The Commons: Book 1: The Journeyman

5-star praise for THE COMMONS:

“I couldn’t put it down! The character development and plot were fantastic…”

“…Well-drawn characters, well-crafted prose and well-constructed storyline – what else is there? Oh right – the spark. And that’s here, too. Can’t wait for the next one…”

an excerpt from

THE COMMONS
Book I: The Journeyman
by Michael Alan Peck

 

Copyright © 2014 by Michael Alan Peck and published here with his permission

PART ONE: NEW BEGINNINGS

 

1: The All-Seeing Eyes

 

Paul Reid died in the snow at seventeen. The day of his death, he told a lie—and for the rest of his life, he wondered if that was what killed him.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Mike Hibbets, the only adult in New York City who’d ever cared about him. “I’m coming back.”

Pop Mike ran the New Beginnings group home, where Paul lived. He didn’t believe the lie. And Paul told himself that it didn’t matter.

“Does your face hurt?” The old man leaned on his desk in the New Beginnings main office.

Paul twisted his pewter ring, a habit that announced when something was bothering him. His face did hurt—especially his swollen eye.

As did the ribs he hadn’t been able to protect two days earlier, when he hit the ground, balled up, in a Hell’s Kitchen alley while four guys stomped him until they tired of it. He’d tried to shield his face, where damage might show forever. But he fared just as poorly at that as the afternoon sun cast a beat-down shadow show on a brick wall and a girl stood nearby and cried.

Paul had little to say, and no one worked a silence like Pop Mike. His nickname had once been “Father Mike” due to a talent for sniffing out guilt that rivaled any priest’s. He asked the New Beginnings kids to drop that name so potential donors wouldn’t confuse his shelter with a religious operation. There’s no God to lift us up—we rise or fall together, he taught them. So they compromised and shortened it.

“Five foster homes, three group homes, some street life in between,” Pop Mike said.

“So?” Paul couldn’t look him in the eye.

“So no one makes it through that without survival skills, which you have. And you’ve found a place here for four years, and now you’re just up and leaving.”

The desk was a relic of the building’s days as a school, a general hospital, and before that, a mental hospital. Its round wood edge was uneven and worn, as if the many kids trapped in this chair over the years had stared it away, varnish and all.

Paul shifted in the chair, his side one big ache. He hated hearing his life recited as if it were recorded and filed somewhere, which it was.

The winter wind forced its way through the gaps between the cockeyed window sash and its frame. A storm was due.

Outside, the fading daylight illuminated the wall of the adjacent building. A cartoon-ad peacock, its paint battling to hang onto the decaying brick, peddled a variety of Pavo fruit juices.

“New Beginnings matters to you.” Rumor was, Pop Mike could go weeks without blinking. “Look how you tried to save Gonzales.”

“I told him to run for help. He just ran.” Paul had practiced this conversation—how it would play out. Pop Mike wouldn’t mind that he was leaving. If he did, Paul wouldn’t sweat it.

Yet he was unable to face the man.

The painted peacock smiled despite its sentence of death-by-crumbling. Its tail, gathered in one fist, bent outward in offering. The feathers ended in a once-vibrant assortment of bottles spread above the Pavo slogan like leaves on a branch of a shade tree: “Wake up to the rainbow! Wake up to your life!”

Decades of sun and rain had rendered the flavors unidentifiable in the grime and washed-out hues. Paul could only guess at grape, apple, orange, and watermelon.

“You could apply for our Next Steps program—work your way to an equivalency credential.”

Paul didn’t bother to refuse that one again.

Pop Mike followed his gaze. “The all-seeing eyes.”

“What?”

“The peacock. In some Asian faiths, it’s a symbol of mercy and empathy. In others, it’s the all-seeing eyes of the Almighty. What that one sees, of course, is a customer.”

“It’s time for me to go.” Paul touched his fingers to his eye, which flared in protest. “This is how New York chose to tell me.” He prodded the bruise to see if he could make it hurt more. He succeeded.

Pop Mike reached across the desk, took hold of Paul’s wrist, and gently pulled his hand away from his face. He didn’t let go until he was convinced Paul wouldn’t do it again. That was the only way he could keep Paul safe from himself.

“Please,” he said. “That’s the one word I have left. It won’t work, but I’m saying it. Please.”

Paul twisted his ring.

Pop Mike took in the beaten-up backpack at Paul’s feet, the military-surplus coat thrown over the back of the chair. “Where are you going?”

“Away. I’ll let you know when I get there.”

Wake up to your life, said the peacock.

 

***

The three-block walk to Port Authority seemed to triple in the stinging wind. Paul’s military-surplus coat was suitable only for motivating the troops wearing it to prevail before winter. It came from a pallet of stuff donated to New Beginnings as a tax write-off. He’d thought the coat would keep him warm and make him look tougher. The bite of the air and the beating in the alley proved him twice wrong.

A radio, its volume cranked up to the point of distortion, hung from a nail on a newsstand, dangling over piles of papers and magazines draped with clear plastic tarps. A weather-on-the-ones update milked the conditions of the approaching storm for drama, as did several headlines. “Blizzardämmerung!” screamed the Daily News. “Snowmageddon!” warned the Post.

The stand’s owner, his face framed by graphic novels and tabloids binder-clipped around the window of a dual-pane Plexiglass wall, sung about how he’d just dropped in to see what condition the conditions were in. Commuters trying to beat the weather home paid him no mind.

By now, the meteorologist was more reporter than forecaster. Rounding the corner at Forty-second and Eighth, Paul had to blink away hard-blown flakes.

