They ate, and Max being Max, he didn’t wait long to pursue the latest topic of interest: slashers. Susan listened to him go at the subject as if he were doing field research for National Geographic: Was anyone born a slasher? What did they eat? Where did they go when they weren’t in the city?
To his obvious disappointment, the children didn’t really know. They traded stories of slashers who’d been grabbed by soldiers, slashers who’d gone after sleepers, slashers who kept to the ruins, eating small game.
“We used to have one that howled all night outside our village,” Yali said. “My da finally went after it with a pitchfork. He didn’t catch it, but it never came back, either.”
Susan raised an eyebrow. This was more interesting than what slashers ate. “You used to live in a village?”
The girl tugged at one of the knots in her hair. “Uh-huh. Till my ma went sick and died, and my da started sleeping in the square. Purity burnt our house, so we had to come.” She eyed Susan. “Anything like that happen where you come from?”
“We’re not from here,” Nell said firmly. “We told you that.”
Yali opened her mouth to protest when Sefi leaned over and whispered to her. Susan caught only the words “fiddled with” and “brains rearranged.” She saw Nell flush. Yali said nothing more, but after a while, she moved next to Kate, staring so long that Kate turned to look back at her.
“What?” she asked.
Yali flushed. “Only, I just wondered if I could touch it.”
Kate frowned. “Touch it?”
“Your skin. It looks so nice.”
Beneath the dirt and ash on her face, Kate flushed scarlet. She nodded.
Susan watched the girl put a gentle finger to Kate’s cheek, then open her whole knobby hand to run it down the side of Kate’s jaw. She sighed.
“It is soft,” she said. “I thought it would be.”
Susan thought of the mark she’d left on Kate’s face earlier and looked down at her hands, her own cheeks burning. She glanced back at Kate and saw that her sister had closed her eyes, her lips trembling. Yali noticed.
“It’s all right,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “I don’t have to touch if you don’t like it.”
Kate sniffled. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “You can.”
Again, Yali brushed her hand down Kate’s cheek.
“Before my da went sleepy, he told me stories of a girl like you,” she said.
Kate turned to look at her. “Me?”
“Well, he said she’d be me, one day, when the change went back. Showed me the painting of her in the village market. It hung there, rally days, you know.”
“Rally days? In the village?” Jean asked. “Like today?”
Yali’s bumpy hair bounced as she nodded. “Only it was a red cloak who spoke. We were too far out for the Genius to come.”
“Not as good,” Espin said. “My ma grew up in the city, and she said the village rallies were so dull they could put the Purity to sleep.”
Sefi snorted. “No! They were good! They even brought a dog out, though he wasn’t as big as Spark.”
“Spark?” Nell asked her.
“The Genius’s dog. You saw him, didn’t you?”
Sefi sighed. “I used to love rally days!”
Susan’s face grew hot as she remembered her own excitement at the rally. Her mind suddenly seemed like a foreign country.
“What happens there, during the rally?” she asked. “I thought . . .” She didn’t know what she thought, really. “Things seemed like they looked different,” she finished lamely.
Max lifted his head. “They did! I thought so!”
Omet only shrugged. “Rally change, that’s all.” She shook her head and clucked sympathetically. “You’ve lost some, no doubt about that. But maybe you’ll get it back, if you try to think real hard.”
Nell caught Susan’s eye and shook her head.
The late-afternoon light had begun to soften, and the sounds outside the ground-floor windows were quieter now. Susan rubbed once more at the lump in her shoulder and stood up.
“Thank you so much,” she said to the children. “For everything you did for us. They would have taken us without you. But now we’ve got to head out. The farther we get from the city, the better we’ll be, I think.”
Omet frowned at her. “That might be so, but you’d be a fool to go now,” she said. “Night’s coming on. Red cloaks and their dogs check the borders, and that’s not to mention the slashers looking for dinner.”
“And the green hoods,” Modo said. “Fanatics. Don’t forget them.”
Sefi and Yali were nodding. Omet waited. Reluctantly, Susan sank back down.
“I guess we’ll stay the night,” she said.
Time, the ancients had written, is a vast house. In this room a man lives, in another he dies, in this one a child is born, and in this one, he holds his grandchild. Yesterday and tomorrow are mere illusions. All thens are now.
The exile read these things over and over, trying to believe them. If all thens were now, there was no aloneness, no banishment, no loss. If all were now, the promise of redemption had come, the five stood nearby, and the age of empty silence was no more than a single room in the vast house, a thousand others alive with joy and union. One could leave the small room and close the door.
But the ancients had also written of a man whose house holds a treasure in its walls. If he knows it not, he owns nothing. If he cannot find his wealth, though it surrounds him, he is poor.
And so the exile stood at the center of the small room in the great house of time and had not the eyes to find the door.
Three nights, Susan thought. Three nights away from home, and not a clue as to how to get back. She shuddered. The sleepers’ children were layering the floor with rags, and Yali motioned to her, showing Susan she’d cleared a corner near the window. She
