Prologue #4
“Like being out here in the freezing cold looking at a rock,” Taper says.
He turns to go. Tara doesn’t go with him at first, clearly wanting another look through the telescope no matter what she said before, but then she rolls her eyes and follows him.
Arrow stays. So do Ben and I, but Professor Kilfoyle starts putting the telescope away anyway.
“I guess that’s all the learning for tonight, folks,” he says.
I look at Ben with a Go on, ask him look. Ben shakes his head. I give him a stronger look. Ben shakes his head again. So I ask, “What about the gods?”
That stops Professor Kilfoyle. Stops Arrow, too. Both are staring at me now.
“Our farm got burned down by a god,” I said. “Screaming and skinless and on fire.”
They’re both still staring.
“Our parents saw it, too,” I say, a little exasperated. “So did the Sky. No one’s had an answer for it yet.”
“I thought . . .” Professor Kilfoyle shifts his stance, choosing his words. “I thought that was . . .”
They think we started the fire, Ben says with his comm. They think Pop burned it down himself in an accident.
“That’s what Taper said today,” I say, “but that doesn’t make any sense. Mom saw it, and she’s on the science team–”
I stop. Ben looks at the ground.
“Is that the story Mom’s telling people?” I say. “Why? She was there. What the hell, Ben?”
“I don’t think she’s actually telling them your father caused it,” Professor Kilfoyle says, then he takes a deep breath. “Things are a little tough in town, though. Politically.”
“What the eff does politics have to do with anything?”
I don’t say “eff.” In fact, whenever I say “eff” here, assume pretty much for certain that I didn’t say “eff.”
Taper and Tara’s mom, Ben says. Her church is getting bigger. Mom doesn’t want to give her any more reason to go after the Land, so she’s keeping it quiet for now.
“The god wasn’t Land. It was human.”
But it’s something the Land know in their history. That’s reason enough.
“But why would she tell them Pop burnt it down? They already don’t like him here.”
She didn’t. She said it was an accident, but that’s the rumor that got started.
I make a sound of aggravation. “Goddamn, people are stupid.”
“Yes,” Professor Kilfoyle says. “Yes, they are.”
“I saw one, too,” Arrow says, his voice quiet. We all look at him. He looks away, super embarrassed now.
“Saw what?” I ask him.
“A god,” he says after a second.
“Tell us,” I say, because he looks reluctant, but he also looks like he’s dying to tell someone, so we just wait. And then he starts talking.
“You can’t tell anyone else,” is the first thing he says. “My folks are in the Wingard Church. They don’t want to hear anything like this, okay?”
He waits for us to say okay, and then he continues.
Seems he was with his little sister, Echo, down by the river, just outside the city limits on the way to our farm.
I can tell by looking at Arrow’s ragged clothes that he’s got even less than a lot of people who live in the city, and you can make a little money down there by mudlarking: reclaiming bits of metal and poly-alloy that have washed away from all the building the town does and all the wars that were fought.
Arrow tells us he and Echo had just found an old set of hunting rifles, far too old and rusted away to ever be weapons again, but once scrubbed of rust, real iron is a valuable and rare commodity here.
“So we were packing it all away in our bags,” he says, “and I remember the wood of the handles on the rifles–”
“The stocks,” says Professor Kilfoyle. We all look at him. “That’s what they’re called.” We keep looking at him. “Sorry,” he says, and nods for Arrow to continue.
“The wood on the stocks,” he says, “was so old and wet and rotten, it crumbled if we just touched it, but the iron in the rest of it was pretty solid. It was a good find.”
“I’ll bet,” I say, agreeing sincerely.
“And then we heard this sound.”
“A scream?” I ask.
He nods. “The worst scream you ever heard. It wasn’t even all that loud, but it’s like it got right under your stomach and jiggled a knife there.”
This is exactly what it felt like, and probably why Arrow is in upper school and I’m walking around all day eating melons.
“And then this . . . thing–”
“God,” I say.
He nods at that, too.
“When you say ‘god’–” Professor Kilfoyle starts, but is silenced by a look from Ben.
“It was huge,” Arrow says. “Taller than the trees.”
And I know that’s what we keep saying about it, “taller than the trees,” but the trees are the tallest things we have around here, so what else are we going to compare it to?
“And it had no skin but it was on fire, somehow. I think that’s why it was screaming. And it ran at us, me and Echo.”
“What did you do?” I ask him.
“What do think we did? We ran.”
“Ours was coming too fast to run from, and we were trapped by the lake behind us.”
“We were trapped by the river,” Arrow says. “But we had a boat. So we hopped in it and pushed it out into the current.”