A feral-looking girl pulled one of the terminal’s heavy glass doors open against the wind and held it for Paul as he swept into the stream of businesspeople headed for the buses within. She shook a jingling paper cup at him, but neither he nor his fellow travelers dropped anything in.

Paul was relieved that he didn’t know the girl, but as he angled through the rush of commuters, he chided himself for ignoring her. He’d worked those doors in more desperate times. He knew what it meant when people were kind enough to part with a few coins—and what it meant when they weren’t.

Getting past the beggars meant going head-down at a steady pace. Paul was holding money, so he didn’t want to see anyone who knew him. The big ones wouldn’t try to take it from him in a public place, but the smaller ones could talk him out of some.

“One way to San Francisco, please,” he told the woman behind the ticket-counter glass after waiting his turn. She laughed at something the man working the adjacent line said.

He couldn’t hear either of them through the barrier. That was the way of Port Authority and the world beyond for the children of the streets—for the concrete kids. The people with something to smile about did it in a world built to keep you out.

She slid Paul’s ticket and change through the gap under the glass. He counted the bills against his chest to see how much was left, keeping his cash out of view.

There wasn’t much to hide. He was nearly broke.

 

2: Trina and the Travelin’ Shoes

 

Annie Brucker sat on the floor of the Port Authority basement, waiting in line for gate two. Leaning against the wall, she read aloud to her five-year-old son, Zach. She held the book, Trina and the Travelin’ Shoes, with one hand. With the other, she kept a cat’s-eye marble rolling back and forth across the backs of her fingers.

She’d been doing this for forty-five minutes, flexing her knee to keep it from going stiff. Her throat burned from speaking. Her fingers ached. But she kept it up for him.

Success with the marble meant Zach watched it instead of withdrawing to his inner place. If he didn’t withdraw, then he might listen. Keeping him engaged was worth the discomfort, and Annie chose to believe he was paying attention because she had no proof that he wasn’t.

Their matching red hair marked them as mother and son to anyone who might have noticed them waiting in line. And whoever did notice would have been shocked to know how much sitting cost her—that a thirty-something mom suffered from advanced osteoarthritis.

That was because they wouldn’t have imagined this pleasant-looking woman held down on a table by three men working hard to keep her there while she screamed, her leg filled with nails, ball bearings, and other shrapnel too tiny and blown out to identify.

“Trina took one step and was gone from her little bedroom—gone from her little house,” Annie read. Zach watched the marble. “With the next step, she left the town of Jarrett, where she knew everyone and everyone knew her.” The legs of the passing commuters flickered light and shadow across the pages. “The shoes didn’t tell Trina where they were going, and they never asked permission to take her there.”

The H.M.O. doctors in Newark said Zach suffered from autism. The V.A. doctors wouldn’t go that far because they weren’t equipped to deal with children, and certainly not kids like him. The experts in San Francisco would tell her more.

Annie didn’t want to know about autism. She wanted to know about Zach. Did he suffer? Was he happy, or was he lost? Was he truly autistic, or was that the easy answer for doctors chasing a goal of how many patients to see in a day?

“Trina watched the trees flow beneath her, step by step,” she read. “Up and over, over and up, she and the travelin’ shoes went.” The marble traveled along with Trina—west to Annie’s little finger, east to her thumb.

The flickering of the moving legs was a distraction. So was the knee, which didn’t approve of her choice of seating. When the two tag-teamed Annie, that was all it took.

The marble went rogue, clacking to the floor and rolling away. She reached for it and missed, and Trina and her travels piled on. The book slipped from her hand, her place in it lost. Cursing to herself, she fought her way to her feet.

A fast-moving commuter, lost in his texting, kicked the marble. It bonged off of a recycling bin and fled into the shadows of a vacant bus gate.

Annie limped across the terminal floor, dodging people, and ventured into the murk. Bending to grope the floor in the dim light near the empty gate, she looked back to check on Zach.

He gazed into the air to his left—already gone.

She needed that marble. No other would do. To hold her son’s attention, it had to be a certain mix of blue, green, and white. It had to be a cat’s-eye.

Zach knew when it was a replacement, and it took him days to adjust. Until he did, she lost him.

Annie walked her hands across the tile, through candy wrappers and empty corn-chip bags. A few feet in, she clipped the marble with her pinky. It escaped and clicked off a wall.

Further into the gloom she went, patting the varying textures of the floor. She was damned thankful for the hand sanitizer back in her purse, assuming that hadn’t already been stolen.

This was New York City. She should have taken it with her.

The noises of the concourse were transformed in the blackness. Voices came not from behind her but from the dark ahead.

“I’m trying!” an old woman cried. “I’m trying!”

Annie conjured an image of a frail figure somewhere off in the terminal. Back bent, cocooned in donated blankets, the poor lost creature was having an argument from years and years before. It was a plea to no one—an attempt to convince some greater force—or maybe just a battle with herself.

Pistachio shells.

A penny, a dime—if what she felt was U.S. currency.

An empty box of some gum or candy called Gifu, its label hardly legible in the bad light.

And there, at last, was the marble, which allowed itself to be captured fair and square. She stood to return to Zach.

The victory fell away from her.

More commuters had entered the concourse. Many more. Flowing four-deep, they blocked her view entirely.

She pressed into the current of people, the tide of sharp-cornered briefcases and interfering backpacks, trying to catch a glimpse of her son. “Excuse me, please.” It was just something she said—a talisman. It had no measurable effect.

“Zach?” A sidestep. “Pardon.” A dodge. She caught sight of their bags.

He was gone.

“Zach?” The voice was nothing like hers. “Zach!”

One of a pair of teenage girls looked up from her smartphone and pointed down the line of ticket-holders. Zach stood alone at the bend, where the queue folded in upon itself like a millipede.

