“Not a goddamn thing except how to run a plow,” he said. “I can’t find a way in, and they don’t like questions. I think I asked one too many.”
“Did they threaten you?”
“They don’t threaten anybody,” he said. “But one day, you just wake up in the cornfield, I’m guessing. Contact Rostow. Get us an exit.”
“I’m not going,” I said. Merle let go of my arm, and I stepped back. “I can’t leave. Go if you wish, but I’ll stay.”
“You stay and you’ll end up one of them,” he said. “Or worse. Something’s wrong here. I’ve been in cults before, but this one’s a whole new rainbow of wrong. It’s like it changes you inside out—not like brainwashing. I can resist brainwashing. This is something else.”
What it was, I realized, was the low-level tingle of power in the camp. Pearl’s influence, breathing around us, infiltrating our every thought, breath, heartbeat. Merle could feel it, even if he had no idea what it could be, and it had frightened him. It was eroding his sense of self, corrupting him from within ... and it was doing the same to me, only for me it had created this false link with Will.
“I can’t go,” I said, as gently as I could. “But you should. As soon as possible.” Merle, in struggling to keep his sense of identity and purpose, was making himself a target. They would know he wasn’t one of them soon, if they didn’t know that already. As good an undercover agent as Merle might have been in other circumstances, here in this place he was in grave danger.
“I’ll let you know when it’s ready,” I told him. “Go back to work. Be careful.”
He nodded, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his gray shirt, and took a deep breath. Even so, he didn’t look himself, I thought.
“Stay cool,” I said. “You’ll be out soon.”
He nodded again and walked out into the sun, head down. Even his body language seemed wrong, when compared to the alert, confident strides of the others in the camp. I could see it. So could others.
Merle was in very real trouble.
I went back to raking the straw as I sank into a light meditative state and reached out for Rostow to deliver my message—a minor enough effort, and a nearly imperceptible use of power, but it still felt more difficult now, as if the walls around the camp were psychic as well as physical blocks. Perhaps it was only that something inside me longed for this life now—the simplicity, the clean and straight lines of it. The honesty and trust.
But the trust itself was a lie, and underneath was a black lake of toxic betrayal. I knew that, I did, but even so, it was difficult to separate knowingfrom feeling.
I reached out for Rostow, but before I could deliver Merle’s plea, I heard shouts from outside. No one shouted here, not in that particular tone.
I looked out to see that it was the girl, Zedala. She was running across the field, stumbling on the carefully plowed rows. She looked terrified.
Mariah, her teacher, had stopped at the edge of the field, and stood watching her with a stiff, unforgiving expression. Next to her was another teacher in a green scarf, who extended her hand toward Zedala.
The next step the girl took tripped her, and she plunged flat onto the ground.
No.
Intothe ground.
I dropped the rake and ran out of the barn. Around the edges of the field, the workers had all stopped what they were doing, but no one was moving to interfere.
Not even Merle, who was standing near the fertilizer cart, clenching his fists.
Zedala didn’t come up from beneath the ground.
I took in a deep breath and ran forward, shoving the two teachers out of my way. I got only a few steps into the field before it opened before me—not my doing—and I plunged down into a thick, heavy darkness of fertile tilled dirt, worms, and the sharp chips of rocks.
I could reach her, I realized. They didn’t expect me to be able to maneuver through the dirt, to use my own Earth powers to guide me to Zedala. But if I did, it would betray me utterly, not only to them but to Pearl.
The frustration made me scream silently into the darkness of my temporary grave.
I couldn’t save her. I could only hope that their goal was to punish, not to kill.
After what seemed an eternity, I felt the ground underneath me pushing upward, expelling me into the air once again. I rolled over on my back, gasping and choking, wiping the black earth from my face with trembling hands.
Zedala was lying crumpled and weeping twenty feet away. She was filthy and terrified, but she was alive.
I coughed up dirt and blinked up at the bright yellow sun, which was blotted out by one of the teachers. Not Mariah. This one was, I was sure, an Earth Warden, and a potentially quite powerful one.
He was also very, very young—no older than Zedala, but with a shimmering cloud of power surrounding him that was unmistakable to the eyes of anyone with a gift. Possibly, I thought, the most powerful Earth Warden I’d ever met, besides Lewis Orwell.
He had dark, empty eyes that held no pity, no reluctance, no doubt. The eyes of a fanatic.
“Go get her,” he said to Mariah, who ducked her head in acknowledgment and hurried over the rows to grab Zedala and pull her to her feet. “Take her to the box.”
“No!” Zedala screamed, but only once. The boy-Warden stared at her, and the next time her mouth opened, nothing came out. The panic and terror on her face spoke loudly enough, though. It was a horrible sight, but when I looked around, I saw that the gray-clothed workers had all turned away, intent on their own duties.
All but Merle, who was still watching, with his fists tightly clenched.
And, standing in the shadow of the corner of the barn ... Will, whose clear gray eyes were fixed not on Zedala, but on me.
The two teachers dragged the girl away. I was left alone to stagger upright, slapping dirt from my clothes. Will strode forward, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me out of the field. Once I was on hard-packed ground, he took my shoulders and shook me, hard enough to make a rain of dirt fall from my body.
“Are you insane?” he demanded. “Don’t you understand that whatever happens, we do notinterfere with the training of those children?”
“Training!” I spat, and struck his hands away from me. “I didn’t see training.I thought they were going to kill her!”
“Their methods may seem harsh, but—”
“It’s cruel, Will! And I’m not sure they wouldn’t have let her die, if we hadn’t been watching! I couldn’t—”
“ Listen to me!You have to, Laura. You have to learn that they know best!”
“Or?” I lifted my chin and stared into his eyes. His pupils slowly widened in response, as if he was swallowing my image whole.
“Or you won’t have a place here,” he said very gently, and touched my cheek. “And I’d regret that. I’d regret that very much.”
So would I, I realized. Even now. Even with the panic and pain in Zedala’s face, the icy indifference in the boy-Warden’s cruelty. I didn’t want to leave this place.
I didn’t want to leave him.
I took a step away, until my knees were steady enough to hold me, and walked back to the barn, head down.
Then I picked up the rake, and went back to work. As I combed through the straw, I reached out for Rostow, to deliver Merle’s message.
I couldn’t make contact.
There was only emptiness on the other side of the fence, where Rostow and the FBI agents should have been. Nothing. An eerie silence that made me pause in my work and rise up into the aetheric, just enough to see.
Beyond the forest’s cover, the FBI trailer was still in place. So were the cars, the SUVs, the tent where the agents slept.
But there was no sign of them at all.
They had all just ... vanished.