He fingered the fabric.
“Max! Are you bleeding?” Susan asked him.
He wished his hands would stop shaking. He balled them into fists so the girls wouldn’t see. “No, that was from them. I’m just scratched up.”
They all were. They made their painful way up through the trees as the sound of the slashers diminished. Great gray rocks still pocked the ground here, jutting out like the teeth of some mythical beast. Between them, poplars with trunks like stone pillars rose toward the sky, their green foliage peppered with yellow leaves. The few that had fallen were black underfoot.
“What if they follow us?” Jean asked. Her voice sounded pinched tight.
Max looked over his shoulder, but nothing was coming. “I don’t know if they can,” he said. “They’re not animals, exactly.”
Nell looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”
“They were wearing clothes,” he said. “Like you saw before.”
She nodded. “That doesn’t mean they won’t kill you,” she said. “You saw their hands!”
He had. But there was something about the look in the thing’s eyes. It had been like someone was there for a second and then gone. He didn’t know how to explain it.
“I don’t think they killed anything,” Kate said.
They all looked at her. “What?” Nell asked. “How would you know?”
Kate bit her lip.
“I saw the walls,” she said. “There was blood on them, and long scratch marks. It was like they’d been scratching at them until they bled. I think . . . I think they were trying to get out.”
“Out!” Nell protested. “Why didn’t they use the door?”
Kate only shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think maybe — maybe they were having a bad dream and couldn’t figure out how to.”
Max felt suddenly sick. He thought again of being locked in that glass box and not knowing the way out.
Nell shook her head. “Can’t imagine a thing like that dreaming,” she said.
But Kate, much to Max’s surprise, seemed certain. “Not a dream,” she said. “A nightmare.”
Change was coming. In dreams the exile felt it; on waking, it was a weight in the air.
The word, with its long history, its burden of good and evil, seemed everywhere now. Each day the exile woke to it, as if expectation were a thing breathed, a scent inhaled.
A new way. Once welcomed, now despised; once embraced, now shunned.
Like the exile, a contradiction.
And still, even in the valley, they spoke of change often, for it had been enshrined in the ancient books:
With Eri came the dawn,
And with Anam the day,
For darkness shrouded all
Before the light of understanding.
As was their way, the thinkers looked deep into the words and unwound the meaning woven there, telling tales of wise men who lit an everlasting flame to shine through the long night of years.
Oh, how the valley cherished the rebellion of its ancients and praised its own. We, the everlasting flame, are like the sun rising to color the sky in its glory, they said. We are the dawn.
And yet how like the dawn was the twilight. How like the coming of the light was its passing away.
The terrain grew steadily stranger as Max searched for a new place to camp that evening. The earth bristled with boulders, and the knobby roots of trees rose from the dirt to overtake them, gripping the rocks like tentacles. Max couldn’t help shuddering at the sight of them. He felt as if he were standing on the surface of a flat brown ocean and some creature from the depths had reached up to grab the stones.
Stop that, he told himself. But he couldn’t help it. He felt battered and jittery, and every place the slasher had scratched or bitten him stood out as a separate hurt, stinging and aching and making him wince. Worst of all was the memory of the thing’s nearly human face, the shattered expression of loss and terror that had flickered there a moment, then gone away.
He tried not to think of it as the five of them stumbled through the rocky wood, looking for a protected place to spend the night. At last, as blue shadows gathered in the trees and splashed across the rocks, they found a circle of clear ground, surrounded by stones. They collapsed inside it, shielded a little from the brooding trees, and struggled to concentrate enough to produce even peaches. Without any blanket to spread, they curled up in the dirt and tried to rest.
The rocks interrupted the pattern of the forest, so that overhead, the umbrella of leaves opened to let in the sky. Night fell and the moon rose, three quarters full, to float over the clouds. Max tried not to feel like he was slowly suffocating.
Next to him, Jean sniffled and rolled over.
“Max, write me a letter,” she whispered. “About getting out of here.”
He squinted up at the moon, wishing he could vault them to it, lie down in the Sea of Tranquility, even if it was just an empty crater, the name a mistake someone once made before space travel showed them the truth. But then he thought this probably wasn’t even his moon, with its comforting, old-fashioned names: Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Serenity, Sea of Rains, Sea of Clouds.
“Dear Jean,” he whispered back. “We’re getting out of here. I promise. Soon. Your brother, Max.”
At least tonight she seemed to believe him. Jean nodded and let her shoulders down a little. Kate wasn’t as easily appeased.
“I wish we’d found another cave,” she said, looking around. “It’s scary out here.”
She moved closer to Susan, who put an arm around her shoulder.
“I’m not walking into another cave for the rest of my life,” Nell said. Max thought she looked a little forlorn, sitting there without her blanket. “At least out
