But that seemed unlikely.
Nothing plausible had come to him by the time the shapes of trees and stones began to fade into the twilit haze. The only thought that did stand out was that if they kept walking, they were going to walk off a cliff in the dark, so when he spotted a small cave shouldering its way up from the forest floor, he pointed to it, and they crawled in. Nell untied the blanket she’d managed to keep wrapped around her waist and let it fall into a heap. Then the five of them collapsed against the cool walls and watched night take the forest.
Max rubbed his hand where the woman had pierced it. The back of his head throbbed, and he wondered if maybe all of this was just an elaborate hallucination. Maybe he was still in that chair, and she’d given him something to make him think . . . panic bubbled in his chest and he did a quick assessment of his surroundings. The rich green smell of the forest and the cool aroma of stone hung everywhere around him in the shallow cave. What was it he’d read about hallucinating smells? Oh, yeah, they were usually awful ones, like skunk and body odor. So he was probably safe.
It was dark before any of them said a word. Outside, clouds obscured the moon, and the faint outline of inky trees shimmered against deeper spaces the color of coal. It was the only way he could tell he wasn’t blind. Inside the cave, it was pitch, but he could feel Jean, who had pushed up against him, feel the hard nub of her doll, the scratchy knottiness of its hair against his arm.
“I’m hungry,” Jean said.
The sound of her voice seemed to wake the others out of their daze. In the black, he heard Nell shift and groan, and Kate sniffle. Susan kept silent.
“What happened?”
That was Nell. “What got us out of there?”
Her question bounced off the cave walls, a tiny echo.
“It felt like something exploded,” Kate whispered after a minute. “Did something explode?”
Max pondered this. It had felt like an explosion. But where had the sound been? And the fire?
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “What could have exploded?”
From somewhere across the cave, Susan answered.
“Me.”
His heart sank. The place had been too much for her. It stood to reason.
“Uh, Susan? People don’t explode, remember?”
She sniffed.
“I’m not an idiot, Max.”
Her voice sounded normal enough.
“I only meant —”
“I know what you meant.”
Nell cleared her throat. “Susan, are you saying you sent that wind through the room?”
Max sat straighter. He hadn’t hallucinated the wind!
“I don’t know. Felt like it.”
Felt like it? He squinted in Susan’s direction. “What exactly does it feel like to make a tornado?”
Susan sighed. “I didn’t make a tornado,” she said. “I didn’t make anything. I just wanted to get out. And then I just was.”
Max fingered the bump on the back of his head and thought they weren’t going to get very far with logic like that.
“Things don’t happen just because you want them to,” he said. He thought ruefully that if they did, he’d be talking to Nikola Tesla right now.
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“Of course, but —”
“I don’t know, Max. It just happened. I wasn’t even sure it was real until about an hour ago.”
Well, that made two of them.
“Still,” he said. “We’ve got to figure it out. If you can do something like that —”
She cut him off. “Don’t start going crazy. It’s not like I did it on purpose.”
Max sighed. Susan had one thing in common with Tesla, anyway. They could both be difficult.
Max woke in the night to shrieking. Kate was screaming into the black, crying and slapping the wall. It took them a while to find her, it was so dark, but at last he heard Susan catch hold of her and wake her. She said she’d been dreaming of the tiled room.
As if things couldn’t get worse, at dawn they heard dogs. Outside the cave, cicadas buzzed and birds whistled, but from somewhere down the mountain, the urgent barking of a pack sliced through the morning.
Max sat up with a stifled cry. He might as well have slept on a bed of knives, the way his muscles screamed when he moved. His head throbbed worse now from the inside than from the knot on the back of his skull.
“Get up!” he yelled at the others. “Listen! Search dogs! They’re looking for us!”
Kate bolted up so fast, she might have been stung by a bee, and Jean was on her feet before she’d opened her eyes.
“What do we do?” Kate cried. “They’ll take us back there!”
“We run,” Susan said. “And keep running.”
They were too weak, though, to move quickly now. It had been more than a day since they’d eaten, or even had a drink. They limped from the cave into the forest, where a wet cotton fog, smelling of old leaves, blurred the ground.
“Try to hurry,” Max said. “We have to keep moving up this mountain. Eventually they’ll give up.”
Jean lost her footing and fell, disappearing into the cloudy ground cover. Max helped her up.
“The ground is strange,” she said to him when he got her on her feet again. “Not like it was before. Look.”
The fog was too thick to see anything below his knees, so he reached down and ran his hand over it. Bare dirt.
Again, the echo of distant dogs pierced the morning.
“Forget about it,” he said. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
His heart was ramming so hard behind his ribs, he thought he might keel over, but Max forced himself on, tugging Jean along, until the sound of the dogs disappeared and the fog melted. It was then he noticed the
