The Ever Breath (8 page)

Praddle nodded.

Camille was woken up by the sound of a loud pop, like a tire exploding or a car backfiring or a gunshot. She sat upright in bed. The room was dark except for a few little rays of light slipping between the boards that covered the windows. She said, “Truman! Did you hear that?” But then she looked over at his bed.

He was gone.

And then she remembered what Swelda had said about being early risers.
Golfers!
she said to herself. The pops were golf balls hitting the house. Truman was a light sleeper. The golf balls had probably already woken him up, she figured.

She slipped out of bed—her feet on the cold floor—and looked out through one of the cracks between the boards.

There was a light dusting of snow on the ground, but this didn’t stop the hearty golfers—and neither did the fog. Two of them were out there on the green. The fog was so dense that Camille could see only their brightly colored pants and the heads of their golf clubs. They were trying to tap their
balls—bright orange ones to stand out against the snow—into the little cup.

The snow reminded Camille of the snow globes. She walked to the bedside table. Truman had taken his with him. And hers? She forgot for a moment she’d fallen asleep holding it. It was lost in the bedcovers. She patted the quilt until she found the hard glass ball. She pulled it out and gave it a shake, wanting to see the snow swirl around the little mud hut again. As the snow churned, the scene disappeared in the white. Camille watched the snow settle slowly, and as it did, a new scene appeared: a sloping hill covered with trees, their limbs weighted with snow. A path wound through the forest, and in the snow on the path there were footprints. Then she turned the globe a little and saw a figure between the trees.

She turned the globe again, trying to get a closer look. It was a boy in a big fur hat and a jacket made of leaves.

She peered closer.

It wasn’t a boy in a big fur hat. It was a boy wearing a wide-eyed cat on his head.

A boy in blue pajama bottoms.

“Truman,” Camille whispered. The water in the globe was trembling, because her hands were trembling.

Just then there was a knock on the bedroom door. “It’s time!” her grandmother’s voice rang out. “The boy has gone through to the other side!”

“Other side?” Camille echoed.

“And she’s lost him! Already! May I come in?”

“Yes,” Camille said, her voice dry in her throat.

The door swung open. There stood her grandmother,
dressed for the day in jeans, a sweater, and her white sneakers. She was wearing the blue woolen hat. “Your brother!” she said. “He’s lost!”

“Who lost him? How?”

“Well, my dingbat sister, of course. Let him run off!”

Camille looked at her grandmother, and her grandmother stared back at her with her one good eye.

“Truman’s gone
where
?” Camille asked.

“The Breath World, my dear! Aren’t you listening?” she said, and then she clapped. “Hurry up! Get dressed, pack a small bag, and bring the snow globe. You’ll need it. The worlds are at stake!”

The path through the forest was covered with small stones, some of which were crusted in ice and had become slick. Burrs and nettles lined the path. Whenever Truman slipped, the nettles snagged his flannel pajama pants and the burrs gripped on like Velcro. Praddle was curled on his head, keeping it warm, but every time he slid one way or the other, she had to scramble to keep her roost.

It didn’t help that Truman was easily distracted by all of the creatures. They were everywhere, fluttering, twittering, rustling in the underbrush, howling in the distance. Truman would catch glimpses of them scurrying up a tree or peering at him from a knothole. He could only make out eyes, the swish of a tail, a bit of beak.

Once he heard a strange clacking noise coming from the dense forest.

“What’s that?” he whispered to Praddle. “Did you hear something?”

Praddle swiveled her head in the direction of the noise. “There,” she whispered.

Truman put his hand on a tree trunk to steady himself and then peered through the trees into a glade. There he saw unicorns—two of them. They looked somewhat young, but each had a brilliant twisted horn, and they were fighting with each other. They didn’t seem violent, though. It was as if they were only practicing. Their coats were a dusty brown, their ears perked. They looked majestic.

