Not just with him, but with anyone.
She pushed back the loose sleeve of her shirt and looked at her arm where the fresh Lizard patch had appeared two days before. It was already bigger.
Like the one on her leg and the one on her back.
Rabbit lifted his fuzzy face to nuzzle her nose, and she nuzzled him back. Rabbit was her best friend–her only real friend. Rabbit wouldn’t care that she was mutating again, the inevitability of what she was becoming so overwhelming she could barely stand to think of it. No, Rabbit wouldn’t care.
But the rest of them would.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE WIND APPEARED shortly after midafternoon in the worst heat of the day. Hawk noticed it first as a series of small gusts that touched down just long enough to stir the loose earth. The larger blow was distant still, too far away for its full force to be felt, an invisible presence kicking at the barren flats. He was walking point with Cheney, his eyes sweeping the horizon when he could make himself stop looking at the steady, monotonous movement of his feet. One foot in front of the other, second foot in front of the first, over and over. He was bone–weary and disheartened, but he was keeping it to himself.
Wind, he thought in surprise, and then glanced at the cloudless sky. Was a change in the weather coming?
Within minutes, the first breezes blew across his face, hot and dry and empty of any promise of rain. The blown air was thick with dirt, and it stung the skin of his face as it swept past, died away, and started up again. He searched the horizon more carefully. Any clouds he could spy were clustered atop either the mountains they had left or the ones they were heading toward, the former seemingly no farther away and the latter seemingly no closer than when they had set out. He fought down the sensation of having gotten nowhere, of having not moved at all. He understood that distances were deceiving, but the perception was disconcerting nevertheless.
Ahead several paces, Cheney lowered his head against the bursts of wind and plodded on, ruff flattened.
As if he knew where he was going even if Hawk didn’t. The boy smiled despite himself. Good old Cheney.
As the force of the wind increased, he glanced over his shoulder at the caravan, a winding snake trailing away behind him in a ragged collection of vehicles, wagons, and people, a pall of dust hanging over everything. The muttering that had begun the night before seeming to trail after it, small whispers of discontent and doubt that circulated through the camp like bothersome flies. They had no specific source, only a specific target. He didn’t hear it himself; the speakers were careful not to say anything in his presence. But word got back to him nevertheless, the way word always does.
“You got to do something about these compound kids flapping their lips, Bird‑Man,” Panther had told him as they’d set out earlier. “All they do is talk, talk, talk about how you don’t know nothing, you just wandering about like some fool. They say you brought them out here to die. This ain’t the little ones; this is the bigger kids, ones who ought to know better. I told a couple of them if I hear that kind of talk again, I’m gonna hit them so hard it’ll kill their whole family. Frickin’ fools.”
Panther, never one to hold anything back. Hawk told him to let it be, that there was bound to be some of that sort of talk. What mattered was that the Ghosts still believed in him.
But did they? Though openly supportive, they, too, must be harboring doubts by now. Some of them, at least. Owl would never doubt him. River probably wouldn’t, either. But the others were struggling, he imagined. They couldn’t help it, whether they admitted to it or not. He didn’t blame them. After all, he was struggling, too.
Not too much farther ahead, he believed, they would find the north–south branch of the Columbia River. Owl had told him so, had shown him the river on one of her maps, tracing their route from where they had left the bridge and its defenders. A little town called Vantage marked the crossing point, a bridge that he hoped was still intact. That was where they were heading. Once across, the landscape would change again, becoming rolling hill country for a time. Maybe they would find water in those hills. Maybe the sun wouldn’t be so intense.
Yet he still had no idea where it was they were going or how far yet they must travel. His sense of where they were meant to go, his instincts, kept him on this path, moving forward. But his instincts were blind, the path invisible, and time short. Everyone knew that the demon–led army would be hunting them. Perhaps Logan Tom and the men and women left behind at the bridge had stopped it momentarily, had turned it aside. But sooner or later it would find a way across the gorge and come after them anew.
Nothing would change for them until they reached the safehold promised in his dream. Nothing would change until he could find the King of the Silver River.
He felt a presence at his side, and a small hand reached over to take his own. Candle, her mop of red hair tangled and wild, her clothes disheveled and dusty, and her face intense, stared up at him, the look in her blue eyes uncertain.
“Can I walk with you?” she asked.
“Of course you can walk with me, peanut,” he told her.
He squeezed her small hand reassuringly and shortened his longer stride to match her own. They walked without speaking for a time, and Hawk found an unexpected measure of comfort in the warm touch of her little girl’s grip.
Ahead, the dust clouded the horizon in widening sweeps, and the wind gathered force.
“Tell me a story, Hawk?” Candle asked suddenly.
He glanced over. “What kind of story?”
“A story about the King of the Silver River. You saw him, didn’t you?”
“I did, but only for a little bit. And I don’t know any stories about him.”
“Tell me what he looks like.”
Hawk thought about it for a moment. “He is very old. An old man with white hair and a beard. But he has a nice voice.”
“What color are his eyes?”
“Blue, I think. He can appear and disappear just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “He did it to me once. It was so quick. First he was there and then he was gone and then a little later he was back again.”
“Was it magic?”
“I think probably it was.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, her eyes on the ground as she walked, thinking. He let her be. He knew she was going through a difficult period, that the loss of her ability to detect potential danger had left her feeling diminished and perhaps even useless to the family. Her talent had defined her for so long that it was hard for him to think of her in any other way, even knowing that she was different now. He could only imagine how it had affected her.
“Are the gardens beautiful, Hawk?” she asked finally.
“As beautiful as anything I have ever seen.”
“Can you tell me about them, too?”
He did so, taking time to describe all of the beds and bushes and vines, the colors and types of flowers and the way they formed patterns and shapes against their lush green backdrop. He talked about the skies and the sweep of the land. He sketched pictures of the fountains and the pools that dotted the countryside. He told her how the gardens stretched away farther than the eye could see, as if they might run on forever. He had walked and walked, and he had never seen their end.
She smiled when he was done, squinting against the glare of the sun and the gusts of wind. “I would like to see them,” she said.
“You will,” he answered.
She shook her head, as if uncertain of that. “I wish I could do more to help you. I’m just another kid like all those compound kids. I can’t do anything anymore.”
“That’s not true. You help Owl every day. She depends on you. She told me so.”