“Oh…” Mara stopped in her tracks and bent reflexively to pick up Nick, who had been walking at her side. “My.”

  “Yes,” Quint said with a knowing sigh. “It is a bit worse on this side of the wall, isn’t it?”

  Their walk through the crevasse had been much shorter than Mara expected–fifteen minutes at most. But the forest into which they emerged on the other side was somehow darker, denser, closer than the one they had left. She sidestepped until the sleeve of her jacket brushed Eli’s, peering out into the trees.

  The thick trunks stood so close together, Quint would have to turn sideways to fit through some of the gaps, the canopy low enough to brush the top of his head. Vines hung like curtains from every low branch, and crept in a tangle over the ground.

  “It’s not far,” Quint said, leading the way into the forest, but Mara hesitated. And not because of the woods, although their new density was admittedly intimidating. It was the sense that their journey had entered its final stage. They might not reach the Enclave tonight, but they’d reached a point where the future felt nearer at hand than the past. Ahead of her was the first person she had ever met who worked directly, openly for the rebellion. Not as a spy or an underground physik or a shadow-caster. As a guard, a wayfarer. He probably knew Davy’s parents, not as distant leaders or as a lofty ideal, but as people. He’d know what they looked like, where they lived. He knew the streets of the Enclave as well as Mara knew the alleyways of the Capital.

  She was so close to her destination. To Davy’s parents, to his past, to the future without him. That future loomed over her as unscalable as the cliff face at her back, and she found herself pressed between the two, unable to move in either direction.

  “Mara.” Eli’s quiet voice wound through her rising trepidation, and his elbow nudged hers, a glancing reassurance.

  Her mouth opened, confession ready on her tongue, but several steps ahead of them and already half-obscured by foliage and darkness, Quint had stopped and turned.

  “Alright back there?” he called, and before Eli could answer, to ask for a couple of minutes which he would no doubt spend escorting her gently through this new iteration of the same tiresome crisis, Mara finally captured her wits.

  “Of course! Sorry.” She plunged after Quint, and a few seconds later heard Eli’s footsteps behind her.

  Fortunately, the choking forest left little space for her thoughts. How Quint kept his way, Mara had no idea. He had no compass, and the trees were too dense for them to walk a straight line even if one knew which direction to travel. The path they followed wound through the trees, the terrain and the mad tangle of vegetation prodding them left then right in tight turns and wide curves. Several times, they had to stop and remove their packs to shuffle sideways through the gap between two trees. Mara thought of the tunnel beneath the city, the way it pressed in tighter as they walked, until they were forced to crawl.

  Cold sweat trickled down the back of her neck and along the curve of her spine. A scream buffeted about within her, and she itched to scramble up a nearby tree, climb until she reached the top, and breathe the fresh air above the canopy. All she could see was a sea of dark green and shadows. All she could hear was the rasp of her own breathing. All she could smell–

  “How much farther?” Eli asked from behind her.

  “About ten minutes,” Quint called back.

  Ten minutes. She could manage ten minutes.

  “So how long have they had you down here?” Eli again, and Mara didn’t need the lingering echoes of an obscure, nigh impossible magical connection to know his intention. She just needed to know Eli, who would have noticed from her posture alone that she was panicking and taken it upon himself to distract her.

  “About four months.”

  “Explains why you stopped answering my letters.”

  “Sorry about that.” Quint turned sideways to fit between two trees, then immediately ducked beneath a low branch. Mara, thankfully, had to neither turn nor duck to follow him. “Wasn’t much warning. They told me I was coming down, and the next day we were off. I asked Bri to mention it. They didn’t tell you?”

  “Might’ve. We left the city months ago and the birds were running slow all spring. Circuit winds were brutal this year.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I was on South Peak before I drew this assignment. Six months since I came off the mountain and I swear I can still hear the wind.”

  “How long is this rotation?”

  “A year.”

  “Must be driving you mad.” Despite the teasing earlier, Mara heard genuine sympathy in Eli’s voice. And fondness. Quint, she had deduced, must be a friend from childhood. Which meant he was likely Davy’s friend as well. She wondered if Davy had exchanged birds with Quint, or with this Bri person. He’d told her so little of the Enclave, except that it existed and that he’d grown up there. He’d told her so little of anything.

  “It’s not so bad. It’s a paired duty with a six month offset for continuity. I’ve been here with Vauntner. No idea who they’ll send down to replace him, though.”

  “Vauntner is a scout?”

  “Two years now. Baby Vauntner, all grown up. You’ll like him. Reminds me of you, a little.”

  “Magic?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about… what was her name? The Delosh girl his family took in. She’d just been born when we were leaving.”

  “Who, Franny?”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Bri didn’t tell you? Franny just manifested last year. Shadow-caster.”

  “How many does that make?”

  “Current count is twenty-two in training, unless it’s changed since I left.”

  “Elise must be ecstatic.”

  “She brought in a trainer from Polandria. Odd fellow. Wears robes.”

  “How’d she manage that?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “What about fighters?”

  Their conversation droned on, and Mara listened with one ear, half fascinated and half distracted. Every new piece of information held echoes of Davy. Davy would have known this Vauntner person, and might have been eager to see him again. Davy would have been excited that the Delosh girl, whoever she was, had manifested as a shadow-caster. Davy would have taken up a training role for the next generation of shadow-casters. Davy would be curious about the state of the fighting force, about the Enclave’s defenses, about the gardens and the fields through which the settlement fed itself. Davy should be walking behind her. Davy should be here.

