TWENTY MINUTES later, Ms. Stuart and Dr. Jacoway, Gabriel and Martin—who is also thirteen and part beetle, with useless iridescent green wings and antennae and disturbing extra joints in his arms and legs, and who seems pretty seriously not bright—are all following me through the woods. Gabriel has a coil of rope slung from one shoulder and a flashlight sticking out of his left pocket. Furious jags of color are running through his skin, even though I’ve told him five times that Rowan is fine. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him this tense.
“Ada? You said it was in sight of the wall?” Ms. Stuart asks after we’ve been wandering back and forth for a while. “You’re sure about that?”
I bet she knows exactly where it is. Why do we have to go through this charade of searching everywhere? “I noticed the wall through the trees, but it wasn’t that close. And there was a clump of paper birch trees maybe twenty feet away, in the direction of the water.”
“The birches!” Dr. Jacoway exclaims. “Five of them, arching gracefully outward like the jets of a fountain? Pearl-colored in the gloom?”
I think there were five trunks, now that I hear him say it. “That’s probably right. Do you know where they are?”
“I do, I do. A favored spot of mine, on those rare occasions when I can steal a solitary hour. Not that I regret any of it, not a single moment of the years I’ve devoted to you children. You are my heart’s refuge. The only beings I have ever seen both strange and revelatory enough to make me feel truly at home . . .” His head starts rocking and I get a little worried that he’s completely forgotten what we’re doing out here, but then he snaps into focus again. “Come. We are much too far from the sea.”
He turns and plunges in a waddling way into an especially dense patch of underbrush, cracking and stamping, and we all go after him.
“Rowan?” Gabe yells. “Rowan? Where are you?”
A responding cry, or maybe a moan, echoes dimly through the trees. If that’s Rowan, he must have been badly injured somehow in the time I’ve been away. I thought Gabriel was overreacting, but now urgency jolts through me, too.
“Rowan, we’re here! We’re coming!”
It’s getting darker, orange slices of sunset stretching ahead as we walk. In the dusk the birches stand out like arms reaching up for us.
The moaning sound comes again, but this time it seems much too far away to be coming from anywhere near those trees. “Gabe? Do you think that’s him?” I ask. “I thought at first it was, but now it sounds wrong.”
Gabriel just shakes his head without looking at me. It’s like he thinks this is my fault. I feel like snapping at him that Rowan was the one following me, not the other way around.
“Careful, please,” Dr. Jacoway murmurs. “Gabriel, you are too impetuous. We can’t have you falling in as well, not when you’re carrying the rope.” He chuckles, so maybe that was his idea of a joke. All at once he veers left and drops to his knees, staring at the ground. Once I get there I can see how Rowan and I broke through a tangle of thin branches and vines on our way into that underground pit; maybe someone deliberately concealed the entrance. “Rowan, my dear boy, are you down there?” Dr. Jacoway shouts down, then cocks his head and listens. “Isn’t this the place?”
He’s asking Gabriel; probably he’s completely forgotten who I am again.
“This is it. Definitely. Isn’t Rowan there?” I drop down next to Dr. Jacoway. The sun has sunk low enough that not a single beam makes it into the pit, and as far as I can tell, the blue has gone, too. All I see is shadow. Maybe Rowan fell asleep so far back in the cave that I can’t see the glow of his warmth? “Rowan? Rowan, it’s me, Ada! We’re here to get you out!”
Ms. Stuart just stands there with a strange look on her face. With the sun falling behind her, it’s hard to figure out what she’s feeling.
That moaning yowl blasts through the woods again, and now I’m positive it can’t be Rowan. It’s deep and rumbling, but with a piercing, tinny warble at the top. It’s coming from the direction of the sea, and there’s no imaginable whale song or seal bark that could sound like that. A shiver crawls down my back.
The weird thing is that Gabriel isn’t bent over the ragged roots framing the hole, screaming for his missing friend. He’s standing five feet away with his hands on his hips, staring into the distance where we all heard that cry.
I try not to, but I start imagining what it could be. I saw the kimes in the pool. If there are other mostly animal kimes out here, some of them might be a lot bigger. A lot more vicious. Maybe that bellowing thing came ashore and reached into the hole with endless, many-segmented arms while Rowan gaped up at it, too petrified to run. Or maybe it crawled in from the darkness and throttled him before he even saw it. Now that I think about it, I didn’t notice a back wall in the shadows past the pool.
“We have to go down there! The cave—Rowan said it went back—it might turn into a tunnel. We have to look for him.”
Ms. Stuart raises an eyebrow. “Are you volunteering, Ada?”
Gabriel definitely told her everything I said about the blue, because for the first time it’s obvious how much she dislikes me.
