Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  But in the end, when they were back at the cottage, the joy ran out, and they ceased to laugh at all. Again, Kate found herself watching Susan as her sister watched the woods, waiting, listening, impatience carved into her forehead and around her mouth.

  Despite the dream of flight, each night as they returned to the cottage and Nell went to the wall with her basket of food, calling Wista’s name, and Max did not come, the world grew heavier, and Kate felt that it had been that way ever since she’d fallen through the window. Even Laysia seemed slower, weighed down by that sense of something needed, someone who wasn’t there and should be.

  Missing had become such a familiar feeling that it almost didn’t surprise Kate when she woke to find Susan gone. It didn’t surprise her, but it frightened her so badly that she nearly couldn’t move.

  She stood in the yard, trying to hear over the screams behind the wall, eyes scanning the empty woods. She tried to outshout Wista.

  “Susan? Susan!”

  But she knew Susan wouldn’t answer. She heard the door behind her and Nell’s voice.

  “I can’t find her anywhere.”

  Behind the wall, Wista wailed and then subsided into a whimper.

  “She’s gone to the mist,” Nell said in the sudden quiet. “She’s gone to get Max.”

  Laysia ran past her, toward the woods. Jean and Nell followed, and suddenly they were all sprinting toward the heavy place where the world seemed to tilt, where all the good feeling ran out like water down a drain.

  Nell got there first, but they were all right behind her, breathless even though they were strong and the summer sun did not burn hot in the morning forest.

  Susan lay on the mountainside, eyes open, tears tracing lines down the side of her face, her lips quivering.

  Laysia dropped to her knees beside her, stared into her face, shook her, talked quickly. Kate saw Susan raise a hand, cover her eyes, and look away.

  “She’s all right,” Laysia said when Kate crept closer. “She withstood it. But she couldn’t get in.”

  Susan said nothing as they led her back through the woods. She walked like an old woman, hunched, slow. And when Kate tried to take her hand, it was limp. Kate squeezed, but Susan did not squeeze back.

  Laysia understood now why she had never been given a child. She would have failed it, as she had failed these she had been given to watch over, so briefly. She could not even overcome the objections of one half-grown girl, and so she had caged the pitiful remains of another child, its wits all gone, behind stone, so it could torment the rest day and night.

  Tur Nurayim had been wrong to have faith in her, wrong to teach her. She had done nothing with his gift but harm.

  She thought these dark thoughts all morning after she’d led Susan back from the edge of the valley. Now the girl sat alone and wept, head resting on her arm, she whom the others said did not weep, this child she’d seen conquer the powers of the warrior — air and light and fire.

  It was all nothing, for she whom they had trusted had no answer to give.

  She tried to think what Tur Nurayim would say, but it was hard, now, to imagine. He had not known this world, this place that had become empty without him. The world had changed, with the loss of him, and though he had known strife, he had never known this aloneness, this place where children were devoured. What would he have made of it?

  At last, undone, she could do only the simplest of things and soothe the child with quiet talk, with tea and cinnamon, as Lan had done when she was small.

  “The mist is terrible,” she said. “We all know it.”

  But the child did not raise her head, and from outside, the lost one wailed and wept and threw herself against the stones.

  They set it against me,” Susan said that night when she had finished crying and become furious instead. “You know what that means, don’t you? They’re holding him! They know we’ll try to come for him, and they won’t let us. It wasn’t me who broke their stupid rules!”

  Kate saw Nell’s shoulders go up. They had spent the afternoon baking bread in the small brick oven behind the house. It was the first time they’d used it since they’d come. Laysia said that like the garden, work done by hand was soothing. Now Nell, who had just returned from lowering a loaf over the wall to Wista, narrowed her eyes.

  “You think this is about breaking rules?” she said slowly. “Still? What rule did Wista break, do you think?”

  Kate looked over at Laysia, but the woman didn’t know how bad the two of them could get. Weeks of upset seemed to wind themselves into Susan’s face when she answered.

