Glenn’s heart flipped. The two figures were already on the wall, but they didn’t pause to find holds. They slid up, their hands flat on the rock, as if they were sticking to it. Glenn threw herself against the stone, finding two more handholds and yanking herself up. When she made it to the hill’s moonlit crest she rolled up onto it, then ran across the uneven rock. The two creatures came over the lip of the hill. They were faceless, freakishly elongated and thin, with tendril-like arms and legs.
Wisps of their dark bodies trailed behind them as they glided across the stone. Glenn fled up a short rise, leaping onto another hilltop that curved away to the right. She took off again, moving down a narrow corridor of rock.
She made it only a few feet before what she saw ahead pulled the last breath out of her lungs and crashed her down onto her knees. There, dark silhouettes against the deep blue night sky, were four more of the smokelike creatures. They stood in a semicircle at the edge of the cliff, their bodies wavering in the wind. Beyond them was sky and, to either side, high rock walls.
Glenn knew if she turned around she’d see the other two right behind her, cutting off her escape. There was nowhere to run. Even if she could fight, there were too many of them.
She had only one choice.
Glenn pulled back the sleeve of her coat and her fingers found the edge of the bracelet. Her breath caught in her throat as she tore it off and the dull metal hit the ground.
Glenn was aware only of the cold rock below the soles of her boots as she advanced toward the faceless creatures at the other side of the hill. She halved the distance between them and stopped. A gust of wind blew across the mountaintop. Removing the bracelet was like waking up a little at a time. The world began to pulse around her, becoming more vivid, fuller. High up on the mountain, there weren’t as many voices coming at her, just the smoothness of stone, the deep night, and the creatures that stood before her.
Without the bracelet to block them out, they were like places where the night, weighed down by some infinitely dense hunger, collapsed in on itself. They reached out for her, tugging at her, eager to press in through her flesh and fill her body. They wanted to devour her.
Become her.
Glenn’s knees started to buckle, but she threw her head back.
Above her the moon was huge and brilliantly white. It was transfixing, so cool and clean. Its light filled up her arms and legs and chest and drew her upward. Soon Glenn was aware of being high above the mountains, barely able to feel the shadowy things below.
The thin air seemed to fill with music the farther she drew away from the earth. She heard bells and horns and the tinkling of crystals.
The moon grew enormous. Glenn began to pick out the forms of the planets and the curve of solar systems. She could feel the universe like a bolt of silk gliding through her fingers, smooth and cool. Glenn urged herself higher, starving for more. Could she walk across the moon’s dusty surface? Could she go farther? Out to Orion? Out to 813? Opal had said that people once walked from world to world. Maybe she could too.
But then a sound rose up from below, followed by a jolt of
animal terror that hit Glenn like molten iron. Below her was a small figure being surrounded by those cold, starving things. They were pressing in toward it. Glenn floated there, watching, but soon she turned away, rising back into that sea of music and light. Soon she would be a part of it.
“Glenn!”
The voice ripped through the air and was like a hand seizing Glenn’s ankle. There was something about the shape of it that fit like a key in her mind.
“Morgan!”
Something snapped. Glenn plummeted down out of the sky and
crashed onto the ground between a young man and the approaching shadows. They had formed a tight circle and were closing in. Glenn felt their tearing hunger as if it was her own.
She gritted her teeth as the darkness flooded her. The creatures pressed in closer, their wormlike arms reaching out. Their featureless faces yawned wide, opening up huge, dark mouths. She tried to push them away, but what were they and what was she? What was the difference? She knew there was something she was supposed to do, but it was fuzzy and indistinct in her head. She was so hungry. A deep moan, a sigh of misery, resounded through her.
A hand took hers, the fingers pressing into her palm. Glenn turned. A spike of heat came from the boy on the ground. She was sure she knew him, but no name came to mind. He was small and thin, but there was something in him, something that burned and pushed the darkness back. Glenn snatched at it and pulled it within herself until it grew into a raging fire.
