“Zirri, she’s new, even if she doesn’t look it!” She shook her head. “Be nice!”
“She’s ungrateful, is what she is,” Zirri said. “Looking like that already. You won’t keep it, you know, if you’re not properly grateful. They could send you back, and you’ll be just the same as you were.”
“Zirri!” Minna said, shocked.
The girl’s open hostility caught Nell off guard. She’d expected Zirri to keep playing the game of pretending not to mean the snide things she said. But Zirri’s anger had come into her face now and been spoken, and the other girls shifted in discomfort. The words hung there a moment, sharp and heavy, before Wista cleared her throat.
“Zirri,” she said, “Nell doesn’t know. There were plenty of things we didn’t know when we came.”
With a venomous look Nell’s way, Zirri said, “I knew enough not to talk like the Genius.”
Nell felt bewildered. “What do you think I’m doing? Making speeches?”
Zirri laughed and tossed her head. Clearly she felt she’d gotten in the last word. Nell squinted up at the willow tree. The branches moved in an early-evening breeze, throwing yellow bars of sunlight onto the grass. Each time the wind blew, it was as if the sun and the tree played a game of pickup sticks, full of shadows and light. She tried to adopt an air of carelessness, as if Zirri and her meanness were nothing, or less than nothing. As fleeting as the shadows beneath the tree, as unimportant as the moths that fluttered among the leaves. But it didn’t feel like nothing.
Wista sighed. “Ingratitude’s not rebellion,” she said.
They let the subject drop after that, but Nell was full of questions. She wondered if these were the kind they answered at school.
That night, as promised, Max’s first letter arrived, addressed to Jean and delivered at dinner by a shaggy-haired boy who carried messages around to the various diners seated in the high-ceilinged room on the other side of the library. The windows here looked over the first garden, just like the ones in the schoolroom, and Nell had been sitting glumly watching a group of older men in vigorous conversation on a bench outside when she heard Jean squeal and rip open the envelope she’d been given.
“Let us all see!” Kate said, getting up to stand behind Jean’s chair. But Jean held the letter up like a prize and then hugged it to her chest. “After me,” she said. “If it’s not private.”
Nell wondered what secret Jean thought Max would share with a second-grader, but she didn’t say it. She just drummed her fingers as Jean took her time unfolding the letter with ridiculous care. There was Max’s familiar, cramped handwriting, flowing unevenly across the page. Nell had the urge to grab it. Had he found anything out or not? She stifled the impulse and watched her sister frown over the page.
“Susan, what are these words?” Jean pointed, and Susan, whose attention had been briefly recaptured by the letter, leaned over.
“Tur Kaysh,” she said. “That’s what they call the old man.”
Jean nodded and bent back to her reading.
“How about this one?”
“Physicist.”
Nell felt her ears heating up. She wondered if steam might actually pour out of them, like it did in cartoons, or if that was just pretend.
Jean pointed again.
“Interested,” Susan said.
“No, I meant that one.”
“Impatient,” Susan told her.
Nell couldn’t take it anymore.
“Why don’t you just let Susan read it out loud?”
Jean gave her a supercilious look.
“I’m almost done,” she said. “Just wait a minute.”
Before Nell could decide whether knocking her over was a good strategy for getting her to share the letter, Jean handed it to Susan.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s not private.”
Nell rolled her eyes.
“Maybe we ought to read it in our room anyway,” Susan told her. “Just in case.”
So they adjourned to their room, hurrying past the tapestried walls into the library and then across to the other side, and at last, Susan unfolded the letter.
“‘Dear Jean,’” she began. Jean grinned widely at the mention of her name, as if she’d only just discovered the letter was hers.
Nell rolled her eyes again. “We know who it’s addressed to. Just get into the letter, will you?”
Susan raised an eyebrow at her but continued:
“Remember I said we were going to be home soon? I really think soon is getting sooner now. The Master Watcher says Tur Kaysh knows everything, that is, he didn’t say it in those words, but he did give that idea off. And I can tell that the man is very smart. He’s not like the other people we’ve met here so far. That is to say, he knows a lot more of what’s going on. I think he’s kind of like a physicist, but here. You saw that room upstairs, with all its books! When he saw I was interested in them, he said I could ask any question, and he would try to answer. I have plenty of questions, and one of them is going to be the one that shows us how to get that window back. Try not to get too impatient waiting, but this is exciting, you’ll see!
Your brother,
Max”
Jean was still beaming, but Nell suppressed a snort. So much for figuring things out! She wondered why Max didn’t just ask the question straight out. That’s what I would do, if it were me, she thought.
Max was definitively not her, however, and for a second she told herself that if the Guide was so smart, he would have known to invite the rest of them to stay up in that sunny room of his.
It was the kind of thing her father would have said, but somehow it didn’t help. The old man did seem smart. Better than smart. And that room had looked wonderful. And Max was there, so he was the one who got to ask the questions. As many as he wanted. All she could do was grumble about it, which she did, while Jean carefully laid the letter on the nightstand for safekeeping, securing it with the weight of her Barbie.
The ancients stood in full light
And we in shadow.
Late to the world we come,
Seeing little and hearing less,
The edges and ends and the echoes of song.