  “Maybe the rule about associating with us,” Susan said. “Why couldn’t you have just listened when I told you not to make waves there?”

  Nell looked like someone had punched her. Kate cringed. Outside, the bread had quieted Wista, and only the crickets were loud now.

  “Listened?” Nell said. “If I’d listened, you’d be the one we had to drag out of there. You were losing your mind, or don’t you remember? But why would you? You were waiting for Max to do something.”

  The shaky sound of cicadas buzzed through the window, and Susan turned her back.

  “Maybe they’re not holding him,” Nell persisted. “Did you ever think of that? Maybe he’s just forgotten about us!”

  “No!” Jean shouted. “He wouldn’t!” She had begun to pull at her doll’s hair in her agitation, and blond strands of it glittered on the floor.

  Susan said he wouldn’t too many times after that, and Laysia, caught between them, would only say that yes, it was possible they were holding him. She couldn’t tell anymore what they would do. And Nell, furious and near tears, went out to the wall.

  The next day, no one went to the clearing. Nell stayed with Wista, talking in that low voice she used, while the slasher moaned and shrieked. The rabbits and the squirrels had long since fled the sound of her, leaving the wood too empty in the circle around the house. Kate felt sick with the emptiness and with the noise. She watched Jean leave the house to draw figures in the dirt beneath the trees. And Susan sat on her bed, sullen and silent.

  “Max will come,” Kate said to her. “And then we can take him to see the ocean. He’ll love that.”

  Susan nodded distractedly.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Don’t you think Max will love to go to the ocean?”

  Susan wouldn’t really look at her. She wasn’t listening.

  That night, Kate woke abruptly in the dark, her heart thundering in her chest. She thought she must have dreamed something terrible, but she couldn’t remember it. All she could think of was the mist. Susan and Nell had both pricked it, and now she could hear it muttering in the dark, restless and hungry. Like some hideous beast, it would soon climb the mountain, jaws wide, to swallow them, just as it had swallowed Wista.

  She slipped out of bed, into the main room, and then, without even finding her shoes, out the front door. The crickets trilled, and in her walled prison, the slasher moaned and grumbled in sleep. There was no moon.

  The stars shimmered overhead, sandy grains of light that barely separated tree from air. But the mist whispered at her, and she felt the persistent weight of it beneath the breeze. She turned and made her way toward it.

  The forest floor hurt her feet, and she picked her way through it, trying to step lightly. After a while, the sudden jab of a twig or the pull of a thorn didn’t bother her. The mist was louder, and the thickness of it swam around her, blotting out other things.

  It won’t notice, she thought. Like Susan doesn’t, like Nell doesn’t. It will think I’m too young to worry about.

  Her pulse beat in her throat and up around her ears, until it was nearly as loud as the murmuring air. It doesn’t know my name, she told herself.

  She reached the edge of the forest and stepped out. The land dipped. Below her, she could feel the valley, and its foggy boundary, stretching up to meet her.

  I’m little, she
thought. It will leave me alone.

  She stood for a second, listening to the steady roar of it, the hiss of a hundred angry voices. But it didn’t change. Though she stood close to it, she could hear no question, no warning.

  She stepped down into it.

  The mist closed around her, and the muttering rose — strange, unintelligible words, a grimy whiteness that she wanted to drag from her eyes. She shut them against it.

  It wanted to come inside her. It wanted to seep in behind her eyes, worm its way there, push into her head. She had lost, all of a sudden, her sense of direction. Which way was down? She needed to walk down, but now she stumbled, thinking that she could go on forever and always be standing right here. She was lost, lost like Nell had been lost, lost like Wista was lost!

  Panic clanged in her brain and she nearly fell.

  No! Laysia said we’re not like them! We’re different; we have a shell. My skin is all hard lines, and it can’t take me!

  She thought it as loudly as she could, keeping her eyes closed. Voices whined in her ear, sinister words in some other language she didn’t recognize.

  It didn’t call her name. It didn’t shout at her. It didn’t know her.

  She breathed in and out, listening to the sound of her own breath.

