Charley was island quiet.
Surely it’s part of Nil’s fun. Seeing rookies squirm as they put the pieces together. Watching as they finally see through the island’s façade. For Charley, Nil’s mask was just starting to crack. For some people, it all crumbles at once; for others, it falls one piece at a time. Either way, it disappears for everyone, eventually. Because it has to.
“And the gates take us back?” Charley asked, her voice remarkably steady. “Back home, back to the Target lot? Or do they take us somewhere else? Some other world?”
That’s two, I thought.One to go.“I don’t know, Charley. No one does. But we know every incoming gate comes from our world, so it makes sense that outbounds take us back, like a loop. But the truth is, we don’t know. Not for sure.” I watched emotion whirl across her face, so fast and furious that I reached out to stop it.
“Hey,” I said, tilting up her chin with my finger, “it’ll work out. You’ll see your family again. I can’t promise it, but I believe it.” I sounded as fierce as Samuel the day before.
Charley’s golden eyes searched mine, like she was hunting fortruths. For the last truth, the one that cracked Nil’s beautiful mask for good. She nodded, but her eyes stayed troubled.
“It’s okay.” I whispered the lie, the same one I told her yesterday.
Her eyes stayed on mine. “I have one more question,” she said.
Here we go. The final question, breaking Nil’s mask to bits.
“Shoot,” I said, braced and ready.
“When I woke up this morning, I swear there was a cheetah pelt on that girl—Natalie’s—bed. Y’all have cheetahs here?”
Her question was not the one I was expecting. “Not that I know of, but there could be.” I smiled. “We’ve had the occasional cheetah, lion, and tiger, along with cows and goats.”
“Don’t forget the zebra,” she said, forcing a smile.
“Too right. We don’t want to leave him out.”
“How do you know it’s a him? It could be a her.”
“Point conceded.”
Charley’s eyes swept the trees. “Thad, my point is, Nil has dangers, like cheetahs, that we might not know about, right? Things we can’t see?”
“You got it,” I said.Person, place, thing, or animal. It’s always the things that are the toughest.
“Just trying to figure Nil out,” she said. She wasn’t smiling.
I knew I should tell Charley about the days. But I hesitated. Maybe because I didn’t want to ruin the morning. Maybe because once you know, it’s always on your mind, like a leech on your brain, sucking out hope. Or like a clock, counting off the minutes, only in my head it sounded like a detonator. The tick-tock, just before theboom.
Soon enough, I thought.You’ll see Nil for what she is soon enough.
I didn’t tell her.
Charley filled the silence before I could. “So what’s the deal with the carving? The one on the black rocks, south of where we met?”
“The Man in the Maze?” I asked.
“The Man in the Maze,” she repeated, like she was feeling the way it sounded. “Exactly. Who carved it?”
“Don’t know.” I shrugged. “There’s an identical carving on the eastern side, near the rain forest, only that one has a woman in the middle.”
“What do they mean?”
“No clue,” I said.
She was quiet. Then, “What do you think they mean?”
“That we’re rats in a maze?” I said, grinning.
