“So?”
“So it does things! Back at home, they have machines that work on brain waves. What if it’s like that here, only more?”
He could feel the others catching on. Nell was nodding.
“It’s like I said before. Real here is different from what it is at home. Here you could make peaches out of the air!”
Sometimes having sisters wasn’t half bad. He grinned at her. “Exactly. Maybe the rules here are as different as they are on the moon, only it’s not gravity that’s funny — it’s some other thing we never heard of. Instead of being able to jump higher, you can do this!”
Susan bit her lip. “You’re saying when I think, it’s . . . louder here?”
He felt like shouting Eureka.
Jean had ducked under a hemlock branch, and now she peered at Susan from beneath a fringe of dusty green bangs.
“I don’t hear her,” she said.
Nell sniffed. “We sure heard the Genius at that rally, didn’t we?”
Max shot her a surprised look. “I guess we did! I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Nell beamed, and the electricity or whatever it was in the air must have been working right then, because Kate and Jean brightened, too.
“So Susan can make the window?” Kate asked. “We’re going home?”
Susan practically jumped onto a hemlock branch. “Whoa! Hold on! Don’t you think I would if I could? I don’t know what Max is even talking about!”
Max held up a placating hand. “It’s not just regular thinking,” he told Susan. “You’ve been wishing to get home just like the rest of us, but this isn’t like that! It’s all about setting up the right conditions.”
“You mean I need to be scared out of my wits again? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, not the fear, the focus! Just try it — will you? It’s got to be right!”
Susan did try it. All the rest of that day, as they hiked upward with renewed energy, she muttered to herself. Once he had her stop and sit, and she closed her eyes for so long, she fell asleep, an unfortunate fact he discovered when she tipped into Kate’s lap.
“Maybe part of the right conditions is not being so tired,” Susan said. “What are we going to do about that?”
But now Max was full of plans. He sent Susan ahead with Kate and Jean while he and Nell and the peaches zigzagged right and left, leaving what he hoped would be a confusing trail for the dogs. They rubbed their sweaty hands onto lone trees, plucked their own hairs out and draped them on rocks, and even sacrificed a peach, smashing it against a hickory tree and leaving some of its pulp twined among the needles of another hemlock.
They caught up to the others in a copse studded with yellow birches, their bronze bark peeling in strips and smelling of wintergreen. Beneath them, Max could see the outline of fallen leaves the ground had withered. Susan emerged from a cave in the hillside.
“No snakes,” she said to Kate. “I checked with a stick this time. Wish I could do that just by thinking,” she said to Max.
“Maybe later,” he told her. “Or better yet, think up that window, and we can sleep in beds tonight.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “I’ve been trying all day. Maybe I’m just not as loud as you think.”
He resisted responding to that. Instead he said, “So we’ll work together. And maybe windows are too big a start. Let’s go with something simple, like water. My hands are full of peach.”
They sat together beneath the birches, and soon Nell and Kate and Jean joined them.
“Think of water,” he whispered. “Really hard.”
“No problem,” Nell said. “I’ve been thinking of that all day already.”
At last they settled down, and Max closed his eyes.
Water, he thought. Despite how much he wanted it, it was surprisingly hard to think about just water without his mind skipping away — to the problem of the wood itself, and to the strange nature of Ganbihar, and then, much as he hated it, back again to the tiled room. He opened his eyes with a grunt of frustration. The others were doing the same. He saw Nell frown and squint before her eyes popped open. Kate gritted her teeth; Jean had already given up and was drawing lines in the dirt with the feet of her Barbie.
Only Susan continued to sit there, motionless, eyes closed.
He stifled the urge to say something that would help. Water, he thought at her as hard as he could. Can you hear us, whatever you are in the air? Water!
A faint crackle distracted him. Had the humidity thickened? And yet it was no hotter than it had been. Max sat motionless. If he hadn’t been concentrating on it so severely, he’d have missed the low buzz in the air. And yet there it was. Susan hadn’t moved, and he worried he’d imagined it.
Again that buzz, just at the edge of hearing. Max felt the hairs on his arm rise, despite the heat of the wood as it settled into evening. The light had softened, but the air felt sharp. Max held his breath to hear it better and kept his eyes on Susan.
Then came another sound, a gentle lapping. Max searched for it, sweeping his eyes across the ground until he found a slick spot.
Water, pumping out of nowhere.
The dagger of madness was hidden in dreams, and though the exile knew it, still it cut deep. In the night a vision had come of the sea rising to land, and children drawing water from the dust.
How many had been undone this way in the years of wandering across the sea? Thwarted prophets aplenty there had been then, dreaming their false dreams of homecoming and return.
Thinking it fruitless, the fool cuts the frosted tree;
He calls the winter field dead and passes it by.
And the simple? He hacks at the sleeping earth,
Demanding spring replace the snow.
So the
