and nod. I hear it too. Don’t go, I want to say, but the decision isn’t mine. Ben wheezes, “It’s time.” A smile pulls at his lips and then, he’s gone.

I don’t know how long I sit there, singing, holding his hand. Long enough for his skin to take on a tinge of yellow. Long enough for his mouth to fall slack. There is no beauty in death. Ben is no longer Ben, but a husk sloughed off by his soul.

All around us people rush back and forth, setting guards, slashing bush, tending fires, bearing hastily made stretchers. I know they’re busy. I know there is much to do, but the fact that no one stops by, no one marks Ben’s passing, leaves me feeling so sad. These men knew him better than I did. They would know if he has children, a wife, someone who might be waiting for him to come home.

I pull a strip of bark from a nearby cedar, and then pick ferns. I will weave Ben a garland to wear. My hands make the knots as part of me starts to withdraw. I see the mist hanging in the air, but I don’t truly feel it. I know rain falls on my head and drips down my neck, but I am not cold. I see the men moving through the undergrowth, their faces grim and serious, but I don’t hear them. The rain. The mud. The forest. The broken tree, stabbing up from the earth.

Ben, lying on the ground, except he isn’t. Only his body is. The rest of him is gone, off on the long journey to the land of our ancestors.

And then, blood rushes in my ears. Something snaps, and the cocoon protecting me from the noise and the cold and the truth breaks.

It’s Madda, calling me.

Reluctantly, I let Ben go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Three dead. Six seriously injured. Two of those will likely pass into the spirit world before dawn. Many with minor cuts, contusions, scrapes, burns. By all accounts, we’ve been lucky. It could have been worse, the men whisper. Much, much worse.

If we lived in the Corridor, if we weren’t Others, the injured men would be treated in a hospital with the best drugs the UA government could muster up. In the Corridor, a broken bone is a painful nuisance. A little plaster, a few pins, maybe surgery, some rest, and you’re all better, sonny. Right as rain.

Out here, we have splints. Honey. Garlic. Boneset. That’s it. The two men who may still pass over? They’ve been burned by the searchers’ weapons. They might still have died if we were in the Corridor. But then again, maybe not. Maybe if we were somewhere else, they’d wake up tomorrow in a hospital room, smile at their family, comment on how lovely the lilies are, May I have a sip of water? Could you bring the bedpan, please?

Darkness descends around us. It’s not true night yet, but the shadows of the rain forest don’t know that, nor do they care. I’m sewing up a bone-baring gash in a man’s arm-I asked him his name but I don’t remember what he said-as I wonder why we’re still here. If the searchers found us once, what’s stopping them from finding us again? Maybe I should wish for that. If they came, we could send these men back with them. The searchers have reason to get them back to the Corridor quickly, to fix what we can’t. But then what would keep them from taking all of us? I don’t know. I still don’t understand why that searchcraft attacked or how it found us to begin with.

I think these things over and over and over because I don’t want to think about what’s happening beyond the canopy of the trees. I don’t want to think about how the searchers penetrated the boundary. I know Madda said there are gaps now, but still-gaps big enough to allow a searchcraft through? That means the boundary is failing. How long until it’s gone completely? And what will stop the UA from coming and rounding us up then?

Madda brings me a steaming cup of tea. “Drink it,” she says when I wave it away. “Healing is hard work. If you don’t, you’ll regret it later, and you’re dangerous to everyone, including yourself, if you’re exhausted.” She glances at the row of stitches that run up the man’s arm. “Nice work.”

I sip the tea. It’s bitter, but warm. “She’ll bring some to you later,” I say to the man when he glances at my cup.

“I hope not,” he says as he closes his eyes. “That smells awful. Hurry up. I want this over with.”

When I’m finished with his arm, I start mixing a poultice for a man who’s lost most of his right ear. While I