Professor Kilfoyle clears his throat. “What happened to the, uh, god?”
“It came after us,” Arrow says. “Or at least it came into the river. Then it fell in and disappeared.”
“Disappeared how?” asks Professor Kilfoyle.
“Just . . . disappeared. The river isn’t that deep. It wouldn’t have even been swept away in a current, but it was like it sunk right down and was just gone.”
Did you see Noise? Ben types.
“Did we see what?”
Noise. When ours disappeared, I saw Noise coming out of the lake and then again in the river with the second one.
But Arrow’s already shaking his head. “We were long gone by then.”
“So,” I say to Ben as we walk back in the dark, down one hill toward another. Ben doesn’t say anything. He’s looking firmly at his feet, even though the glow light is more than enough for us to see where we’re going.
“Ben?”
Arrow’s sister was a non-speaker, he finally signs.
“How do you know that?”
I know every single one in the city.
And this is certainly true. Ben knows more about his lack of speaking voice than probably anyone in the world except maybe Mom, and even then . . . But I also immediately know where he’s going with this. “Ben–”
So who have the gods appeared to?
“Two people isn’t enough information–”
Come on, Max.
I make him stop walking. Arrow and Professor Kilfoyle are already ahead of us, so I let them go.
It’s just me and Ben here, in the dark quiet of the forest. There are dangerous things out here, but this close to the city, the most dangerous thing is probably me and my brother and any germs we might cough, so I’m not too worried.
Though I do keep checking around for gods, just in case.
“Even in your huge example of two, it doesn’t work,” I say. “Echo was with Arrow, I was with you. It’s hardly you personally making gods appear.”
Max–
“It’s probably to do with the Glyph and/or the dreams. Or maybe there really is a disease from the Land making us all see stuff–”
That’s racist.
“Probably. All I’m saying is, we don’t know yet.”
Even he has to see that I’m right about this, yeah? But nope, it’s all over his face he still thinks it’s him personally.
“Is this because you’re not dreaming?” I ask.
He’s immediately defensive. I dream, he signs.
“I don’t think you do. Not the Noise dreams.”
Max, I swear to god–
“Oh, would you please cut the shit, Ben? I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s the way you didn’t immediately say back that you had them when I did, and when Taper mentioned them, you didn’t look embarrassed, like everyone else our age.”
He frowns a little bit, a storm across his face. Don’t tell anyone, he signs.
“Okay,” I say, meaning it, “but why not?”
He looks angry, but not at me, and believe me, I can tell. Why is it only me not having them? he signs. What’s wrong with me?
“Trust me, Ben, you don’t want them.”
That’s not the point.
“No, I guess it isn’t, but you gotta think it’s because of your . . . condition.”
He doesn’t like that word. Who would? Just another way for me to be left out, he signs.
“How are you left out? You’re in upper school. You can communicate with anyone–”
You wouldn’t understand.
“I wouldn’t? I wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be different? Or have to find a new way to connect to the world because the way I was born wasn’t a way the world could understand me?”
He just looks down. I feel kinda bad. “Look, we’ll ask Mom,” I say. “I know you like asking her everything anyway, so we’ll ask her. Not about the dreams, but about you and Echo, okay? Happy?”
When have I ever been happy? he signs, and it seems like a real question.
My poor miserable dickhead brother.
···
“Echo Goings?” Mom asks, not wildly happy that we woke her up, which in retrospect was probably a mistake.
“Yeah,” I say. “Arrow Goings’s little sister.”
She takes out her pad, opens things, and scrolls a bunch with her fingers. “You’re right,” she reads, “she didn’t speak until neurotherapy.”
“Yeah, we know,” I say, “that was kind of the whole point of the story.”
But she’s still reading. “Her batch was different though.” She glances up. “She’s young, right?”
I shrug and look at Ben. I barely know Arrow, but Ben’s been in occasional classes with him for a long time.
She’s like seven or eight, Ben signs.
“Right,” Mom says, looking back at her pad. “And she’s the only non-speaker in that batch.” She flips through a few more things. “And it’s because she had a birth defect in her vocal cords that the neurotreatment fixed.” She looks up at us again. “It was unrelated to the cure.”
Huh. “So what does that mean?” I ask.
She glances at Ben. “That these things appearing is not related to the cure or any of its side effects.” Ben doesn’t seem too sure. “I’d like to talk to them anyway,” Mom says.
“Arrow told us it in private,” I say. “I don’t think he wants people to know.”
“If we’re in danger from these god visions, then that outweighs his embarrassment, I should think.”