Personally, I loathe the urinary tract. Liquid invariably ends up going the wrong way. —Galen’s Anatomy

Chapter 15

A mudslide is seldom something you want to be stuck in. Trust me—I’ve toured a city swallowed by one, and all that was left when the dirt had settled were tiles and teeth. Jenny was fortunate to be riding the slide on top of a snarl of roots. Otherwise, she might have been sucked into the center of the churn.

A few seconds later, she was shunted sideways by a tree trunk and chucked onto the flat of the road. She lay there, petrified, as half the mountain—and her satchel—cannoned toward the bottom of the Gorge.

“Pandora!”

There was no response except the pounding of rain.

“Pandora!”

A pause. Then . . .

“What?”

Jenny searched the high ground as best she could, but, for the life of her, she wasn’t able to locate her best friend. “Where are you?”

“That’s a stupid question—I’m in the Gorge!”

Apparently the mudslide hadn’t dampened Pandora’s energy for a fight.

“Are you hurt?” called Jenny.

“I’ve got a big bump on my head.” Pandora’s voice rose a decibel. “But I can still remember exactly what you said!”

Well, there’s gratitude for you, thought Jenny. Here she was trying to make sure no one was punctured in eight places, and she was being roundly insulted for it.

“Pandora, we can kill each other some other time. But we need to get you out of there first. Can you see the road to Troy?”

Another pause.

“No.”

This wasn’t good. Night would be sweeping in behind the storm. Once that happened, things were liable to get dicey. And very, very dark.

“How about a waterfall at the head of the river? Can you see that?” From her vantage point, Jenny could spy the foam from the whitecaps near its top. “Kam said there’s one that comes out of Lake Gaia near Troy.”

“I think I see a waterfall.”

That was a blessing, at any rate.

“Can you get to it from where you are?” asked Jenny.

“Probably. Unlike other people, I’m not stupid!”

Jenny was almost relieved Pandora wasn’t standing next to her. She would have been tempted to toss her best friend right back over the edge. “Okay, you aim for the waterfall. I’ll walk along the road and wait for you there. Have you still got your satchel?”

“Yes, but my cheese is in yours,” said Pandora.

Jenny yanked a branch from her hair. “I lost my satchel in the mudslide.”

“You didn’t save my cheese?”

“Pandora!” yelled Jenny, plucking a web of thorns out of her backside. “Be quiet and get to the waterfall before it’s dark!”

Though her best friend tried to be silent, Jenny could hear sounds of rocks being rolled and swears being sworn. Pandora was on the move—that much was clear.

Propping up her courage, Jenny examined the road. It was plain they were in a tight spot. The rain was ebbing, sure, but frost was already forming on her sinews. They were miles from civilization and heading for a ghost town. It was going to be a rough evening.

The best thing to do, reasoned Jenny, was to find a place to shelter in Troy. The settlement was deserted, but the buildings must be hardly more than fifteen years old. With a few sticks to start, she could light a fire most anyplace. Wiping an inch of slop from the bottoms of her boots, Jenny began walking.

I’ve often found that the problem with solitary rambles is they give you time to think. On her way toward the waterfall, Jenny was slowly recovering from her shock and quickly remembering all the awful things Pandora had said.

She wasn’t scared, she wasn’t less than anybody, and she most definitely was not in love with Kam! How dare Pandora accuse her of being ignorant of what others said? Sure, over the years, she might have heard her schoolmates call her a vicious name or four. Or forty. But that was to be expected in a place like Eden.

Besides, what was she going to do about it? Round up the entire town and tell them how it feels to live on the skin of a bubble? Give adults a lecture on the importance of avoiding words like “degenerate”? Sure, she scoffed to herself—that was certain to work.

Going round and round like this, Jenny was beginning to appreciate what it’s taken me sixty-odd years to fathom. Some people are plain ignorant.

Like it or lump it, the world is full of numbskull judgers and half-cocked judgments. Wherever you go, you’re bound to find folks who will peg you by the cut of your cloth, the arch of your vowels, or the hue of your hide. You can argue with them until words have run out, and they’ll refuse to see reason. You’re lucky if you find one that will listen at all.

