Chapter 6
Pop walks over to the Land, who are already cutting trees and branches to stop the spread of the fire. He opens his Noise wide as he approaches. Max and I wait by Angharrad, who keeps nudging me out of concern and saying boy colt, in her Noise. She’s an old mare, but a good, good horse.
“We did see it, didn’t we?” Max whispers to me now, both of us watching Pop enter a Noise conversation with the Land, which moves faster than anything either of us could follow.
I nod in a way that says, Yes, we definitely did.
“You saw it, too,” he says.
I nod again, kind of rolling my eyes. Of course I saw it. I’m sitting here with a broken arm, aren’t I?
“What was it?”
I can barely move my hands with the healing going on, but I grimace and sign, A god.
“That’s the word I thought, too,” Max says. “Weird. But whose god? And from where?”
He looks at me like I really might have the answers.
Max isn’t my biological brother. Like me, he was born at the tail end of the hard times after the new settlers came, when there were struggles for food and medicine and arguments about the Noise and a whole bunch of bad decisions on all those things before everybody settled in and finally got things up and running.
Not everyone survived. Not every kid got their “real” parents. But family isn’t biology. Or it is, obviously, but only sometimes. Family are the people who look out for you no matter what. Max is family, even if he’s always been a pain in my ass.
“They never heard of such a thing,” Pop says, coming back over to us. “They thought the hole in the trees was caused by one of us. I’m afraid they still mostly think that, but I did show them what you told me.”
“Whatever it was,” Max says, “it looked human. It wasn’t Spackle.”
I wince at his mistake.
“You know I don’t like it when you call them that,” Pop says.
“They don’t mind.”
“It’s not their name. It’s the name humans gave them. And it’s a people and a person’s right to choose what they’re called. Isn’t that right, Max?”
Max blushes.
That’s a nice lesson, I sign, though the sarcasm isn’t as clear as I’d like with my arm still stiff. What about the burning god?
“They’ll ask the Conversayshun,” Pop says. “If anything like this has happened the world over, they’ll find out.”
He helps me up onto Angharrad’s saddle for the ride back.
“We did see it,” Max insists, walking along with us.
“I believe you,” Pop says again. And he does. We can see it in his Noise. “But there’s not one thing about it I can explain. And I don’t like that at all.”