“They’re beautiful,” Truman said. But when he took another step, his foot snapped a twig. The unicorns froze, then bounded deeper into the forest.

Eventually the trees thinned, and Truman and Praddle came to open farmland. Truman saw a herd of what seemed to be cattle up ahead. But as he and Praddle made their way down the dirt road closer to the herd, Truman noticed that the grazing animals had plumes of smoke swirling above their heads. It couldn’t just be their breath in the cold air. The smoke was thick. It chugged up from their mouths like smoke from old trains. That was when he started to be able to make out the spiky ridges on their backs. One lifted its head and then sat back on its haunches and stretched, unfolding a pair of restless wings. A bell on its neck gave a hollow
tock-tock
, and then the creature settled back down to grazing.

“Those aren’t cows at all!” Truman said.

“Herrrd of domesticated fire-breathersss,” Praddle explained, as if this were the most ordinary thing of all.

The houses grew closer together. Shops sprang up, and soon Truman and Praddle found themselves in the thick of the city. Truman held the snow globe in one arm and Praddle in the other, and they jostled through an open-air market. Stalls were set up on either side of the narrow road. An eight-foot
giant hawked barrels of mead. A spindly man with only one eye—in the center of his forehead—was announcing a new line of pickled cabbage. A beast that looked like a living gargoyle—monkeyish, with fangs, and dragonlike too, with scaly skin—was offering remedies for toothache and gout. A diminutive centaur blacksmith had a line of hoofed creatures, snorting impatiently, awaiting new horseshoes.

Truman and Praddle bustled by the opening of a large tent. Loud shouting, singing, wheezy accordions playing offbeat polkas, and the noisy din of bongos billowed out from its flaps. “Ruckusss tentsss,” Praddle hissed.

“What’s inside of them?” Truman asked, trying to get a peek.

“Ruckusesss!”

There was an electrified air to the city. Truman loved the oddness of it all—the noises, the strange smells, the creatures. He felt as if he were being pushed along by a strong current. Everyone seemed to be heading into the city, and no one was moving against the tide—except for a company of large hairy spiders. Truman spotted them hustling along the gutter in a long, tidy row.

He stopped and pointed them out to Praddle. “What are they doing?”

“Don’t point!” one of the spiders scolded. “Didn’t your mother tell you it ain’t polite?”

“Sorry,” Truman said. “Where are you all headed?”

“Tired of being treated like dirt,” the spider said. “There’s jobs for us. Good jobs, too, from what we hear. Up in the highlands. The lightning wing-beaters is already working, and the fire-breather flies.”

“Good luck,” Truman said, marveling over having conducted his first actual conversation with a spider.

The spider gave him a nasty look. “And good riddance!”

Truman wasn’t sure what to make of that. He backed away from the angry spider and joined the crowd again. It wasn’t long before he noticed a cage and, locked inside it, a horned man wearing a tweed suit and a blue necktie. The cage sat in front of a spice shop. It was the same kind of cage he’d seen the vultures carrying through the snowy sky the night before. Truman stopped in his tracks.

Attached to the cage by wire was a sign:
HORNED BEAST
.
THREAT TO OUR GOODNESS. SPY. BETRAYER. JARKMAN
.

The man was staring off, unaware of Truman.

“Did he do something really wrong?” Truman asked Praddle.

Praddle shook her head. “He disssagreed …,” she hissed.

“With …?”

Praddle swiveled her head, checking all directions, and then she whispered, “Official Affairsss.”

Truman looked around and saw other cages—between the hawkers’ carts and tents, sitting on the ground, swaying heavily from lampposts. All were marked “Property of the Office of Official Affairs.” He read a few of the signs:
BANSHEE. MIXED BREED OF MONKEY-BIRD. URF. KNURL.
Most of them also ended with
JARKMAN
.

