Jack, Tara, and Kyle made it safely to the tree without being ambushed by The Evil, thanks in part to Cornelia’s eagle-eyed scouting from above. It seemed safe to assume that anything moving on the sand below was an Evil spy; they hadn’t yet seen a single living thing on the planet that wasn’t Evil. When she squawked and turned off the path leading to their destination, they knew they had to change course, too, in order to go around the creature ahead.

They were helped by a sudden shift in the weather. Clouds rolled in from their right (Jack couldn’t tell if that was north, south, east, west, or some other direction he didn’t have a word for), bringing a brief but intense squall of icy rain with it. They huddled around one another with Cornelia tucked safely between them, riding out the pummeling hail and deafening winds until, just as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The clouds swept on across the desert. The two bright suns and yellow skies returned, over a desert smoothed flat by wind and rain. All trace of their footsteps had been erased.

Before the hail completely melted, they stuffed their mouths full of ice and sucked greedily at the moisture. Jack dreamt of Grandma X’s hot chocolate, but this would do for now. They pressed on, Cornelia watching from above as before. Behind them, the curved walls of the anthill city faded into the blurry horizon, and their immediate fears of ambush were put to rest. Step by step, mile by mile, the tree Cornelia was leading them to grew steadily closer.

*  *  *

Two things became apparent as they neared it. The first was that the tree was huge. Its rippling, many-limbed trunk was as wide across as a city block, and its uppermost boughs were higher than most buildings. Jack had thought the tree in Grandma X’s backyard was big, but it was dwarfed by this one. Portland would easily fit in its shadow. Scarborough, too, probably.

The second thing was that it was dead — very, very dead — and had been for a long time. Its branches were bare of leaves, and in numerous places great rents and tears in the bark were visible where branches had come crashing down through those below, and now lay in drifts of sand around the trunk. Those fallen branches reminded Jack of the bones they had seen all over the desert, only much larger, and black rather than white. It was as though the tree was little more than a skeleton now, one slowly falling in on itself.

“This is where your great-aunt is hiding?” asked Kyle, fanning himself with his hat. His curly black hair lay plastered across his scalp, slick with sweat. The earlier rain had entirely evaporated, leaving the air thick and humid.

“I don’t know,” said Jack. It did seem unlikely that anyone lived here, let alone for so many years. “But this is where Cornelia is taking us, and it’s not as if we have anywhere else to go.”

Tara marched on, not wasting energy on doubts or uncertainties. The boys trailed in her wake, eagerly anticipating the shade. They didn’t know how long they had been walking. Hours and hours, it felt like. Jack’s stomach had given up telling him he was hungry long ago, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about food.

Cornelia swooped in and took a perch on one of the outermost branches, so she could watch their approach. When they finally stepped into shadow, Jack breathed a huge sigh of relief. This was where he belonged. It was instantly ten degrees cooler.

Tara waved and Cornelia swooped down to land on her forearm.

“Where to now?” she asked the bird. “Where’s Lottie — I mean, Charlie?”

Cornelia swiveled her head nearly all the way around in one direction, then just as far the other way.

“Does that mean you don’t know?” asked Jack.

Cornelia bobbed her plumed head.

“But she was here?” asked Kyle.

The head bobbed again.

“So I guess we’ll just have to look around,” said Jack, taking in the enormity of the space before them. From a distance, the fallen branches had looked insignificant, but now, close up, they were big enough to hide whole families.

“We should split up to save time,” said Tara.

Jack was loath to agree with that. The deathly silence under the tree was already beginning to creep him out.

“Why don’t you just call her, using that telepathy thing of yours?” said Kyle. “If she’s here, she’ll hear you.”

“The Evil might hear me, too,” Jack said.

“And it might not.”

Jack looked at Tara, who nodded. He got the impression she hadn’t been looking forward to splitting up, either. Her brave face was a good one, but it was wearing thin.

“All right,” Jack said. “Let’s just go in a little farther and I’ll give it a try.”

