rock, he wound the string around a shaft of wood and
held the thing between his palms.
The waiting was neither here nor there, neither burden nor pleasure, and when he heard an
argument downriver, he had no interest. Skirmishes were also the way of the camp, and he knew
what the fight amongst the other pretrans was about. Just because you pulled a fish from the
water did not mean you could keep it.
He was staring into the rushing current when the oddest sensation touched the back of his
neck-as if he'd been tapped upon the nape.
He leaped up, dropping his line on the ground, but there was no one behind him. He sniffed the
air, probed the trees with his eyes. Nothing.
As he bent down to retrieve his line, the stick flipped out of his reach and off the bank, a fish
having taken the bait. V lunged for it, but could only watch the crude handle skip into the stream.
With a lunge, he ran after it, jumping from rock to rock, tracking it farther and farther
downstream.
Whereupon he met up with another.
The pretrans he'd beaten with his book was coming up the stream with a trout in his hand, one
that, given his rapacious satisfaction, had no doubt been stolen from another. As he saw V, the
bobbing stick with V's catch on it went by him and he stopped. With a shout of triumph, he
shoved the kicking fish in his pocket and went after what was V's-even though it took him in the
direction of his pursers.
Perhaps because of V's reputation, the other boys got out of the way as he went after the
pretrans, the group abandoning the chase and becoming cantering spectators.
The pretrans was faster than V, moving recklessly from stone to stone, whereas V was more
careful. The leather soles on his coarse boots were wet, and the moss growing on the backs of
the rocks was slick as pig fat. Even though his prey was pulling ahead, he held back to ensure his
footing.
Just as the stream widened into the pool the others had been fishing in, the pretrans leaped onto
the flat face of a stone and got within reach of V's hooked fish. Except as he stretched out to grab
the stick, his balance shifted… and his foot popped out from under him.
With the slow, graceful tumble of a feather, he fell headfirst into the rushing stream. The crack of
his temple on a rock inches below the surface was loud as an ax striking hardwood, and as his
body went limp, the stick and the line spirited along.
As V came up to the boy, he remembered the vision he'd had. Clearly it had been wrong. The
pretrans did not die on top of the mountain with the sun upon his face and the wind in his hair.
He died here and now in the arms of the river.
It was a bit of a relief.
Vishous watched as the body was pulled into the dark, still pool by the current. Just before
sinking below the surface, it rolled over so it was faceup.
As bubbles breached unmoving lips and rose to the surface to catch the moonlight, V marveled at
death. All was so calm after it came. Whatever screaming or yelling or action that caused the
soul its release unto the Fade, what followed was like the dense quiet of falling snow.
Without thinking, he reached down into the frigid water with his right hand.
All at once a glow suffused the pool, emanating from his palm… and the pretrans's face was
illuminated as surely as if the sun shone upon it. V gasped. It was the vision realized, exactly as
he had foreseen it: the haze that had muddled the clarity was in fact the water, and the boy's hair
waved to and fro not from wind, but from the currents deep in the pool.
«What do you do unto the water?» a voice said.
V looked up. The other boys stood lined up on the curving bank of the river, staring at him.
V snatched his hand from the water and put it around his back so no one would see it. Upon its
removal, the glow in the pool faded, the dead pretrans left to the black depths as if he'd been
buried.
V rose to his feet and stared at what he knew now were not only his competitors for scarce food
and comforts, but now his enemies. The cohesion between the gathered boys as they stood
shoulder-to-shoulder told him that however contentious they were within the camp's dry womb,
they had been bonded over one like mind.
He was an outcast.
V blinked and thought about what
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