“You think this is about breaking rules?” she said slowly. “Still? What rule did Wista break, do you think?”
Kate looked over at Laysia, but the woman didn’t know how bad the two of them could get. Weeks of upset seemed to wind themselves into Susan’s face when she answered.
“Maybe the rule about associating with us,” Susan said. “Why couldn’t you have just listened when I told you not to make waves there?”
Nell looked like someone had punched her. Kate cringed. Outside, the bread had quieted Wista, and only the crickets were loud now.
“Listened?” Nell said. “If I’d listened, you’d be the one we had to drag out of there. You were losing your mind, or don’t you remember? But why would you? You were waiting for Max to do something.”
The shaky sound of cicadas buzzed through the window, and Susan turned her back.
“Maybe they’re not holding him,” Nell persisted. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe he’s just forgotten about us!”
“No!” Jean shouted. “He wouldn’t!” She had begun to pull at her doll’s hair in her agitation, and blond strands of it glittered on the floor.
Susan said he wouldn’t too many times after that, and Laysia, caught between them, would only say that yes, it was possible they were holding him. She couldn’t tell anymore what they would do. And Nell, furious and near tears, went out to the wall.
The next day, no one went to the clearing. Nell stayed with Wista, talking in that low voice she used, while the slasher moaned and shrieked. The rabbits and the squirrels had long since fled the sound of her, leaving the wood too empty in the circle around the house. Kate felt sick with the emptiness and with the noise. She watched Jean leave the house to draw figures in the dirt beneath the trees. And Susan sat on her bed, sullen and silent.
“Max will come,” Kate said to her. “And then we can take him to see the ocean. He’ll love that.”
Susan nodded distractedly.
“Don’t you think so?”
“Hmm?”
“Don’t you think Max will love to go to the ocean?”
Susan wouldn’t really look at her. She wasn’t listening.
That night, Kate woke abruptly in the dark, her heart thundering in her chest. She thought she must have dreamed something terrible, but she couldn’t remember it. All she could think of was the mist. Susan and Nell had both pricked it, and now she could hear it muttering in the dark, restless and hungry. Like some hideous beast, it would soon climb the mountain, jaws wide, to swallow them, just as it had swallowed Wista.
She slipped out of bed, into the main room, and then, without even finding her shoes, out the front door. The crickets trilled, and in her walled prison, the slasher moaned and grumbled in sleep. There was no moon.
The stars shimmered overhead, sandy grains of light that barely separated tree from air. But the mist whispered at her, and she felt the persistent weight of it beneath the breeze. She turned and made her way toward it.
The forest floor hurt her feet, and she picked her way through it, trying to step lightly. After a while, the sudden jab of a twig or the pull of a thorn didn’t bother her. The mist was louder, and the thickness of it swam around her, blotting out other things.
It won’t notice, she thought. Like Susan doesn’t, like Nell doesn’t. It will think I’m too young to worry about.
Her pulse beat in her throat and up around her ears, until it was nearly as loud as the murmuring air. It doesn’t know my name, she told herself.
She reached the edge of the forest and stepped out. The land dipped. Below her, she could feel the valley, and its foggy boundary, stretching up to meet her.
I’m little, she thought. It will leave me alone.
She stood for a second, listening to the steady roar of it, the hiss of a hundred angry voices. But it didn’t change. Though she stood close to it, she could hear no question, no warning.
She stepped down into it.
The mist closed around her, and the muttering rose — strange, unintelligible words, a grimy whiteness that she wanted to drag from her eyes. She shut them against it.
It wanted to come inside her. It wanted to seep in behind her eyes, worm its way there, push into her head. She had lost, all of a sudden, her sense of direction. Which way was down? She needed to walk down, but now she stumbled, thinking that she could go on forever and always be standing right here. She was lost, lost like Nell had been lost, lost like Wista was lost!
Panic clanged in her brain and she nearly fell.
No! Laysia said we’re not like them! We’re different; we have a shell. My skin is all hard lines, and it can’t take me!
She thought it as loudly as she could, keeping her eyes closed. Voices whined in her ear, sinister words in some other language she didn’t recognize.
It didn’t call her name. It didn’t shout at her. It didn’t know her.
She breathed in and out, listening to the sound of her own breath.
What had Susan done, that first time?
Don’t open your eyes, she told herself. Don’t make it more real than it is. It’s like the light, there but not there. Bend it, like the light.
The mist, too, was only pieces. She’d been thinking of it as a fog, but it was a sandstorm. A million individual drops, able to be nudged apart.
She pushed at them and felt the weight pressing on her give a little.
Tentatively, she opened her eyes. There was the valley below, glinting dimly in the starlight.
Kate ran through the tunnel in the mist.
No one stopped her this time as she made her way alone onto the boys’ floor. She didn’t know which room
