She coughed again.
“Or I am just old.”
Green tried to hold his arms away from his sides, wincing each time he brushed against his own ribs. Something akin to heartburn hit him each time Valentina spoke. This particular brand of misery did not love company.
“Please tell me you have something in your backpack that ends this. I don’t care what it is. I just need it to be over.”
She shook her head and flinched.
“No. Just time. A few hours. Did you check the house?”
He knew a few hours was better than a few days, but he wanted to scream in her face anyway.
“Yeah. They’re alive, but they won’t be happy when they wake up.”
When Green and Valentina made it back to camp, morning had arrived and the woods were raining down fists made of birdsong. Every twitter in the branches, every scuffle of chipmunks racing through the underbrush, every chitter of scolding squirrels felt like wet garbage pressed directly against Green’s raw, exposed brain. The two walked in silence with their eyes on the path.
At camp, they managed a two-word conversation before retreating from the day.
“Bed?”
“Bed.”
Valentina went to her camper. Green to his shed.
He fell into his bed, muddy clothes and all. Exhaustion wrestled with misery and, eventually, his mind surrendered to dreamless sleep.
He woke in the early afternoon and felt shockingly whole.
He groaned, stretched, and touched his face. The sensation didn’t summon a bolt of pain.
That’s better.
He sat on the edge of his bed, feeling wonderfully neutral and promising himself never to take feeling simply fine for granted again.
All the moisture was gone from his mouth and he worked his tongue, trying to coax it back. He sat up and rubbed the grit from his eyes.
Catskill was sleeping somewhere full of inhuman pressure and quiet and the effortless normalcy of that knowledge made Green shake his head in disbelief.
“There’s a monster inside my mind. And we’re family.”
His stove had gone dark and he held his palm above the ashes to check for heat. There was still enough warmth there that he knew leaving a log to smolder would return the fire to life by evening. Hewas beginning to know such things. He placed a log in the fluffy gray ashes, then went out to find his teacher.
She was in the library tree.
Green heard voices as he entered the hatch.
Valentina sat in front of an open laptop. She was video chatting with someone. It was like spotting a microwave in a Renaissance painting of biblical martyrdom.
He hadn’t thought she was a Luddite exactly. He just hadn’t expected her to own a computer.
She was wrapped in a thick coat, though it must have been nearly seventy-five degrees in the room, the electric heaters purring away near the trunk.
She motioned for him to pull up a seat.
The woman on the screen was ancient, a dried apple dollface offset by a colorful pile of shawls. Her left eye was missing. In its place, a stone the color of a tropical lagoon gleamed conspicuously.
“My apprentice. Green,” Valentina said.
