sedge and bracken, and Lia withdraws from her gown a deep green bundle, a huge alocasia leaf packaged and bound with root fibers, filled to bursting with the fruit they’ve picked. She rations Jack out a handful of dark purple berries and palms the rest for herself.
She sneaks little glances at him between bites and he has that far-off distant look about him again—the look that makes her crazy.
She flings a berry and it hits him in the face.
Jack turns his head and raises an eyebrow.
“Well…?” she says demurely. “What aren’t you telling me?”
He scrunches up his face. “So… we’ve been walking five days since they found us. Since they took everything. Five days. If Cirune rode fast enough, he could make it back to the Temple in two and a half days, maybe less. If he even made it there at all—and we have to think he did, right? If they turned right around and went out looking for us again on horses, they could be back on us by tomorrow or day after, I figure. Then I thought, maybe they didn’t wait for anybody to come back. Maybe they just sent out more searchers. And if that’s what they did…”
“Then they could be anywhere.”
“Yes. Anywhere.”
“That’s what you’ve been thinking about all day?”
“Mmm,” he says. “Worried now?”
“Yes.”
They walk down the middle of a long residential avenue, surrounded by straight rows of papery old trees, many with dead trunks rotted out, and their younger offspring are sprouting haphazardly across the open spaces. They pass an unkempt field with a pallid brick building standing at the center. Broken letters on its facade spell El ment ry chool. On a grassed-over blacktop there stands a solitary upright pole. They forage around in the overgrown field and come up with just enough to clear their heads and stop their stomachs from growling.
Thick sunlight beats down on them from a pale sky, guiding them along as they shamble through more neighborhoods. Past a wilted office building that looks to be slowly imploding, they come to a wide intersection. The narrow cross street angles into a long, flat boulevard that stretches far across the valley. An old, rusted track runs the length of it, and the metal undercarriages of the railcars have become a pleasant flowerbed for sprays of yellow violets and purple lupine. Lia stops and picks a few stems and twists them together absently as they walk.
Scores of field rabbits dart away quick as light and Jack briefly contemplates the length of time it would take to stop and trap a couple of them. Maybe toward dusk, he figures, when they settle down for the night and make camp. He is deep in such ruminations when Lia places the yellow and purple crown upon his head.
“King Jack.”
“I don’t want to be king.”
“But you’d make a good one. And it looks pretty on you.”
He fights the urge to yank it off his head, and instead laces his fingers through hers and declares her his Queen, to which she consents, and they bound down the vast boulevard, hands clasped between them like lovers on honeymoon. They carry on with the same comfort and ease they once found in their old home village. They make conjectures about the customs and ways of the long-ago people, the unknown lives that were once lived on these very same streets, and now lay buried beneath ever-compounding layers of topsoil. There are two worlds surrounding them in tandem, they see. One world which deconstructs steadily back into the fine particles that once formed its constituents, and another which takes those fine particles and rebuilds itself one minuscule piece at a time until it blooms abundant. In the trees and wildflowers rest the bodies of the folk who once traversed these paths in olden times. Growth and decay everywhere, melted together so seamlessly they look inseparable.
Shapes in the hazy distance catch Jack’s eye and he turns. Several dirty gray wolves carouse down the middle of the road. They dig their muzzles into the earth and sniff around fastidiously, then jog ahead with such grace they are almost prancing. Their advance is unhurried, but deliberate.
Jack grabs Lia and pulls her flush against a leaning half-wall. They crouch down and watch the wolves.
“Are they from the Temple?” Lia asks through a clenched jaw. “Are they already here?”
Jack flicks his eyes across the roadway behind the wolves. Empty.
“They look wild,” he says. The pack is several blocks off now and gaining. “Come on.”