Blue Window Read online

  Nell looked around. “What is this?” she asked. “Looks like somebody poisoned it.”

  “All of it?” Susan asked, and pointed up the mountain. The sun was high in the sky now, and it sent stripes of light through the trees. Beneath them, the bald dirt stretched out to the horizon.

  “I guess we took a wrong turn,” Nell said.

  Max had hoped to find the orchard again, behind the ruined house. Before they’d been taken, they’d meant to go west, back the way they’d come. Instead, they’d run eastward, into this strange wasteland. Overhead, the trees were full of chirping birds and the chipped-wood voices of squirrels, but below, nothing lived: no deer, no foxes, no rabbits, no green.

  But that was a clue, wasn’t it? Somebody had done something here, or how could trees grow when grass wouldn’t? He wondered if that meant that as long as they were in this sproutless wood, the dogs would be right behind them. Probably. Well, then job one was obviously to get out of this forest.

  It was easier in theory than in practice. They walked all morning, and still the naked ground persisted. Worse, they hadn’t found a single thing to eat or drink. Max tried climbing a tree to taste the leaves, but all that did was make him spit green.

  “Can we eat acorns?” Jean asked him. “Like the squirrels?”

  He’d have liked to test that out, but the few fallen acorns he’d spotted were shriveled husks in the strange dirt, and the ones in the branches were so high that even with Nell standing on his shoulders, they couldn’t reach any.

  Soon it was water they were most desperate for. The bitterness of the wood hung in the air, seeping into their pores and coating their tongues. Max thought his head couldn’t get any heavier, but by the afternoon, he decided that it, too, was filled with uranium. And to his horror, when the birds quieted, he could still hear the faint sound of barking, far below.

  Jean slapped at a mosquito and smeared a bright streak of blood across her sweaty cheek.

  “Mosquitoes are about the only thing eating anything out here,” Nell said, disgusted.

  Ahead, another shallow cave yawned from the dead ground, and she dropped to her knees to crawl inside and collapse in the cool shadows.

  “Nell, get up! They have dogs!” Kate said in alarm.

  Nell pressed a hand to her forehead. “All they’ll find is a dried-up raisin of me if I don’t take a rest,” she said. “I’m starting to see double. And my stomach doesn’t feel too good, either.”

  Max felt the same way. Heat and exhaustion had ground down even the desperate fear that had rapped in his chest all day. His tongue was like a weight in his mouth. A weight covered in fur.

  Susan sank to her knees, then dragged herself into the shade. “Later, we’ll keep walking,” she said, sounding as weak as he felt. “And we’ll find something to eat, too. And drink.”

  “Is that a theory or a prediction based on facts?” he asked her.

  “Oh, brother, Max!”

  They piled into the tight space and dozed fitfully until afternoon, when a breeze sprang up, carrying with it the bitter half-burned smell that clung to the dirt. They struggled to their feet and continued walking. For the moment, the dogs were out of earshot, but Max wondered how long that would last.

  His head was throbbing by the time a brief cloudburst gave them some relief. They tried to drink from the pools that formed at the base of tree roots, but the water burned their throats and made them retch.

  “It’s like drinking seawater!” Nell said, spitting.

  They sampled the water that gathered in the crevices of rocks and clung to the few leaves they could reach. This, at least, was sweet, so they moved from tree to stone, searching out the moisture, until their heads cleared.

  Unfortunately, quenching their thirst only seemed to sharpen the edge of the hunger.

  “They salted the dirt,” Max said to Susan. “That’s my latest theory, anyway. What I don’t get is how the trees survive it.”

  “Your latest theory?” Susan asked him. “There were others?”

  He chose to ignore her doubting tone.

  “Well . . . there will be.” His eye roved the rising line of the wood. “There’s got to be something to eat somewhere.”

  “Is that a theory or a prediction based on facts?”

  He ignored that, too.

  By dusk they’d found nothing. The woods stretched endlessly ahead of them. They had no choice but to rest again, and this time there was no cave, so as night fell, they sprawled around a pair of birches, listening fearfully for the dogs and staring up through bony branches at the waxing moon.