He watched a skinny kid in an army jacket who used a pack as a cushion. The boy, a teen from the looks of him, was up against the wall, eyes closed, unaware that he had an audience.

Annie calmed herself. If she allowed Zach to see her upset, he would be frightened, too. Despite all of the things he screened out, he was quick to adopt her moods and slow to lose them, even after she moved on. Freaking out would make the long ride ahead of them that much longer.

She took a breath and held it for a count of three.
***

“Zach?”

The voice ended Paul’s attempt to doze through the wait for the bus. Napping was impossible in Port Authority. Faking it could stop people from bothering you, but not often enough.

A pretty red-haired woman stood behind a little kid who was staring at him.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked the boy, who Paul figured was hers. She smiled in greeting.

Paul replied with a stiff nod. Cute girls threw him off his game. Women were even worse. He knew it, and so did they.

“Who’s that, Zach?” she said. “Did you make a new friend?”

“Hello, Zach,” Paul said. The kid regarded him with the most serious of expressions. “What’s going on, buddy?”

The woman’s smile fell a little. Maybe she didn’t like nicknames.

The kid turned to his mother and held his hand out, beckoning. She hesitated, unsure, but then placed something into his palm.

He offered it to Paul—a marble.

Paul liked to keep to himself on the road. Other people meant complications—delays. But this was kind of interesting. “That for me?”

No reply. The kid just kept holding out the marble.

Paul took it from his hand.

The boy looked back up at his mother, who seemed as flummoxed by her son’s behavior as Paul was by her. Something important was going on, but Paul had no idea what.

The mother didn’t, either. She glanced from Paul to the kid, as if there were some secret they kept from her.

He tried to hand the marble back. “He’ll miss it,” he told her.

The kid wouldn’t accept it.

Paul gave it another try, but no. “You sure? I have to give you something, then.”

The kid pointed at his ring.

“Not that.” He went into his pack, pulled out his notebook and pen, and wrote “I.O.U. one gift” on a page. Tearing it out, he handed it over to the boy, who studied it.

“He doesn’t do this,” the mom said.

“I work with little kids at this place I live—lived. Worked. Sometimes they give me stuff.”

“No. He doesn’t do this. With anyone.”

Paul was so terrible at reading girls—at figuring out what they meant when they said things to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, and because maybe he’d done something wrong.

Zach held his arms out to his mother. He appeared to be satisfied with the trade.

She picked the boy up.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said.

 

3: Bump-Di-Di-Bump

 

“How fast are you going?” June Medill asked the bus driver, leaning sideways to check the speedometer.

“Fast enough to get there, slow enough to get there alive,” he said.

June Medill had asked the driver about his speed many times in the hours since the bus commenced braving the storm. Paul figured the driver would ignore her at some point—or tell her to shut up. But June Medill was tough to tune out, and she didn’t seem the type to listen to others anyway.

Paul, Annie, Zach, and everyone else knew June Medill’s name because when she’d boarded, she told the man sitting behind the driver that he was in the seat reserved for Medill, June. She’d told him loudly, and she’d upped the volume when the driver said that the bus line didn’t issue assigned seats. She’d been just as audible when pulling out her cell phone and threatening to call Port Authority and New Jersey Transit to complain.

The driver had pointed out that they were not on a New Jersey Transit bus, but the man in the seat got up and moved in order to keep the peace. That freed June Medill to hector the driver as he guided the motor coach through curtains of snow at a safe crawl, though not a crawl safe enough for June Medill.

Near the middle of the bus, Paul watched the storm stream across his window. Passing headlights illuminated veins of ice on the glass, lighting up a tag someone had scratched into it: “IMUURS.”

Another tagger had claimed the back of the seat in front of Annie, across the aisle, in silver-paint marker. Paul tried to read it, but couldn’t make out the words as the headlights washed across them. Maybe it was the bad angle. Maybe it was June Medill.

Annie had given up trying to read to Zach over June Medill’s interrogation about a half-hour in. Instead, she leaned close and murmured to him while he stared at the graffiti on the seat back as if he were able to read it.

“Normally, I wouldn’t make such a big deal,” June Medill said. Paul was certain  that wasn’t so. “But it’s coming down so hard. Don’t you think it’s hard?”

“Everything’s hard with you yammering,” the driver said, angling forward to peer through the powdered arcs cleared by his wipers.

Paul switched on his overhead light and rummaged through his pack for his iPod, last year’s holiday donation. He pulled out socks, snacks, rolled-up shirts, his notebook, and other items, and piled them on the seat next to him. He’d packed in a hurry. Nothing was where he remembered putting it.

He wanted to listen to something other than the chatter up front, and he was sorry that Annie had quit reading. Her soft voice and the tale of the traveling girl reminded him of story hours with his mother—a long, long time ago and far, far away. He couldn’t recall much about Jeanne Reid other than the yarns she spun, which starred heroes named Paul who always succeeded in doing right.

“Are you going to the Gaia festival?”

Paul stopped digging.

Annie held his notebook, which had fallen off the adjacent seat, along with a pamphlet and a photo from its pages.

“Not until summer,” he said.

“You’re going to San Francisco to see family, then, or is this your girlfriend?” She studied the worn snapshot.

“That’s my mother.”

“Now I’m prying. Never mind. It’s just that I like to sneak into the world of boys so I can be prepared for when he’s older.” She ruffled her son’s hair.

Zach scrutinized the tag on the seat back. From what Paul had seen of him, he might never be like other boys. Which might not be the worst thing, given what boys were capable of.

For instance, they abruptly left behind those who helped them. But that didn’t matter, right?

