And Lan — even Lan! — ran forward.
The fleeing children swerved and turned back, caught between the troops pouring from the hill and the watchers who ran to meet them.
Laysia spun around. “Stop!” she screamed at Lan. “They’re children!”
But she could see the watchers changing. The skin of her brother’s face rippled and bent.
Madness! Its poison was everywhere; it choked the air. Laysia and the children hurled wind and stone and threw the dust from the ground into the faces of the attackers, into the fires, but no one stopped and no one heard beneath the shattering noise of flame and wind.
Fear sliced knife-like through her chest. Kate! The girl let go of her hand and darted after her brother, who’d bolted past the fleeing children toward the oncoming soldiers.
Madness in the children, too! Laysia chased after them, calling — when a light sparked and shimmered, and the sunlight ignited. The noise of the coming stampede abated. Laysia froze.
A wall of thick glass shimmered between the panicked children and the red cloaks.
Behind her, she heard Nell laugh.
“A window!” the girl said. “Max made a window that doesn’t open!”
Shielded now by the glass, the fleeing children stopped. Behind Laysia, the watchers did the same. But the old man shouted, “No!” and hurled a wind to batter the wall. The bewildered children ducked beneath the blast of air and tried to run, but they were bound, and more — they each held their hands out, stiff, as if running with a gift to show.
Laysia could make them out now: silver balls that hung around their necks, pulled out and held in their cupped hands. What was this?
Then a small boy tugged at his neck, tearing the orb away. A flare, and his sleeve caught fire.
“It’s on them! They’re wearing it!” Nell shouted. “Max! Stay back!”
The boy stopped short, but Susan didn’t. She ran past Laysia toward the child trying to douse his arm in the grass.
“Espin!” she shouted back at them. “It’s Espin!” Horror poured from the others as the boy writhed. Max and Nell snatched up a fallen cloak, torn from one of the attackers, and beat at the fire. Kate and Laysia ran to do the same.
Still the watchers sent the wind, trying to shatter the wall and reach the enemies on the other side. The children cried out, the orbs glinting in their hands.
“Get them off! Get them off!” Nell shouted. And Laysia and Kate, Max and Nell ran from child to child, lifting the orbs from their necks. But the wind blew too sharply, and one after the other, the orbs popped. Stung, the children dropped them to the grass, which lit, flames shooting up into the heat.
Then Susan stopped moving. For a moment, Laysia again feared madness, but no dark terror pulsed from her now, only that needle of focus, the hungry shout to the listening world. The air shuddered. Beneath Susan’s feet, the soil buckled.
“Get back!” Nell screamed at her sister, but as the ground churned, Susan shot into the air. A sheet of water tore the grass in two. The geyser ripped upward, throwing the rest of them to the ground amid a shower of dirt and grass and foam. It arched overhead and then splashed to earth, drenching the children and dousing the burning swath before the glass wall that shimmered and glittered now with spray. Once, twice, the water shot heavenward, until the fire had been pounded from hair and skin and clothes and grass.
Suddenly, silence. Jean looked up and saw the wall of glass, glittering in the spray, and the Genius, his hand raised. The troops had paused on the ridge. As it had in the tiled room, the man’s face shifted before her eyes, its already rough edges going jagged, the hair thickening, the eyes receding further into the bony skull.
“Coward!” he shouted, and his voice echoed strangely across the now quiet hollow. “How long will you hide your face from me behind pretty walls? The time has come, old man! Show yourself!”
For a beat, nothing moved on either side of the wall. And then two figures rose from behind it to land on the glass ledge.
“Yes! See my face!” the old man called back. “Look at the face of a man before you feel the weight of his hand!”
Muttering anger from the troops on the ridge, but the Genius only laughed.
“Oh, I will! I’ll look at your face and your outstretched hand. It offered me five smooth-faced children, after all. Who wouldn’t come for such a gift? But, old man, did you think that was all I’d take?” He flicked his head at Jean and said to his guard, “Bring me the girl!”
They dragged her from the corral, Liyla tripping after her, and the Genius grabbed Jean by the shoulder and pulled her against him to face the hollow. Liyla hunched before her, clutching the gathered pendants.
On the glass wall, the second man called out, “Who are you to speak of courage, dog? You hide behind a child!”
Jean gave a start. It was the voice of the Master Watcher!
“Ah, but I don’t hide my gifts,” the Genius countered. “I make use of them. Look how I adorn this one you sent me!” And then the basket was beside them, and as Jean struggled to pull away, he slipped a necklace over her head. She recoiled as the weight of the metal pressed through the thinness of her dress.
“Do you think you can deter me now? With this?” the old man shouted at him. “When so much is at stake?”
The Genius’s laugh shook them both, and Jean cringed. “Deter you? Never! We are the same, you and I, aren’t we? We always have been.”
“You’re a dog who barks at men!” the Master Watcher roared. “This great man is nothing like you!”
Again,
