—And I’m standing in the forest, Mark beside me.
Keep running, he says. Then takes off, the howling of the wolves loud behind us. Even though it’s a scary sound, I’m glad to hear it, I’m glad to hear, period.
The leaves and twigs crunch beneath my feet, every rustle an explosion of pleasure in me. My feet free and swift without the CAM Walker. And if the wolves chew on my flesh at least I will hear them do it.
Another howl, even closer.
Hmm.
Maybe hearing them eating me wouldn’t be such fun after all. I start running faster, my breath heaving in my chest. The smell of sap and decaying vegetation is in my nostrils.
Eventually the forest runs out, just like that, suddenly. In front of us is a vast prairie, spreading to the horizon. Mark holds his hand up for us to stop and we stand for a moment, still in the shadow of the forest. The prairie is dry, I see now—all the grass is dead.
Mark isn’t even breathing hard, and I’m gasping for breath. Then he steps out onto the prairie, leaving the forest behind.
Come, he says. The wolves don’t like to leave the trees.
I follow him, out onto the brown, dry grass. The landscape reminds me of the place we went to with Luke, the reserve—a vast landscape of grassland, stretching out to the horizon, creased with thin gullies and canyons. Above us, a dark mirror to the lightness of the grass, is an enormous bowl of night, studded with millions and millions of stars.
I look up, stunned, forgetting about the wolves behind us. I have never seen a night sky like this. The scale of it is just … I can’t describe it. It’s like it’s the first time I have ever seen stars, really seen them, I mean. There are so many of them, it seems impossible.
I start to walk farther out onto the prairie, wanting to look at the stars, and to get away from those hungry, hungry wolves I can still hear behind us, wanting to put as much space as—
but Mark reaches out a hand and closes it over my arm and I stop, stunned by his strength; it’s like being held by a concrete pillar.
No, says Mark. They don’t like to leave the forest, but they will if they have to. And we should not be on open ground when they come.
He turns and nods toward the forest. I look where he wants me to and see the glinting eyes again, the hard eyes of the wolves lurking there at the edge of the forest.
We stand here or not at all, he says.
Then he adopts a stance somewhat like the one I use in the batting cage. Hawks, he says, and his voice has gone strange again, has that echo in it. Foxes. Badgers. Will you stand?
His voice is urgent too. The words coming out fast, but with a strange kind of authority and shimmer. Like a tuning fork after the first bright shine of the note.
Nothing happens, but there’s another feeling around us, like when Mark spoke those words when I first entered the Dreaming, like the whole air is asking a question.
Mark nods.
And … and, well, movement happens.
It’s not dramatic—it’s more like there’s a sense of feathers in the air, in there among the leaves, and the undergrowth is suddenly alive, and suddenly those gleaming eyes of the wolves are flicking around in panic, and it’s as if the forest is eating them alive.
Then everything is still.
The wolf eyes are gone.
Mark waits for a moment, tilts his head, and nods again. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten, he says, but who he’s saying it to, I don’t know. I don’t see anything moving anymore.
What the hell? I say. Who are you? How come you can talk to badgers and hawks and foxes and whatever?
This is the Dreaming, he says.
I can only shrug in response to that. I mean, yeah. Okay. It’s the Dreaming. It figures. And anyway I’m weirdly glad to be here with him, with Mark—to be talking to someone who isn’t my mother, even if it’s someone who might not actually totally technically 100 percent exist.
At least tell me what I’m doing here, I say.
I was trying to, he says. When the wolves came. You see the grass? The trees?
I look at the brown grass, desperate for water. At the trees, with their shriveled leaves. I crouch down and touch the grass. It’s dry as straw, colorless. There’s a drought? I ask Mark.
It never rains, he says. Not anymore.
Really, never?
Not anymore. It used to be said, the Dreaming has a face of sunshine and fingers of rain, and it holds us all in its arms, and we will never want, for everything will grow. But now—
Wait, I say. What did you say?
But now—
No, about the rain.
He blinks. A face of sunshine and fingers of rain …
That, yes. Where did you hear that?
It is said.
Yes, but when?
Forever. Since the beginning of time. Since the Dreaming began.
I turn away from him. Whatever, I think. But I’m feeling pretty majorly unsettled by this whole fingers of rain thing. By the fact that this is almost exactly what my mom said about leaving Alaska.
Why doesn’t it rain? I say.
Because of the Crone, he says. And it’s getting worse. She will not allow it to rain. This is why we need you, in the Dreaming. She has stopped the rain and she has also captured—
Just then Mark whirls around, and I’m about to say, oh come on, you have to be kidding me, but then I follow his acute gaze, and I see a movement in the forest. Then there’s a rustle of sound, the sound of leaves being parted by bodies, of twigs cracking underfoot.
Get behind me, says Mark.
We watch the leaves, trembling. We see branches pushing out toward us, a section of the forest seeming to bulge, as something begins to emerge. I begin to edge around behind Mark, my eyes always on the trees, and the wolves that are about to come out.
Then …
A spiked stick appears, I think for a moment it’s a weapon, and then I realize that it’s an antler. The branches part, and an elk moves out of the shelter of the trees. I recognize it from the rock paintings Luke took us to see.
Mark breathes out a sigh of relief and his body relaxes, a fist unclosing. Oh, he says.
The elk approaches us, big gentle eyes full of fear, its step trembling. It’s afraid, but curious too. It stays a safe distance from us, but keeps its eyes on us.
People, it says, its words echoing within the walls of my head. In the Dreaming.
Yes, says Mark. Greetings, elk.
