Now, we have already said that Avery and Zib lived on the same street, and that they were the same age, which means even though they went to different schools, those schools started at the same time. So it was that Zib went rushing out the front door of her house and ran down the sidewalk in one direction as Avery emerged more decorously from his own house and began walking at a brisk pace down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. Neither of them saw the other go.
The doors slammed; their parents did not look up; no one felt that there was anything different, at all, about this day. It was a morning like any other.
It was a morning unlike any other. It was simply that no one had realized it yet.
We must pause for a moment, and consider the shape of the town. Avery and Zib lived on a street that ran along the edge of a forest. Were this a different sort of story, it would be about two children who went camping and got lost, tangled in a wonderland of briars and bears and other terrible things. But this is not that story. Zib knew the woods like they were her own private playground, and would never have become lost there. Avery, on the other hand, would never have willingly set foot in the shadows of the trees, which were tall and terrible and frightening.
The woods stretched on for miles; what was beyond them doesn’t matter.
As for the town itself, it was simple and straightforward, designed by clever architects who believed that following rules was the way of the future. They thought there was no need for winding, tree-lined streets or graceful, curving boulevards; everything was set out with precision, all right angles and efficient use of space. They had managed to keep control of the planning office for the better part of twenty years, and under their watchful eyes, every new development and shopping mall had been slotted perfectly into their geometric ideals. A person could walk those streets for years and never once get lost. It was a good place, a safe place, a perfect place to raise a child. That was why, when the doors closed on Avery and Zib’s homes, their parents thought nothing of it. Everything was as it should be.
Avery walked with quick, precise steps, content with his place in the world, secure in the knowledge that he knew exactly where he was going and exactly what he was going to find when he got there; he knew the route between home and school better than almost anything, and it held no surprises for him. So it was that when he turned off his street to find his way blocked by construction equipment, he stopped, confused and blinking.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t in the plan. But the street was broken, cracked like an eggshell, and water gushed up from a hidden, splintered pipe, flooding everything. Men in hard hats swarmed around the break, dropping sandbags and tubes, trying to minimize the damage.
One of them saw Avery and waved. “Sorry, kid,” he called. “Water main burst due to an electrical fire. You’re going to have to go around.”
Avery’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Go around? Go around? He had walked the same path to school every day since he’d been old enough to start going to school at all. His parents trusted him to walk this way, to follow the clear and sensible rules that were there to keep him safe. He had never considered going a different way. He didn’t know how.
The man in the hard hat, for all that he is a minor character in this story, as so many people must be—for a story is, by its very nature, a narrow thing, focused on this hero and this villain, on making them the most important people in the world, and hence excluding anyone who might be a threat to their positions—offered the boy a sympathetic smile. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “All you need to do is go up the block to the next street and you can get around the damage.”
Avery disagreed. Everything was not fine. But he had been raised to listen when adults spoke, and so he merely nodded, tightened his hand on the strap holding his books in place, and turned to go back the way he’d come.
As for Zib, she walked along the perfectly straight sidewalk in a wavy, erratic line, sometimes slowing to a crawl to watch a snail working its way down the pavement, sometimes running to make up the time she’d spent malingering. “Malingering” was one of her favorite words. Her teachers liked to use it about her when they thought she wasn’t listening—which, to be fair, was always. Zib had a way of making people think she was paying attention to anything but them, when in fact, she was taking careful note of everything that happened around her.
When she reached the end
