The Fog of Forgetting (25 page)

“I'm headed east, away from the river, and then north,” he announced.

Knox sat up.

“But that means going into the mountains, into Varuna.”

Chase gave him a dark look. “That's where I'm going—I'm not asking you to come.” His back was rigid as he walked away.

Evelyn and Knox hauled themselves to their feet. They cast one last look at the river that had stolen Teddy, liquid gold in the morning light, and followed Chase, wordlessly, into the brush.

C
hase allowed the other two to go ahead of him by several yards. He had no intention of speaking to either of them. Every now and then Evelyn bent down to scratch at the earth or pick something off the ground, storing her findings in a makeshift bag she'd tied together from her robe. Knox was up ahead. Evelyn bent down again. Chase saw the knobs of her spine poke through the thin fabric of her shirt. Flesh and bone. Fragile. The long trek had calmed him: He hadn't forgiven her, but he had stopped hating her.

The Hestredes lay to the southwest, a glimmering ribbon unspooling from the Voss; Chase knew the shortest way to the foothills of Varuna was straight north—away from the river. Knox was feeling unusually cautious and preferred to keep the river in sight, but they all knew they could not follow it the entire way. Soon they would be in unfamiliar territory.

The afternoon stretched slowly into evening; no one said a word except for Knox, who guessed out loud that they'd walked about twelve miles from where they'd started on the ledge. The terrain was uneven and slowly steepening. Orange-winged butterflies hovered and lit on spiky, flowered bushes growing alongside their trail. The air was warm and dry and buzzed with the industry of small insects. They walked on, seeing no sign of human habitation. When their shadows lengthened across the ground, Evelyn sat down, hungry and tired and unable to walk any farther. Chase broke his silence to agree to stay with her—albeit at a distance—while

Knox climbed to the summit of the hill to scout the surrounding area. He wasn't gone for long and and came jogging back.

“We're closer than we think,” he reported. “When you get to the top, you can see the mountains and the lake. It's pretty rough going by the river—lots of up and down—but if we hike east about a mile, the land gets flatter and more open.” He threw himself down on the ground. His face was flushed from running.

“Back in your element, huh?” asked Chase, not really caring if he answered. Knox looked at him hopefully, glad his brother was at least speaking again.

“What do you mean?”

Chase waved his hand, taking in the thick vegetation, the damp ground, the tall grasses and wildflowers bending in the wind. “You know, back on the trail. No food. Danger at every turn. Your daylights are happy.”

“True that,” Evelyn agreed, also eager to get back into Chase's good graces. “Melorians are easy to please.”

Knox lay back, cradling his head in his folded arms. “So you agree with Rothermel? That I'm a Melorian? Do you think he's controlling my daylights right now?” He stretched out both arms, pretending to be a zombie. “Must walk. Must hunt.”

“I wish you would hunt,” grumbled Evelyn. “I can't stop thinking about food.”

Chase grunted in agreement, still reluctant to begin speaking to her again. Evelyn withdrew a little bundle from her robe.

“I don't know if I'm a Melorian or not, but I did manage to pick some food on the trail.” She untied the bundle. It contained a small pile of mushrooms and some kind of acorn-looking nut, which she offered to Chase first. “We'll have to make do with these.”

Chase picked up one of the acorns and put it in his mouth and bit down. “Ow!” he cried, holding his jaw.

“You have to let them soften in your mouth first,” said Evelyn. “If I wasn't so tired I'd go down to the river and get us some water so we could soak them, but—” She took another peek at him from under her eyelashes. He was frowning, but his eyes looked less hard. “Just suck on it for a while, like a candy. It will get soft pretty quickly.”

Knox mimicked her. After a few moments, he made a face. “Sure doesn't taste like hard candy. Flo's never sold anything like this.”

“Don't talk about Flo's! Just thinking about it makes me hungrier,” groaned Chase. It also made him think of someone. The tight knob below his heart started knocking and a pressure built behind his eyes, but he was good at shoving beasts in his chest back underground. He cleared his throat. Knox stared at him hungrily.

