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“I know.”

She laughs at that, the not-funny laugh, and starts packing the kit, and I sit on a slab somebody cut ten millennia ago, in the heart of a swamp with my arm stitched shut by a schoolteacher, watching her, and I understand two things with unpleasant clarity.

The first is that she is going to keep coming out of the roots.

The second is that I have stopped intending to send her home.

CHAPTER 5

CLARA

Idon't sleep, and I'd like it on record that this is a choice.

Garrick's table takes up most of the front room once I've cleared it, and by two in the morning I have all six of the hand-stitched journals open at once, weighted flat with jars of swamp water, and a lamp doing its best. Somewhere under the floor the tide moves. Every so often the whole house shifts on its legs and settles, like a big animal changing position in its sleep.

Here is what nine years of grading has given me. I can read handwriting the way a doctor reads a limp.

My uncle wrote fast, and fast writing has habits. He crowded his margins when he was excited and left them generous when he was bored. He pressed harder on numbers than on symbols. And in all six journals, on eleven separate pages, he drew a small vertical stroke in the outer margin and then wrote nothing beside it, which for two nights I assumed was a slip of the pen.

It isn't. It's a page marker. He was building an index for himself and he was too paranoid to label it.

I copy out all eleven marked pages onto one sheet, in order, and the thing they have in common walks up and taps me on the shoulder at about half past four.

Every marked page contains a bearing. Every bearing is written after the description of a place. And every one of those places appears, earlier, at the bottom of a different marked page.

They're not eleven sites. They're one route, cut into eleven pieces, buried in eleven separate holes, so that no person who found a single cache could ever do anything with it except find the one after.

“He made a chain out of his whole life,” I say, to nobody, to the jars.

Draeven arrives at first light and finds me exactly where he left me, surrounded by paper, holding a pencil I have apparently chewed.

“You didn't rest.”

“I rested emotionally.”

“That isn't a thing.”

“It is if you commit.” I turn the sheet around so he can see it. “Eleven. Not ten, not twelve. Eleven links, and we have two of them, and the people shooting at us have one.”

He reads it. He takes a surprisingly long moment over the middle section, and I realize with a small internal jolt that he is not humoring me. He's checking my work.

“What's this notation.”

“I've got no idea. It shows up under four of the bearings and nowhere else.”

“Find out,” he says, and it is the closest thing to a compliment I have received on this planet.

Joren takes us out, because the fourth bearing runs into water no outsider is getting through.

His boat is narrower than Garrick's and sits so low that I can put my hand flat on the marsh without leaning, and he steers it into a wall of reed that has no gap in it until, abruptly and unfairly, it does.

“Don't tell anybody about this one,” he says.

“Who would I tell?”

“You'd be amazed. People come through here twice a season now. Never used to.” He glances back at Draeven, folded into the stern with his knees somewhere near his shoulders, and something in his face relaxes by a fraction. “Garrick used this cut. Said it was the only road worth knowing.”

The channel goes on for an hour. Trees close overhead until the light comes down green and stops behaving like daylight. Insects the size of my thumbnail sit on the surface in rafts and part around us and reassemble behind.