“It’s okay.” Paul didn’t like anyone handling the photo, which he’d examined so often and for so long that he could see it in his own mind with little effort. A young woman in a crowd, her hair the same shade of red as Annie’s, looked back over her shoulder, caught before she could pose, as if someone had spoken her name. On her left hand was the ring Paul wore now.

“Very pretty. When was this?”

“Ninety-six.”

“Are you staying with her?”

“No. She’s not—” He didn’t want Annie to feel bad or, worse, feel sorry for him.

“I ask way too many questions,” she said.

If it had been June Medill, it would have been too many. But Paul was pleased that Annie wanted to know even one thing about him.

She handed him the photo and the notebook, then switched on Zach’s light and gave the boy a few crayons. The process required some negotiating before he had colors he liked, but he soon settled into drawing on the page from Paul’s notebook.

Paul steered the subject back to Gaia, an arts-and-culture festival held in the Nevada desert every year. He hoped that Annie might understand why he’d want to go to it, unlike most of the other New Beginnings kids, who didn’t.

“This was taken at the very first one,” he said of the snapshot, holding it like a charm to ward off the danger of him saying something stupid. “She told me it was one of the happiest times of her life.”

“That was nineteen ninety-six?”

“Yes.”

“You’re what—sixteen, seventeen?”

“Seventeen.”

“So she tried to explore a little bit before settling in with a baby.”

“I don’t think she had a plan. She was there to find one. That’s where she met my dad.”

“And he wants you to go there now?”

“No. That was the only time they … I never—“

Her eyes shone when she smiled. “Sorry. Too many questions.”

She did understand. Paul was sure of it. “I’m closing the circle,” he said. “I need to go there to figure out who I am.”

Up front, June Medill demanded to know how it was possible that they hadn’t yet passed the Delaware Water Gap. The driver said he thought the problem was going too fast, not too slow. June Medill told him that too many people drove while talking on the phone.

“This is already some trip,” Annie said, listening to them. “I’m guessing we both know about traveling, Paul.”

He agreed.

Later—much later—he would wonder why he had.

They hadn’t known a thing.
***

Bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp. The thud of Paul’s earbuds provided a backbeat to the bus’s plodding progress through the landscape of otherworldly white.

Outside, a man stood by a snow-carpeted car that looked like it had slid off the interstate. He watched the bus as it passed. Paul blinked, his eyes heavy. The car’s trunk was angled up higher than its hood; it wouldn’t be going anywhere without a tow.

A blast of wind coated the window with powder. By the time it cleared, the man was gone. After that, Paul couldn’t be certain he’d been there at all.
***

Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump.

“Watch it. Watch it!”

“Dammit! I told you to sit down!”

June Medill and the driver invaded the rhythm, cracking through it, waking Paul. He hadn’t felt himself falling asleep.

Across from him, Zach and Annie dozed, the boy’s head in his mother’s lap. The notebook page and the crayons lay in the aisle.

Paul picked them up and turned Zach’s drawing over. It wasn’t a drawing.

It took effort to read the boy’s scrawl—the letters were more like shapes than language—but it was the tagged phrase from the seat back: “Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno.” What was weirder: that someone tagged a bus seat with such a thing—or that a five-year-old worked so hard to copy it down?

Paul tucked the paper and crayon into Annie’s bag. She didn’t budge.

Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump.

Taillights passed the bus on the left—way too fast for the conditions. The veins of window ice flashed red, like lightning, flagging the recklessness. So did the scratched-in tag. IMUURS.

“I’m only trying to help,” June Medill told the driver.

“Look, you leave me alone from here on out, and maybe I won’t have you arrested when we get there, all right?”

Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump.

“Can I just—“

He turned around to glare at her. “What?” He’d reached his limit.

The windshield glowed with the red of the passing car, framing the driver in crimson frost as he turned his attention back to the wheel. Then the red went sideways, replaced by the blue-white of headlights as the car spun out in front of them. The lines and shadows of the bus’s windshield wipers swept through the glare.

“Hey.” June Medill’s voice was soft, her surprise barely audible through the earbud beats.

The light grew brighter. The driver stomped on the brake pedal.

The bus fishtailed.

Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump. Bump-di-di-bump.

Everything slowed.

Something hit Paul very, very hard as shapes filled the white. A flash of a question. When had the fight started?

It hit him again. Cries from all around. Bang.

Bump-di-di-bump.

Some trip, Annie had said. But he didn’t care, right?

A thing broke. A thing tore. A thing howled.

Bright, bright light. Too much.

All was light as the snowy windshield blazed at him in lines of hot stars.

The bus imploded into white.

Bump-di-di-bump.

 

4: That No Longer Applies

 

Jonas Porter sat at a desk in the Central Assignment Department of the Envoy Corps home office. The desk was the size of a dining-room table, and it was not his.

Porter’s desk was in cubicle 814, near a window with good light. He’d earned that spot decades before, when Corps management rewarded his century of service with an enviable new location and a leaded-crystal paperweight containing a hologram that resembled him if tipped just right.

He’d commandeered the team director’s office, which was closer to the message-relay tubes. If something came in, he would hear it. His assigned desk was out of earshot. That was why, when the office was busy, he received his assignments there only when a courier was on duty to deliver them.

There were no couriers left now. The office was silent. Porter was the only person in the building, which claimed a full city block, and his solitude was a circumstance to which he’d long since adjusted.

He clocked his days watching dust float in sunlight focused through thick windows. He wondered if he should again try to stop drinking diet soda.

When the tubes began delivering fewer assignments, the couriers stopped coming to work, so the Envoys monitored the tubes themselves. When the Envoys stopped coming to work, the director asked Porter to use a cubicle closer in. When the director failed to show up, Porter claimed her space. And when the vending machines ran out of caffeinated bubbles, he brought his own.