  “We came when it was half,” Susan said. “It’s been days now. How did any of this happen?”

  Max sniffed. A whiff of vinegar was in the air.

  Nell wrinkled her nose at it. “Nothing’s right here,” she said. “This dirt’s the least of it. I thought Liyla was strange, but she was nothing compared to the Genius, the wind . . .”

  Her voice faded, and she sighed and lay down, trying to find a comfortable position.

  Max didn’t even try. He just sat there, his back against the tree, listening for the dogs. Would they keep searching at night? If he fell asleep, would he wake with teeth at his neck? He wished the five of them could keep running until the dogs were lost behind them, until they were so far away no one would ever find them, ever —

  “Max?”

  It was Jean, who’d crawled over from Nell’s blanket.

  “Go to sleep, Jean. It’s okay. I’m watching.”

  “I can’t sleep. I’m too hungry.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’re going to figure it out, right? You’ll find us food tomorrow?”

  I can’t wanted to come out of his mouth. Don’t ask me. But he pressed the words back behind closed lips.

  “Max?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You will, right?”

  A theory would have been comforting, but he couldn’t even make a realistic prediction. All he could offer was a promise, and what was that based on? Wishing.

  He listened to her waiting.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I will.”

  For reasons that had always eluded Max, from the time Jean was Jean, she’d decided he was going to be her favorite. Max usually prized logic, but in this one thing, in Jean’s dogged devotion, he was sheepishly grateful to accept serendipity. He’d always considered it a kind of miracle that this one little sister, who loved her ridiculous Barbies and who spent hours playing a game she’d devised called “dress for a party” with Kate, had in her own inscrutable way fashioned herself into the brother he’d always wanted. Here he was, the odd man out, the only boy in a family of girls and the one who, at least compared to Susan, made the most trouble, and behind him came Jean, climbing bookcases and deconstructing things just as he had, even if what she deconstructed — some of the time — were shoes and dresses. But she was as interested as he’d always been in the physics of flushing a toothbrush down the toilet, or whether a basketball could make it through the laundry chute. So they had an affinity for each other. One of Max’s secret fears was that one day she’d wake up, turn pure girl, and leave him behind. But for now, to his private amazement and joy, she stuck to him like glue.

  So he ignored the hammering in his chest and pushed away thoughts of dogs and the tiled room and that woman, Ker, rolling the metal table his way.

  It shouldn’t matter that I’m scared, he told himself. I should be able to think. He could do it at home. Even when guys like Ivan and Mo called him Einstein and egghead and waited in the hall to push him around, punishing him for offering his thoughts on experiments in science or suggesting that there was a faster way to do a problem in math, he kept on speaking up. Once, Ivan had slammed him into a bank of lockers while Mo asked him what the circumference of his head was compared to the toilet, and that hadn’t stopped him from raising his hand half an hour later, back in math, as the two of them glared at him and muttered threats.
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br />   He told himself all this, trying to force his head into gear.

  Only now, when everything depended on his finding the answers, his mind slid away from him, and there was nothing. It galled him.

  Beside him Jean sighed in her sleep. He had promised he would figure it out. And yet all he had were the strange pieces Nell had listed: the tiled room, the rally, and Liyla. Had her face really changed, that first time they saw her? None of it made any sense. A lump rose in his throat.

  He wouldn’t sleep. He’d stay up until he figured it out. And if he couldn’t figure it out, at least he’d keep watch. He’d keep one promise, anyway.

  But even that, in the end, he couldn’t do, and at last even worry, even sadness, fell away, and sleep settled over him. The ache in his bones slipped from him, the throbbing in his hand was forgotten, and he slid into the silent place where the mind wanders, lifting images and turning them over like bright pennies and autumn leaves. . . .

  He saw the market square. The Genius stood waving and shouting, making the buildings shimmer. A wind blew. It rose from the barren ground and tossed all the people away as their faces shifted from smooth to rough and back again.