  What had Susan done, that first time?

  Don’t open your eyes, she told herself. Don’t make it more real than it is. It’s like the light, there but not there. Bend it, like the light.

  The mist, too, was only pieces. She’d been thinking of it as a fog, but it was a sandstorm. A million individual drops, able to be nudged apart.

  She pushed at them and felt the weight pressing on her give a little.

  Tentatively, she opened her eyes. There was the valley below, glinting dimly in the starlight.

  Kate ran through the tunnel in the mist.

  No one stopped her this time as she made her way alone onto the boys’ floor. She didn’t know which room was Max’s, had no idea where exactly to find him, and so she moved from door to door, barefoot and silent, looking in on the sleeping boys.

  She found him at last in a room alone, asleep beneath a window that was open to the night. She stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and shook him.

  “Max! Max! It’s Kate!”

  He bolted to a sitting position even before he was fully awake. When his eyes had focused, he looked at her, confused.

  “Kate? Kate!”

  He grabbed her then, hugging her so tightly she lost her breath. “You came back! I’m so glad!”

  Kate nodded, trying to get the words out. She told him of the mountain, and Laysia, and the others.

  “You don’t have to stay here!” she said. “You can come with us!”

  But as Max listened, he dropped his arms and pulled away. He was watching her now, eyes shrouded in the darkness.

  “Kate,” he said, “who sent you here?”

  Startled, she shrugged. “No one sent me. I came because I wanted to!”

  He was sitting back now, regarding her in a way she didn’t understand. “Alone? I don’t think so,” he said. “They said you’d gone to that woman they told me about. Did she send you? The exile?”

  “Her name’s Laysia.”

  “Laysia, then. Did she send you?”

  “I told you, no!”

  “Kate, stay here. I’ll make sure they take care of you. Jean, too.”

  She stared at him. “What about Susan and Nell?”

  Max dropped his eyes. “Them, too — just not right away. I’ve tried to talk to the Guide about that. Explain that things are different where we come from. He doesn’t understand just yet. But he’ll come around. I know I can make him understand. He’ll let them back soon.”

  Kate’s stomach twisted. “Who can you make understand?”

  “Tur Kaysh. The Guide. And the Master Watcher. He’s almost as big. Did you know that? And he came for us himself!”

  She shook her head.

  Max leaned forward, eyes alight. In the next room, a boy mumbled in his sleep and a bed behind the wall creaked. Max glanced that way and lowered his voice.

  “Listen, Kate. What I’m doing here is important! Jean knows — I wrote her about it! We’re different from the people here — did you know that? We can do things even they can’t do — at least not as easily, not as naturally. Do you know, when I showed Tur Kaysh what I’d learned to do in the woods, he said it was a sign that the time is coming? Do you realize what that means? Do you see?”

  But she didn’t see. She only understood that Max was not being held. Max wanted to stay. Nell had been right.

  Kate sat across from Max in the dark room, trying to make him see.

  “But they pushed Nell out! And Susan, too! They hurt people, Max. They make the mist! Do you know what it does to people? What Nell told us is true! Don’t listen to them, Max! Come back with me.”

  Max thrust his lip forward, and his eyebrows came down.

  “It’s not true,” Max said. “The Guide is a great man! He knows what he’s doing. It’s all for the good, Kate. You’ll see!”

  She pulled away from him, stunned. All for the good? What was he saying?

  “How can it be, Max? Hurting Susan? Hurting Nell?”

  “Kate, you don’t get it.”

  But she did get it. She did.

  Max reached across the bed and took her arm, shook it lightly. “Kate, I know it’s hard for you to understand. You’re not big enough. But trust me. Trust me! You wouldn’t believe the things I’m learning here — things we’d never have dreamed of in the woods! Things we couldn’t do on our own! And it’s not for nothing, Kate. It’s not just for fun!”

  She pulled herself from his grip, folded her arms across her chest.

  “Can you fly, then? Can you push the light away so you can’t be seen?”

  His mouth opened, then closed. He regarded her a moment.