The relay tubes were pneumatic and noisy. Long before, when the office was filled with the din of Envoys coming and going with their assignees, typing reports, and giving counsel, the hiss and thunk of the steel capsules hitting the tubes’ intake doors was difficult to hear. When there had still been some hold-out Envoys left, they’d listen hard and race to the tubes at the sound of the rare capsule. Porter’s seniority gave him dibs on assignments, but he doled them out fairly to keep up morale.

Then the assignments ceased to mean anything. Then they ceased altogether.

Now there were no capsules and only one Envoy. The tubes could be heard anywhere if they bothered to clunk—even in the empty waiting room, which Porter paced to keep his legs from falling asleep.

The last of the Envoys checked the director’s desk clock, which no longer kept time. He drew a line through the current day on the blotter calendar—which had multiple lines through its days—and drank the last of his soda. He didn’t like ending the day early but allowed himself that lapse in professional rigor.

In the hallway outside, he turned the deadbolt and realized he’d forgotten his walking staff. He went back inside, retrieved it, and was locking up again when he swore he heard the hiss-thunk of a capsule through the door.

He did this to himself every day—this and the diet soda. Determined to make headway on at least one bad habit, he yanked his key from the lock.

Pocketing it, he walked to the elevators at a brisk pace. The heel-strikes of his wing-tips echoed down the hall.

They echoed up it, too, when he hurried back to the door and inserted his key for the fourth time that day, ignoring his inner voice’s scolding. The voice was winning as he inspected the relay tubes, which held only dust, their signal flags all down.

The voice shut up when he opened the door to the second-to-last tube in the rear-facing bank—the one with the flag that hadn’t worked in years.

***

Every fight Paul ever lost mattered, and he’d lost a lot. Pop Mike said he had a talent for being outnumbered and overmatched—a Captain Marvel heart in a Rick Jones body.

Paul Googled the reference. Pop Mike had a point.

The afternoon he happened upon the gang bangers bothering Victor Gonzales and his girlfriend mattered. They were targeted because she was white, or because Victor wasn’t, or just because the two of them were there and so were the guys.

After Victor ran off and the thing got started, Paul landed some respectable shots. He tried to protect the girl before the numbers had their say. But he went down hard into the gravel and glass while she screamed.

He needn’t have worried. They never touched her.

When the kicking was over, the guys moved on. Gonzales wasn’t coming back. The sobbing girl tried to help him.

It wasn’t clear whether she cried for Paul or for herself. Or maybe because her new boyfriend bailed on her. It didn’t matter. Paul just wanted her to let go of his wrists and stop trying to pull him up.

He couldn’t breathe. He was too hurt to stand, and her tears burned his burst knuckles.

Drip. Drip. He opened his eyes. This wasn’t the alley.

A crying peacock sat on a branch above, watching him. Paul blinked water away. The drops weren’t the bird’s tears.

He was on his back on a snowy hill. The peacock, lit by the undulating tangerine glow of nearby flames, peered down at him as ice melted from the tree’s limbs.

Paul took a breath, sending a crack of hurt from hip to shoulder. The next was a little better and the one after better still.

Cold wet splatted across his face. He wiped it off, and the back of his hand came away streaked with flecks of red. His nose had been bleeding. An icy rain followed as the peacock pushed off from the branch and flapped up into the sky, which was lightening into a gray dawn.

He sat up with care. To his left, a hunk of the bus was on its side, twisted. It had plowed a trench into the snow and earth, seats jutting from the floor at a right angle to the ground. Yards away, a woman’s shoe sat upright in the snow, as if its owner had jumped out of it in a trick performed for her child.

Beyond the shoe was Annie. A trough of pink on white marked where she’d dragged herself over to cradle Zach.

Both were still. Both were dead.

It was a tableau of awful serenity. Bodies, some still belted into their seats, marked the path of the motor coach. The bus’s remains were scattered—a few of the pieces burning—all the way down the hill.

Paul hurt inside. The hand he leaned on was numb. The cold was too much.

Annie and Zach were dead, as were many others. The trees wept into the snow.

Standing, the grind of his ankle and the jolt across his body were audible in his head, a pulse of their own. Then came louder sounds: the rhythmic thrum of helicopters, the growl of trucks. Help.

Paul wanted Annie and Zach to know, as if they could still be told—and might be saved. But that wasn’t so.

It all arrived fast. Black military choppers descended toward the hillside in the gray—hovering, surveying. Black trucks and black-uniformed soldiers in helmets and goggles boiled up from the woods at the bottom of the hill.

Paul waved his arms to get their attention, his shouts hoarse and unheard over the din. He looked to Annie and Zach again, maintained his fool’s notion. This could be changed for them.

Then the elements of the picture became questions, and the questions had answers. As Pop Mike said, Paul possessed survival skills. Why soldiers and not medical personnel? And who wore helmets and body armor for a rescue operation?

He stopped waving.

The soldiers ignored the living—the few on the ground who moved, the handful who sat up or tried to stand—and dealt first with the dead. The troops on foot worked in tandem with those in the covered trucks who handed down stretchers and bags.

Fast and not at all gentle, they zipped up the bodies, rolled them onto the stretchers, and hefted them up and into the backs of the trucks. Paul couldn’t see into the dark interiors. It looked like the bodies were fed into hungry mouths.

They were not here to help. This was not a rescue.

One man was able to get up on his own, waving an approaching soldier away and pointing him toward a woman lying nearby. He was clubbed down with a rifle butt and bagged. Other soldiers dealt with the woman in a similar fashion.

Paul didn’t want to register what was plain to see. June Medill shook him out of that.