  Max jerked awake.

  Jean lay curled against him like a baby; a foot away, Nell rested on a hump where the tree roots lifted from the earth. Kate had rolled herself so tightly in Nell’s blanket that the only visible part of her was a gush of loopy hair. He looked for Susan and found her slumped against the other birch, the lines in its bark like a hundred small wounds, black in the moonlight. She dozed with her head tipped to one side.

  “Susan!” he whispered.

  Her head twitched. She blinked. “What?”

  “Remember what Omet said, about rally change?”

  “Rally change,” she said sleepily.

  He watched her head start to tip, and reached over to poke her, trying not to wake Jean.

  “Remember the Genius? Remember how the buildings looked? That was what she meant! Rally change. People turning smooth. You saw it, right? Just like Liyla seemed so different when we first saw her!”

  Until it clicked into place beside his memory of the rally, Max had nearly forgotten the moment when they’d first seen Liyla.

  Susan didn’t answer right away, but Nell lifted her head from the root. “Yeah!” she said. “She did look different for a minute — normal.”

  Susan straightened. She was awake now. “I thought I was going nuts. But we all saw it!”

  “I didn’t think it was real,” Max said. “You know, maybe a group hallucination or something. The rally, too. But that wind — that wind was real! And the busted straps! Do you think maybe all of it was real? Maybe you can do that here!”

  Nell propped herself up on one elbow, and he could see her frown in the moonlight. “Susan, what exactly did you do?”

  “Nothing!” Susan said. “Not on purpose, anyway. I just was so scared. I could see the straps, and I wanted to get out.”

  She pressed her head back against the tree trunk and studied the long ugly cut the woman had made on her inner arm. It had begun to scab, and Max saw her scratch carefully around the edges of it. In the pearly light, it looked as if someone had drawn a black line down her arm in marker or paint. He shuddered, thinking of the truth.

  “I guess I imagined I was out, and then I was,” Susan said.

  Max’s head throbbed again. So much of this place looked the same as home: same trees, same sky . . . No, not the same sky, exactly. But close. Maybe the sameness had misled him. This wasn’t home. The rules were different here. . . .

  “Do you think you can just imagine something and it happens?” he asked.

  The word imagine sounded flimsy as daydreams. It had no relation to that awful tiled room. At least it didn’t feel like it should. But then, he hadn’t been the one who’d done it. Susan had.

  “What were you thinking right when it happened?” he asked her. “Just that second? Do you know that? Can you remember that?”

  She grimaced and wrapped both arms around her legs, hunching over to rest her chin on her knees.

  “I was thinking the exact same thing you were! I wanted to get out of there. Who wouldn’t?”

  A cloud crossed the moon, and the wood darkened.

  “But you yourself told us you did it,” Max said. “So how? What did it feel like?”

  He could see only the shape of her shoulders now, where they stood out from the silhouette of the tree. But he could see when she shrugged.

  “The strangest pumping through my arms and legs, like something had to get out. Like I was going to burst into flame.”

  “And you couldn’t have touched anything. . . .”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “We’re going to have to go over it again, step-by-step. I know we can figure it out.”

  Nell rolled onto her stomach to face Susan. “Maybe you’re more afraid of needles than the rest of us. Could that be it?”

  Susan’s voice was frosty. “She came at me with a knife, Nell!”

  “I know, I know! I’m just saying . . .”

  Susan sighed. “You just keep saying, I know. And now Kate and Jean are looking at me like I can just blow us home from here! Don’t you think I would if I could? It’s something that happened to me, Nell. I didn’t do anything! I’m starting to wish I’d never said it was me. Maybe it wasn’t.”

  Max knew that wasn’t true. Susan had been out of her chair first.

  “Just because something happened to you doesn’t mean you can’t figure it out,” he told her. “You know what it felt like!”

  For a moment, there was only silence. Then the moon drifted back into sight, and in the sudden illumination, he could see Susan shaking her head.

