The bear, huffing a quick thanks, tossed the matchbox to Prue, and she held a lit flame to the crumpled paper below the kindling. Soon, a glowing fire radiated warmth into the modest lean-to. Prue watched the bear as the flames cast glowing shadows across his broad face. She tried to move into a seated position, but the pain at her side proved unbearable.
“Don’t move,” said Esben. “You’re pretty badly worked over there. That was a nasty creature you angered. Not wise.” Reminded, he began rifling through a duffel that he had strapped over his shoulder, pulling a worn T-shirt from within. “I’ll see to those wounds. Best do it quickly.”
“But why?” asked Prue. “Why’d you come back?”
As if in answer, he reached into his duffel and retrieved something else: Zeke’s smiling face on the badge gave Prue, in her swimming vision, a cheerful thumbs-up. “A city of moles saved my life once; it occurred to me I had a calling to do the same for someone else.” He put the badge down and, picking up the T-shirt, stepped over to where Prue lay. He began dabbing at the dark heart of the wound at her side with the cloth wrapped around his right hook.
“I’ve got some wrongs to right of my own, half-breed,” said the bear. “And I figure falling in with you is the first step forward. No sense in running away.”
The pain ratcheted upward; Prue grimaced and turned her head to the opening of the hovel. The rain was slashing sideways; the lights flickered against the haze of clouds. The last of the circus trains sounded in the distance, heralding its progression along the wide iron tracks that ran along the river and out of town. The circus was leaving, the ringleader having not yet realized that one of the animals’ cages stacked in the middle car, the one formerly housing his star, lay empty. Instead, the star was here, in the trough of garbage, seeing to the health of this one injured child. Here, in this bent lean-to, where a fire burned quietly in the deep dark.
CHAPTER 25
Season’s End
Listen.
The snow has stopped; the rain has begun.
Listen.
Through the checkerboard neighborhoods of his former world, the boy is walking away. He can hear the lowing of the train in the distance. The blackness of the night hides him. He is a stranger to the world. He is still wearing the outfit he wore at the beginning of his journey. The rat remains perched on his shoulder, his snout pointed ever outward, a sentinel on the bow of a storm-plowing ship. The boy is intent on one thing: to find his adopted family, the one to whom he’d given his oath, his vow. He silently curses himself for having disregarded that vow f
or so long. He will make it right, he swears. The trees loom far on the horizon, over the river and through the sleeping city. This is where he means to return.
Listen.
A man in a dirty and ash-smeared argyle sweater is kneeling in front of a building on fire, his plump tears making clean tracks down the soot on his cheeks. The smoke from the conflagration is billowing into the air; there are sirens sounding in the distance, but the man knows that it is far too late, the fire is far too progressed, and that the salvation of the building and all his beloved machines within is beyond reach. He can only kneel there, in the wet gravel, and watch the thing burn. He’s been left by his compatriots: the woman in the gown, the man in the tight-fitting suit, the man with the pince-nez. They’ve left him to watch his building burn; they are walking away with a young, parentless Korean girl and the blind man whose side she refuses to leave. They have their quarry; they have no more need for the man with the goatee and the argyle sweater. He swears mightily under his breath; a deep vengeance is growing in his heart.
Listen.
Farther into this nest of silos and smokestacks there is a wide expanse of lonely, abandoned buildings, their windows empty, their roofs collapsed. It is a quiet place; no one lives here. Even those who toil inside the Industrial Wastes have no reason to tread in this desolate land; the avenues are pocked with potholes, the sidewalks splintered and broken. But now a group of tired children have entered it, searching for shelter. They have run a great distance to arrive here, their pursuers having given up the chase long ago. They walk with slow, heavy steps. They have lost two of their number, the Korean girl and the blind man, and their hearts are heavy at the loss. At the front of the pack are two girls, one older than the other, one with straight hair and one with curly. They are holding hands. The younger girl, the curly-haired one, is holding a doll that has been rescued from the burning building by one of the other children. The reunion was gleeful—she’s only just stopped pressing the button on the doll’s back and making her talk—but now she’s fallen into a deeply thoughtful reverie as she considers what lies ahead. She looks at her sister; she is encouraged by the determined look on her sister’s face. They have learned a strange secret about themselves, one that may lead them to find their brother, long lost. But first, they’ve decided, they must save their friends. A building, its roof intact, comes into view of the crowd of children. It stands in the center of a large square. Seeing it, the children walk toward it, as if drawn by the building’s gravity. Perhaps this will be their home.
Listen.
Far off, beneath a shanty roof made of discarded sheet metal, a bear is stoking a small campfire and warming the quiet body of a young girl. She is awake and staring at the flames. The rain is falling on the metal of the roof; it’s falling on the heap of garbage beyond their vestibule. The girl is thinking of all that she must do; she is wondering at how impossible it all seems. She is wondering about her parents, about her brother. She is wondering about the words the plants spoke to her; how she was able to speak to them so clearly in return. But most of all, she is wondering about the iron-and-brass chassis of a mechanical boy who lies in state, a mausoleum his home, far away in a very different land. They have much work to do, the girl and the bear. But she is confident that their actions are correct. The tree has decreed it.
Listen.
Looming over the city landscape, the burning building, the forgotten trash heap, and the abandoned square is an expanse of deep green, of sky-tall trees and vast carpets of moss and fern. Inside, a world is alive.
In the southernmost region of this deep wood, a city sleeps. The windows on a mansion are drawn closed, and a quiet murmur descends on all the region’s denizens, animal and human. Their daily struggle, the tenuousness of their lives in the vacuum of power that has remained in the wake of a revolution, can wait until tomorrow.
And over the spiny range of a mountain chain, beyond a patchwork of tidy farm plots, a massive tree, its gnarled limbs snaking against the cloudy black sky, sits rooted to the loamy ground. A young boy sits in meditation at its foot, communing with the tree’s silent spirit. All of this: the boy and the rat crossing the Outside, the crying man in front of the burning building, the captive child and her blind friend, the lost children in search of a new home. The bear in the metal lean-to, the quiet, thoughtful girl pondering the road ahead, the sleeping town—all of this, he sees.
The snow has stopped falling; the rain has come.
Winter is passing.
A Spring will soon arrive.
The End