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“Sayra?” said Elias. “But what is it? Looks so strange.”

Linny tried even harder to look: there were at least two silky rosebuds swimming before her eyes now. And when she made a heroic effort to bring the images together, the blossom still looked like something made of rose-colored smoke, transparent and insubstantial.

“Give it back,” said Linny, closing her blurry-sick eyes. “Sayra gave it to me for my birthday, and then I gave it to her, to the shell of her, I mean, in her own room in Lourka, and then when I found her . . .
almost
found her . . . in Away, she kind of gave it to me again somehow . . . and I feel all spinny, Elias, like I’m about to fall off the world—”

“Lie quiet,” said Elias. She felt him tucking the soft almost-nothing something back into her palm, and then she was dozing again.

When she opened her eyes the next time, she felt a bit better. She opened her hand and looked again, and the smoky-delicate rosebud unfolded itself for her, like a breath of magic in her palm. Sayra must have held on to that silky bud so hard that it had ended up in Away with her—but the hours it had spent in that impossible place had changed it. She tucked it safely back into the sash, itself deep in her pocket, and turned her head to
see what Elias was up to.

He was scrabbling over to the left, messing with twigs and dry grass.

“What’re you doing?” she asked.

“Making some supper,” said Elias. “Doesn’t look like you’re ready to walk home just yet.”

“You can do that? Make a fire? Cook?”

“’Course I can. You can’t?”

Linny shook her head and winced. Elias was striking sparks off his flint, and then he knelt down and blew carefully on that little flame. She hadn’t ever seen that expression on his face, that quiet concentration—it looked like her father’s face, when he was polishing an especially nice piece of wood.

“Ma says you’re not a full grown-up adult until you can feed yourself and at least six other people,” said Elias. He even almost smiled for a moment, as he fed twigs to the flame. “Number not chosen randomly! She has all of us taking turns on meals. Seven of us, so my day’s Wednesday. I’m good at it, too.”

The baby fire was crackling now for real. Elias went back to rummaging around in Linny’s bundles, sorting out the edibles.

“If you don’t mind me asking, Linny, why are you lugging a cookpot around, if you can’t cook? To whack people with?”

She would usually have flared up at that, but she couldn’t get the energy together, somehow.

It was a reasonable question, too. All that stuff in her bundles—what was the point of it, really? It was useless, maybe, like Linny herself. Making wicked instruments that brought doom down on the people she loved most. Not getting lost, except that here she was now, as good as lost. And what was the point of always knowing where you were, anyway, if you couldn’t find a way to find and save your best friend, really and truly lost somewhere beyond the edge of the world?

What would be left of Sayra, after spending so much time in Away?

“You all right?” said Elias.

She must have made a pathetic little noise, right out loud. That made her mad enough that she pushed herself up from the ground and heaved her body into a semi-sitting position against the nearest tree. She had to pant for a minute or so after that, just to clear her head again, but the world made a lot more sense from this perspective. She could feel the contour of the hill underneath her. To one side, through the trees, she could see a wedge of far ridgeline.

“Oh!” she said. “How’d we get down
here
?”

“The hills spat us out, remember?” said Elias. “Something like that.”

“It’s so far from the ridge,” said Linny. “I don’t remember doing that much walking.”

It was way past the boundary trees. That was one thing.

“Naw. I told you. We got spat out. It was pretty weird. And I had to lug you
and
all your things.”

“Oh.”

That wasn’t such a nice thought, having been lugged about by Elias. She tried to put it out of her head.

“You got water from a creek over there,” said Linny. “Did you taste it? Is it ours?”

“Have some. You should be drinking water anyway, so you mend. That’s what Ma always says.”

He dug a bowl out of one of the bundles and gave Linny some water to sip. It was cold, with a sweet hint of pennyroyal and, beneath that, a whiff of buttered toast. The wrinkled creeks each favored certain flavors over others, though sometimes they experimented.

“Mostly ours,” said Linny, recognizing the toast. “But some other creek’s joined it, I guess. We must be pretty far below the village now. Past the boundary trees, for sure.”