“Tell me what you remember about Flo's,” he said, eager to be back on Chase's good side. Everything was colder and emptier without his brothers.

Chase thought about not answering, but he had to admit, it was getting too hard to keep giving them the silent treatment.

“Dunno. I guess the soda fountain, the wall of pictures, some of the toys on the shelf, and those little red fish.”

“Swedish fish,” Knox volunteered.

“Yeah, those. And the chewy tan candies in the yellow wrapper.” Chase tried to think of other kinds of candy he had liked, but found it hard to remember anything specific. One moment he could picture the inside of Flo's in vivid detail, but just as quickly, the image would vanish.

“Bit-O-Honeys,” said Evelyn softly. “I liked those, too. And the chocolate bars with the coconut.”

“Chase, remember my tree fort and that cave in the rocks?” asked Knox, with a wistful expression. “Man, I really loved that fort.”

“Remember your stupid cap gun? I thought I'd gone deaf after you fired that thing!”

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

Chase raised an eyebrow, surprised that Knox sounded genuinely remorseful. He looked out of the corner of his eye at Evelyn.

“That's the day we first met you.”

Evelyn chewed her lip, thinking. When she answered it was as though she were pulling the words up from some great depth.

“On the beach. We found sand dollars.”

Fragments of that first day at Summerledge came back to each of them. They took turns recalling pieces of it, weaving their memories together until the day was almost whole in their minds, and solid, like a blanket to ward off the chill that was descending as the sun set. Still, it seemed like a lifetime ago. No one said anything out loud, but they all knew how much they'd lost since then.

“Knox,” asked Evelyn, taking a deep breath. “What does it feel like?”

“What does
what
feel like?” he replied, yawning. The sun was at its lowest point on the horizon, almost gone.

“The daylights. What does it feel like when they call you, like Seaborne told us?”

“I dunno, really.” Knox shrugged. He frowned in concentration, trying to find words for the sensation he'd felt in the forest when they first met Rothermel. The feeling of belonging—no, he corrected himself—of
being
the forest.

“I guess if I had to describe it, I would say that it feels like everything you've ever wanted or ever missed is right there in front of you. But it's even better than you imagined. It is also a little scary, because it's like you aren't you anymore … or, maybe, you're more like you than you've ever been, but you are also everything else.” He shook his head. “I'm explaining it badly. Chase—have you felt anything?”

“Me? No.”

“Maybe you will when we get to Varuna,” Evelyn suggested.

Chase pondered this for a minute. “That's convenient. I'm a Varunan, Knox is a Melorian, and Teddy's a Metrian. That leaves you and Frankie to Exor.” He scowled. “That trick you played on Rysta could have been right out of Dankar's playbook.”

Evelyn's face fell. She was quiet a moment.

“That's what I'm worried about,” she admitted. “Don't you think it's weird … or at least one big coincidence that there are five of us, and five stones? It's almost like it was planned. One stone for each one of us—and if that's the case, then who planned it? And who is the Exorian? Me—or Frankie?”

Chase pointed his finger at her, as if it were completely obvious. Evelyn's hurt expression made him retract it. He pulled at his bangs.

“You're jumping to some big conclusions, anyway, Evelyn. We don't know if any of this is true, not even the part about the Fifth Stone. It could all be a mass hallucination—maybe they all ate some weird mushrooms or something, and made up all this stuff about the daylights and the stones to make everyone feel better about killing and kidnapping each other. Maybe there's nothing special about this place—or the Keepers, except that they're all insane.” Even as he said, it didn't feel like the truth, but it felt good to say it for some reason.

“Do
you
think it's real, Evelyn?” asked Knox, confused. Chase cut in before she could answer.

“It doesn't matter whether or not it's real—the only thing that matters is the facts: Number one: We're stranded here. Number two: Frankie and Teddy have been kidnapped, at the very least. Number three: We're headed into the mountains with no map, no weapons, no warm clothing, and no food. We have no idea if Ratha will be friendly, and we know Dankar and the Exorians won't be. So, all in all, the facts pretty much stink.”

