“The stories,” he said. “My granddad said . . .” He sounded sheepish but plowed on after a second. “He said that if the powerful ones blessed you, you’d stay blessed. Could you do that? Lay your hands on me?”
Max didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t that. His cheeks burned.
“It’s not like that,” he said. “I can’t bless anybody.”
“Please,” the man said. “Else I’ll be taken, for letting you go.”
Max had never seen such fear in a grown man’s face. He didn’t know what to say.
“I wish I could,” he said. “I — listen, why don’t you run? Don’t go back. That city’s a terrible place. Just keep running until they can’t find you anymore.”
The man dropped his head.
“The dogs will lead them to me soon. Please,” he said again.
Max was out of words. But Nell took a step toward the soldier.
“I’ll bless you,” she said.
He looked up at her. “What good would that do? I need him to do it.”
Nell frowned, then glanced at Max.
“Okay, then, Max, you bless him.”
He started to protest, but she continued: “Just you remember, now: it only works if you don’t tell on us. Nobody can follow us or you’ll regret it.”
The soldier paled a little but nodded. “Please,” he said. “Or it’s the back room for me.”
Max understood the desperation in his face now.
Awkwardly, he put his hands on the soldier’s head. His ears were on fire, and he felt like a fool.
“Uh, consider yourself blessed,” he said.
The man nodded.
“Better hit me, too,” he said. “I can’t be found without a mark on me. They’ll know.”
Max felt his stomach turn over. He didn’t mind fighting back, but hitting a man who sat there waiting for it — that was another thing. The soldier saw him hesitate. When Max continued to say nothing, he looked frantic.
“You know what they’ll do to me if you don’t!”
Feeling queasy, Max retrieved the branch that had fallen. He closed his eyes and swung.
They were never going to stop running. Soldiers might not come for a while, but Max understood now what he hadn’t before. They would never be safe.
He sat on Nell’s unfolded blanket beneath a stand of young aspens. They’d gone back to get it — and the last of the peaches — before climbing higher up the mountain. They had stopped near dusk here, in a clearing where the blackened trunks of a ruined poplar and several fallen oaks lay in the dirt. The aspens had sprouted in the space they made, white bark bright against the dark wood.
They’d been so many days beneath taller trees that Max hadn’t seen the sky spread out this way. The sun was setting, and red and orange and gold colored the vast panorama overhead. It seemed bigger than he’d ever seen it — too big.
It’s an optical illusion, Max told himself. The sky’s no bigger today than yesterday. But he realized it had been big then, too. It stretched for miles, keeping pace with the ground. Black despair followed that thought. They kept walking, day by day, but where were they going, anyway? Only into more trouble. He’d been thinking about it since his encounter with the soldier. Max had never seen desperation like the kind in that man’s eyes.
You know what they’ll do to me, he’d said.
Max did know.
His mind came back again to the silky, dangerous voice of the Genius: Do you think you can tell me lies and I will simply walk away?
No, Max thought. I don’t.
And that was the problem. He’d known it even before seeing the soldier’s fear. The Genius would never walk away. The wood might be quiet for a while, but he was coming.
Max said nothing, but the unsettled feeling infected them all in one way or another. Susan came to sit beside him beneath the aspens.
“I know it was rotten, with that soldier,” she said. “I know you didn’t like hitting him.”
That was true. Max had known his share of bullies. He remembered the first time he’d met Ivan, in the fourth grade. Already he was a foot taller than anyone else, and looking for someone to kick. He’d chosen Max because Max had brought a geode to class, and Ivan thought it funny to say that the kid with the strange hair thought a rock was show-and-tell. Mo had joined him a year later. He was a small wiry kid with a mean streak and a quick temper who thought the height of hilarity was someone falling down or getting knocked that way. He loved to make other people look like idiots. Even when he wasn’t the butt of it, Max never thought that was funny.
Hitting the soldier — worse, fooling him — made Max feel like one of them. He hated it.
“He was ready to drag you back down to that tiled room and that monster-faced lady,” Nell said from her place at the other end of the blanket, where she’d been divvying up peaches for supper. “Now he thinks he’s lucky. What’s rotten about that?”
Max only shrugged. Susan knew.
“You didn’t have to fool him like that,” Max said. “That was uncalled-for.”
Nell frowned at him. “You could say, Thank you, Nell, for making him tell the others not to follow.”
He thought of telling her how useless that had been. Did one soldier’s word mean anything against the Genius? Maybe it made her feel better to think so for a while. He didn’t know. When he didn’t answer, she glowered at him and turned her back.
A wind rushed through the wood and rustled the aspens until they clattered and whispered to one another. Just like us, Max thought. Stuck in a cage and rattling the bars.
“Let’s try for the window again,” he said suddenly.
Susan looked up at him.
“How?”
“What about it being too big?” Nell said.
He shrugged. “If you can make the wind blow, you can make a window,” he said. “It’s just understanding the rules, right? We need
