The air smelled as if something green had curdled. Despite the thickness of trees all around, the forest floor stretched out empty as a vacant lot, dirt without a thing sprouting. A few withered weeds looked as if they’d started to grow at the base of a tree and thought better of it, shriveling nearly black before they sagged into the roots.
Nell looked around. “What is this?” she asked. “Looks like somebody poisoned it.”
“All of it?” Susan asked, and pointed up the mountain. The sun was high in the sky now, and it sent stripes of light through the trees. Beneath them, the bald dirt stretched out to the horizon.
“I guess we took a wrong turn,” Nell said.
Max had hoped to find the orchard again, behind the ruined house. Before they’d been taken, they’d meant to go west, back the way they’d come. Instead, they’d run eastward, into this strange wasteland. Overhead, the trees were full of chirping birds and the chipped-wood voices of squirrels, but below, nothing lived: no deer, no foxes, no rabbits, no green.
But that was a clue, wasn’t it? Somebody had done something here, or how could trees grow when grass wouldn’t? He wondered if that meant that as long as they were in this sproutless wood, the dogs would be right behind them. Probably. Well, then job one was obviously to get out of this forest.
It was easier in theory than in practice. They walked all morning, and still the naked ground persisted. Worse, they hadn’t found a single thing to eat or drink. Max tried climbing a tree to taste the leaves, but all that did was make him spit green.
“Can we eat acorns?” Jean asked him. “Like the squirrels?”
He’d have liked to test that out, but the few fallen acorns he’d spotted were shriveled husks in the strange dirt, and the ones in the branches were so high that even with Nell standing on his shoulders, they couldn’t reach any.
Soon it was water they were most desperate for. The bitterness of the wood hung in the air, seeping into their pores and coating their tongues. Max thought his head couldn’t get any heavier, but by the afternoon, he decided that it, too, was filled with uranium. And to his horror, when the birds quieted, he could still hear the faint sound of barking, far below.
Jean slapped at a mosquito and smeared a bright streak of blood across her sweaty cheek.
“Mosquitoes are about the only thing eating anything out here,” Nell said, disgusted.
Ahead, another shallow cave yawned from the dead ground, and she dropped to her knees to crawl inside and collapse in the cool shadows.
“Nell, get up! They have dogs!” Kate said in alarm.
Nell pressed a hand to her forehead. “All they’ll find is a dried-up raisin of me if I don’t take a rest,” she said. “I’m starting to see double. And my stomach doesn’t feel too good, either.”
Max felt the same way. Heat and exhaustion had ground down even the desperate fear that had rapped in his chest all day. His tongue was like a weight in his mouth. A weight covered in fur.
Susan sank to her knees, then dragged herself into the shade. “Later, we’ll keep walking,” she said, sounding as weak as he felt. “And we’ll find something to eat, too. And drink.”
“Is that a theory or a prediction based on facts?” he asked her.
“Oh, brother, Max!”
They piled into the tight space and dozed fitfully until afternoon, when a breeze sprang up, carrying with it the bitter half-burned smell that clung to the dirt. They struggled to their feet and continued walking. For the moment, the dogs were out of earshot, but Max wondered how long that would last.
His head was throbbing by the time a brief cloudburst gave them some relief. They tried to drink from the pools that formed at the base of tree roots, but the water burned their throats and made them retch.
“It’s like drinking seawater!” Nell said, spitting.
They sampled the water that gathered in the crevices of rocks and clung to the few leaves they could reach. This, at least, was sweet, so they moved from tree to stone, searching out the moisture, until their heads cleared.
Unfortunately, quenching their thirst only seemed to sharpen the edge of the hunger.
“They salted the dirt,” Max said to Susan. “That’s my latest theory, anyway. What I don’t get is how the trees survive it.”
“Your latest theory?” Susan asked him. “There were others?”
He chose to ignore her doubting tone.
“Well . . . there will be.” His eye roved the rising line of the wood. “There’s got to be something to eat somewhere.”
“Is that a theory or a prediction based on facts?”
He ignored that, too.
By dusk they’d found nothing. The woods stretched endlessly ahead of them. They had no choice but to rest again, and this time there was no cave, so as night fell, they sprawled around a pair of birches, listening fearfully for the dogs and staring up through bony branches at the waxing moon.
“We came when it was half,” Susan said. “It’s been days now. How did any of this happen?”
Max sniffed. A whiff of vinegar was in the air.
Nell wrinkled her nose at it. “Nothing’s right here,” she said. “This dirt’s the least of it. I thought Liyla was strange, but she was nothing compared to the Genius, the wind . . .”
Her voice faded, and she sighed and lay down, trying to find a comfortable position.
Max didn’t even try. He just sat there, his back against the tree, listening for the dogs. Would they keep searching at night? If he fell asleep, would he wake with teeth at his neck? He wished the five of them could keep running until the dogs were lost behind them, until they were so far away no one would ever find them, ever —
“Max?”
It was Jean, who’d crawled over from Nell’s blanket.
“Go to sleep, Jean. It’s okay. I’m watching.”
“I can’t sleep. I’m too hungry.”
“I
