CHAPTER 4 — EXPEDITION

The bikes only went as far as the logging road. After that the forest closed up, and they walked.

Mina led, because Mina had the coordinates and the certainty, and Kai followed, because Kai had agreed to follow the moment he set the vial on her desk. He carried the heavier bag. He had not been asked to. He had taken it off her shoulder at the trailhead and put it on his own and said nothing about it, which was the most Kai thing he could have done.

She was not a forest person. She wanted that on the record, at least to herself. She liked rooms with the variables shut out, problems that held still while she worked them. Out here everything moved and nothing labeled itself and the ground kept trying to take her ankle. But the warm point had sat on her map for five days and would not resolve into anything she knew, and Mina Patel could not live in the same world as a thing she could not explain. So she walked.

The signal was a mile in. Maybe more. Her handheld, a thing she had built out of a dead tablet and a radio board and a great deal of stubbornness, ticked warmer the deeper they went.

She noticed the quiet before Kai did, because noticing was her whole job.

It came on gradually. First the birds thinned, then the insects, and by the time they were half a mile past the road the forest had the stillness of a room someone has just walked out of. The only steady sounds were their own feet in the leaf litter and Kai's thumb working the disc magnet against the buckle of the bag strap. Peel and press. Peel and press.

"You hear that," she said.

"Hear what."

"Nothing. That's the point."

Kai stopped. Listened. She watched him get it, watched the easy set of his shoulders go careful. "Okay," he said. "That's weird."

The gold started a little after that.

She saw it first on a fern, a dusting of fine bright flecks along the edge of a frond, catching the light like pollen except no pollen she knew was that color, or held that still when she breathed on it. Then more of it. On the bark. In the cracks of a fallen log. Worked down into the soil in faint glowing threads, brighter the deeper they went, all of it running the same direction, like iron filings lining up along a field.

Kai crouched and touched a patch of it on a root. It did not smear. It did not come off on his finger. It glowed up at him from inside the wood.

"Mina."

"I see it."

"No, but Mina." He looked up, and his face had the thing in it she only saw when a problem stopped being a problem and started being a wonder. "It's all going one way. It's pointing."

"Then we follow it."

"That's what I'm saying."

"That's what I said."

He grinned, briefly, and they went on, and the grin did not last, because the gold got brighter and the quiet got deeper and the two of those things together did not feel like a wonder anymore. They felt like a held breath that belonged to something else.

They came to the gray the way you come to the edge of a hole in the dark. One more ordinary step, and then the ground is wrong.

The trail of gold brightened, brightened, and at the lip of a clearing neither of them had known was there, it stopped. It stopped at a patch of gray.

Mina's hand came up on its own, and Kai walked into it, that was how completely the gray wrong-footed them. A circle of ground maybe a yard across where the clover and the grass had gone the color of ash and lay folded shut. Everything around it was summer. The patch was a photograph of summer left out in the rain until the color ran out of it.

Her handheld, which had climbed warmer for a mile, dropped. Hard. Right at the edge of the gray it gave her a reading that was not cold, exactly. It was nothing. A hole where a number should be.

"This is it," she said. "The second point. The cold one. This is what I saw."

Kai had crouched at the edge of the gray, not touching. In the middle of the dead patch lay a moth. Or what had been a moth. The wings were whole, perfect, every detail held, and entirely without color. A paper husk in the shape of a living thing, light enough that the small movement of his breath shifted it.

"It's not crushed," he said quietly. "It's not even broken. It's just." He did not have the word.

"Empty," Mina said.

"Yeah."

Kai took the vial out of his bag. His hands were not quite steady, which she noticed, because she noticed everything, and did not mention, because some things you do not mention. He used a twig to tip a pinch of the gray soil into the glass, and then, after a moment, the moth with it, gentle, as if it could still feel being moved. He capped it. He did not make a joke. That was how she knew he was as scared as she was.

That was when the handheld screamed.

Not a real scream. A burst of static so loud out of the dead quiet that they both flinched, and the screen filled with the garbage a screen shows when it has stopped understanding what it is being asked to read. The gray patch, for one second, seemed to deepen, the ash going darker, a cold coming up off it like the draft off a freezer door left open too long.

Kai's hand closed on her sleeve. Not to pull her. Just to know where she was.

Then it stopped. The screen cleared. The patch was a dead patch again, and the forest was only quiet again, and Mina noticed she had stopped breathing and made herself start.

"We should not be here," Kai said. He did not move toward leaving.

"No," she agreed. She did not either.

She looked up, past the gray, to see where the gold had been so determined to take them.

✦ ✦ ✦

Inside the dome, Zaro felt them before he heard them.

He had spent the day on the floor by the window, gathering himself back a shade at a time, the way a cup refills under a slow tap. The siege had cost him more than he had known he carried. The gray patch sat out past the boundary where he had left it, because he could not fix it and could not look at it, and he had spent the day trying not to look at it, and failing.

Then something changed in the clearing.

Not the dark. The dark had not come back. This was the opposite of the dark. Two warm shapes at the tree line, where the gray patch was. Warmth that breathed. Warmth that made sound. Living things, bigger than the deer, upright, coming closer with the particular slowness of things that are afraid and coming anyway.

Zaro got to his feet. His light was still low. His hands, when he looked at them, were the color of late afternoon, not noon.

He had no words for what they were. Not people, not kids, not found. He had only the two feelings that arrived together and would not sort themselves out. The cold drop of something new at the edge of his safe place. And under it, so sudden it frightened him more than the dark had, a wanting. A pull toward the warmth. A hope shaped exactly like the thing he was afraid of.

"Okay," he whispered. His voice shook. "Okay. It's okay."

He did not believe it. He went to the door anyway.

✦ ✦ ✦

Past the gray patch, the trees opened, and Mina saw a clearing that was on none of her maps, and she had memorized her maps.

A cabin stood in the middle of it. Small and old, and somehow not derelict, its one good window catching the afternoon. A tree grew beside it that was wrong in a way she could not name until she could: it was too big. Too big for how young the bark was. The trunk was thick and the leaves were a green that did not seem to stop at the surface, and nothing in the forest behind her grew anything close to it.

Kai came up beside her, breathing hard, and went still.

"Mina," he said.

This time there was no wonder in it.

Because something was standing in the doorway of the cabin.

Small. No taller than a child. Round and soft, lit from the inside the way nothing alive is supposed to be, a warm amber-gold that dimmed and brightened with what might have been breathing. It had two dark eyes, and it was looking at them, and it was as afraid of them as they were of it.

Nobody moved.

In Kai's hand, sealed in the glass, the drained moth weighed nothing at all.