The words danced in Nell’s head, shadows and light, edges and ends. This was the text Mistress Meva brought the next afternoon for lessons. The morning had been full of hours spent on calculations and with a curious talk on the makeup of plants and soil concentrations, followed by another long recitation of the chant of seeds, which Nell thought she’d never learn. But that had all been washed away by the words that hummed in Nell’s head. She wondered what book they were from.
What did it mean, the edges and echoes? Nell was thinking a thousand things, not one of them having to do with purity, which was the Shepherdess’s emphatic explanation. When Nell asked her if this was the same kind of purity they had in the city patrols, she scoffed and said that was an altogether false kind. “A twisted shadow” is what she called it, going on to say that true purity had gone from the world, lost with the freshness of youth and the goodness of the early days. “We are left, as the ancients would say, ‘nearsighted and half blind by the dirt in our eyes.’”
Nell was busy trying to piece together what she meant by that when a thundering gong made her jump. Once, twice, it reverberated through the classroom and outside, in the gardens. Nell swiveled in her seat. Was it a fire alarm? She looked to Mistress Meva for answers and was surprised to see the expression on the woman’s face. The Shepherdess had gone pale, her face contorted in a tight-lipped grimace. As Nell watched, tears sprang to the woman’s eyes.
Five clangs of the gong, and then silence. But the noise of life did not resume.
“Girls,” the Shepherdess whispered, “stand now, to mark the punishment and mourn the soul lost.”
The girls rose to their feet. Nell stole a look at Wista, in the seat near hers, and saw the girl’s hands trembling. She clutched her copper pendant so tightly, her fingers were red.
Wh
en they’d resumed their places, she looked to the Shepherdess for explanation, but the woman seemed undone. “Keep quiet as you return to your rooms” was all she said. Her voice caught.
The girls filed out silently. In the hall, beneath the weaving of an ivory sky over a dark land, full of the silhouettes of people moving through a river of shimmering blue thread, Nell caught up with Minna. “What was that all about?” she asked her. “Did somebody die?”
The redheaded girl looked sweaty and a little green. “They’d be better off if they did,” she said, her voice low. “That was the signal of banishment. When the elders decide someone’s broken the rules, they push him back through the mist. It’s exile.” She wiped a damp hand across her dress, then suddenly clenched the fabric into a tight ball.
“So they have to go back to the city?” Nell asked her, not understanding the look on the girl’s face. At the other end of the corridor, the rest of the class was already dispersing, moving quietly toward the library to cross to their rooms.
“I don’t know where they go,” Minna said, casting a glance their way. “But that’s not what’s awful about it. When you’re pushed out that way — when the mist takes you, it takes you. Understand?”
Nell shook her head. Down the hall, doors shut with small clicks and quiet puffs of air.
“It takes you. Your soul. Your mind. Everything. The banished ones change back, to the way they were before they came. But on the inside, they’re not like they were. They go mad. They don’t know their own names, or how to speak, or anything. They’re like animals that once were human.”
Nell didn’t move. Into her mind had jumped the image of a wild creature the size of a man, baring its teeth at Susan. She could feel the hot breath of the slashers in the cave, the stench of them as they pressed her to the ground, tearing at the bag of food.
“The — the ones in the city, then? The wild men that attack the sleepers? Those come from here?”
Minna nodded, lips pressed tight together. “We don’t speak of it,” she whispered. “But I saw one when I first came. Some of the others did, too. Mistress Meva told me that it’s the punishment for rebellion. If they’d known to do it in the ancient times, we would have been spared the Genius.”
Minna took a half step away, looking again up the hall.
“What? How?” Nell asked.
“I can’t explain it,” Minna said, taking another step toward the door. Nervously, she rubbed her sunburned nose, shedding small flecks of dead skin onto the hallway floor. “We’re not supposed to talk of the banished ones! Forget it, Nell! Pretend it didn’t happen. It’s better that way.”
Minna turned and hurried down the hall; Nell watched her go. When the door had closed behind her, Nell ran down the stairs into the gardens. They were suddenly empty of people. A breeze cascaded through the curtain of the great willow, and the grass bent softly beneath it; all the doors were shut. Nell moved quickly to the first passageway, the great tunnel that had taken them into the sanctuary, and emerged into the valley as the breeze died. The stillness held her for a moment, made her stand and look at the orchards and the fields, desolate in the settling heat. Then, far to her left, along the outer wall, she saw a group of men clustered, standing at attention, faces turned toward the hills.
Nell squinted at them, trying to see what they were looking at. Suddenly, from up the slope, a wail shattered the afternoon. It was an animal cry, but something more — a nearly human sound of despair and terror, high-pitched, frantic. The sound echoed across the valley, so terrible she put her hands to her ears. In the distance the robed men turned and disappeared into the sanctuary wall.
Again and again the cry pierced the afternoon until Nell, unable to stand it any longer, fled inside.
Too soon again, the sounds of terror and pain jangled the thickets and tore at the silence of afternoon. Newly lost, the outcast thrashed on the grassy clearing, wailing and scrambling, until all signs of those who had come before were gone. From a hidden place among the trees, the exile waited with the food wrapped in its blue bundle, but the newly wild lunged to its feet and lurched past, just as so many had fled past the small welcome of the cottage garden.
