He writes, too, about what is happening to him, about how Gawea is helping him.
For most of his life he has been able to contain or ignore it. What his father called vile and freakish, what the rest of them call magic. He refuses the word. Magic, to him, is illusion and fancifulness. Magic is the unexplained. He knows himself as a man of precise habits and logical thinking—and he knows the world as a realm to be sampled and studied and categorized. What is happening to him must be explainable. He asks Gawea to help him, please.
She wouldn’t before. At first she allowed him only brief and cryptic responses sketched in the sand. Now she talks, at first with reluctance and then more and more willingly, the words tumbling from her, as if learning to talk is learning to trust. In part this is thanks to York, who walks on his hands and springs a flower from her ear and makes her smile, even laugh. And in part this is thanks to Lewis, who opened up his wrist and risked death and in doing so gained Gawea’s trust and proved himself worthy of the journey. Every day, she strikes him as more human, whereas before she came across as a wooden carving that only resembled a young woman. He wonders if she sees a similar change in him.
This is what she tells him. If they have left behind a world where a plastic tablet could store a thousand novels, where high-speed elevators could shoot someone seventy stories high in a matter of seconds, where warheads could lay waste to whole cities, then that means there is room in the world for other kinds of technology, more elemental.
One morning, by the fire, Gawea tells him to watch. She reaches out and draws back her hand and opens her fingers to show a ball of light spinning in her palm. She asks him to do the same. When he leans in, when he snatches at the flames, when he feels the heat still in his hand, he can’t help but gasp and swat his palm, the fire falling to the ground. The grass catches and he stamps out the blaze and looks around to make sure no one has seen. She tells him to try it once more. He sits there long enough to take ten deep breaths before grabbing again at the fire. Another ball sizzles to life in his hand, and this time he holds it for many minutes, until it blinks out with a twist of smoke. “Good,” she tells him.
His dreams are as vivid as life. In one, Aran Burr holds out his hand. Its palm cups a stone. He drops it. It thunks to the ground. Then he looks at Lewis and winks, and the stone returns to his hand, as if drawn there by an invisible string. He drops the stone, and it falls. It falls because of gravity, a force. A force most people associate with the earth, but it is more than that, a force that every object has for every other object. A tree has gravity. A chair has gravity. He has gravity.
He asks Gawea what it means and she tells him what Burr told her. If two people stand on opposite ends of a field, they both emit a small charge of gravity that will draw them toward one another. Something that is supposedly too small to be felt. But we have all known people who turn every head, who catch every eye. People are pulled to them. They emit some force. Yet they are not bigger than anyone else, at least on the outside.
If a rock falls, it falls down, not up. Because a force, the force of gravity, draws it down. It is this same force that keeps an arrow from sizzling through the air for a thousand miles, keeps a horse’s hooves on the ground instead of pounding the animal upward in the air. To make a rock fall up instead of down requires another force, a force stronger than gravity.
He thinks of the rockets they used to blast into space. An engine could do it. An engine made by man, metal and plastic, conceived by the mind, constructed by hand. Gawea tells him, “There are forces—there is energy—all around. Not only in gravity, but in air and earth and water and fire.” Energy that makes things slow and speed up, cool and burn, grow and shrink, and she is helping him discover this, like a child who finds his shadow and begins to cast his hands into doves, dragons.
Today a shadow ripples across his journal. He looks up to see a flash in the sky, the sun reflecting off metal, the owl. It spirals toward them. The sound of its fast descent is as bright as a boiling kettle.
Lewis holds out an arm and it lands there and he sets it on the log beside the fire. The gears wind to a stop inside it. When he reaches for its breast, he pulls his hand back with a hiss, the metal hot from its flight. He tries again, hurriedly flipping open the compartment door. Sand spills from it. He fishes out the note folded inside. He ignores the others when they request he tell them what it says, until he has read it through twice.
His tongue wets his lips. “It says, ‘Dear Lewis, You can imagine my surprise and disappointment when I found you gone. Did I curse your name and wish upon you unimaginable pain? Yes. But I also hoped that you might live to write this note, just as I continue to hope you might live to write another, the next time to tell the rest of us to follow. As you might imagine, things have been unwell since your departure, worse even than before. Hurry. Be safe. And please do not forget about us. I will do as you asked and share the news of your success, but your note ended abruptly and it remains unclear to us what you want us to find in the Dome. Ella.’”
“Us?” Lewis says. “Who’s us?”
Reed snatches the owl. Its wings flap and its claws rake the air. There is a noise inside it like an alarm clock dropped down the stairs. He peers into its hollow breast. “Is that all?”