I’ve heard many a theory as to why bullies and bigots decide to persist, but none that seem to take. If I had to make a personal guess, I’d hazard they’re frightened of change. They’re cozy and content to believe in a system where they sit on top of the living ladder. But they’d best be careful. People who perch on ladders are liable to have the legs kicked out from under them.

Course, at the hour and place of which we were talking, Jenny wasn’t thinking on ladders and bigotry. She was still in the stages of fuming about Pandora. Around halfway through another imaginary argument with her friend, she realized that, one: she was freezing. Two: she could barely see. And three: she must have gone far, far past the place where the road would have met the waterfall.

At that point, reality came crashing down with the cold and the night. Even if Jenny retraced her steps, there was no certainty she would be able to find the location. Kam had never actually said the road went straight past the waterfall. He had only said you could spot it from a height.

That meant Pandora might be standing there for years without help.

Worse than that, Jenny was having trouble maintaining her wits. In the past hour, her feet had grown numb and difficult to maneuver. Her breath had turned quick. She felt tired and dizzy and sick to her stomach, all at the same time. She knew in the back of her mind that there must be a way out of this pickle. But she was having trouble remembering the difference between pickles and plums. Though she wasn’t to know it, the fact that she was soaking wet in the cold was giving her a touch of hypothermia.

Jenny’s instinct told her to stumble forward. Every path, she reasoned in her confusion, must end at some point. Maybe there was a signpost. Or a turning. Or a way to stop this gosh-darn, lousy shivering.

It was darker than pitch that evening in the high country, black as the coal in a strip mine. The storm had sent every reptile and mammal scurrying for shelter, and Jenny was alone on the high road. On she trudged through the mire as the clouds above began to thin.

Sooner rather than later, she reached a rise in the hill. Her shivers were easing off and the tip of a crescent moon was piercing the gloom. Weak as it was, it was light, and it snagged on a shape in the land.

The lake!

Instantly, Jenny’s head became clear. With the moon and the stars to guide her, she could follow the shoreline of Lake Gaia toward the waterfall. From there, like her hero Still Hope, she would rescue Pandora and bring her friend to Troy. The weather was beatable. They were going to be fine.

Down the rise she went, groping toward the water’s edge. With each quarter mile, her muscles grew weaker, but she was bound and determined to succeed. No matter what you might think of her temper, you can’t beat a Burns for stubbornness.

She was almost at the water—she could hear the waves slopping—when she was yanked from her feet. A strong pair of arms encircled her back and her legs.

“Blet pea snow!” burbled Jenny, flailing with her fists, incoherent from exhaustion and the cold. “Blet pea snow!”

“Shut it!” barked her carrier.

After a full day of walking, this was the end. Whatever willpower she had left was gone. Jenny lay like a limp rag, head hurled back, watching the lake and the moon and the upside-down silhouettes of outbuildings trundle by.

It was only when they reached a door and a warm blast of heat hit her eyes that she finally remembered what she was there for. And whom she was missing.

“Manpora!” she gargled. “Manpora!”

“Stop fussing, Jenny. I told you I wasn’t stupid.”

It took the better part of two hours to bring Jenny’s core temperature up to acceptable. She was set by a cast-iron woodstove, bundled in blankets, with one wrist tied to the leg of the bench she was lying upon. This, she realized groggily, was her punishment for elbowing her savior in the abdomen.

Pandora sat opposite, airing out her oilskin and chewing on jerky.

“Waterfall,” mumbled Jenny after a lengthy interval.

“I waited for a bit,” said Pandora. “Then I figured you’d left me for dead.”

“I tried . . .”

“I walked here and found Silent Jack, and he told me that the road veers away from the waterfall. So we calculated you were probably roaming around the lake. Freezing to death.”

Jenny wrenched her head sideways to catch a glimpse of the elusive hermit, but Doc Magee’s partner was nowhere to be seen. What she got instead was a stone-cold room studded with panes of glass. They winked at her in the gloom.

“Where did he go?”

“He’s out fetching fuel,” said Pandora. “He said he wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“What is this place?”

“It’s the old church at Troy. Silent Jack says he sleeps better in sacred spaces.”

Jenny took a closer look at the interior. Ah, there they were, at the opposite end of the building—an altar and a stone basin. Silent Jack had left some of his washing up in the bowl. Though she wasn’t much for pious buildings, it appeared a respectable enough place to live.