“You’ll get us back, though, right? Bonked heads need rest, says Ma, but tomorrow you’ll be walking better. Finish that water.”

How had he done that? The cookpot was already
bubbling. Something was beginning to smell amazingly like soup. It actually made Linny’s stomach forget all about how sick it had just been feeling. Fickle stomach. It rumbled.

“I’m not actually going back home right now,” said Linny.

Elias curled his lip in disgust. He was definitely still a lummox, then, after all.

“Running away?” he said. “That’s pretty stupid. That’s what little kids do when they’re mad about something.”

“I’m not the stupid one,” said Linny, with as much dignity as her grogginess would allow. “I have something important to do. I have to go down to the Broken City.”

“You mean the place they call Bend? Down all the way to the edge of the Plain? That’s a good one. Have some soup. It’s pretty basic, but it’s warm.”

He didn’t believe a word she was saying, Linny could tell. But he poured some of his miraculous soup into her bowl, and for a few minutes, anyway, she had to forgive him.

Then she said, “I’m going to the city to find medicine for Sayra. My mother says in the Plain they would cure her there with medicines. That gave me the idea.”

That had Elias surprised. She could see him recalculating all sorts of things he was thinking.

“You’re going to Bend
on your own
?” said Elias slowly.
“That’s very far away. And you can’t make fires or cook or anything, you said so yourself. It’s a crazy idea.”

“Sayra’s my almost-twin,” said Linny. “The Voices should have come for me, not her. You know that. I have to make things right. I promised her I’d save her. So now I have to.”

“Hmm,” said Elias.

He was letting the fire burn itself out now. The sky was getting dark around them already. How could a whole day have passed since their disastrous trip up to the edge of Away? Though it also felt like a million years ago.

“Go to sleep,” said Elias. “Tomorrow you’ll have changed your mind, probably. Besides—oh, never mind.”

“Never mind what?”

“I promised her, too,” said Elias, looking away, and the fire hissed as he dumped creek water on it. They both knew about being careful with fires, when you’re out in the woods.

Linny was glad of the dark; she could roll her eyes without Elias, that lovesick lummox, having the faintest clue.

Because really. Honestly. Who did he think he was?

Everywhere all around, the trees were already dipping those points of theirs into a sea of bright stars. Elias rolled himself into a ball and fell immediately asleep, like one of the puppies that always seemed to be dozing in the
corners of kind Molleen’s crowded house.

Maybe she would just have to sneak off on her own the next morning. That’s what she thought, all drowsy-like, and when another part of her brain remembered the boundary trees, and where they were, and how maybe Elias wouldn’t be able to find his way home again, her thoughts muddled themselves up until in fact she wasn’t thinking at all.

A mere moment later, however, or so it seemed, her eyes were flying open, her heart hammering like a woodpecker. Morning had rinsed the stars away, and somebody had just given a wild, frightened shout, not very far off. Down the slope that way, it sounded like: nearer to the creek.

“What’s that? What’s that?” she said in alarm, turning to poke Elias awake.

But the patch of ground where Elias had been sleeping was now only pine needles and brown earth. Elias himself was gone.

That shout—Elias’s shout?—lingered in the air.

She sprang to her feet, felt for the whittling knife in her pocket, and was halfway to the creek—slithering from tree to tree—before she even noticed that her head seemed to be feeling like itself again. Thank goodness! Sneaking through forests is hard without a clear and unspinning head.

Linny knew how to move through the woods without
making a racket, that was true. You couldn’t do as much sneaking around as Linny had done all her life and not learn how to avoid breaking twigs. She was careful to stay in the fringe of the forest and on the near side of the creek, keeping her eyes and ears open and slipping from tree to tree. She hadn’t gone too far when there was another bout of commotion ahead—a couple of quick shouts, and a protesting sound, and sounds that Linny could not make sense of at this distance. She scrambled through the trees as fast as she could go, her heart pounding, and as soon as she was over the next little rise of rocks, she saw a knot of people on the opposite bank. She counted them quickly: five, all in identical gray clothing without the slightest flash of color in it. Why a bunch of grown-ups would want to dress in exactly the same uninteresting, ugly clothing, Linny could not even guess.