One moment she wasn’t there, the next she appeared from behind one of the bus pieces to come at a soldier from his blind side, yelling. He didn’t notice until his partner pointed to her. The soldier pulled a long baton from a holster on his leg.

A truck passed, blocking Paul’s view. When it was gone, June Medill was on the ground, her hand reaching up, as if trying to tell the soldier she was sorry or begging for understanding.

Another truck passed. June Medill lay face-down in the snow, arms out to embrace it. The soldier unzipped a bag.

Paul was exposed against the white.

Down below, a trooper spotted him and spoke into a shoulder microphone. Others turned to look up the hill. Some headed in Paul’s direction.

Move. Move and hide.

The bad ankle brought him down in one step, and he slid and crawled as fast as he was able. He bit down against the pain, fighting his way through the snow to the nearest piece of the bus—the one he’d been sitting in, judging by the trail Annie left. He threw himself into it and rolled his back up against the now-vertical floor.

He chanced a look over the sideways seats. Soldiers made their way up the hill, some stopping to bag bodies or club the living. Choppers beat the skies overhead.

The bus piece rocked as Paul grabbed the seat and pulled himself to his feet. He shouldered aside something hanging from the arm rest, and it fell to the ground.

His pack. In the snow next to it was his coat. He wriggled into the coat, grabbed the pack, and limped around the end of the bus piece.

Keeping the fragment between him and the soldiers, he made it to a nearby tree. His ankle threatened to give out again, but he clung to the bark and worked his way over the snow-covered roots to the far side. From behind the bus came a radio’s crackle and the sound of a man bludgeoned into submission.

The helicopter grew louder.

At the next tree, Paul could only hope that the chopper wouldn’t spot him—that the soldiers were too busy with the other bodies to target him.

Annie and Zach. He pushed that thought away.

He was a dozen long yards from a stand of trees, and a clump of woods beyond those offered the chance to hide. He looked back. Hope faded.

A trail of footprints and drag marks in the snow pointed the way right to him. His only chance was to run and pray.

Now came what Pop Mike called a moment of true seeing. They came along in various situations, but Paul had only ever experienced them just before a fight. It didn’t matter if you were smaller, outnumbered, slower, or scared. The thing started, and you were in it. You swung for the soft spots. You moved.

He crossed the snowy clearing, lurching and hopping. It wasn’t his fastest, but it was enough.

Passing a clump of shrubs, he brushed against the white-covered branches, spooking some birds hiding within. They flew up and out in a burst of flapping and chattering—a stream of winged alarm bells. Even if they weren’t heard over the choppers, they’d be seen.

A shout from close behind. A trooper by the bus piece pointed at him, talking into his shoulder mike.

Paul flat-out ran, agony and all. A good way across the clearing, a hole hidden by the snow took him out. He fell on his pack and rolled, grunting and holding his ankle.

He was done. Caught. Maybe the soldiers would be merciful enough to knock him out, and he wouldn’t have to feel anything for a while.

“You have to stand up, Paul.” A voice from above.

A curse came to his lips as he prepared to tell this idiot that he would be carried, or he wasn’t going anywhere. But the man looking down at him wasn’t a soldier. He was upper-middle-aged, gray-bearded, and dressed like a civilian—here in the snow in a patch-elbowed jacket and dress shoes.

The man glanced in the soldiers’ direction, frowned, and offered Paul the end of a thick carved-wood-and-brass walking stick. “Grab hold.”

“I can’t.”

“There’s no choice being offered here. I cannot do your standing for you.”

Paul gripped the brass foot of the stick. The man leaned back with the weight and pulled him to his feet. A spear of hurt pierced Paul’s ankle, and he hissed.

The man reached around and grabbed him by the back of the neck, pulling him in until their foreheads nearly touched. “Listen to me,” the man said. “Your mind remembers what happened to you in the wreck. That no longer applies.”

With a measuring look, he shoved Paul backwards.

Paul stumbled, catching himself on his bad ankle. An echo of the expected pain flared, faded, and was gone. He shifted the weight to the good leg, then back. Nothing. It no longer hurt.

The man picked up Paul’s pack and handed it to him.

The soldiers allowed them no time for explanation. The whup-whup-whup of the chopper grew.

The man looked over Paul’s shoulder at a spot behind him. His eyes narrowed, and he raised his walking stick, as if testing the air.

Paul turned to see a black-helmeted trooper, rifle to shoulder, taking aim. The shot was a crack in the beat of the helicopter.

The man twisted his staff. The soldier’s back arched, chest thrust out like he’d been struck from behind. He dropped his gun and sank to his knees, flailing for the fallen rifle, then trying to stand. He pitched forward into the snow.

“Let’s go,” the gray man said. Hitching the shoulder bag he wore higher, he made for the next stand of trees. The sound of the chopper above pounded through them. Paul followed.

Emerging on the other side of the trees, they trotted through tall snow-powdered grass—and right into a half-ring of soldiers who rose up from the cover around them.

They looked back. There were more troopers coming through the woods behind. They were surrounded.

The chopper descended. Speakers in the machine’s belly emitted an unintelligible squawk.

“You won’t like this!” the man said over the noise. He was strangely calm, given their predicament.

“What?”

The man raised his staff. “This,” he said, giving it a twist, “might feel a bit—“

The clearing, trees, and sky spun. Paul’s vision went fuzzy, and his balance deserted him. In the next instant, the soldiers, the helicopter, and the noises were gone.

“Odd,” the man finished. His voice was softer now.

Around them, all was silent. They stood in a field of grass, feet immersed in anemone-like dandelions. The man took a deep breath.

Paul celebrated their escape by easing himself down into the green and yellow.

