Neither option appealed to Max. The stones pressed in on him, and the trees moving in the wind sounded like a warning.
He looked up at the moon and tried to count time. The clouds drifted across it, blotting the light, and then uncovered it to reveal again the fierce shape of the land.
Was it two weeks now that they’d been here? Max spent a minute calculating. Almost. The thought dropped like a cold weight in his stomach. What if they never got home?
“Can this place get any worse?” Nell whispered. She pushed her back against one of the stones and hugged her knees. “Even the forest looks haunted. And that’s not to mention this weird dirt.”
“I told you it hated us,” Susan said to Max. “I think I was right.”
“Places don’t hate people,” he told her wearily. “We’ll figure it out. Look how much we’ve figured out already! You’ll see. I promise.”
But he knew he said it now only out of habit. He was teetering on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. The wind hissed in the trees.
If he didn’t think they’d ever get home, what was there? What was there to solve, and where would they go? He closed his eyes and pushed the thought away. No. They would get out. They would get home. This place didn’t hate them, because places didn’t hate people, and the world, even strange worlds on the other sides of windows, made sense. If he was going to be sure of anything, he’d be sure of that. He had to be, or there was nothing left.
He closed his eyes and forced himself to sleep.
Things were supposed to look better in the morning, but they didn’t. The hot wind had picked up, clattering through the branches and swooping down to raise tufts of dust from the dirt, so that the ground belched out a low, muddy fog.
When Max woke, the girls were already on the other side of the stones, talking. All except Susan, who sat just feet away, staring fixedly at the ground inside the circle.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
She didn’t look up.
“Susan!”
He had to practically shout at her to get her to look his way. Then she blinked at him, a little startled.
“Were you calling me?”
He nodded. “Twice. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m concentrating. I was thinking that you’re right. Places can’t hate people. So if the ground’s sour here, maybe we could do something about that. You know, like sweeten it up a little.”
Max just stared at her. They couldn’t manage a window, but she thought she could fix a whole forest. He turned away without saying another word. It was tiring, sometimes, being the only sensible one.
He found the others busy with a similarly ridiculous activity — teaching Nell to play the game Kate and Jean had made up, something called stones, or squish, he couldn’t tell which, since they kept arguing about it.
“Susan done yet?” Nell asked him.
He shook his head.
“She told me she needs to have a talk with the dirt,” Nell said. “I think she might be losing it.”
Kate frowned at her. “She’s not losing it,” she said. “Don’t say that.”
Nell only shrugged, and Jean passed her a stone. “Ready?” she asked.
Max sat pondering all the places he’d rather be when he felt a slight buzz in the air. Maybe Susan had done something after all. He turned, and there she was, already emerging from the circle of rocks to join the game.
Again, the hair on Max’s arms stood up, and he sensed a nearly inaudible hum.
“Do you feel that?” he asked Susan. “That zap in the air?”
She stopped for a second, listening for it.
“Maybe. What do you think it is?”
“I thought it was you.”
She shrugged and shook her head.
The wind died, and they all sat, straining to hear something.
“All I hear is bugs,” Jean said.
“Shh,” he told her.
Again, that faint buzz, then a sound like a flag flapping.
Kate sucked in her breath and pointed.
Behind Susan, where no one had been a moment before, stood a figure wearing a hood.
Max had never liked fairy tales — stories that made things easy, that kept the night at bay. What was wrong with the truth? The truth was layered and fantastic, full of quarks and quasars, microbes and galaxies. The truth didn’t believe in bad guys who wore black hats and good guys who wore white ones. The truth was just the truth, and when you knew it — you could breathe.
But he stood looking at the hooded figure who had appeared from nowhere and wondered if in fact it didn’t really matter what you believed in the end. If you were stuck in someone else’s story — in the nightmare they’d created — who cared what you knew?
And then the figure did something unexpected. It reached up to pull back its hood.
Kate threw her hands over her eyes. Jean squeaked. Susan paled and Nell gaped. Max just stood there watching and thinking, Whatever it is, I can stand it. Knowing is better than not knowing.
The green mesh fell away.
It was a man. Just a man. No fur, no fangs, no strange, stretched features. The fanatic’s hood had concealed nothing but a serious-eyed man on the early side of middle age, with light-brown skin and the beginnings of lines around his eyes.
Instinctively, Max took a step toward him. “You’re normal!”
Susan caught his arm.
“Rally change!” she whispered. “Remember?”
Max stopped short. If this was a trick, if the soldiers had followed them this far, it was all over.
The man just stood there, waiting to see what Max would do. Could he be real? Max eyed him, trying to run through everything he remembered about the rally as fast as he could.
The stranger watched him consider. His eyes flicked from Max to Susan.
Just to his left, a dusty hemlock stood forlornly among the rocks, its jagged branches bobbing in the hot breeze. Every needle and cone hung crisp and sharp