“He seems to be pretty chatty for a silent man. Maybe years of solitude have done him good,” said Jenny.

“He talked because I asked,” said Pandora. “You told me I can’t speak to people. Well, I can. So there.”

Jenny had hoped that hours of being nose-to-nose with death might have softened Pandora’s feelings. Apparently not.

“Did you question him about Doc Magee?”

“Yes,” said Pandora, swallowing the last of her jerky. “And he told me to shut my mouth.”

“Wonderful. Then what are we doing here?”

Pandora stood up. “We’re here because you started something and couldn’t finish it.”

Jenny made a move to counter and was yanked back by the rope on her wrist. “You’re the one who was raring to meet Silent Jack!” she said.

“You’re the one who went searching for rose hips!” retorted Pandora.

“You’re the one who found the skeleton map!”

“You’re the one who wanted to look for gold in the first place!”

Picture a chained dog barking at an obstinate tree and you’d have some conception of the scene that met Silent Jack when he came through the door. As soon as they saw him, Jenny and Pandora fell silent.

Holy father of bovines, thought Jenny. He’s a beast.

Beastly he was—that I’m bound to report. Many a man in the territory was fond of insulation, but Silent Jack had taken the cultivation of whiskers to the extreme. He was coated in hair, from the three feet of locks that trailed from his head to the curtain of brush that fell to his knees. The centers of his ears, the backs of his hands, the hollow tucked under his Adam’s apple—everything was a mass of hoary fur.

After scraping the mud from his boots, Silent Jack lugged his box of cut scrub to the stove and refilled the interior. Then he clomped his way up the aisle, collected a mug from the basin, and filled it from a bottle on the floor. He sat down at the base of the altar and took a long pull. Finally, he opened his mouth.

“Murder,” he growled.

“’Scuse me, sir,” said Jenny. “Did you say something?”

“I said, murder.”

“Well, that’s helpful,” muttered Jenny to Pandora. “And here I was thinking he was reciting the alphabet.”

“What kind of murder?” inquired Pandora.

Silent Jack peered at her through the thicket of his brows. “Al-vays murders in the Rush.”

Jenny was feeling close to uncomfortable. It suddenly struck her that an almost-empty church in an abandoned gold town with a man talking about murder might not be the best place for two twelve-year-old girls to spend the evening.

“Did you ever kill anyone?”

“Pandora!” hissed Jenny.

“I seen it done,” said Silent Jack.

Jack cocked his head and tossed back a third of his bottle. Fragments of bark quivered in his beard.

“Tell us,” challenged Pandora.

“The first vun vass a shooting,” said Silent Jack. “Outside a hut. Vun man said his partner vass lazy, and the other man said he looked like a voman. So the vun who looked like a voman shot the lazy vun in the stomach. His insides fell out.”

Sly and silent, Jenny began to pick at the knot on her wrist.

“You said the first one. What was the second?” asked Pandora.

“The second vun vass a stabbing in the post office. A drunken miner got a good-bye from his sveetheart. So he vent vild vith a letter opener.”

The knot was too tight, Jenny realized. She would need a knife. Or a letter opener.

“Any more?” demanded Pandora.

Jenny wanted to take back everything she had said about Pandora being too afraid to talk to people. At this point and place, she would have cheerfully licked her best friend’s feet if it stopped her from asking this extremely hairy man what he thought of murder.

“There vass alvays murders,” repeated Silent Jack. “Men should not live in the mountains. It makes them mad.”

As if to echo his point, Silent Jack hurled his mug against the wall, smashing it into scores of pieces. Then he began a slow walk down the aisle toward the girls.

“Pandora, we’re toast!”

Silent Jack gave no response. Instead, he kept coming, walking right on up to Jenny’s left side.

“Hold still,” he commanded.

In the lick of a split, he had untied the knot on her wrist and dropped the loose twine on the floor.

“Enough talking,” said Silent Jack, jerking a coat from a peg near the door. “Sleep now.” He shrugged his sleeves over his pelt and gave Pandora a long and searching stare. “And lock the door.”

A frigid blast of alpine wind swept through the church. In the time it took for Jenny to draw a warmer breath, Doc Magee’s partner was gone.