Knox gulped. “But what if it
is
true? What if our daylights are stronger, and the power of the Fifth Stone is protecting the balance—and us?”

Chase pressed his lips together and looked at his feet. A strange mood had taken hold of him.

“Not likely, Knox. Tell me something: If Evelyn is right and it's all a plan, how do you explain the Fifth Stone? Which one of us is connected to it, and why aren't they feeling it? Don't you think one of us would be picking up signals from this all-powerful entity, or whatever it is? Wouldn't we have
some
inkling if it existed? Makes you wonder, doesn't it?” He leaned back with a satisfied smirk, perversely happy to be debunking the daylights.

“But I feel so different,” Knox whispered.

Evelyn inched closer, saying, “I was raised among people who told me that much of what is true can never be seen. This is what it means to believe in something, whether it is a stone, or a person, or an idea. Sometimes belief is enough to
make
something true.”

Chase exhaled a long sigh. “Maybe you're right, Evelyn—but where's the proof?”

“Chase,” she said, “believing is always a choice, not a certainty.” Her expression made her look far older than her age. “So, I think, the better question is: Do you or don't you.”

“Do I or do I not what?”

“
Believe
in the daylights. In the Fifth Stone. Because if you don't, I don't understand why we are headed to Varuna.”

Chase felt as if everything depended on his answer: their survival, Frankie's rescue, Teddy's life. Minutes stretched out as he considered what to say. He tried to think of a logical explanation for everything that had happened to them. A reason. Finally he lifted his gaze and met theirs.

Knox's peaked forehead was pink and sore-looking from the sun in Metria. His freckles stood out like constellations on his skin. Evelyn's dark eyes were troubled. Her skin was gray, and she had chewed her lower lip to shreds. The two of them looked cold and hungry. For the first time since the riverbank, his anger fell away completely and he saw them for who they really were: his brother and his friend.

“I do. I choose to believe,” he said, truthfully. “I have to … for Teddy.”

“I do, too,” whispered Evelyn. “For Frankie.”

“So do I,” whispered Knox, squirming ever so slightly closer to Chase.

The darkness was now thick around them, the evening filled with the soft whirring sound of bat wings and the hooting of owls. Teddy's signal in Melor. The painful knob rose again in Chase's chest and knocked. He swallowed it. Together they watched as one by one, the stars appeared, high and remote in the vastness of space. The ground lay quiet and half-lit, the shadow of the mountains to the north just visible. In that moment, time seemed to stop, and they saw what the world might have been like when it was new and unpeopled: a perfect and absolute stillness, immense and eternal. Evelyn, Chase, and Knox huddled together, feeling very small.

It was just past daybreak when Evelyn roused the boys to an overcast sky. The air was still and much cooler than the night before.

“The wind shifted again,” said Chase.

“The top of this hill isn't far,” said Knox. “I can show you what I told you about last night. I think if we move inland and walk on the flatlands, we'll get to the foothills of the mountains within a day or so; then we can turn west and head toward the Voss.”

And then what?
was the thought no one dared voice out loud. They also tried to avoid talking about their stabbing hunger pains. Evelyn's stomach growled loudly.

“We have to find some food,” she whimpered to no one in particular.

By the middle of the following day, they reached the Varunan foothills. Peaks that had looked so peaceful and distant on the horizon were now at hand. Tall, rocky outcroppings undulated north, going from green to brown to white as they increased in height. The terrain once again sloped sharply uphill and the air was now quite cold. The children shivered in their Metrian dress, wrapping the long but far-too-thin robes around them as tightly as they could. Hunger, too, was taking a serious toll. Knox, who could almost always be counted on to make some kind of idle chatter, had grown sullen and silent. Evelyn was using all of her energy to put one foot in front of the other. Chase was the only one who was not tired at all. In fact, if it weren't for being cold and hungry, he would say that he'd never felt better. As he walked behind Evelyn, watching her weave and stumble, he considered what she had said about his daylights. Maybe they were tied to Varuna after all.