“But you’re going to figure it out, right? You’ll find us food tomorrow?”
I can’t wanted to come out of his mouth. Don’t ask me. But he pressed the words back behind closed lips.
“Max?”
“Hmm?”
“You will, right?”
A theory would have been comforting, but he couldn’t even make a realistic prediction. All he could offer was a promise, and what was that based on? Wishing.
He listened to her waiting.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I will.”
For reasons that had always eluded Max, from the time Jean was Jean, she’d decided he was going to be her favorite. Max usually prized logic, but in this one thing, in Jean’s dogged devotion, he was sheepishly grateful to accept serendipity. He’d always considered it a kind of miracle that this one little sister, who loved her ridiculous Barbies and who spent hours playing a game she’d devised called “dress for a party” with Kate, had in her own inscrutable way fashioned herself into the brother he’d always wanted. Here he was, the odd man out, the only boy in a family of girls and the one who, at least compared to Susan, made the most trouble, and behind him came Jean, climbing bookcases and deconstructing things just as he had, even if what she deconstructed — some of the time — were shoes and dresses. But she was as interested as he’d always been in the physics of flushing a toothbrush down the toilet, or whether a basketball could make it through the laundry chute. So they had an affinity for each other. One of Max’s secret fears was that one day she’d wake up, turn pure girl, and leave him behind. But for now, to his private amazement and joy, she stuck to him like glue.
So he ignored the hammering in his chest and pushed away thoughts of dogs and the tiled room and that woman, Ker, rolling the metal table his way.
It shouldn’t matter that I’m scared, he told himself. I should be able to think. He could do it at home. Even when guys like Ivan and Mo called him Einstein and egghead and waited in the hall to push him around, punishing him for offering his thoughts on experiments in science or suggesting that there was a faster way to do a problem in math, he kept on speaking up. Once, Ivan had slammed him into a bank of lockers while Mo asked him what the circumference of his head was compared to the toilet, and that hadn’t stopped him from raising his hand half an hour later, back in math, as the two of them glared at him and muttered threats.
He told himself all this, trying to force his head into gear.
Only now, when everything depended on his finding the answers, his mind slid away from him, and there was nothing. It galled him.
Beside him Jean sighed in her sleep. He had promised he would figure it out. And yet all he had were the strange pieces Nell had listed: the tiled room, the rally, and Liyla. Had her face really changed, that first time they saw her? None of it made any sense. A lump rose in his throat.
He wouldn’t sleep. He’d stay up until he figured it out. And if he couldn’t figure it out, at least he’d keep watch. He’d keep one promise, anyway.
But even that, in the end, he couldn’t do, and at last even worry, even sadness, fell away, and sleep settled over him. The ache in his bones slipped from him, the throbbing in his hand was forgotten, and he slid into the silent place where the mind wanders, lifting images and turning them over like bright pennies and autumn leaves. . . .
He saw the market square. The Genius stood waving and shouting, making the buildings shimmer. A wind blew. It rose from the barren ground and tossed all the people away as their faces shifted from smooth to rough and back again.
Max jerked awake.
Jean lay curled against him like a baby; a foot away, Nell rested on a hump where the tree roots lifted from the earth. Kate had rolled herself so tightly in Nell’s blanket that the only visible part of her was a gush of loopy hair. He looked for Susan and found her slumped against the other birch, the lines in its bark like a hundred small wounds, black in the moonlight. She dozed with her head tipped to one side.
“Susan!” he whispered.
Her head twitched. She blinked. “What?”
“Remember what Omet said, about rally change?”
“Rally change,” she said sleepily.
He watched her head start to tip, and reached over to poke her, trying not to wake Jean.
“Remember the Genius? Remember how the buildings looked? That was what she meant! Rally change. People turning smooth. You saw it, right? Just like Liyla seemed so different when we first saw her!”
Until it clicked into place beside his memory of the rally, Max had nearly forgotten the moment when they’d first seen Liyla.
Susan didn’t answer right away, but Nell lifted her head from the root. “Yeah!” she said. “She did look different for a minute — normal.”
Susan straightened. She was awake now. “I thought I was going nuts. But we all saw it!”
“I didn’t think it was real,” Max said. “You know, maybe a group hallucination or something. The rally, too. But that wind — that wind was real! And the busted straps! Do you think maybe all of it was real? Maybe you can do that here!”
Nell propped herself up on one elbow, and he could see her frown in the moonlight. “Susan, what exactly did you do?”
“Nothing!” Susan said. “Not on purpose, anyway. I just was so scared. I could see the straps, and I wanted to get out.”
She pressed her head back against the tree trunk and studied the long ugly cut the woman had made on her inner arm. It had begun to scab, and Max saw her scratch carefully around the edges of it. In the pearly
