She had no answers, and Susan, despite her pile of books, could be no help. For a while, Nell watched her struggling to read, but when she hadn’t turned the page after ten long minutes, Nell felt as if she could almost see the mist pushing at her sister, wrapping itself around Susan’s head, trying to smother her. It made her want to jump in and block it somehow, put her arms around Susan and bat it away. But then Susan would never let her do that. So she sat, helpless, as her sister squinted blindly at the book. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, Nell got up and left the room.
If rain kept everyone indoors, Nell had the urge to be out in it. No matter how high the ceilings or airy the rooms in the sanctuary, looking at Susan’s strained face made her feel closed in. She walked down the corridor toward the hillside stairs and on impulse knocked at Wista’s door.
Zirri opened it and eyed her coldly.
“Nell!” Wista called from behind. “Come to tell me stories?”
Nell slipped past Zirri, who pointedly had not moved to make space for her.
“I guess so,” she said. She looked uncomfortably at Zirri, who was sneering.
“Want to go for a walk?”
Wista bobbed to her feet, her copper pendant swinging.
“Of course! Zirri, do you want to come?”
Nell smiled to herself. You couldn’t not like Wista, with her persistent friendliness. Her face had grown pretty, these last few days, as the last of the change had receded from it. She had become a round-eyed girl with a square chin and a little gap between her bottom teeth. The fingers that played with her pendant were slim.
Zirri, too, had completed the change, but if it had sweetened her disposition, Nell hadn’t noticed.
“Why would I want to walk in the rain?” Zirri said. She went and sat on her bed.
They left her there and made their way downstairs to borrow a walking canopy from Mistress Seta, who kept a store of them for rain harvests. An oilskin strung between poles, it let two walk side by side, each holding a pole, leaving a hand free to work. They took it out into the cornfield and walked beside the lines that had yet to be harvested.
“Wista, after you came down here, did you hear the mist? You know — sort of a hissing or anything?”
Wista shrugged, making rain spill off Nell’s side of the canopy and slap wetly into the mud.
“Does the mist have a sound?” she asked.
Nell guessed that was as much an answer as any.
For a while they just walked, listening to the rain. Nell couldn’t hear anything else.
“You’re different,” Wista said after a while. “You and those others you came with. Maybe that’s why you ask the questions you do. I wish I could do what you can.”
A little jangle of alarm rang in Nell’s chest.
“What do you mean, do what we can?”
“You know, read. And write. I saw that little one, Jean, do it. Who taught her so young? Did you?”
Nell let out the breath she’d been holding. “Oh, that. No, I didn’t teach her. She learned in school. Didn’t they have school where you came from?”
Wista shrugged. “Not for me. I come from a little mining village, down in the southern plains. Most girls there go into the mines young, so the parents can try for a boy instead.”
It was a warm rain, but Nell felt the sick cold she’d known in the city, among the sleepers’ children.
“Did you have to go?” she asked.
Wista shook her head. “No, my ma had been, but she was so smart, she learned metalwork, so she didn’t work all the time below. That’s how she lived, she said. She made me this.” She lifted the copper pendant to show Nell. “Clever hands, my ma had. Wish I were as clever.”
Nell thought Wista was better than clever. She was nice.
“So she kept you out?” she asked.
The other girl nodded. “Said it wasn’t worth what the Domain would pay to send me. Wouldn’t listen to a word my da said about it.” She sighed and squinted out at the rain collecting in the muddy field. “She’d have liked me to read, I know, but she didn’t know how herself. She did know stories, though. Told me lots of them. Birth of the Genius, the banishing, the unchanged time. All those were good. She even knew stories they passed in the mines, about the powerful ones. That’s how I got here. When she got sick, she told me to go looking.”
Wista’s free hand went to her necklace, and she was quiet so long that at last Nell broke the silence with one of the stories Susan had read, the one about the rebel who became the Genius.
Wista laughed. “Different from the one my ma told,” she said. “She’d have liked this one better, I think.”
They walked on beneath the rain as the corn bent and the sky faded, and Nell could only wonder if maybe she fit in here after all, in this place where all the children seemed, in one way or another, to be lost and alone.
Susan had sent the little girls to supper on their own.
“They were noisy,” she said by way of explanation when Nell found her still in the room, in exactly the same spot she’d been more than an hour before. “If I could just get a little quiet, I know I could find something in here.”
Nell looked unhappily at the books.
“Maybe we should leave,” she said. “Maybe it’s just no good for us here. We can tell Max, and he’ll come — I know he will! If he’d just take a look at you —”
“Don’t you dare!” For a second, the color returned to Susan’s face. “You think I’ll be better sleeping in caves with monsters? We’re here for a reason, and we need to stay. If that means following a million crazy
