Hillsinger had forgotten that Diana was capable of this sort of thing, although she killed the effect by saying honk as she passed onward. The serving girl, who was passing beef with horseradish, leaned close to him and whispered that the Old Man had rung the bell several times for chicken broth. Trays were to be left outside the door, and otherwise he was not to be disturbed. It was concerning, given his father’s state when they returned from Baffin. Hillsinger asked Susan to keep him informed.
When she entered from the kitchen, Lila was shocked to hear a room come extravagantly to life. Diana ran across the room and embraced her.
“I’m completely adrift,” Diana said.
45
Catta had been wrong again—the trees were not less dense opposite the sea. Sharp spikes dug into him from all sides. He could see nothing. All of his strategies had failed. Somewhere above him were the stars, but the woods here were completely dark.
So he went slack, disengaged his arms and legs, even his neck. Catta fell, landed on a sharp branch, and cried out. He took a few seconds to recover and then reached forward in the dirt, expecting to find a wall of limbs—but no: the lower ground was clear. There was space ahead of him if he stayed very low. He crawled forward under branches and around trunks and over hard roots until he was stopped again by a set of wide trees whose roots and branches forced him sideways. That was dangerous. He risked going around in small circles on Baffin, forever.
Are there bears on Seven? he wondered. Scorpions? Warthogs? Malaria? He tried to scare himself and called up all the bogeymen he could think of. Copperheads? No—none of those, definitely not—although the other day his mother had seen a green snake on the harbor trail, and she screamed. In a museum, Catta had seen a painting of an eagle with a snake in its talons, and he wondered if there were really eagles on Baffin, and—if they were here—would they fight bears and snakes? The painting argued that they would, but they had lied to him about the eagles once already. Or had they? Was the eagles’ nest a lie or not?
He slid forward on his stomach, and when that was blocked he stood up and took half-steps to one side and lowered himself down again, through the spikes. He paid for every inch of progress. Feeling a void at head height above him, Catta threw a leg up and onto a higher branch and climbed over, landing carefully, avoiding the sharp leaves. He no longer had any real bearings, not the Big Dipper or anything else. His only reference was some faint intuition of a downward slope: the Old Man had told him once that an area toward the center of Baffin was below sea level in a sort of ravine, which explained some unusual plants and animals there. Therefore, downhill meant inland, until he reached the lowest point. But if no one ever came here, then how did the Old Man know that?
Catta was cold when he stopped moving and hungry when he thought about it, although the Baffin interior was protected from the wind and therefore somewhat warmer than the shore. This, he thought, was how the world crushes you. There was no announcement. No freakish blow or lightning or floods or even bears. No mystery, not even any struggle or surprise. It was fantastically simple. You were forced into a series of small bad decisions that slowly and irrevocably cut off your options. And then, once you were confused and desperate and worn down by hunger and cold and whatever else—when at last you could no longer move or think—then the crows came down from their trees.
Suddenly—shockingly—he walked three steps in the clear, and his movement chased away despair. His approach to darkness changed. Take three steps, he thought, and then start over.
If he could forget the cold for thirty seconds, then he would lie down. If he took four steps forward in a row, then he would call it a clearing; if there was a clearing in the woods, then he would lie down, and he would sleep. If that was impossible, then the second he felt the gentler touch of a pine tree anywhere on his body—if he could break off a needle and smell fresh pine pitch—then he would lie down at the base of that tree. Then he would sleep. You are still OK on food and water, so now find sleep. Then keep moving. If he followed these simple steps, Catta thought, the crows would stay in their watching trees.
He reached out five times, and there was nothing. On the sixth he felt the soft fingers of a pine tree in front of him. He broke off a small branch and inhaled the pitch. Now he could sleep. He lay down on the ground and wrapped himself around the trunk, with his head on one arm. He was covered with rough needles and dirt, and the tree’s lowest branches rested on his shoulder. He wondered if he could sleep this way, or any way at all. He wondered if sleep on Baffin was the same as sleep in other places.
46
Lila watched Billy Quick eat from across the table. In all the years she had known him, through the shapes and mazes of their acquaintance, she had never noticed that he ate in these preposterous short bursts. Infinitely precise about cutting and arranging his food, Billy would stop and lay down his knife and fork, exactly parallel, tips at the center of the plate, and then talk in one direction or the other with violent hands, like a cartoon, before raising his fork again and spearing a loose pea and taking a bite from one of his separate piles. Then he would place knife and fork down, again very correctly, with the same practiced motion. It was so absurd that she almost laughed out loud.
As she watched him, the serving girl raised the half-finished plate from Billy’s right side—and there it was. Susan’s eyes flickered over Billy for just half a second too long. The effect was subtle, not more than a tremor. With an armful of plates, though, the extra half-second unbalanced her, and she had to touch the back of Billy’s chair with her free hand. She was searching—taking risks to learn her fate. Only Lila had seen her, and only Lila could have formed these scattered bits into a picture of the truth.
Billy had fallen for Hannah very early on. Lila remembered the night as beautiful—right when the War started, just after the Messiah performance at the church. That felt like the end of something—it was the end of something—and everyone stood outside for hours in the falling snow. It was a moment in time when even nonexistent love could easily have been invented. He and Hannah had only met in passing—Lila had introduced them—but eventually the crowd pulled them all in different directions, and then when the War was truly underway, Billy’s family had moved briefly to London, but when he came back, he had not forgotten her. Within a month, he knew Hannah’s last name, where she went to school, and, crucially, her usual route home. He never revealed the sources of this information.