They wound their way through fallen dead branches until they found one just the right height for them to sit on. Gray dust puffed up when they did so, making Kyle sneeze. Cornelia took to the branches above, where she sat grooming her feathers and staring at the shadows with her black eyes.

“Okay.” Jack closed his eyes and concentrated on what he knew about Lottie. She had looked exactly like Grandma X when she was young and presumably looked just like her now. He had never met her, but they were related by blood, which had to count for something.

++Hello?++

His mental voice vanished into the thick shadows under the long-dead tree.

++You don’t know me, but my name is Jack Shield and I’m your great-nephew. My sister and I got your living mail. Are you here somewhere? Can you tell me where you are?++

“Have you started yet?” asked Kyle.

“Shhhh,” said Tara. “Don’t distract him.”

Jack listened a full minute, and when no reply came tried again.

++I want to go home, and I want to take you with me. But we’re running out of time. Are you there? Can you answer me? It would really help if you would say something.++

From above came a squawk and a flutter of wings.

“Charlie!”

“Jack,” said Kyle. “Open your eyes.”

He did and saw standing before them a ghostly green image of the woman he was trying to contact.

“She’s trying to say something,” said Tara. “Can you hear her?”

Lottie’s lips were moving, but no sound was coming out. Jack couldn’t hear anything with his mind, either.

“Maybe it’s slugs again,” said Tara, poking the image with her sword. The blade went right through the image, unhindered.

Cornelia landed on Jack’s shoulder. “Charlie?”

The ghostly woman smiled as though she had heard, and reached out one hand to touch Cornelia’s gleaming feathers. Her fingers passed right through them, however, and Lottie’s face fell.

++Lottie!++ Jack cried with all his strength. ++Tell us where you are and we’ll come to you!++

Lottie’s lips moved soundlessly again, and she shook her head with frustration. Her image flickered.

“Wait,” said Kyle. “Don’t go!”

The ghostly image of Lottie disappeared as though it had never been there.

“That really was her this time, wasn’t it?” said Tara.

Jack nodded. “I think so, but I couldn’t hear her, no matter how hard I tried.”

“Well, that means she’s here somewhere. All we have to do is find her.”

“Cornelia, do you know where to go next?”

The bird managed a very humanlike shrug in answer to Jack’s question.

“Great,” said Kyle. “What if she’s on the other side of the planet?”

“I don’t think so,” said Tara. “She didn’t come to us in the city, but she did just now, which I think means we’re getting closer. We just need to know which direction to go.”

“Not that way,” said Kyle, pointing back the way they had come.

All three stared at a gray cloud that hadn’t been there before. It was noticeably growing larger.

“Uh-oh,” said Jack. “It heard.”

“What do we do now?” said Tara.

“We hide,” said Kyle. “Before it sees us.”

*  *  *

Kyle led them deeper under the lifeless canopy, leapfrogging over fallen branches or crawling under them where space allowed. They left a wide trail of footprints behind in the dust, which Cornelia tried to brush away with her wings, but Kyle stopped her.

“We’re going to create a false trail,” he said. “Let’s make it look like we climbed the trunk, then we’ll double back and take cover … there.”

He indicated a triangular hollow formed by two fallen limbs, one of them forked in a wide V. Tara kept a worried eye out for The Evil’s approach, and suggested every minute or so that it was time to turn back. But Kyle was adamant that they had time to do it properly, if they hurried.

They reached the trunk, where they put some handprints on the rough bark, and then began walking back on their own footprints. It was harder than it looked, and much slower than any of them liked. Already they could hear the humming and clicking of insect wings as The Evil approached. It was growing louder by the second.

Finally, they reached the hollow.

“Okay, you first,” Kyle said, pushing Jack ahead of him. “Burrow down deep, and cover yourself with as many twigs as you can find. Don’t smother yourself, though. Leave an air hole. Now you.” Tara went next, then Kyle, sweeping the trail behind him with a crooked stick.

The light from the suns outside was turning a deep brown as The Evil encircled the tree. Cornelia landed next to Jack and burrowed down with him. The sound of their rustling seemed terribly loud to him. Surely The Evil would hear and descend on them like a horrible hammerblow? Hopefully the brooch-charms would help. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and kept a tight grip on Cornelia, who was quivering with fear.