Now Truman also saw that there were posters tacked to the sides of buildings and tents. Above the slogan
US VERSUS THEM! THE DIFFERENCE IS SIMPLE!
they all showed a picture of a man with a hawk’s beak who had plumage sticking out around the collar of his shirt and the sleeves of his suit jacket. The feathered man stuck out his little dimpled chin and looked squinty-eyed. Two protruding ears completed the un-settling image.

Truman was sick to his stomach. “What does it all mean? I don’t understand.”

Praddle shook her head and put a hand over her mouth. She couldn’t talk about it, not here.

All of a sudden, Truman felt disoriented. “Maybe we should try to go back, up the mountain. Maybe I can sneak into the hut and find the hole and go back to Swelda’s.”

But Praddle wasn’t paying attention. She climbed up Truman’s arm and sat tall on his shoulder.

“Praddle,” he said. “Are you listening? This city’s too big. We’ll never find the boy in the snow globe.”

Praddle mewled.

“What is it?”

She pointed into the crowded streets.

“What is it?” Truman said again.

“Mewl-mewl!” she cried.

And then Truman spotted it too. A blue woolen hat on a man’s head. An ugly blue woolen hat that could have been knit by mewlers. Truman raced into the crowd, against the flow of traffic. He dipped down, dodging in and out among people and their big woven baskets. He kept an eye on the hat. It bobbed along through the crowd.

Truman knocked into someone’s basket.

“Watch out!” a well-dressed fawn bleated, trying to regain his balance on his hooves.

“Sorry,” Truman said.

At one point, Truman got down on his knees and, clutching
the snow globe in one arm, slipped behind the stalls to try to gain on the man in the hat. But he was blocked by an ogre.

“Get out of here!” the ogre yelled. “Are you some kind of thief?”

“No, no!” Truman said. “I’m not a thief!”

The ogre reached out to grab Truman but he dipped down and crawled back out into the street.

He hopped up and down to see the hat in the sea of creatures. He caught glimpses of one odd creature after another. They were a blur of claws, hands, horns, pudgy noses and snouts, feathers, and furry forearms. It was like a dream, but the kind of dream that seems like a stranger but almost truer version of home.

Praddle pointed again. “Mewl!”

Truman saw the tip of the hat—just the faintest bit of blue. The man had stopped. He was standing under a sign that read
EDWELL
’
S HOPS AND CHOPS HOUSE.
He was gazing through the plate glass window.

“Hurrry,” Praddle purred urgently.

Truman hid down the alley next to a store called Idgit’s Inkhorn and Plume Shop. “What will I say?
Where did you get that hat?
I don’t know what the hat even means.” Truman peered around the corner at the man in the blue hat, getting a good look at him for the first time. “Wait,” Truman said. “I know that man!”

It was the man who’d been stabbed in the first scene that Truman had seen in his snow globe—the man on the ground, blood spreading across his white shirt. But his shirt was white now, not stained at all. He was fine.

Truman looked at the snow globe. “Does it make things up?” Truman asked Praddle. “How does it work?”

“Futurrre, passst, presssent. They’rrre all ssswirrrled, like sssnow.”

Truman stared at Praddle and then at the snow globe. “If it was telling the future, then I might be able to save him.” He paused. “Who is he, Praddle?”

“He’sss one of usss.”

Truman decided to take another look. He moved one step beyond the corner of the building and heard a sharp squeak.

“Hey, there! Watch it, you giant galumph!”

Truman looked down and saw a mouse wearing a red vest and a plaid scarf. The mouse had a rolled-up piece of paper in his fist, and he shook it at Truman.

Praddle bared her teeth.

“Sorry,” Truman said, retreating to his spot in the alley, with his back against the wall.

“You should all be shrunk! Oversized idiots,” the mouse muttered, and then scurried on.

Swelda ushered Camille toward the front door. They both stepped over a chunk of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling and lay in a dusty heap. “Oh my!” she said under her breath. “It’s beginning to self-destruct!”

“What’s self-destructing?” Camille asked.