  “Where did you hear about that? The exile? Did she tell you?”

  Kate set her jaw. “You don’t have to learn here, Max. You can be with us.”

  But he wasn’t listening. His eyes were gleaming.

  “Kate, listen. Something big is happening. Here. Not out there. Most of them here don’t even know about it. But the Guide told me, because I’m part of it, don’t you see? My coming is part of it!”

  Outside, an owl hooted in the moonless night.

  “Part of what?” she asked him.

  “The end of the Genius. You saw how terrible it was there. What they do to people! Remember what they’d have done to us! But it’s almost over now. The Guide’s been preparing for years, and it’s almost time. We’re going after him now. We’re strong enough!”

  “We? You, too? You’re going back there?”

  He leaned forward, so focused on what he was trying to express that he nearly stood up.

  “I have to, don’t you see? I’m stronger than I was before! Different! I know things. We all do. The Guide’s been teaching us, and we can do what they never could do when the Genius took over. It’s time to end it. To finish them in the city. And I’m here for that.”

  “No! Max, the Genius is dangerous!”

  He laughed, so suddenly it made her jump.

  “Kate, we’re dangerous. To him, anyway. More than he’s ready for. And I’m part of that. Do you think we came here by accident? Do you think we just fell through that window?”

  She shook her head. “Why are you saying this? Did they tell you about the five?”

  He sat back, surprised. “So she told you that, too. They’re right that she’s dangerous, spilling secrets like that. But yes — the five. I’m one of them! The Guide knew it from the first! I’m here because I’m meant to be, Kate. I’m going to help them get him. Finish him.”

  Kate felt a heat rise behind her eyes, and her throat tightened.

  “But what about us?” she whispered. “What about the five of us?”

  He barely seemed to hear her.

  “Max
! Laysia says it’s the five of us who are here for a reason!”

  That got his attention. He frowned and shook his head.

  “Kate, she is crazy, telling you that. You’re a little kid! Don’t be ridiculous. Can’t you see how dangerous she is?”

  Kate understood suddenly that nothing she said would matter. He wouldn’t listen.

  “Max,” she said, “what about getting home?”

  “Later,” he assured her. “There’ll be time for all of that. After the Genius is gone, I’ll come back. And then we’ll go. I promise.”

  He reached for her hand, but she drew back.

  Max was different now. More different, even, than Susan.

  Jean had had enough of the waiting. Max had said this wasn’t a dream, and at last Jean had come to believe him. There wasn’t so much waiting around in dreams. Not even in nightmares. Until now, she’d been patient, she thought. More than patient.

  She liked to remind herself that she was small. She wasn’t like Kate — the suggestion didn’t make her mad. Who wanted to be big, anyway? She preferred to play, which was what small people did. She didn’t like all the fuss and effort and upset of big people. Nell in the sanctuary, for example. Jean hadn’t understood that. The people there were nice, and her teachers had been cheerful, and she liked the songs.

  Most people were nice, in the end. Even Liyla, who Jean hadn’t liked at all, turned out not to be too bad. Like Jean, she had a mother and a father who cared about her. They were strange, true, but then lots of people’s parents were strange. Not like the Genius. Of all the people Jean had seen here he, he and that pinch-faced lady in the red dress, were unrecognizable. Jean was pretty sure neither of them had a mother or father.

  Thinking of mothers and fathers made Jean feel bad, and she tried not to think of her own, waiting for her back home. Countless times over the past two months, she’d pushed such unhappy thoughts away, and she did it again now, reminding herself that Max would have to be here sometime, and at least the Genius and Ker were far away now, and put away, like a bad dream after you woke up. And since that bad time in the city she’d played wonderful games here, even Susan and Nell and Kate had played. She’d seen Susan flicker out like a candle, only her voice left. Kate had surprised her by swooping off the cliff without shrieking in terror. And Nell had sent a firecracker of flame shooting from her hand into the sky. That had been worth being here for. Here, she could bounce her Barbie on the air or sing a little come here song to the sea and feel the splash of the wave, even up high.