“I’d—rather not go alone. But even with the flashlight, the rest of you might miss Rowan in the dark somewhere, and I won’t. I mean, if he was knocked unconscious somehow.” Of course, if those tadpole things in the pool are Ms. Stuart’s experiment, she’ll probably find an excuse to keep me out of the cave. She’ll want only people she trusts to see them. “So yes, I’m volunteering.”
Unless she knows exactly what’s making that cry. It could be another one of her special projects. Maybe she’s so fed up with me that she’ll send me down there knowing I won’t come back.
She gives me a nod, but her mouth stays grim. If the tadpoles aren’t her creation, then who else could be responsible? Dr. Jacoway is just too out of it, I think.
“No one could say that you lack for courage, Ada. We can use the rope to lower you first. I’ll follow. Gabriel and Dr. Jacoway should wait here.”
Gabriel whirls on her. “I am not waiting! Ada can sit around while we go search for Rowan. Ms. Stuart, if she’s getting—I mean, you know it’s serious. Rowan wouldn’t just run off into some tunnel when he knew we were coming.”
“She?” I ask. No one answers. I don’t think he was talking about me, though.
“Ada raised a compelling point. This is precisely the kind of situation where her abilities can be most useful to us.”
“Then you wait here. Ada and I will go. What, are you worried that I’ll lose her for you?” Gabriel might be rude to everyone else, but I’m not used to hearing him talk to Ms. Stuart this way; she and Rowan are the only two people I’d guess he genuinely loves. More than anything that’s happened so far, the snapping shows how agitated Gabe really is.
So what was he about to say? If she’s getting angry? If she’s getting hungry? Could she mean that long, rippling serpent shape I saw out in the ocean?
“The last time you and Ada undertook a mission together, Gabriel, it didn’t turn out especially well. I don’t doubt your commitment. Your judgment is another matter.”
Gabriel grins harshly. “It turned out great, actually. We haven’t had any more trouble with normals screaming at the gate since then. What happened that night must have really freaked them out.”
Ms. Stuart might hate me, but not enough to be happy with Gabe basically saying that getting me bashed in the head was a fantastic idea. She gives me a quick, embarrassed look.
“What about me?” Martin asks sleepily. “I’m stronger than any of you.” His antennae twitch. No one answers.
Gabe smirks, pivots away from us, and flings himself down into the hole. The rocks rattle under his body, and he crashes with a gasp. It takes me a moment to realize that he carried the rope in there with him, so there’s no chance of anyone else getting lowered down gently, either. Whoever goes is going the hard way.
“I’m okay,” he calls up. I can see him down there in the dark, a red shape hunched on the rocks. He’s clutching his ankle.
“Gabriel!” Ms. Stuart yells fiercely. “Gabriel, forcing the issue is in no way acceptable behavior. Get—” Then she realizes how absurd it is to order him to climb back up here. That’s why he took the rope with him: so there would be no choice. She snorts and turns to me. “Ada? Are you still volunteering to go, even though your companion is clearly a reckless idiot?”
From something in the tone of her voice, I know she’s angry in the way parents get when they’re very afraid for you. Out of all the kids here, Gabriel is the one she truly loves as her own son.
“I’m still volunteering,” I say. “Rowan is my friend too.”
Her eyebrows contract just a bit. “In the outside world, adults have the luxury of being precious about the safety of children. We don’t have that here. All we have are common resources and calculations as to how best to use what we have. For Rowan’s sake, I would stake a great deal. We are using you now, Ada: using your abilities to find a boy we all love. I want to make sure that’s clear.”
“You aren’t using me,” I snap. It’s hard to face slamming into that hole again, but I shift myself and sit on the edge. “I’m not going to find Rowan for you. I’m using myself to help someone I care about.”
She smiles. “By all means, think of it that way. If you prefer.”
I don’t say anything, just push off with both hands. The darkness opens around me like a wound, and the rocks clamor and jump at my back. I wasn’t prepared for how much sliding down would hurt now that I’m already bruised. I land in a swirl of bouncing stones and skid five feet before my body wheels to a halt.
Gabriel’s got the flashlight out. He’s aiming it into the pool. His right knee is bent like he’s trying to keep his weight off that ankle.
I stand up, stiff and aching, and walk back to the bottom of the hole. “Ms. Stuart? We’re all right. We’ll come back as soon as we find him.”
“We’ll be waiting, Ada. Try to restrain Gabriel’s more foolish impulses, if that’s possible.” She’s bending over, her head and shoulders a ruby blotch against the fraying trees.
“Who on earth is that girl?” Dr. Jacoway asks. His voice sounds dim and shaky. “She seemed to materialize out of purest nothingness, but somehow I have the strangest feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before.”