The man sucked in more air, then dropped to one knee beside him. “You all right?”

It was all Paul could do not to pass out.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “A jump that big costs you.” He took another deep breath and let it out. “And costs me even more these days.”

Paul was able to get to his feet with help. The man shouldered his bag, tucked his stick up under his arm, and strode away.

“Wait,” Paul said. “Where are you going?”

“Wherever you are.” He moved fast and didn’t look back. “But first, away.”

“Hold up.”

He didn’t.

Paul understood that this was not a person to lose. “Please.”

The man stopped.

“How did you get away from the bus?” Paul said. “Where are we?”

“The Commons. Now, I could tell you about it while we stand here, and then we could see if our friends in the black helmets find us again.”

“I just—“

“I’ve never seen that kind of Ravager commitment at a drop zone,” the man said. “We were lucky to make it clear of them, and that’s probably because they weren’t expecting me. Now they know I’m with you, and they’ll be prepared. We will not be here in the open when they arrive.”

He walked away again, covering an impressive amount of ground without appearing to hurry.

Paul ran after him. His ankle still felt fine. “How did you know my name?”

“Paul Reid. Born April tenth.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m Jonas. Friends call me by my surname, Porter, and I’ve never convinced them to stop.”

“Where did you—“

“All right, that’s not true. I have no friends. They’re all gone.”

“You know my name.”

Porter increased his stride. Paul struggled to keep up.

“I have a sad habit of showing up at the office even though there is, for all intents and purposes, no functioning office to speak of,” Porter said. “Every day I wait for an assignment and none comes. Today, that changed. No one ever escapes the Ravagers. Today, that changed. Let’s see what we can make of that.”

Paul tried to shake off his fog. “Wait.”

“No.”

“We have to go back for the people on the bus.”

“No, we have to keep moving—for you. You’ll keep up. You’ll do what I tell you. And if we have more luck than I’ve enjoyed in a very long time, we may make it through the afternoon.”

Paul was sweating in his heavy coat. It was no longer winter, and they hurried along under a warm sun. “Where’s the snow?”

Porter stopped, leaned on his stick, and watched Paul try to sort out his situation. Birdsong echoed across the grass.

“I don’t understand,” Paul said. “I’m in a bad place here.”

“Yes. You are.”

“Those people on the bus need help.”

“Yes,” Porter said with a note of sadness. “They do.”

Then he turned, swung his stick back up under his arm, and walked off across the field.

 

5: Much to Do, Much to Rue

 

Mr. Brill examined the red-haired woman, and Gerald Truitt watched. Truitt enjoyed nothing about the process, but Mr. Brill drew satisfaction from reviewing new arrivals in detail, as if he were going over acquisitions for an investment portfolio.

Which he was.

The big man was thorough in all things, especially those related to equity. He expected the same of his personnel.

It was not advisable for those in Mr. Brill’s employ, which was anyone not hanging from a rack or soaking in a vat somewhere, to disappoint him. Employment was far preferable to the alternative.

Much to do, much to rue.

The woman, immobile and insensate, was suspended upside-down by her feet in a web cocoon that covered all but her head. Wisps hung from her hair like pulled strands of cotton batting. Webbing filled her open mouth and was stitched from lip to lip.

No seamstress had done the work. In the dim light of the warehouse, the web’s creators were visible only in shadows crawling up and down the threads and in fist-sized lumps scuttling under the batting, which stretched across the floor like malignant moss.

Mr. Brill stood in front of the hanging woman, studying her inverted face. He leaned forward for a closer look. “Interesting.”

Steady as a surgeon, he reached for her eye. Truitt feared he might blind her. Instead, he brushed strands of webbing from her lashes.

No response.

He lightly tapped his finger on her pupil, as if testing a microphone.

Truitt blinked.

Much to do, much to rue.

Mr. Brill straightened, his suit stretching over his muscles like snakeskin. He thumbed some notes into a digital tablet, frowning. “This is how they manifest the process.”

“Yes, sir.”

Truitt surveyed the room. He knew from years of service to avoid viewing the numbers while Mr. Brill was evaluating them. Some believed that Mr. Brill left his screen unguarded to see who was unwise enough to read it, and that was why certain people enjoyed only a brief career before vanishing. Truitt had never known anyone to test that theory, nor had he ever considered doing so himself, which was probably another reason for his length of service.

The new arrivals, all of them cocooned, hung in rows stretching off into the reaches of the industrial space. Mr. Brill, for whom efficiency was paramount, said that his storage facilities were no larger than necessary. That may have been true; Truitt had never seen the end of one.

Already, many of the new faces were veiled in webbing. Farther down the rows, the veils were full shrouds, the cocoons much thicker. With the older ones, it was difficult to discern a human form.

The weavers worked fast. The red-haired woman would be covered within hours.

Next to her, unnoticed by Mr. Brill, a small boy whose hair was the same shade as the woman’s was being similarly wrapped into a chrysalis. Something about him was different, though Truitt couldn’t say precisely what.

Much to do, much to rue.

He couldn’t remember when that rhyme became his mantra, but it helped see him through the execution of his duties. Which was a personal detail he never shared with Mr. Brill.

“It doesn’t have to go this way for them,” Mr. Brill said.

Truitt couldn’t imagine it going any other way but kept that to himself, too. “No, it does not, sir.”

“They could be in soft beds, meditation rooms, lying on a beach. Instead they conjure up webs, bloodletting facilities. Do I look like an insect to you? A vampire?”

“It is unfair, sir.”

Mr. Brill glanced up from his screen to see if Truitt was being sarcastic.

At the edge of Truitt’s vision, the boy turned his head to regard them. Years of practice were all that kept him from looking back at the boy.

