The closest they came to having a meaningful exchange was on the third afternoon. Corinn entered the common room they passed most of the day in and glanced around with heavy-lidded eyes. Mena was surprised when Corinn drifted over toward her, plopped down on the couch near her, and exhaled a bored breath.
“Did you hear? One of the soldiers said that two men had been found trying to leave the village. He said they were ‘trussed for it’ and the other laughed and said it served them right. What do you think that means?”
“I am sure it means they were punished,” Mena said.
“Of course it means that!” Corinn snapped. “You always say the most obvious things. Punished how? That’s what I was asking.”
“I don’t say the most obvious things,” Mena said, fearful that this unexpected interaction was about to turn sour. If anyone said the most obvious things it was Corinn herself.
Corinn made a noise low in her throat, a sort of moaning protest. “It is so strange here, Mena. Nothing is as it should be. I cannot stand the way the people look here. They look like-like they’re dumb, like they have the brains of animals instead of people. I so want to go home. I hate this limbo. I have too much to do. Important things.”
“Like what?” Mena asked, trying to cast her voice in a way that would not offend.
Somehow she managed to anyway. Corinn looked askance at her. “You would not understand.”
On the fourth day, when a servant of the chairman brought them dice to play rats running, Mena truly gave up the pretense of finding diversion inside the compound’s bare walls. She counted the days just as precisely as Aliver, both of them waiting for the next bit of news from Thaddeus, hoping he would call them home. When the first terse, cryptic dispatch from the chancellor arrived, however, it brought them no change whatsoever. The situation was still unstable, he wrote. They should remain where they were. He promised them that he would alert them to any change, but while he said that, he provided them not a single indication of what had transpired since they left. Not one piece of news about the war. No indication of whether the situation was better or worse than before.
Mena noticed a pall in the sky one afternoon, and feared that her foreboding had somehow reached into the world in physical form. There were shadows in the air, cloudlike formations that rippled and flowed on low currents of air. Seeing them through the small window in her room, she realized they had always been there. She just had not stopped to study them before. The sky was not simply overcast, as she had assumed. Beyond the shifting darkness was a screen of light blue, clear all the way to the heavens. How strange, she thought. On this first glimpse she could not help but look away, those shapes in the sky too much like harbingers of ill, too much like swirls and currents that might materialize as something more ominous if she stared too long.
On waking in the morning she went to the window before doing anything else. The dark vapors were still there, clear and obvious now that she had learned to see them. They even grew heavier toward the evening. The longer she watched it, the more aware she became of the clouds’ presence in myriad ways around her. Mostly they shifted with currents she could not feel, but at still moments particles of the stuff fell all around her, settling on flat spaces and collecting on the rough contours of the walls. It was a form of dust, so light that it moved propelled by breaths of air. She felt the touch of tiny crystals on her cheeks and in her eyelids and collecting on her brow. She could taste it in her lungs, a grit that she inhaled with each breath. It was everywhere. It amazed her that it took her so long to notice it.
Mena asked the servant who changed the bed linen if she had noticed it. The girl did not seem at all happy with being spoken to. She almost backed out of the room. “Princess, what you see is dust rising from the mines. It just comes from the work, is all.”
Mena asked if the mines were near, and the young woman nodded. Just beyond the hills above the compound, she explained. Where were all the workers, then? Mena asked. Why had she not seen any signs that the mines even existed?
“You have seen a sign. You read it in the air. But for you it need not be any more real than that. The workers? I don’t know, lady. Perhaps there are no workers. It’s not for me to say.”
The young woman used the pause as Mena considered this to slip out of the room. Annoying behavior. A servant should not leave once she had been engaged in conversation. On the other hand, the woman’s boldness in sneaking away might have been the thing that inspired Mena’s own actions a few hours later.
She left the compound well after dark, cloaked in an overcoat she had found in her closet. She avoided the guard posted outside her door by squeezing out her window, dropping down onto the patio there, and then opening the gate to freedom. She took no light, but the moon was high and, though nervous and alive to even the slightest sound, she had little difficulty following the bone-white paths away from the compound.
There was a second guard to get past just up the pathway a little. He was a dense form in the darkness. She sensed the details of his body, the position of his head, and probable direction of his gaze. There was even a musty scent on a gust of air blowing toward her-his odor. She slipped off the path when she dared proceed on it no farther. She walked, crouched low through grasses, feeling with her hands and feet and finding a crease in the landscape that took her past the soldier.
She kept hearing sounds that set her heart beating faster: the rasp of her coat; the bonelike snap of the shoots of grass beneath her feet; the way the press of her weight caused grains of sand to shift and protest; the explosion of sound as a rodent, startled by her proximity, fled. She never stopped expecting the man to call out to her. She had heard before that it was difficult to travel silently at night and that Marah guards were trained to hear any concealed irregularity in night sounds. Now she wondered who had said it. For all of her rapid breathing, despite the violence the tiniest of sounds did to her ears, even though her calves ached from the effort of the strange squatting posture of her stealth-in truth her escape did not really feel that difficult. She kept moving and was soon beyond him and rising back up toward the main path. Her feet and hands and fingers and muscles seemed to know what to do of their own accord. She was half inclined to sit down and ponder on this, but she had yet to reach the goal she had set out for.
A series of staircases climbed away from the compound. It had been sunk into the hillside so that in her crouched position she could proceed without fear of being spotted. The stairs ended at a junction with a stone road. She cut straight across it and climbed up the steep bank on the other side, clawing handfuls of the long grass.
All told, the climb took only a few minutes, but still, what relief to feel the angle of the slope lessen and to see that there was nothing above her. She breathed heavily the last few steps, taking them slowly, as one does when a goal is reached. She stretched to full height, which helped her see over the rise to the landscape beyond. She knew what was supposed to be there, the very thing that she had been curious about, the reason-if there was one-for this night journey. And yet she was not ready for what she saw.
Gone was the quiet night on the other side of the ridge behind her. The moon was nowhere to be seen, nor the clear sky she had just traveled under. Instead the earth seemed contained beneath a flowing, dust-laden billowing, a cloudlike seething of motion. Beneath this sprawled a great pit, many mouthed and enormous. It took up the entirety of the view before her, a crater of caved desolation like nothing she had seen or imagined before, alive with a throbbing, cacophonous, angry clamor.