What do you mean, I’m a square peg?
I had a vague impression of Matt glancing back and forth between us before bending back to his work. Colleen’s smile went from bright to bashful, as if we were two kids at a high school dance and I’d just asked her for the next waltz. Then her eyes shifted away from mine toward the door to the outer room.
“Oh,” she said.
I followed her gaze. Doc stood in the open doorway, a fat backpack in his hands. Something passed between them, swift as thought-a secret conversation that made my ears burn. I felt myself flushing.
The moment passed and Doc raised the pack. “I have finished the med-kits. We will have two.”
Colleen got up to take the bag and pretended to stagger under its weight. “Jeez, Doc! I hope you didn’t rob Peter to pay Paul.”
“Pardon? Oh, no. Cherise said they could well afford this. They have already a good collection of basic supplies. They lack organization.”
“Not for long,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll have that infirmary up and running in no time. Then you’ll be bored stiff.”
Doc looked past her to me. “You didn’t tell her?”
“He told me. I was faking. But you’re the expert at that, aren’t you?” There was another silent exchange, at the end of which Colleen punched Doc lightly on the shoulder. “Albatross.”
We spent the next several days prepping for the journey. While Colleen marshaled supplies and decided how to distribute them among pack and saddle horses, I plotted our route, compulsively checked and rechecked the mechanics of the chime system, and worried about what would happen to Magritte when we stepped out of the safe confines of the Preserve. That was a question we still had no real answer to, other than Maggie’s repeated assurances that she was stronger than the other flares and better able to protect herself from the Source. Having seen how she’d been the day we lost Faun, I was hopeful, but not certain.
Doc spent his time doing what he could in the Preserve’s small infirmary, giving Cherise and her two volunteer nurses pointers on everything from dosages to the fine art of surgical stitchery.
Enid rested for the most part, though he did open the portals to allow foraging parties in and out. If they were going to be cut off from the outside for any length of time, Mary’s little community was going to need all the food, seed, and other supplies that could be brought in.
It was Goldie who concerned me most. In the days leading up to our planned departure, I saw him so rarely, I began to think he was a figment of my imagination. The one opportunity I had to talk to him, he artfully dodged me.
He was cheerfully stuffing his face in the dining hall one morning when I wandered in, feeling like reheated animal protein. Despite the early hour, the place was buzzing with activity as Olentangians lined up at the fruit and grain bar for breakfast, chattering like a bunch of tourists on holiday. Only the snatches of conversation I caught informed me that their concerns were more pressing than any tourist’s.
Goldie had parked himself at one end of a laden trestle from which he was snatching random food items.
“Well, if it isn’t Goldini the Magnificent, Master Escape Artist,” I said.
He bowed deeply from the waist and performed a flourish with a tortilla-filled hand. “My fame precedes me,” he mumbled around a mouthful.
“So, what have you been up to?”
“Busy.”
“Busy. Doing what?”
“Stuff.”
“Stuff.”
“Is there an echo in here? Stuff-you know, things to do. Don’t nudje, I’m keeping myself busy.” He moved away from the food toward a less occupied corner of the room.
I picked up a muffin of some sort from a large ceramic bowl and followed him. The muffin was an unappetizing shade of green, but tasted of berries and honey.
“That’s not the point,” I said. “I was hoping we could all be highly productive during our last days here.”
“Who says I haven’t been productive?”
“Goldie-”
“I told you, I’ve been busy. Productively so, in fact. Now stop sounding like my father, okay? You’re scaring me.”
A hint of annoyance had slipped into his voice, and I realized he looked about as tired as I felt. Dark circles and lines of strain stood out around his eyes.
“Fine. Just tell me what you’re doing.”
He took a last bite of tortilla and washed it down with a swig of the local tea before setting his cup on a bus cart. “Say, did Colleen mention that there’s a portal north of here on Lake Erie?”
I stumbled over the change of direction. “Uh, Magritte mentioned it, actually. Someplace called Put-in-Bay?” “Yeah. I guess Mary considered moving the whole Preserve up there because it’s so isolated, but the weather is too inclement; the Veil can only do so much.”
“And you mention this at this juncture because…?”
He grinned. “Well, um, partly to sidestep the issue of what I’ve been doing, and partly because I noticed when I was up there with Colleen that the weather is really, really bad outside the Preserve and I think we’ll need to be better prepared for that.” He caught his breath and added, “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover-a couple of states worth.”
He’d succeeded in distracting me, at least momentarily. “This northern portal, is there any way we could use it to get closer to Chicago?”
“Yeah, but there’s this little problem.”
“Which is?”
“A lot of very deep, very cold water. Put-in-Bay is an island, remember? Accessible only by airplane or ferry.” “Or rowboat?”
He flashed another grin. “Two words. Winter. Great Lakes.”
“That’s three words.”
He shrugged. “Gotta go.” He started for the door. “Whoa! Whoa! Where are you going?”
“I’m late for my flute lesson,” he said, not even slowing, and was gone.
Under other circumstances the whole scene might have been funny, but under these circumstances it made me uneasy. Was Goldie slipping out of touch with reality into some sort of manic episode? If he was …
I stopped the train of thought. There was no time for it now and too much to do.
During that last week, the weather turned decidedly colder even within the protected precincts of the Preserve. Mary made certain we were well-provisioned with warm clothing, blankets, dry kindling, and other necessities of winter travel, but I was still uneasy. We had hundreds of miles of open terrain to cover in a midwestern winter, which I had every reason to believe would be even harsher with the Change. And through it all, we would be taking the chance that at any moment Enid would have to start “jamming” to keep Magritte safe.
I shook off a tremor of real fear and put my mind to the business of preparation.
Mary had maps. I got one and did the math. Assuming that Chicago was where we’d left it, we were looking at about a 250-mile trek, as the crow flies. None of us being crows, and given that we’d no doubt have to take evasive action to skirt Indianapolis, the journey could easily exceed three hundred miles. At an average of twenty to thirty miles per day, that gave us road time of ten days or more. At last report from the northern portal, it had begun to snow.
Almost against my will, I also checked the map for “anomalies.” They abounded. There was some sort of ragged edge around Indianapolis. What it was, I couldn’t tell, but I had a sharp if fanciful vision of the city perched on a towering scarp, below which wild rivers raged. Or at least I assumed they raged; under my fingertips, they felt just as the Ohio had, rough and spiky.
I decided the best route would be to take Highway 317 northwest, swinging far to the north of Indianapolis and passing close to towns with such charming names as Arcanum and Nineveh. I found myself wondering if the Biblical story of Jonah was neither myth nor metaphor, but rather the way the world operated then. Maybe a man could live inside a giant fish. Maybe there was a God-one with a peculiar sense of poetic justice. And maybe the Source was something that had always been with us. Something that had just been trapped in another dimension for uncounted centuries, or locked up in a celestial prison house until human intervention had caused an inopportune jailbreak. Maybe Jonah had known the Source and simply called it by a different name.