  “Don’t you hear how crazy you sound? That’s like saying if someone gets sick, he ought to cure himself. That’s what doctors are for!”

  Nell huffed softly in annoyance. “And this place is so full of doctors,” she said. “Besides that Frankenstein lady, I mean.”

  “Don’t be so literal, Nell,” Susan snapped.

  “Don’t be so stupid, then.”

  They were off after that, and when the sniping was over, Susan lay down and refused to say another word. Max felt like yelling at both of them, but especially at Susan. Why did she have to be so stubborn? She was so smart, except when it came to believing she could figure things out. Then it was all too big, too impossible, illogical, unrealistic. She reminded him of one of those roly-poly bugs back home that crawled along at a clip until somebody poked it. Then it would curl up into a little gray ball of nothing.

  When Susan got like this, she didn’t think anyone could figure anything out. As far as she was concerned, they were all little gray balls of nothing.

  The next morning, she was no better. Jean made the mistake of wondering if Susan, who had made the wind blow, could make it rain, too.

  “Of course not!” Susan snapped. “Can you?”

  She blamed that on Max.

  “You’ve got everybody thinking I can fix this,” she complained. “I can’t!” She kicked at the dirt in disgust. “Even the ground hates me here. I can feel it.”

  Were there stages in losing it? Stage one, denial; stage two, anger; stage three, paranoia so bad you suspected the dirt.

  “Maybe you’re getting delirious,” he said.

  “Criminations! I’m not delirious!” she yelled. “I’m hungry! My head hurts! And I want to get out of here as much as anybody. I just don’t think pretending we can figure this out is going to get us anywhere. We’ve got to find somebody who can help us!”

  Back to anger, then. When Susan started hurling unusual curses, Max knew things were bad.

  He sighed and watched her march up the mountain fuming. Jean, following her, turned and shot him a pleading look. But for that, too, he had no answer. He thought of the tiled room, and of Susan standing there, and the wind blowing from nowhere. Susan had done it; she’d said so herself. If he’d bee
n the one, he would have figured it out by now. He wouldn’t waste a second being mad. He would be thinking. But not Susan.

  She preferred to turn gray and roll into a little ball.

  The price of banishment was madness. So it had been, now, for years. If the exile’s penalty had long been delayed, it had come due at last, for now the night swarmed with half glimpses of children — a nearly grown boy lost in shadow, a small dark-haired girl running beneath old trees. Perhaps madness approached this way, slowly, out of dreams that reawakened old yearnings. Flaunted each night was the future that might have been, the loss that had come with disobedience. With it came torment that clouded the mind and threatened to swamp it. For in dreams lived hope. And each morning came the dawn, to crush it anew.

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, mathematician, philosopher, moralist, and possible inventor of calculus, was, according to Max, solid proof that you didn’t have to be old to know things. Leibniz had mastered Latin by the time he was twelve, finished college by sixteen, and written his first book of philosophy by age twenty.

  Max had spent a night last fall telling the family about Leibniz’s feats after trying to use the philosopher as his mystery person in a game of twenty questions. He’d stumped everybody, of course, but the girls had cried foul.

  “Gottfried Leibniz?” Susan demanded. “Who ever heard of him?”

  Max had said he didn’t see what the problem was. Susan was always coming up with obscure people like Euripides or Charlotte Brontë when it was her turn.

  “I’ll take a turn,” Kate had volunteered. Kate had the annoying habit of trying to be helpful when people got mad.

  “Clara Barton,” Nell snapped at her.

  “How did you know?”

  “You always choose Clara Barton.”

  Max didn’t care. He liked Leibniz. If you don’t know something, ask questions, why don’t you? If nobody has the answer, then go invent one. That was Leibniz.

  Max had been a little boy when he’d first realized that knowing things made all the difference. His ears had been clogged, and as a result the world was a garbled mess. Unable to understand what people wanted of him, not knowing any of the rules, he’d spent the months before they were cleared confused and getting into trouble. That feeling of not knowing had made him want to jump out of his skin.