CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nobody
VIII
“Oh no you don’t.” Gramma clamped a hand on Wilburn’s shoulder, halting him in his tracks. The four of them were nearly to the top of the hill, but still downslope of where the valley’s shadow met the ruddy light of the setting sun. “Think, boy. This could be important. Forget what Iddo told you for a minute. What were Red Guy’s words exactly? Was it arithmetic? A list of numbers?”
“Erm…” Wilburn rubbed his chin.
Ez bobbed on the balls of her feet, hugging herself and shivering. She didn’t know what to think—except that she was cold. She couldn’t believe her son had witnessed deaths. Suicides even… And hundreds of them? No, Ez wasn’t ready to believe that. There had to be some other explanation. It just… couldn’t have been real. Wilburn showed none of the symptoms of trauma that she would have expected. If it had been real, if her son had really witnessed… all that, then one of two things must be true: either Wilburn was so traumatized he was repressing his emotions, or… he genuinely wasn’t traumatized. Of course Ez didn’t want him to be traumatized—but what kind of little boy wouldn’t be? It was a deeply uncomfortable question. Thus, Ez didn’t know what to think—except that she was cold.
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“I dunno, Gramma,” Wilburn said. “I guess if it’s important, I could check…” He stuck his tongue out and made a groping gesture in the air above his head. The first time Ez had seen him do this, she’d been baffled. Now that she understood the reason, however, her imagination was able to sketch in the technicolor rope he must be handling in a higher dimension. A rope of memories… well, why the heck not? It was, on the whole, one of the saner propositions she’d encountered in the past twenty-four hours.
Ez shuffled closer to Thoralf, hoping to absorb some of his warmth. She had long since come to rue her clothed bath in the creek, for as the sun went down, the wind was picking up and slicing through her without mercy. Now Ez had hypothermia to deal with on top of all her injuries. Really intelligent maneuver, she thought vindictively to herself. Who could have predicted that evaporation causes cooling? She expected to reach the campfire before her condition grew dangerous, but in the meantime she felt absolutely wretched.
“Found it!” Wilburn tried to snap his fingers, but he hadn’t quite mastered the technique yet. Ez took a few hopeful steps uphill, then stopped. The others weren’t moving. Being dry, they were in no rush to get back to the campfire; and even Thoralf appeared intent on Wilburn’s tale, too intent to notice Ez’s misery. A different woman might have interjected at this point, but Ez opted for the stoic path. She was frankly too cold to give a damn what Red Guy had or hadn’t said, but a small part of her—likely the last warm part of her—knew she ought to care, and the knowledge was sufficient to keep her shivering in place, even as the rising wind wafted the smell of woodsmoke to her nostrils.
“K,” Wilburn said, “so the girl, she was like, Speak, right? And I was like, No way, she really said that to a grown up? And then Red Guy—actually it was Her Majesty talking through Red Guy—but anyway, what his exact words were was…”