“Mom!” Kate wailed. “Mom!”
He leaned in and called into her ear. “Kate! Do you see her? Do you see Mom?”
She thrashed in his arms. “Mom! Mom!”
He could hear the others in the dark, groaning, patting at the ground to find their way. Still, he held on to Kate.
“Get her, Kate!” he shouted over her crying. “You can get her! Take us to her!”
Kate’s voice rose an octave. “Mom!” she shrieked. “Mom!”
Susan had found him now. She located him with her hands and tugged.
“Max! What are you doing? Stop that!”
Max shoved her away.
“Aren’t you scared, Kate? Don’t you want her?”
“Kate!” Susan called over him. “Kate, it’s okay, we’re here!”
Kate sobbed. Max’s throat tightened, but he thought of chemistry, and rules, and . . . then Susan yanked him sharply backward. Suddenly Kate’s wails were muffled by Susan’s shirt.
“Kate, it’s okay,” he heard Susan say softly. “It’s okay. Wake up.”
At last they quieted her. Max sat by the cave wall, silent, while Susan sang Kate back to sleep, and Nell told Jean, who had begun to cry, to come beside her and hold her hand. No one spoke to him, not even Jean, and he didn’t have to see them all to feel the bite of their disapproval. He tried to shrug it off, but all the crying made him want to shrink inside himself.
Finally, he heard Susan rise and fumble along the cave wall until she reached him.
“That was mean,” she whispered.
He cringed. “It was an experiment. I had to try.”
Silence, then a long sigh from Susan.
“But it didn’t work.”
“No. Obviously not.”
She moaned softly, a disappointed, hopeless little sound.
“What did you think was going to happen?”
He looked out of the cave into the forest, where cobwebby strands of mist clung now to the bases of the trees. The clouds had cleared away, and a full moon glared overhead, whitening mist and trees to bone. “I thought maybe it was chemistry.”
“Chemistry?”
He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. “You know, like all those chemicals that work in your brain when you’re upset or excited. I thought maybe it needed something more than just regular fear or being angry, something really strong, like a nightmare. So I decided to try it. But it’s not just strong emotion. If it were, we’d be home right now.”
Susan was quiet awhile. Then she said, “It couldn’t have been, anyway, if you think about it. If it were, things would be changing here anytime someone lost his temper or fell in love.”
“How do we know they aren’t?”
“Did Liyla say a thing about it? Did Omet? No. They talked about rally real, but they didn’t say it happened anytime they got angry or scared. Don’t you think those sleeper kids are scared enough to make something happen? If it’s like that, what happened to all those kids they took to the workshop?”
He couldn’t escape her logic. Max bit his lip. Experiment failed.
Susan lay back down, and he waited in the dark, listening until her breathing deepened. Then he crawled over to Kate, her sleep interrupted every few breaths by small hiccups left over from the tears. He found her hand and leaned down close to her, keeping his voice low.
“Kate,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She was only half asleep. At the sound of his voice, she rolled over and put her other hand on his. A lump rose in his throat. He knew what it was like to feel small, and helpless, and like nothing made sense. If this was hard for him, what must it be like for Kate, or Jean? He sat and thought about that, long after Kate’s breath evened and he knew she was asleep.
To escape the dreams and the half-heard wail of the valley, the exile sought the sea. Four clearings from home, a cliff stretched to the end of land and looked to water. Below, the distant surf, blue and gray, reached endlessly for the sand. In ancient times, men had crossed the sea and seen the lands beyond. The world then had been busy with trade and invention.
Now the great cities were husks, and the last of the wise devoured their own. Ancient promises had turned to torment, and the song of the valley had become a lament.
Nell emerged from the cave in time to catch a falling peach with her head.
“Hey!” she yelled at Max, snatching it from the dirt and rubbing furiously at her hair. “What do you think you’re doing?!”
Max thought it was pretty obvious what he’d been doing. After a sleepless night, he’d come out at dawn and decided that he’d better try some experiments that didn’t include sisters.
At least he thought they wouldn’t include sisters, until Nell inconveniently decided to put her head in the way.
“Sir Isaac Newton,” he said, by way of explanation. He retrieved the bruised peach from her hand and tossed it again. It shot up into the glare of the rising sun angling through the trees, performed a little somersault, then fell back into his hand, slightly stickier than when it had started.
All the while Nell stared at him blankly.
“You know? The guy who discovered gravity? It’s an experiment. If the laws of physics are different here, I figure we should see it, and where would we see it better than with gravity? Sir Isaac Newton had an apple drop on his head. I’m just using a peach.”
Nell rubbed her hair again. “Well, nobody asked you to use my head, did they? Besides, we’ve got to eat those! Why didn’t you use a stone or something?”
Nell had little appreciation for the scientific process.
“That was an accident. And anyway, if I’d done that, you’d have just gotten hit in the head with a stone!”
She glowered at him, immune to logic, and nodded at the peach.
“That one’s yours.”
Gravity had flayed the peach, and the juice ran sticky through his fingers. Already an interested gnat had brought
