“Where did you go?” asked River, dark eyes already wide with wonder.
“I went into these gardens,” Hawk said. “Tessa and I were thrown from the wall and everything was suddenly blinding and I must have lost consciousness. Then I woke up in these gardens and there was this old man. Real old. He said he was a Faerie creature.” He caught a glimpse of Panther’s smirk. “I know, Panther. It sounds crazy. I thought so, too. But that’s what he said, that he was a Faerie creature. He called himself the King of the Silver River. He said the gardens were his and that he had brought me there to learn about myself. He saved me because he said I had something I needed to do.”
“You went into the light, is where you went,” Panther insisted. “I heard about people doing that. You died and came back, is what you did.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Hawk replied, shaking his head. “I don’t know for sure where I was. But the old man didn’t seem to think it was anything big. He told me the same thing Logan Tom told me in the compound cells—that I was a gypsy morph, that I was made out of a kind of magic. But I was a boy, too. Just like everyone else,” he added hastily. “Except that I had to do this thing. I had to come back and find you and all these other kids, and then I had to take you to this place where you would be safe.”
“Safe from what?” Panther wanted to know at once.
Hawk hesitated. “From the end of the world.”
“The end of the world,” Fixit repeated.
“Oh, man,” whispered Chalk.
The others muttered similar pronouncements, glancing uneasily at one another and then back at Hawk. This caught even Owl off guard. “Are you sure about what he told you?” she asked him.
Hawk nodded. “It gets stranger. He told me that others would be coming with us. I mean, besides the children. He said there would be Elves.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
“Sure there will,” Panther declared, nodding soberly. “Probably trolls and pixies, too. Maybe some dragons. Just like in that book Owl read once, the one with all those magic things.”
“He knows what he was told,” Tessa insisted, coming to Hawk’s defense. “This isn’t what you think. He’s serious about this.”
“You saw all this?” Panther pressed.
She shook her head. “No, I was asleep. When I woke up, we weren’t in the gardens anymore. We were on the banks of the river south of here—Hawk and Cheney and me. But if Hawk isn’t telling the truth, how did we get there? How did Cheney end up with us, for that matter?”
“How did you get here?” Owl asked, steering the conversation in a different direction while everyone was still calm enough to listen.
“We just started walking,” Tessa answered. Her dusky face lifted into the moonlight and her eyes shone. “Then we found this camp with all these children and their protectors. Hundreds of them, come up from somewhere south, fleeing an army that had killed everyone else. Hawk took them across the river, over a bridge.” She hesitated, as if she might say something more about this, but then decided against it. “After we were across, he told the others to wait for him there until he returned with his own family. Then we came looking for you.”
“You knew where we would be?” Owl said.
Tessa nodded. “Hawk knew.”
Owl and the others looked at the boy. Hawk shrugged. “I just did. I can’t explain it. It has something to do with the magic.”
Panther looked off into the night. “I’m not calling you Bird-Man anymore. I’m calling you Magic Man. Or maybe Crazy Man.”
“Panther.” Tessa spoke his name firmly and waited until he looked at her. “Don’t call him names. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. He isn’t the same as you remember. He’s something else now, something special.”
“Tessa, don’t,” Hawk said. “I’d say the same thing as Panther if he were telling me all this.”
“So tell us more about the world ending,” Chalk urged, brushing past the rest of it. “Is this for real?”
“The old man said so. He said it was all ending, and we had to get to someplace safe until everything got better and we could go out into it again.” Hawk shook his head. “I asked him if he was serious, if he was sure about this, and he said he was. He said it’s all gone too far and everything’s ending. I guess I believe him.”
“Look around you,” Cat said suddenly from one side, the scaly patches of her mottled face reflecting the moonlight. They all turned to look at her. “I don’t know about this old man, but I know enough to believe what he says about the world. It’s already ruined. Anyone with half a brain can tell that. Why should it be so hard to think it’s going to end?”
“She’s right,” agreed Sparrow. “Giant centipedes and armies killing off the compound people. Croaks and Lizards and all the rest. I think it’s ending. What do we do, Hawk?”
“We go back and join the children I left behind, and then we head east to wherever it is we have to go to be safe.”