Chapter 6
“Remember when Kilfoyle told us to keep looking for the Glyph at night?” she says. “And he gave us those cheap handheld telescopes that broke if you coughed too loud?”
Yeah, I type.
“I snuck out at night because I wanted to see if I actually could find it myself, you know? This huge important thing no one’s talking about enough. Taper didn’t want to come with me, because he’s lazy and annoying.” She looks up at me. “Which I can say but you can’t.”
I nod. I understand this completely.
“So I go back to the hill where Kilfoyle took us. I do the calculations on the pad, and it gives me the point in the sky to look at. And I’m just up there on that hill, by myself, middle of the night, feeling cold and stupid.” Her face gets grim. “And then I heard this scream.”
I know the scream, I type.
“It’s awful, isn’t it? As awful as anything in the Noise dreams. And for a minute, I think I’m having one of those dreams, that I’ve nodded off and fallen into a nightmare.”
She kicks a stick from the boardwalk into the river. We watch as it bobs a few times in the roiling water, then it’s swept away, out of our sight.
“But I hadn’t. It was real. I’d heard Max’s story. I could guess what it was.”
She starts walking back down the boardwalk. I walk along with her.
“Then I see a light in the woods. Not close to me, down from the hill I was on, but it was like someone had flipped a switch.”
The god was on fire.
She nods. “And it comes rising out of the trees. And it’s just screaming, like it’s in unbelievable pain, and you know, like, no wonder, because it’s on fire and it has no skin. And I can’t run. I can’t hide any more than the darkness already hides me. If it comes for me, what am I gonna do?”
We’re heading toward a bend in the river. I thought she’d slow down, but she picks up her step.
When was this? I type.
“Last night,” she says.
Shit, I type. They’re back.
“It didn’t come for me, though, Ben. Yours and Arrow’s came right for you, you said.”
Yeah, but it’s impossible to know what the gods are thinking.
“It’s sacrilege to call them gods, you know.”
You just called it one, too.
“My point is,” she says, walking a little faster so I have to hurry to keep up, “I was able to watch it without having to run for my life. It just went through the woods, screaming and setting trees on fire–though there wasn’t any big fire reported this morning, so maybe I’m wrong about that.”
The Land don’t let forest fires burn. They stop them as fast as they can.
She looks surprised at this, a new fact to add to whatever lies about the Land she’s been told by her mother. “It walked . . .” she continues as we round the bend in the river. The boardwalk turns–
And stops suddenly, the wood all broken away, as if something huge burst through it on its way to the river.
“Until it got here and threw itself in the river.” She shakes her head, looking at the broken boardwalk. “I needed to see I wasn’t dreaming it.” She looks at me. “And I needed someone to see it with me.”
I believe you, I type. I believed you without you having to prove it.
“I needed to prove it to myself.” She gets a particular look on her face, like she’s about to ask me something.
You want to find where it came from, I type.
She looks surprised, then pleased. “Yeah,” she says. “Yes, I do. I don’t think you or Arrow know where your gods exactly appeared, right?”
I nod. Ours just came out of the woods from who knows where. We looked and found trails that just petered out in rocks and open fields. No sign of a source.
“I know exactly where this one started,” she says. “Will you come look with me?”