Chapter 5
“And everything he says is true?” Pop asks me, wrapping a bandage around my arm, saying it just quietly enough for Max not to hear. Pop’s having a hard time believing us, which is annoying, if understandable.
I nod. The injection from the medipak is reknitting my broken arm, and the painkiller in it means I don’t feel anything except the weirdness of my bones moving on their own.
“Okay,” he says, and his Noise says, Okay. “I believe you. I believe you saw what you saw.” He glances back at the lake, completely still now even where Max is finding places to look deeper and deeper into it.
“It’s not there, Pop!” Max hollers, and there’s a lot of fear in his voice. “I can see all the way to the bottom now, and it’s not there! Where did it go?”
Pop looks back at me. I shake my head. I don’t know either.
Pop’s Noise is full of confusion, full of fear for his sons, all with a little undercurrent of wondering if his leg is being pulled.
I do leave for upper school next week, after all.
If we were going to pull a prank, now would be the time.
Except we’ve never been pranksters, Max and me. Who’s got time for that on a farm?
Pop’s still questioning stuff in his Noise, so I gesture to the big, burning hole in the tree line.
“Yeah,” he says. “I reckon neither of you did that, did ya?”
Now that it seems to be all over–though who can be sure–I feel like, well .
. . it’s not that I’m starting to doubt what we saw, because we absolutely saw it, of that I will be sure for the rest of my life.
It’s more the opposite. I’m starting to feel the real danger of it.
The sheer unexplainable impossibility of it.
This terrible thing that happened right here, right in front of us.
That could have killed us, killed me, was reaching for me–
Pop sees the wet in my eyes and he puts a gentle hand on the back of my neck. I shake him off, and his Noise gets a little hurt before he hides it.
“Look, we’ll get you home,” he says, “but I want to talk to the Land when they get here.”
“The Land are coming?” Max says, heading back over to us.
“They aren’t going to let that fire burn,” Pop says.
And he’s right. He hasn’t even repacked the medipak on Angharrad’s saddle before the Land start coming out of the woods. They carry those white saws they use that cut down trees better than any chain saw.
A few of them wave to Pop. A greeting they learned from him, actually, since the language barrier is still pretty much a brick wall for most people.
The biggest stupidity the makers of the cure didn’t properly think through before giving it to nearly everyone?
The locals are a Noise-based society. If you don’t have Noise, talking to them is about ten thousand times harder.
Not that most of the town seems to care much. Or the Land, neither, come to think of it.
Pop cares. He was brought back from the brink of death by the Land when he was a couple years younger than I am now.
His Noise became part of their great Conversation, the one they’re always in the middle of, the one that carries their history and news and information all over the face of this planet.
The one that remembers every single crime humans committed against them.
There were a lot.
But there were other things, too, I guess.
And other people who were different, other people the Land thought worth saving.
Like I said, it’s been pretty much peace since I was born, and Pop tells us this was absolutely not the case when he was a boy.
Still, he’s closer to them than most humans are, and that’s despite the fact he killed one once.
In fact, maybe it’s because of it. They can see his regret in his Noise, see his life of constantly trying to fix that mistake, probably why they saved him when no one else could.
Probably why hardly anyone else on the planet likes him very much.