Chapter 2
“I miss your dad,” Mom says over dinner that night, and it seems like it’s out of nowhere, but of course it isn’t. They’ve been gone for days, Max has been hurt, they’ve found Granddad. But I guess I must be grouchy because I sign, You’re the one who moved out.
She looks at me. “Can you at least pretend, once in a while, that there’s a subject you don’t think you know every single thing about?”
I don’t do that.
Though I think I may totally do that.
“We’ve got an incoming Glyph,” she says. “We’ve got Margery Wingard preaching about an infection that’s actually real but doesn’t do any of the things she’s saying. We’ve got all you kids having terrible dreams.”
I look down at that.
She just sighs. “You remember I told you about my friend Bradley?”
Yeah, I sign. He was a friend of my mom’s from way back to the settler ship she came here on where her parents were caretakers alongside him. He died in a flu epidemic before I was born, but she kept his picture up in our house.
“He always told me, do the next right thing. You don’t have to know the whole answer, just do the next thing that’s right to do, no matter how small, and it’ll lead you to the right place.
” She sighs. “Right now, I don’t even know what the next little right thing is.
Do you have any idea how frustrated that makes me? ”
I can’t talk in a world full of talking people. I know what frustration is.
“Yeah, okay, you’ve got a point there. But look,” she says, “I act. That’s who I am. I do things. Your father does, too. That’s why we work together. That’s how we . . .”
Saved the world? I say when she doesn’t continue.
“Yeah,” she says, like it was no big deal. “But something’s coming. I’m doing all the action I can, but it’s up there or it’s in your heads or it disappears in fire and water. I can’t act on it. I can’t do anything about it.” She clenches her teeth. “It’s driving me kinda crazy.”
Pop is acting, I say, a little grudgingly. Why didn’t you go? Why didn’t we all go?
She looks me in the eye. “You don’t think I wanted to?”
Then why didn’t you?
“Because there are things I want even more than that.”
What things?
She cocks her head, surprised I’m not getting it. “Did you not see who got eaten in that story by the Sky?”
Yeah, it was all the teens and kids.
“All except one.”
The boy with the artificial leg. He got left behind.
She’s still looking at me.
Oh.
You think I’m him. The one who gets left. I’m kinda pissed at that. Because I don’t speak?
She doesn’t want to say yes, but I can see it on her face. Besides, it’s not as if I haven’t thought the same thing myself.
Well, look, even if that’s true, what does it mean? If I get left behind, Max still gets eaten by the god. So does everyone else.
“I don’t know what it means,” she says, teary-eyed. “Or how to stop it. But maybe you’re the key, Ben. Maybe you’re the one who can.”
And I have no idea at all how I feel about that.