Years ago, when the first of the lost had come into the woods, pulling at its face and arms, tearing at its changing skin, the exile had tried to say a word of solace, to call the thing back from the abyss. It had not heard. None ever had.
Now the frightened creature ran on, only to fall bloodied and exhausted among the trees, eyes rolling in its head until sleep, merciful and powerful, took it.
Gently, the exile laid the bundle beside it. Outcasts were forever hungry, empty in a thousand ways.
Food could fill only one. And yet that, too, was a mending.
Nell felt that the world was tilting and all the solid things, the up and down of gravity, the bulk of trees and rocks and houses, were poised to fall out of the light of day into the dark. Sober-faced men stood in groups turning people into monsters, nodding and consulting and ripping the mind from a man before walking sedately back to their studies. How could such a thing be? Worse, how could the old man not know about it?
He did know. He must know.
A cold terror wrapped around her bones when Nell understood this, and on shaking legs, she ran back to the room, to Susan, to Kate and Jean.
But it was Max she saw when she came panting through the door. He was sitting on her bed, hands pressed between his knees, rocking. The room was bright with the light of the afternoon sun streaming through the windows from over the mountain, and Nell thought suddenly, It shouldn’t be. It should be dark.
Max jumped to his feet when he saw her.
“Where have you been? Didn’t you hear what happened? We were starting to think it was you they put out!”
He was white faced and unsteady, as unsteady as she felt. He must know. He must have seen, she thought. He must understand, as she did. He’d been there, with the old man, with all of them. . . .
“We have to go!” she said, moving past him to the window. The valley spread out below her, still desolate, and silent now, after the terrible sounds from the hill. “We’ll have to run for it while they’re still inside —”
She was making plans, hastily trying to determine the safest route away. They wouldn’t want to meet it, or the men who had made it. Did anyone follow the thing up the mountain when it fled?
“Nell, what are you talking about?”
Max was staring at her. For a second, he had looked relieved at the sight of her. Now he only looked confused. She glanced at the others. The fear she’d seen when she first rushed in was going. Kate and Jean had been huddled on the bed, Jean squeezing the air out of Barbie’s plastic skull. Now she set the doll in her lap and looked to Susan, who had been slow to raise her head.
They didn’t know. The look on Max’s face, the upset and fear, that was on her account. They wouldn’t look this way if they knew. They’d be worse.
“The sound from the mountain! Didn’t you hear it?”
But they hadn’t. The windows and doors were shut. Only she had followed. After the gong, they’d been sent upstairs, and Max had crossed the gardens to join them. No one else had been in the fields. She looked from one to the next and saw they’d only been waiting for her, half panicked at her absence.
Shakily, she told them what she’d seen, what she’d heard. Max abruptly sat down, and Susan looked sick.
“Slashers?” Max said. “From here?”
She nodded.
“No,” he said. “No, they wouldn’t.”
Nell stared at him. He’d come to his senses in a second, if she’d only wait. She practiced her patience, though it was hard, with her legs shaking so, to sit still.
Again, Max said, “No.”
Nell turned to Susan. Why was she so quiet?
“Susan, say something!”
Susan blinked, her hand pressed to the side of her face. A cloud crossed the sun outside, and the brightness faded from the ro
om. Behind Susan, the image of the golden man emerging from the pool dulled.
“Max, you were with them,” Susan said. Her voice sounded muffled, as if she’d just woken. “You would know. What did the old man say? Did he tell you anything?”
Worry had made Max’s face look young. He shook his head. “He only said something about discipline, and the protection of the sanctuary, and the great gift we have to be grateful for. He means our minds! He’d never do that, Nell. Never! You’re wrong!”
Nell bit her lip. She’d seen the men standing in a group! She’d heard that terrible cry!
But Max was talking fast now, words and words and words that battered her until she wasn’t completely sure anymore. Could she have been mistaken? She remembered the old man’s lovely voice, the warmth of it. Max asked if she’d seen him there, and she hadn’t, or if she’d seen the man who cried out, and again, she hadn’t. She tried to say something, but he kept talking, quicker than ever, rolling over her until she frowned and pressed her lips together, trying to think whether anything made sense.
She hadn’t seen the old man. She hadn’t seen the slasher. She’d only heard that terrible wail, that sound. That lost, broken sound.
“It’s different here,” Max was saying. “It’s not like the city. Do you know that the whole place, all of it, is one big school? They saved the books, Nell, saved all that knowledge when the Genius tried to burn them! They want people to know things! Not like the Genius! They hid away and protected all the things that are important. Would people like that turn someone into an animal? How could they? Why would they?”
It was rare that Nell couldn’t think of something to say, but the urgency in Max’s voice, the mix of concern and certainty, pressed on her. And then there was the old man himself. She’d seen him in the sunlit room. She knew. . . .
“You don’t know, Nell,” Max was saying. “Really, you don’t know what you saw. We have a chance to learn here. To find out things we couldn’t ever dream of on our own. You do want to get home, don’t you?”
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