Greetings, man. Greetings, woman.
Uh, greetings, I say. To an elk. In a dream world. While my mom is screwing Luke in the real world. Then the elk comes a little closer and I look into its huge brown eyes and I am back in the moment again.
We are well met, says Mark to the elk, in that weird formal voice he used with the foxes.
Yes, we are well met, says the elk.
But where are your kin? says Mark.
The elk turns back to the forest. There’s a loud sound of hooves passing over twigs and through leaves, and then a whole herd of them step out onto the dry brown grass of the prairie, some small and some large, their antlers twisting up into the night sky.
The wolves were chasing you, says the first elk, who seems to be the leader. Then they were gone.
Yes, says Mark.
You used some kind of human magic? says the elk.
Something like that, says Mark.
We are grateful, says the elk. The wolves were preying on our young.
Mark frowns. But why were you in the forest, where the wolves have their home? he says. Why do you not run on the prairie, as elks should?
No grass, says the first elk. We entered the forest because we thought we could reach the leaves of the trees … But elks do not climb.
The elks look up at the brown leaves of the trees, and their eyes are big with sadness. I notice then that their ribs are showing through their flesh, striations of bone, so each elk is like a punctuation elk, like this:
:“))))?
They are terribly, terribly thin. I didn’t see it so much with the first one, because he was close to us, and facing us, but when they turn to look at the forest and I see them from the side it is unmistakable. These elks are starving.
See? says Mark to me. It is because there is no rain. They have nothing to eat.
I look up and see green leaves in the trees above us. Leaves the elks cannot reach. Can they eat those? I ask.
Mark nods.
Well, I can climb, I say, surprising myself.
Your leg—
We’re in the Dreaming, though, right? I ask.
Mark sighs. You have more important things to do. It’s dangerous to—
As dangerous as bringing me to some world where there are wolves that want to kill me?
His shoulders slump. Be fast, he says. Be careful. Use your knife. I reach into my pocket and it’s there, with its bone handle, the shape of an antler still imprinted in it. I test the edge with my thumb, and the knife slicks with blood. It’s so sharp it’s like it’s greasy.
Ouch, I say.
It’s a knife, says Mark in a withering tone.
I walk over to the nearest tree. I lean back, looking up—there are leaves right at the top, in the, what do you call it, the canopy. It’s a long way up. I put my hands on the raspy trunk. There are easy holds, thick branches at even intervals. It doesn’t look like any tree I know; an oak would be closest, maybe. I’ve never climbed a tree before, but how hard can it be?
Hard.
It can be hard.
I slip, about twenty feet up, and fall—
Crunch
Crash
And … catch.
I swing from a branch, my hands and arms burning. Muscles tense, I pull myself up until I can get my left knee over the branch, then I straddle it, panting. I can hear Mark calling from below but I ignore him. I keep going, hand over hand, trying to use my right foot as little as possible—it isn’t hurting, but even in the Dreaming, it must still be broken.
Finally, I look up, and I’m in green, starlight filtering through; the feeling it gives me is something like the word “sacrosanct,” made into a picture. I slow my breathing, and start cutting the branches above me, choosing ones that will fall without striking me. The knife goes through them like a steak knife through meat.
The green leaves fall softly down, turning and bouncing, and some get caught but most reach the ground, I think. I cut and cut until my hand is aching and there’s another wolf howl, from far away in the woods, and Mark shouts in my head, enough.
There’s a tone I haven’t heard before in his voice, and I choose to obey.
Climbing down is even worse, but finally I step down onto the ground. There are leaves all around me, green on the ground like emeralds in the starlight, and the elks are already noses down, eating.
About time, says Mark. We’re no longer safe. There are more wolves coming. We must go.
Go where? I say.
To the Crone’s castle.
What for?
Mark glances at the knife still in my hand. To rescue the Child, and to kill the Crone. He says this like it’s a perfectly normal thing to say.
Who’s the Child?
Mark is watching the elk eating the leaves I cut for them. He turns his head when there’s another howl from deep in the forest. But he must figure it’s far enough away, because he nods to himself. All right, he says. We have a little time. Sit. He motions for me to sit down on a tuft of grass.
I sit.
He sits too, on a rock. In the Dreaming, as in all things, there is balance, he says. He is speaking quietly so that the elks can’t hear. There is First Woman and First Man, says Mark. There is the Crone, who is the energy of destruction. And there is Coyote, who is the energy of chaos.
Coyote? I say, thinking of the coyote I saw after the car hit me, and again by the car, in the forest.
Yes. Also, there is the End, and there is the Child. That is balanced, as it should be. But the Crone has captured the Child, and this is what has given her the power to stop the rain. But by taking the Child she is hastening the End.
Which means what? I say. I don’t understand. It’s not real. This world isn’t real.
It is real, it’s just different. We must rescue the Child, and kill the Crone, to break the spell of no rain.
Or what?
Without rain everything dies, he says. The Child is very young. Defenseless. She will not survive long in the Crone’s care.
Suddenly I flash back to my recurring dream—the child in the hospital, crying for someone to come, crying for help. What if … what if the dream has been trying to tell me something? Warn me about something?
You mean the Dreaming will end? I say. If the Child dies?
He shakes his head sadly. No. The Dreaming. Your world. Your everything.
I stare at him. Are you serious?
I am very serious, he says.
I am thinking that this is all crazy—the Dreaming, talking elks, wolves baying for blood. I don’t understand him at all. But I do believe him.
What do I have to do with all of this? I say.
You’re the only one who can save the Child, says Mark.
Why?
But he doesn’t answer, because—