The Evil swarmed through the canopy, calling his name.

++Jackaran Kresimir Shield! We heard you and we have come in answer to your call! We are the only way you will ever get home. Join us and we will take you there now, as one of us!++

Jack was immune to its temptations, no matter how badly he wanted to go home. He knew that any bargain he entered into with The Evil would end up with him a glowing-eyed zombie intent on betraying everyone he loved. Mental tendrils reached for him, but he concentrated on thinking thoughts that had nothing to do with him, lest they betray him. The smell of the dust; the feel of petrified twigs digging into his sides; the dry, ashy taste of some dirt that had somehow got into his mouth …

Slowly, he became aware of a quite unexpected sensation, something he had experienced before in the second Examination but had never felt so clearly in real life. The ground around him wasn’t just dirt. It was a complex environment that spoke to him in a language he could somehow understand. He saw the layers of soil around the tree’s massive roots. He saw the pockets where life had once thrived, from catlike creatures who’d lived in tunnels, down to worms and bacteria. It had once been a vital, thriving place, and even though all the living things had long been taken over by The Evil and amalgamated into its ghastly whole, the ground itself remembered, and it knew of one place in the entire realm where life remained.

Jack thought the ground was talking about him and his friends. They were alive, and the ground could sense him just like he could sense it. But that wasn’t the case. There was another pocket of life not far away … an oasis in the middle of the vast Evil desert….

So excited was he by this discovery that he very nearly exclaimed aloud. It had to be Lottie! Who else could it be? Only with great difficulty did he keep himself still until he felt The Evil swarm pass over him, grumbling and clicking in frustration before heading off.

He didn’t move, even though he could feel Kyle beginning to get restless. Jack couldn’t feel The Evil through the ground, perhaps because it wasn’t life as he knew it. Maybe The Evil was faking going away and was waiting quietly for them to emerge. If they broke cover too soon, they might find themselves surrounded and overwhelmed, and not even Grandma X’s brooches would help them then. So he counted to a hundred, and then he counted to a hundred again. Only when he had finished doing that did he risk bringing his head up to see what was going on.

His dark-sensitive eyes saw nothing above or around him but the dead tree and its branches. With a rustle of ancient leaf litter, Tara sat up next to him, sword at the ready, followed by Kyle. Cornelia unfolded herself from Jack’s arms and fluffed up her feathers.

“Will you take a look around for us?” Jack asked her in a whisper.

She bobbed her head and took off to circumnavigate the tree.

Jack told the others what he had sensed through the ground.

“Which way?” asked Kyle.

Jack recalled the feeling clearly. “That way,” he said, pointing toward the trunk but meaning the desert on the far side. They would have to go around the tree to get where they needed to go.

“And Lottie will be there?” asked Tara.

“I think so,” said Jack. “I can’t imagine where else she could be. This whole place is dead, like someone sucked the life out of it.”

“How can The Evil live here?” asked Kyle. “Don’t its bugs need to eat?”

“Maybe they eat each other,” said Tara with a quick shudder. “I can’t wait to get home.”

Cornelia returned.

“Smooth seas and plain sailing,” she declared.

They unearthed themselves and brushed down their clothes. It didn’t make much difference to their appearance. They remained dirty from head to foot, which was possibly a good thing, Jack thought. Even a small amount of camouflage might help hide them from creatures looking for them across the desert.

“When we get home,” Jack said, “I’m going to sleep for a week.”

“I’m going to eat a hamburger and drink three thick shakes, each a different flavor,” said Kyle.

“I’m going to have a bath and never get out,” said Tara. “And I’m never going to wish I was a troubletwister again.”

Jack grinned at her, although part of him still felt painfully guilty that she and Kyle had been caught up in this. Grandma X had often warned them about the dangers of involving ordinary people in Warden affairs. He could see the consequences all too clearly now.

Tara raised her sword. “Onward!” she cried, so onward they went.