“Who’s speaking?” the boy said.
Millard picked up a scarf that lay on the edge of the bed and wrapped it around his face, revealing the shape of his nose, his forehead, his mouth. “Here I am,” he said, moving across the floor toward the boy. “Don’t be frightened.”
As the rest of us watched, the boy reached up his hand and touched Millard’s cheek, then his forehead, then his hair—the color and style of which it had never occurred to me to imagine—and even pulled a little hank of it, gently, as if testing its realness.
“You’re
“And you’ll be, too, even after the rest of you goes,” said Millard. “You’ll see. It doesn’t hurt.”
The boy smiled, and when he did, the woman’s knees wobbled and she had to steady herself against Bekhir. “Bless you,” she said to Millard, near tears. “Bless you.”
Millard sat down at Radi’s disappeared feet. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, my boy. In fact, once you adjust to invisibility, I think you’ll find it has many advantages …”
And as he began to list them, Bekhir went to the door and nodded at Emma and me. “Let’s let them be,” he said. “I’m sure they have a lot to talk about.”
We left Millard alone with the boy and his mother. Returning to the campfire, we found nearly everyone, peculiar and Gypsy alike, gathered around Horace. He was standing on a tree stump before the astounded fortune teller, his eyes closed and one hand atop her head, and seemed to be narrating a dream as it came to him: “… and your grandson’s grandson will pilot a giant ship that shuttles between the Earth and the moon like an omnibus, and on the moon he’ll have a very small house, and he’ll fall behind on the mortgage and have to take in lodgers, and one of those lodgers will be a beautiful woman with whom he’ll fall very deeply in moon-love, which isn’t quite the same as Earth-love because of the difference in gravity there …”
We watched from the edge of the crowd. “Is he for real?” I asked Emma.
“Might be,” she replied. “Or he might just be having a bit of fun with her.”
“Why can’t he tell
Emma shrugged. “Horace’s ability can be maddeningly useless. He’ll reel off lifetimes of predictions for strangers, but with us he’s almost totally blocked. It’s as if the more he cares about someone, the less he can see. Emotion clouds his vision.”
“Doesn’t it all of us,” came a voice from behind us, and we turned to see Enoch standing there. “And on that tip, I hope you aren’t distracting the American too much, Emma dear. It’s hard to keep a lookout for hollowgast
