During the day, the Smokestacks were like walking through a vague and mild nightmare–murky and unsettling but not overtly threatening.

Mara wouldn’t describe the state of equilibrium she found as ‘calm’ but she was able to keep up appearances for Nick. Which admittedly was a paltry metric for mental soundness, but at least it was a metric she could meet. Throughout the day, she entertained him–and distracted herself–with the plants and the little sounds they heard out in the woods. She made up animals to go with each sound–sweet and ridiculous creatures with sweet and unthreatening lives.

But as the day wore on, the light began to fade, as light was wont to do when days wore on. Enclosed as they were in the thick canopy, Mara had little indication that time was even passing, let alone that the sun might be sliding back toward the horizon. So she had little warning that day was about to turn into night. Between one stretch of woods and the next, the light was simply gone.

Nick, who was walking beside her, his hand in hers, slowed.

“Mama?”

“I know, love.” She picked him up and pecked his cheek. “We’ll find somewhere to make camp for the night, shall we?”

“I’m scared.”

“I know, my love. These woods are awfully dark and spooky, aren’t they?” He nodded, his face a shifting charcoal shadow, lower lip protruding in a wobbling pout. “But do you know why that is?” He shook his head, and she began to walk once more. “The reason the woods are so dark is because these trees are just so big and healthy, their leaves are gobbling up the sunlight before it can reach us. And the reason it feels spooky is because there’s so many stories here. Think of all the plants and animals we learned about today! We didn’t have half that many different plants and animals in our little house, did we?”

“No.” His voice was thready and woebegone.

“And each plant has a whole life of its own. A whole story. And it fills the air with that story, so that we can hear it if we listen very carefully. And here, there are just so many lives and stories, our ears get tired.”

He’d laid his head down on her shoulder, so that his hair tickled her neck and the underside of her jaw. She felt his nod in the hollow of her throat.

“So it’s not that anything is scary, it’s just that it’s loud here, but in a different kind of way that you hear with your heart instead of your ears. Do you think it would help to hear a song?”

Again, he nodded, fingers wrapped around the strap of her pack, so she began to hum. She didn’t sing, as a rule. Singing felt a little bit like flashing her breasts in the middle of a crowded street. There was nothing wrong with her breasts, per se, or even with people seeing them, just as there was nothing terribly wrong with her singing voice. But it still wasn’t a pleasant thought. Some things were meant to be private.

She didn’t sing, but she did hum. She liked the way humming felt, the low and slow vibration in her chest and throat. It soothed her, she thought, as much as it soothed Nick. And Davy, when he came home weary so she brought him to bed and tucked them both between the covers, and they reversed their normal positions so that his head rested on her chest, and she stroked his hair and hummed until he fell asleep.

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Her eyes burned, and the strain of the mournful melody she was humming caught in her throat. She cleared it out and came back to herself. Nick had fallen asleep, one arm dangling down by his side, the other hand still clutched around the strap of her pack.

She squinted into the darkness around her, trying to find something resembling a safe place to stop and rest. But all she saw was trees and milky darkness. Something in her chest began to press outward–a building need to scream. As the last of the gray light faded to black, the volume of the forest brightened to an incessant clamor, popping and cracking like a fire. The sounds wove together into a ragged tapestry that rippled like a flag in the wind, each sound at once distant and close enough to touch.

The scream within her had crawled up to writhe around in the back of her mouth when she finally stumbled upon a half-decent shelter–two trees that had grown out of the ground and then somehow twined together, thick trunks merging into a sloppy braid of light bark against dark. Their joining formed a sort of cave, small and shallow, but with enough coverage overhead and along the sides to provide some sense of security.

Mara stomped on the ground beneath the overhang and kicked out the collection of dead leaves, grateful there wasn’t enough light to see all the creepy crawlies she’d no doubt unearthed as they wiggled across the newly bare patch of soil to find shelter elsewhere.

Once the ground was clear, she knelt and laid Nick down, and shrugged out of her pack. Working blind–night had properly fallen–she worked the sleeping roll free from its straps and spread it across the ground beneath the overhang, shifting Nick onto it as she worked.

Once the blankets were rolled out, she wheedled Nick’s limp body under the blankets and then slipped in with him, boots and jacket still on. Tomorrow night, she would keep track of the time, find a campsite while there was still light, and do the proper thing. She would take their boots off, brush their teeth, change their shirts. She would do a lot of things differently tomorrow. But tonight it was enough that they had survived the day.

Mara tucked them into the safety of the blankets, pulling her pack close so that it blocked the opening near their heads and looping the strap around her arm in case some enterprising life form tried to snatch it from her while she slept. She’d turned the pack so that she had access to the large knife strapped to the side. She used the knife primarily to dig up tubers and split firewood and would probably be more danger to herself than others if she tried to use it in a fight. Still, she felt safer with it at hand. Eli had bought it for her back in Cinder. He’d even given her a few lessons on how to hold it if she needed to defend herself.

Stop thinking of Eli.

Strange, how much safer it felt under here. There was really nothing protecting them except concealment, and that only from creatures that navigated with eyes that saw the way hers did. Their scent was everywhere, no doubt, the sound of their breathing deafening to anything that listened, their magical footprint a messy, intrusive human splotch against the slow interweaving of the plant life around them.

But she did feel safer. Safe enough to slow her breath and imagine that she and Nick were not in fact humans but part of the trees that entwined around them. She thought of their roots, their slow dance down into the soil, the security of knowing that even if some creature came along and scoured their bark with a claw, they would still drink up the earth with their roots and breathe the sunlight and dance the dew from their leaves in the breeze coming down off the mountains.

She thought of all the years they would have together, watching the sun rise and set across blue skies and behind the dull gray of the clouds. The roots of new undergrowth would tickle them beneath the soil, and then go still, and some time later worms would carry down the remnants of those other lives and feed those sweet and savory morsels into the soil, and she and her child would capture up the remnants and send them back up out into the sky for the sun to burn away.

Her arms twined around Nick and she sank them into the earth, and slept so deeply even Davy didn’t wake her.