But it wasn’t the blandness of these people in gray that troubled her most. It was the way they stood in an anxious, slump-shouldered circle around something, arguing among themselves and coughing and moving angry, nervous hands in the air. Linny crawled up to the back of a conveniently placed bush and listened as hard as she could, but she still couldn’t make out all the details of their speech. They were calling one another fools and idiots and other, even ruder words. Before Linny could figure out what they were saying to each other, one of
them had moved off (angrily) to the side, and for the first time she got a clear look at the thing they were gathered so intently around. That thing was poor Elias. One of the gray people must have knocked him down, and he was on his knees, holding himself off the ground with one trembling hand and rubbing his head with the other.

“Told you there was a
madji
brat sneaking around,” said one of the gray men, wiping sweat from his forehead. He spat out that word, “madji,” as if it were some vile curse. His voice was hoarse and rough, and in between words he took desperate gasping gulps of air.

They all looked sick, Linny thought. They looked cranky and wobbly and like people at the end of their ropes. But that didn’t make them less dangerous. Sick animals are worse than well ones—Linny knew that much from the woods.

“Stupid fool! What have you gotten us into?” hissed another gray man—only actually she was a woman, Linny realized once she began speaking. The woman was mad at the first man, for some reason. “Well, go ahead, bind his hands, now we’re stuck with him.”

“
They
take
us
prisoner when they can,” said the first man sulkily. “He’s got information, right? Probably knows where everything is around here, at least—don’t you,
madji
boy?”

Elias mumbled something Linny couldn’t hear, but
the man was unhappy with it. He raised his hand over Elias’s head, but the woman yanked the hand away. She must be their boss or something.

“So tell us, boy. You got any friends out here with you?”

Elias shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Just me.” Linny could hear how hard he was trying to hide the shake in his voice.
Good lummox!
she thought.

“Stop and think logically for a minute,” said the gray woman to the two gray men. “The hillsickness has gotten to your brains. And you call yourself Surveyors! What do we do with him now, you fools?”

“Treating him better than they treated ours. What about that officer they took years ago, hunh? Just left
her
uniform folded neatly under a rock.”

“You’re not making sense,” said the woman, her voice like ice. “We can’t let him go. Think about that.”

“He’ll lead us right to that lost village, I bet. He looks like he comes from way up in these logicforsaken hills. We could get a lot of land charted, if we had some help. Hey, boy! Where are you from?”

But Elias just swayed a little on his knees, and didn’t say anything that Linny could hear.

“Leave him a moment,” said the woman. “He’s tied up, yes? The rest of you, over here. Now.”

The gray people shuffled about twenty feet farther away and continued that angry discussion. They clearly didn’t want poor Elias to hear whatever it was they were saying. Elias, meanwhile, was working away at the ropes on his wrists and shaking his head.

That reminded Linny of one important thing: the knife in her pocket. She sneaked forward to a slightly nearer rock. What should she do? Throwing the knife seemed more likely to damage Elias’s head than to get the knife safely into his hands. All right.

She would have to sneak across the creek and do this thing herself.

7

“THANK YOU, BRAVE LINNET!”

S
he moved quickly up through the woods, her heart nervous in her chest, and crossed the creek at the first likely place. Then it was back through the woods on the gray people’s side of the water. She was lucky with the placement of the trees—she could get pretty close to the clearing and still be hiding among the trunks and branches. But the gray people had come to the end of their discussion, apparently, and the gray woman was already walking back to Elias, who was only about twenty feet away, with the other gray people straggling behind her. Linny froze behind her tree.

“You, boy,” the woman said crisply when she reached him, her voice cold as ice. She gasped for breath like the others, but Linny could tell she was fighting not to let her breathlessness show.
That one must be very tough,
thought Linny. But the woman was speaking again: “Where are the other
madji
? We are willing to be lenient if you cooperate.”