“Husbands and wives can’t hear each other anymore?” Will asks.
“That was our first theory.” Dr. Cliffton pushes his glasses up his nose, looking weary. “It evolved as the night went on. While the phenomenon was happening to most spouses, it wasn’t true for all of them. And then we’d discover it was happening among other sets of people who were seemingly unconnected.”
For Mrs. Cliffton’s sake he writes in a quick, methodical hand, “All three Sisters reporting inability to hear voice of person they love.”
He fiddles with the chalk in his hand and turns back to us. “Romantic love,” he clarifies.
“So it is a Disappearance,” Will says, aghast. He sits down heavily, as if someone’s shoved him.
“Yes.” Dr. Cliffton nods and clears his throat. “It does appear that way.”
“But it hasn’t been seven years yet!” Miles protests, stomping his foot at the unfairness of it all. “It’s not following the rules!”
Dr. Cliffton scrawls for his wife, “Town in uproar.”
“It’s causing all kinds of additional chaos,” he tells us. “Mrs. Doyle can hear Mr. Doyle, but he can’t hear her. Mr. Stevens can’t hear Mrs. Doyle, but he can hear his own wife.” He drags his hand over his eyes and groans.
“Will,” Mrs. Cliffton says, “ask your father how we will communicate.”
Will relays the message, and then his father’s answer: “Lip reading? Carrying a pad of paper everywhere? We can learn sign language. We’ll devise a system. Until I can find a Variant.” Though Dr. Cliffton looks exhausted, he says, “I’ll start looking now. This very morning.”
Mrs. Cliffton’s lips tighten, and her eyes fill with tears. “Another one? Another rabbit to chase?” She plays with her wedding band, twirling it around her finger. “This is never going to end, is it?” she murmurs, and the look on her face gives me the same tumbling feeling as though I’ve just missed a stair.
“I’ll find it, Matilda,” Dr. Cliffton says, his brow creasing. He takes her arms and holds on to them as though he’s tethering her, as if she otherwise might simply float away. “I promise,” he says fervently, tilting her chin up toward him. “I won’t stop trying until I’ve found it.”
“I’ll do whatever I can to help, too,” I say. “Me too,” Miles says. “And I will, too,” Will vows, his jaw clenching. I clasp my hands together, hard, in my lap and put up a front of bravery for the rest of them. But I’m thinking that if hope has escaped even Mrs. Cliffton, now there is really reason to be afraid.
“A new Disappearance is bull manure,” George mutters the next morning in Digby’s lab. He halfheartedly measures a blue-tinted liquid into a beaker. The room around us is quiet, with students huddled wordlessly over their experiments or speaking in voices so subdued they blend with the scratching of pencils on paper. I sit on my stool and watch the dust sparkle across a sunbeam.
“Things don’t just happen for no reason,” George insists to Beas and me. “Something’s changed. Something set this off.” He looks up at us for acknowledgment.
“Maybe you solved the music Variant too quickly,” Beas whispers sardonically. She draws a music note that has the base of a skull. “Maybe the Curse didn’t think we had suffered quite enough.”
“I suppose that could be a possibility,” George says thoughtfully. “I mean, it is another auditory Disappearance. Maybe we’re supposed to take that as some sort of warning.”
George swivels to grab a glass slide and knocks the edge of the beaker with his elbow. It tumbles to the floor in slow motion and shatters.
For an endless moment we all just look at it.
The room has fallen so still that we can hear the sudden ricochet of steps moving down the hallway. They grow louder and faster as they approach, and then the door to Digby’s lab bursts open and Chase Peterson enters.
“Mr. Peterson, excuse me—” Digby begins, turning from the chalkboard.
“Have you heard?” Chase says breathlessly. “The Disappearances have hit a fourth town.”
A sudden gust of air sends Dr. Digby’s stack of papers to the floor, scattering in large white tiles. George rises, slowly, from where he has knelt to sweep the glass. It crunches like gravel under his weight.
Dr. Digby’s voice is strained. “Class, you are dismissed.”
“Why?” George asks, slamming his hand down on the picnic table. His breath puffs out in angry billows. His hands are already turning red and numb with cold, as if he’s too distracted or defiant to use the Variants.
His mother, of course, has already collected every scrap of available news by the time he reaches her on the telephone. “She heard that the Disappearances struck Charlton,” he relays.
“Where’s that?”
“It’s the town just beyond Sheffield.”
“Today?” I ask.
“Yesterday. Around the very same time as our Disappearance.”
My chest lightens a little at the sudden sight of Will, his hands shoved into his pockets. He approaches our table and stops there, leaning his weight against it. Beas is a half step behind him. She slides onto the bench next to me.
“Just the voices disappeared in Charlton, then?” I ask George.
“No,” George says. “They got every Disappearance we have. It hit them all at once.”
“That’s even worse than what happened to us,” Beas says, picking at the pills on her wool gloves. “Not our gradual descent. Just—?one day you have everything, and the next . . .” Her gloved fingers flutter.
“I heard the Council is heading to Charlton to brief them about what we know—” Will begins.
“They’re bound to be a bit disappointed that we haven’t solved it in the past thirty-five years,” George mutters.
“—?and to see if they have any clues that could help us . . .” Will continues.
“And to make sure they stay quiet about everything, I’m sure,” Beas says.
“Your father is going?” I ask Will, and he nods.
“This has to be making the Council nervous. The Curse almost seems to be mimicking a virus or an infection now,” George says absently. “To spread like this, in such close quarters?”
“Why jump, suddenly, to a new town?” Will says. He squints away from us. “And why disrupt the cycle of seven years?”
“This deviation should not be happening. Everything up until now has always been so ordered,” George says. He fumbles in his backpack for his Variant research notebook. “Do you reckon this means . . . the Disappearances will start speeding up?”
I clasp my hands together and rub them under the table. To me the Curse is acting less like an infection and more like a fox I’m trying to hunt. Every time I think I’ve caught a scent, it veers off and loses me again.
Beas shivers and scoots closer to me. “I never realized there was something rather comforting about the seven years,” she says. “Depressing, yes, because we knew it would just keep going—”