“Some of my friends back home got pregnant,” she said. “Only one kept the baby, though.” The girl had married a photographer—a real classy guy—and had brought the baby back to the apartment to show the other girls. Nok had held it uneasily. It wasn’t entirely awful; it had smelled nice, at least.
Rolf stopped, blinking steadily, and faced her. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, Nok. But I can promise you one thing. Whether we end up having a child or not, whether they take it away from us or not, I’ll always be there. For you, I mean.”
She swallowed back a surge of tenderness. No one had ever been as sweet to her before.
She cleared her throat, suddenly nervous. “Hey, look. More Pluris ostrus or whatever.”
He smiled. “Pleurotus ostreatus.”
“Well, we can’t all be geniuses.”
The grin fell off his face as his cheeks reddened. He pushed at the bridge of his nose. “I’m not a genius.”
“You think Leon can identify swamp mushrooms? Why do you downplay it so much?”
His fingers twitched by his side, performing some calculations, as though that might help him think better. “Girls don’t like smart guys,” he said at last.
She looked at him in surprise. Suddenly she regretted all her crocodile tears, all her acts of helplessness. She knew when a boy liked her, and Rolf had it bad—but he didn’t even know who she really was.
“Let me be the judge of what I like,” she said softly.
They reached the end of the swamp at last. As they climbed out, the moss lining the bank soaked up the slime on her feet, so that she looked utterly clean. She glanced at her reflection in the nearest black window and adjusted her hem.
The light overhead changed. Late afternoon.
“Nok, look.” Rolf pointed ahead. “What’s that?”
Through the swamp trees, distant lights came on. Nok’s heart beat a little faster as she recognized them. Her headache returned tenfold, and she doubled over in pain.
“Impossible,” she gasped.
17
Cora
THE FOREST WAS EERILY quiet as Cora and Lucky passed among the trees. It had been almost three days since they’d found each other on the beach, but in a place without clocks or lengthening shadows, did time even exist the same way?
Cora hadn’t slept more than a few groggy hours, and it made her headache worse. At home, there’d been one sleepless night, driving the Virginia back roads, that she’d heard a radio program on a psychological experiment where they put test subjects in a room without natural light. Strange things started to happen: people would sleep for days on end, then wake for a week at a time. Was she changing, like the people in the experiment?
Her temper had gotten snappier—everyone’s had.
She hugged her arms around her dress. She’d found a dozen of them the night before, in the dead girl’s armoire. Rolf had said it was wrong to wear the dead girl’s dresses because the Kindred might punish her, but it was worth the risk to feel like herself.
They followed the trail passed a chalet with murky black windows. “They find a way to watch us everywhere, don’t they?” she said.
Lucky glanced at the window. “I’ll give them something to watch.” He raised his middle finger.
Cora grinned, but then she glanced behind them at the trail that had somehow telescoped in distance, and pain shot through her skull. “Ah—my head. Feels like someone’s stabbing screwdrivers behind my eyes.” She leaned her head against a tree, fighting the pain. “It has to be like Rolf said. Our minds can’t handle the unnatural angles and distances.”
“It can’t help that you’ve barely slept,” he said. She looked up at the worry in his eyes, as he crouched next to her. “Didn’t you think I’d notice? You look like you’re practically sleepwalking. I . . .” His voice faded as he caught sight of something behind her. “Are those . . . platforms?”
Cora shaded her eyes as she looked in the direction he pointed. Dark shadows in the trees formed into rough shapes that looked a bit like platforms and tree houses and ladders. “You think it’s one of the puzzles?”
“I doubt it’s an Ewok village.” He stood. “We should check it out. I’ll give you a boost, if you feel up to it.”
Cora hesitated. In seventh grade she’d climbed a high ropes course at day camp. She’d been fearless, the first one to the top, and that night her mother had invited her friends over for cake to celebrate. But that was before that horrible weightless fall when her car had plunged three stories off a bridge.
You were fearless once, she reminded herself.
“No. I can do it.” He formed a stirrup with his hands. She stepped up and clambered up a branch, blinking through bleary eyes. Lucky hoisted himself up beside her, as effortlessly as if he’d spent his life climbing trees, and she gaped. “Maybe that’s why the Kindred took you,” she said. “Supernatural climbing ability.”
He grinned and then pointed down. “It helps to know we don’t need to worry about falling. The ground cover’s spongy pine needles. I bet we’d only bounce.”
“Yeah, they wouldn’t want to bruise any of their precious specimens.”
Slowly she climbed higher, until they reached a platform circled by a thick rope. She gripped the safety of the rope, trying to catch her breath. Ten feet away, a metal object gleamed on another platform.