At the rally, the buildings had wavered. In the tiled room, the air had buzzed and gone hazy near the Genius as he changed.
“I think it’s okay,” he said to Susan. “Look.”
She held on. “One of them tried to grab us in the city!”
Then the man spoke for the first time, and the sound of his voice startled them as much as the sight of his face. It was as if a monster or zombie had suddenly become human.
“Companions of mine,” he said. “They were clumsy, but they meant you no harm.”
Nell wasn’t nearly as bowled over as Max by the sight and sound of the strange man.
“They could have said something,” she said.
For a fraction of a second, the man frowned, but his face was placid an instant later, and Max wondered if he’d imagined it. When he answered, he spoke to Max as much as to Nell.
“That’s forbidden. We’re silent among the changed, and we never show our faces in the city.”
“We’re not changed,” Nell said petulantly.
This time he did look at her, and the intensity of his stare made Max want to take a step back. “Not,” he said, “anymore.”
“Not ever!” Nell snapped back.
But the man only gave her a pitying look.
“So you’ve forgotten, then. It’s not unusual for the past to be hazy after a return.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but the man ignored her. He had a force that Max found both disconcerting and impressive.
“At any rate, they were there to help you, as I’m here now.”
Max couldn’t stop staring at him. He stood like a soldier and wore an expression Max wished he could manage and had sometimes practiced in the mirror.
“Creeping up on people in the night?” Nell said. “That’s a strange way to —”
“What kind of help?” Max cut in.
The man shot him an approving look, and Max flushed.
“Rescue,” he said. “Sanctuary.”
Kate and Jean probably didn’t even know the second word, but Max did. A safe place.
“You can keep us away from the Genius?”
The man smiled.
“Absolutely.”
Nell had opened her mouth to keep going, but she shut it abruptly. And that made sense, Max thought, because there was nothing else worth talking about.
“Then let us get our things,” he said. “We’re ready.”
Someone’s pretty full of himself,” Nell griped as they walked back to the circle of stones. When, struggling to have the last word, she’d asked the man his name, he’d told them they could call him Master Watcher Lan. Nell’s eyebrows shot up. To Max it sounded appropriately forbidding.
“What do you think somebody who goes around wearing a hood is going to want to be called?” he whispered to her. “Jim?”
She only rolled her eyes. But it seemed to Max that the Master Watcher was the beginning of something promising. He looked back over his shoulder and wondered what the man was thinking. What would he be thinking if he met five kids carrying nothing but some peaches and a birthday doll? It wasn’t exactly an impressive sight.
“Keep that Barbie tucked away,” he said to Jean as she ducked into the circle of stones to retrieve it. “Stick it back in your skirt, why don’t you?”
Nell elbowed him.
“Of course you like him,” she said. “He thinks you’re smart.”
Max half smiled. “So what?”
No use telling Nell that the Master Watcher unsettled him. He reminded Max of the kind of person he’d avoid back home, the kind who measured your worth by how hard you could hit a ball. But the man had acted like he thought Max was smart. That was different.
Jean stepped into the circle of stones and drew a sharp breath.
“Hey!” she whispered. “Susan, look!”
They followed her. The doll no longer rested on the dirt. Beneath it, a faint curl of green nudged its way out of the brown. Kate crouched and pushed at it with her finger. On one end, Max could see the beginning of a bud.
Susan had figured it out! He grinned at her.
“See?” he said. “I told you the dirt didn’t hate you.”
A wave of elation washed over him. For days, he’d been trying to understand how everything worked. He felt like he’d shouted Show me! at this place a hundred times. The answer had always been no. Now Susan had gotten her yes. He had a feeling he was about to get his, too.
“Dear Jean,” he said. “You can cheer up. We’re practically home already. Your brother, Max.”
Jean beamed at him and Susan laughed. “Is that a promise?” she asked him.
“Better,” he told her. “It’s a prediction.”
Nell was not one to lose things. Unlike Kate, who regularly lost items of clothing, homework, and her backpack, or Jean, who walked out of the house and lost herself a couple of times, Nell kept track of things that mattered. She’d salvaged the old-but-still-good cushions off the living-room couch and installed them in her room to keep them from the trash, and held on to a stuffed dog her grandfather had given her long after the little girls had lost theirs.
But of course, losing stuffed dogs wasn’t as bad as what Susan and Max did, which was to lose track of people.
Well, one person in particular.
At home, she was forced to remind them, regularly, that she existed. Here, it was worse. Listening to all those sleeper children saying the names of lost sisters and brothers, she’d wondered if the others would have said hers. And now, trudging behind Max and the Master Watcher, she wondered it again.
“Is the sanctuary on top of a hill?” she’d asked the man when the ground rose again sharply past the spiky clearing where they’d spent the night.
“No,” he’d said.
“Then where is it?”
The Master Watcher hadn’t even turned.
“You’ll see it tomorrow. We won’t be able to get there until morning.”
Nell hated when people refused to answer questions.
“What kind of place is it?” she’d asked, trying again.
Max had shot her a “Cut it out!” look that time. The man only turned