  Davy should be coming home

  When the trees finally broke ahead of them, and the log cabin came into view, she knew she should’ve been charmed by the chaotic garden that surrounded the cabin, by the candlelight flickering in the windows, by the inviting smell of woodsmoke. But bitterness tinged the picture a sickly yellow.

  Quint unlatched the front gate, and Mara wasn’t so lost in her surging grief to miss the runes carved into the wood beside the latch or the feather of magic that tickled the soles of her feet as she stepped through the gate. A trail of flagstones cut a haphazard path through the tangled garden to the front door of the cabin, but Quint didn’t lead them up it.

  “You alright to stay out here a minute while I go brief Vauntner?” he asked, looking to Mara for an answer.

  “Of course,” she said, barely hearing herself. “We’ll stay here and admire your garden.”

  “More Vauntner’s passion than mine,” he said, before ambling off up the path.

  “Oh look,” Mara said, reaching for a shrub growing beside the gate and plucking one of the delicate pink and white flowers. The colors were so bright, they all but glowed even in the twilight. She twirled it in front of Nick’s face. “You remember this one, love? We found some back in Loftland.”

  Nick shook his head before dropping it heavily onto her shoulder, rubbing at his eyes.

  “I’ll take him,” Eli said quietly.

  With a sigh, Mara handed her son over. Nick went so easily, snuggling into Eli’s chest with a fist tucked under his chin and eyes already going foggy with sleep. Eli, for his part, accepted the burden as if it was his to bear. An unbidden, unwelcome thought scraped at the back of Mara’s mind. Nick was too young to truly understand what he had lost. He’d simply traded one father figure for another, and the new one didn’t leave for weeks and months at a time.

  The window for her to tell her son about Davy’s passing, and for him to actually care, had probably already closed.

  “You okay?”

  Mara startled and realized she’d been staring down at the pink and white flower–dustlily–with tears in her eyes. She looked up at Eli, who stood with Davy’s son in his arms, Davy’s pack slung over his shoulders, Davy’s burdens carving a deep, worried line between his brows. He’d lowered his chin to rest lightly atop Nick’s head as he studied her, waiting for her answer.

  “Of course!” she said brightly, swiping her finger beneath her eyes to clear the tears away before they could fall. “We get to sleep indoors tonight, right?”

  He didn’t believe her. She knew by the long, pointed look he gave her–the I’ll ask again later look–before he shifted his gaze to the flower in her hand. “Dustlily.”

  She sniffed and smiled a wobbly smile. “That’s right. Uses?”

  “That I can’t remember.”

  She twirled the flower, until the starburst of pink streaks shooting out from the stamen blurred into a circle. “It’s a mood stabilizer,” she said absently.

  “Would it help with grief?”

  “It can,” she admitted, lifting the flower to her face and taking a whiff. It smelled, of course, of her son’s hair and of Davy’s soap. Dustlily always smelled of the things one found most calming. But the smell of Davy was faint. Faraway. As if she was already forgetting. “It’s not very powerful, though. One would really have to want it to work.”

  “That’s a shame.” His words were a murmur, and she saw why. Nick’s eyelids were drifting closed, his fingers loosening their grip on Eli’s sleeve.

  Mara looked back down at the flower and then tucked it into her pocket. When she looked up, Eli was still watching her, eyes intent.

  “You okay?”

  She swallowed. “You already asked me that.”

  “I’m asking again.”

  Just for a moment–a wretched, weak, selfish fraction of a heartbeat–she wanted to step into him and lay her head on his chest beside Nick’s and tell the truth. She wanted to say, No, I am not. I’m not okay. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to keep going. Take me back. Back through the Smokestacks. Across the Morro plains and the Ribbon. Take me back to Ashfall, and then to Loftland, through the tunnel, into the city. Take me home. Take me back. Take me to Davy.

  And he would, she thought. If she asked, Eli would turn them around tonight and lead them back through the Smokestacks, across the plains. He’d tow them across the Ribbon and half carry them over the mountains of Ashfall. But there was no further back to go from there. From there, the only option left was a new version of forward, across the Stormway to Ralin and a new life.

  The only way to return to Davy was in her dreams, and she knew she couldn’t keep him there. She could perhaps, if Eli was right, hold fast to her love and her grief and never let him go. She could have him–soft and sleep and evergreen, unchanging in her dreams as the relentless march of her own waking years wore her down and reshaped her into someone he didn’t know.

  “Mara?”

  She found Eli’s eyes, half his face lit by the warm light from the cabin, the other in shadows. Insects sang a chorus from the thick tangle of plant life around them. “All these people… they know Davy. We’re getting so close.”

  Rubbing a hand up and down Nick’s back, he nodded.

  “I don’t know how to…” She raised her hands and let them fall at her sides. “I don’t know what to do. When we get there, I still don’t know what to do.” I don’t know if I can let him go.

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “I don’t know if I will.”

  “You will. And if you can’t, I’ll be there with you. I’ll help.”

  Her vision blurred, her nose burned, and she closed her eyes just as the first hot tears broke loose and tracked down her cheeks. She wanted, more than anything else in the world, simply to be held. Not in her dreams, but here. Now. In this moment, when her ribs were caving in from the force of the emptiness inside her and her skull was cracking with the pressure of her fear. She wanted, needed someone to hold her together.

  Here.

  Now.

  Light flared against the back of her eyelids, and Quint’s voice called from behind her.

  “Alright, you can come in. You’ll be taking your boots off at the door, though. Vauntner’s rules.”