“All will become clear when we reach it,” he’d said. “Save your strength for walking now.”
Nell had been told to keep quiet in so many ways, by so many different people, that she understood perfectly what that meant.
She plodded through the humidity, thinking about the Master Watcher and about how, if she stopped walking right now, if she disappeared, he wouldn’t care a bit. Would the others?
It was a panicky, rubber-ball kind of a thought that reminded her of a poem she’d learned in school, about a man who’d been swallowed by a sea creature.
And it swallowed him whole, body and name.
She’d thought about that line for a long time after reading it, wondering what it would be like to be erased like that, not just from the world, but from memory. Ms. Montgomery, her teacher, had said that a poet’s job was to undo that kind of forgetting. Poets saw, and remembered.
Lying in caves at night, breathing in the chalky air and staring into stone-black darkness, Nell had found herself wondering if, after all, not just she herself but the whole world she’d known could be erased as easily and completely as the cave’s cool walls blotted out the light. So in the long hike across the mountain, Nell taught herself to be a poet.
In her mind’s eye, she’d taken herself back home a hundred times, toured her house, catalogued the pictures on the walls and the feel of the carpet, inhaled the earthy smell of wood and cloth that greeted her at the front door every day after school. She’d gone over her mother’s face and then her father’s, remembered the sound of laughter, the way her father’s hands were shaped, and the songs her mother sang sometimes at night without knowing she was doing it.
She had learned to pack it all away for safekeeping, so nothing she saw could be erased. And doing it had become a comfort. Now, as she walked behind the silent Watcher, she did it again, taking in the flat light-green undersides of the beech leaves that waved just over her head and noting the shriveled husks of their nuts, where they’d fallen in the sour dirt. She memorized the shaggy bulk of a hemlock, the looming, dark triangle of a white pine, and the hawk that circled over them, the outline of its body black against the sky.
Other people might forget, but she never would.
There once was a man with a hood
Who thought he was better than good.
Why a regular guy
Should act mighty and high
Is something Max won’t ask
But should.
Nell was a poet in more ways than one. Rhymes ran around in her head, and she amused herself with them when she was bored, or tired, or annoyed, all of which she was now, as she continued to walk silently behind Susan, glumly following Max and the Master Watcher.
“What’s so great about him?” she muttered to Susan as they fell back to keep an eye on Kate and Jean. “He hasn’t even done what you and Max did.”
“What, make peaches?” Susan said.
“Yeah! He acts like he’s so all-powerful. You’re powerful!”
Susan sighed. “Why, because we made lunch? How do you know that even means something here? Maybe those hooded guys can all do it! Making the window — now, that would be powerful.”
Nell blew her sticky bangs from her eyes and swatted a cloud of gnats from the path. Max and Susan had not asked the man about windows or anything else, saying that if they wanted a real answer, an answer worth anything, they’d wait for the right moment.
Nell wondered what kind of moment that might be. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that came up in casual conversation. Oh, and by the way, has anyone ever fallen in from another universe before? Just asking.
Anyway, there was nothing casual about Master Watcher Lan. He wrapped himself in secrets so thick, she doubted he’d tell her what time it was without a fight. In principle, Nell liked having some secrets of her own. So she didn’t mind keeping the man in the dark about what Susan had done in the city, or how they’d gotten the peaches, even if that meant that they had to wait a little longer for answers. But she would like to have been asked her opinion. And Max was getting altogether too friendly with the man, Nell thought. When the Master Watcher spoke, which was rarely, Max looked at him as if he’d suddenly become Albert Einstein.
She started on a second verse:
I’d ask him myself,
Since Max is so adoring,
But the man has a superpower;
He’s a champion at ignoring.
Jean, who’d been trying to keep up with Max, now dropped back. “Can I have my peach?” she whispered. “I’m hungry.”
Nell nodded. Having lost the blanket, she and Susan had been carrying the peaches in their pockets. She pulled one out and handed it to Jean, then took another for herself.
“Kate,” she called. “Snack time!”
Ahead, the man turned to look at them. She watched his eyes fasten onto the peaches.
“Well done,” he said to Max. “You prepared. The change may have dulled your memories, but that shows a sharp mind. Wanderers starve in these woods if they don’t make ready.”
Nell waited for Max to say something, but he only shrugged, coloring.
She nudged Susan from behind. “Lunch,” she said, and grinned. Susan frowned over her shoulder. Way one million and eighty-seven of telling her to be quiet, Nell thought.
They went on. To Nell’s surprise, on the edge of sunset, with the sky flame-lit overhead, they came to a place where the brown earth gave way to a green film of moss. It was so faint at first, it looked like a rash of mold on the bare ground, but soon it thickened, and after a while the forest floor came to life again, grass layering itself over the moss, and then, eventually, winding