Glenn leapt again into the sky as the light and heat welled up in her pores and exploded outward, scouring the cold stone. She was a sun, and the creatures screamed as they fled from her, the light tearing at their smoky bodies, rending them apart.
Their cries doubled, keening pathetically. Words bubbled up through their screams. They came from everywhere, from each of them at once, clawing at her.
We are not these things
, the voices said as their arms reached out to her.
We are trapped. This is not who we are.
Glenn loosed another wave of light. It burst from her and pushed the creatures away, but still their cries surrounded her. Glenn dropped to the ground. A cluster of them was at the edge of the cliff, cringing with their dark arms wrapped tight around one another. Their moans still echoed in Glenn’s head. She strode forward, her body burning.
“Stop!” someone shouted distantly, but it meant nothing. Glenn burned hotter and brighter, ready to blast them away into nothingness.
The power was glorious.
A hand suddenly clasped her wrist. Glenn turned just as the young man yanked her toward him. There was a gray circle in his hand and he slapped it onto her wrist. Soon there was a great contraction and Glenn crashed to the ground.
“Glenn? Glenn!”
She was pulled into someone’s lap and cradled into their chest.
Her head lolled back.
His face was covered in ash and there were streaks of burn marks on his cheeks and on his shaven head. His eyes were luminous and strong. Glenn raised her hand up toward his face and he took it in his.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re going to be okay. They don’t want to hurt us.”
Glenn looked out toward the edge of the cliff, but the creatures were gone.
In their place lay a man, a boy, and two women, horribly thin and dressed in rags. Their skin was waxy and pale. One of the women drew herself up from the ground. A girl, really, not much older than Glenn.
She touched the others reassuringly. When she turned to look up at Glenn, her eyes were huge and bright blue, her hair a greasy, matted blond.
“Thank you,” she said through the aching wreck of her voice.
“Thank you for freeing us.”
“What’s your name?”
The girl with the blue eyes stared down at the rock floor. In the light of their small campfire, her pale face seemed nearly translucent.
She had led them here, to a small cave cut into the hill below where they’d stood only minutes ago. She said they came here when they weren’t out hunting. Her voice had trembled when she said it.
While Glenn waited for an answer, she raised the flat of her palms in front of their small fire. Even now, in the haze that came once the bracelet was back on, it seemed strange that she was separate from the fire. Something about it made Glenn ache, like she was missing a friend.
On the other side of the fire, Kevin sat with his back to her, talking low and encouragingly to the others. The woman would listen to Kevin a while, but inevitably she turned away, slipping glances out the mouth of the cave into the night, her face slack, as if she had lost something but couldn’t remember what. Each time the man noticed, he would whisper to her and she would nod and turn back toward Kevin. It was never long before the whole process started again.
The boy seemed worse off. As soon as they’d reached the cave, he’d ignored the rest of them, slumping down outside of the fire’s glow and muttering to himself. Glenn kept expecting the older man to say something to him, to reach out to him in some way, but he only glanced at the boy without emotion or recognition.
“Margaret,” the girl said.
The girl was twisting the ragged end of her sleeve in her fingers.
Dust fell from it as the old fibers tore. Her brow was furrowed in concentration.
“I think my name was Margaret.”
“Is Margaret,” Glenn corrected. “Your name
is
Margaret.”
Margaret stared at Glenn as if she was struggling to translate her words into another language. The tip of her finger had gone a tortured white where she had turned the frayed cloth of her sleeve tighter and tighter around it.
Glenn reached for her pack and rummaged around inside. There wasn’t much left: a crust of bread, some cheese. Glenn tore the bread in two and held a piece out to Margaret.
“You should eat something.”
Margaret looked at it strangely.
“Go ahead,” Glenn urged.
Her fingers trembled as she reached for it. Margaret set the piece of bread in her mouth and held it there for a time before slowly working her jaw around it and then swallowing. Glenn handed her another.
“Do you know what happened to you?” Glenn asked.
“I think … we came here. I don’t know how long ago it was.
