She says something under her breath and starts running down the path toward the lake, her boots wallowing in the snow. He begins to run too.
It’s three-quarters of a mile to the lake, and the footing is horrible, slushy snow over mud over frozen earth. For years he’s made his body into an old man’s. He slips and his arms windmill as he catches up to her.
“—foresaw this?” he pants.
She turns back to him, furious. “Are you a Talent? Does it always work for you? I was talking to you! And if you can push fire away, why can’t you push earth and just fly?”
“I don’t fly—”
He is a man. Men don’t fly. He is a man, like others; he had friends; he had a wife; he was in love. He is Mr. Green, Bill Green. He is not something fallen from the sky, doomed to be alone. He doesn’t fly.
He was mankind’s Protector once, and he is too lonely to go back to that lonely place. A Protector flies. A man doesn’t.
He hears screaming from the lake.
And he flies. Nothing superhero- like, rocketlike; he just pushes the force of gravity away. He’s awkward, rising, wobbling. Too far at first; he thinks he’ll be spotted and spends too much time scanning the sky for a plane. He ducks down into the trees, gets tangled and caught in a pine, flails at branches. He bullies his way through the treetops like a bear through shrubs, sticky with pine sap, whipped by branches.
There’s light in front of him, a plain that looks like a wide white field.
The lake is smoking with fog. He can’t see anything. He drops downward, shouting for her, for them, looking for the shore. In the fog, somewhere, they’re shouting for him.
When he hits the ice, it tilts.
Broken ice. Open water. He runs across them both, light as a skater. He’s never lost anyone on the ice, and he’s not going to start now. The ice bobs under his feet, and suddenly, out of the fog ahead of him, he sees the kids. They’re stupidly huddled all together by the edge of a fractured black hole, and thrashing in the water he sees two of them, the boy with the long hair and his father. Lan is already out on the ice, flattened on it, her red hair a shock in the grayness, holding her hands out to the boy. “I’ve got you,” Green shouts at her. “It’ll hold.”
But it doesn’t. He tries to extend a cradle of force all the way across the ice, over the hole, without trapping the boy and his father. But there are too many of them, the kids all together are too heavy on all that tipping ice, it’s too far, it’s been too long.
The ice cracks; she slips and flails and is gone. One by one the kids slide in after her and in a moment the ice is empty.
His giant invisible hands of force reach out and tilt the ice back, find a struggling body here, a furry parka there. His giant invisible fingers sieve the black water, hunting the kids. He shapes a globe of air and shoves a drowning kitten into it. A bear is grabbing at the ice, breaking more chunks away. A Red Sox hat, a Hello Kitty backpack, but no flaming red hair—
He touches something, touches her. Pulls Lan out of the water, her hair a river of blood down her back, her face blue. Throws her down onto the bank. How to get water out of lungs? He makes up something, moving air, moving water. Feels something in her dark and alien as death. Then feels her retching cough.
“What am I looking for?” he yells at her. Another part of him is a net, dredging. “Help me find them!”
In the end he recognizes them only because there are the same number of them as before. There were five girls, one boy, two men; now, one girl, a snake, a great brown bear, five little beasts. A bedraggled kitten stares up at him, a sobbing round badger clutches a girl’s glasses in one wet paw. The girl has a long braid. The bear has a Red Sox cap.
They look at him with adoration, as if he could solve all their problems, and their superhero is so lonely he could howl.
HE and Lan have sent the kids back to the cabin to bathe, and they stand outside to give the kids