My …” She searched for the right word. “Parents. They were …
scientists?”
“You’re from the Colloquium?”
“Colloquium,” Margaret said, balancing the word on her tongue.
“Yes. We came because of an … idea my father and she — my mother
— had. We came to see if their idea, if it was real.”
“What was their idea?”
The girl didn’t answer. Glenn wasn’t sure if she had heard her.
“Margaret …”
Margaret’s eyes narrowed on the ground in front of her as if she was trying to will the pieces of a particularly complicated puzzle into place.
“Do you know how … when there’s a tree? A tall one? An oak?
First there’s a seed. And then there’s a tree, but once there’s a tree, you can’t … you can’t make it into a seed again. Is that right? Is that true?”
Glenn didn’t know what to say. Margaret stared hard, searching, then shook her head.
“It’s … there’s now, and then there’s what was before now. We weren’t these people then. We were other people. I remember yellow paper on the walls and … a table. Blue. And chairs. But then … we were here and those other people were gone and there was just us.
These people. Now.”
“What happened when you came here?” Glenn asked.
“Margaret?”
Margaret stared out into the darkness beyond the fire. She pulled at a thin layer of flesh on her arm, pinching it cruelly between her fingers.
Glenn held out another piece of bread, but Margaret ignored it.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t —”
“We had been here … it was a while, I think. Tommy and me
thought it was fun. There were birds and horses, but the people wouldn’t talk…. Dad said they were superstitious. He laughed. Scared of their own — what was it? Shadows. We lived in the woods near a village. A camping trip, Mom said. A holiday. Dad wanted to teach the people, give them … something. I don’t know what it was. Something to make them better? It was our duty to show them how life could be better. Then one family finally talked to us. They told us to leave before” — Margaret’s breath hitched in a small gasp — “the man said there was a woman.”
Something cold spread through Glenn as she said it. Margaret leaned farther into the fire.
“A woman in black. He said we had to leave before she came. No outsiders, he said. Dad … he always … he was so happy, he always laughed. ‘Send for her. Let’s meet this woman in black.’ Mom laughed too. But then she came. The woman. Very beautiful. She was full of birds. My dad raised his hand and said hello and she raised hers and she said some things and there was a sound like something cracking open. I thought it was the world, but really it was us. We were dropped into the hunger, and then time turned without us in it. People crossed our paths and we … pulled their hands and their faces and their breath into us until they weren’t anything anymore. We took them and we made them into us. Just so we could be warm. But it was never enough.”
It was silent in the cave when Margaret finished. She sat poised over the fire, her eyes locked onto the night outside. Glenn fought to make a wall that would hold Margaret’s story at bay. How could she stand to hear more of her mother’s horrors? When she closed her eyes, she saw lapping waves and her mother’s pale skin shining in the sun at the edge of a lake. Glenn took a stick from the pile of scrap wood and poked at the edge of the fire. It flared and settled.
On the other side of the fire, Margaret’s parents were lying down on the stone. Her father’s arms were wrapped around her mother’s. His eyes were closed. Hers were open and staring blankly at the ground.
Tommy was lying on his side, his hands splayed out in front of him, twitching like birds.
“Maybe you should try to get some rest,” Glenn said.
“I don’t sleep,” Margaret said.
“Maybe you can now.”
Glenn waited, but Margaret made no sign that she had heard. She sat against the wall of the cave and stared over the top of the fire and into the dark.
Across from them, Kevin shook open a small blanket from
Glenn’s pack and laid it over Tommy. He whispered something in the boy’s ear, but there was no response. Kevin left him and went to stand out by the mouth of the cave.
He said that the innkeeper told him she had gone, and he had been able to find a ride with a hunter not long after she left. Other than that, they had barely even looked at each other since that moment on the hilltop. Every time Glenn did, she saw a stranger wielding a golden dagger.
Glenn left Margaret, edging around the fire toward Kevin, trying to ignore the churning in her stomach.
“We have to get them home,” she said.