“Repeat that?” Mr. Brill said.

Truitt didn’t dare break eye contact to see if he was imagining the boy’s movement. Mr. Brill would interpret that as fear. The big man was a predator weighing a strike.

“It is unfair, sir.” This time he sounded more aggrieved. “But as you know, they remain somewhat aware of what’s being done to them, even if the resulting expression of that is unjustly harsh.” He waited for an appropriate amount of time, then averted his eyes in deference.

The boy hadn’t moved after all.

“This one,” Mr. Brill said, nodding toward the red-haired woman. “Brucker, Ann Elizabeth.” His screen zoomed into her specifics. “Two tours, Army database administration. Civilian contractor in the green zone after that. Top-secret clearance.” He closed her record. “Pull her.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Brill began to walk away, swiping the glass of his tablet with his fingers.

“Sir?”

The big man stopped, still reading.

“What about her son, sir?”

“What about him? He’s of no consequence.”

“It will mean fewer resources to maintain her focus if we keep them together.”

“Fine. Him, too.”

Much to do, much to rue.
***

Mr. Brill proceeded down the path between the rows of cocoons. Truitt maintained his customary position a few steps back—close enough for service, far enough for protocol.

They moved from the warehouse portion of the storage facility to a section Truitt found even more unsettling: The Fen. Their footfalls now thumped along the spongy planks of a floating walkway that crossed an expanse of foul water black as tar.

Orderly rows of former people—now charges, in Mr. Brill’s parlance—floated upright and naked in the murk. Heads tipped back, they were like patients awaiting sustenance or a dose of medicine. Their faces were losing features, as if rotting, or being consumed. The odor, thick and obscene, invaded his nose and mouth.

“Sir, I have an update on this last harvest. The bus accident,” Truitt said. “It seems that there was a problem at the drop zone.”

“What kind of problem?”

“There was a boy.”

Mr. Brill stopped, opened the tablet’s cover, and tapped the screen. “A boy.”

“A youth.”

A river of numbers flowed over the tablet as Mr. Brill swiped his fingers across it. His brow furrowed more deeply with each pass.

“There was some small resistance reported.” Truitt didn’t have Mr. Brill’s full attention. “The boy managed to clear the zone. And we lost a man.”

“We lost a man?”

He had it now. “Yes, sir.”

Mr. Brill closed the tablet cover and began walking again. Truitt followed.

“The new acquisitions I just reviewed,” Mr. Brill said. “The priority lot.”

“Yes, sir.”

They made their way into a new environment, footsteps muffled by office carpet as they walked down a long row of bleak clay-colored office cubicles. The cubes were filled with fatigued workers in matching white and gray who stared at screens filled with line graphs, bar graphs, tables, and scatter plots.

All of them avoided eye contact with Mr. Brill and Truitt.

“I thought we went in heavy.”

“We did, sir.”

“Not heavy enough. This is why we have safeguards, Truitt. Redundancies.”

“I understand, sir.”

Truitt had delayed delivering the news as long as possible, certain that Mr. Brill would be looking for someone to punish. Timing was everything in such circumstances.

Instead, the big man appeared to have taken the news in stride. That might change once he gave the matter further thought.

They arrived at a massive door of polished mahogany. A glance from Mr. Brill brought a muted click from within it. He waited for Truitt to step up and open it for him.

Sometimes the door opened itself. When Mr. Brill wanted to remind Truitt of his place and standing, he made him do it.

On the other side of the door, which was as thick as a bank vault’s, was Mr. Brill’s personal office. It was a palatial space of robber-baron opulence, from its rugs, trim, and appointments to its furnishings.

Mr. Brill took his place behind the room’s centerpiece—an altar-sized, ornately carved antique desk. An assortment of floating video monitors, all positioned to give him the perfect viewing angle, provided most of the light in the otherwise shadowy office.

As Mr. Brill moved, so did the screens. Some displayed views of rooms similar to the one they’d just left, with rows of workers toiling listlessly. Others showed training camps from on high, with black-clad Ravagers drilling and practicing combat maneuvers. Still others trickled out flowing lines of data in a painter’s dream-palette of color.

Mr. Brill scanned a bank of smaller monitors floating over his desk. He swiped his fingers through the air in front of him, cycling through screen after screen of numbers.

“Circumstances change, Truitt. We change with them, or cracks become fractures—and fractures become fissures. I want to know why this nit wasn’t picked.”

“Well, that’s just it, sir. We know something of why.” Truitt adopted a collegial tone. They were in this together and would address it as a team, though only one of them would find himself floating in The Fen if the other chose to abandon the cooperative approach. “He had help. From an Envoy.”

Mr. Brill fixed him with the predator’s stare for the second time that day. “There are no more Envoys.”

“It would seem that there’s one,” Truitt said. “Sir.”

 

6: The Van-Tasta

 

Jonas Porter knew this about beliefs: the more faith you fed them, the more they spit it back at you. When he believed that the Envoys would survive, he found himself alone in the office. When he was certain he would never again receive a Journey assignment, the tube brought him one.

Undependable, these beliefs.

Porter believed this about knowledge: the more sure you were, the more likely you were to be wrong. With that belief in mind, Porter easily rendered an accurate assessment of the current Journey and his worthiness as a guide.

He knew almost nothing.

The last of the Envoys stood in the middle of a narrow country road, feet planted on either side of its double yellow line. He gazed into the distance and risked the betrayal of another belief—that a ride would appear because they needed one.

“Can’t you just jump us where we need to go?” The boy sat on the roots of a sugar maple, his back against its trunk. They’d been here for a while—a generous stretch of tedium on top of Paul’s traumatic arrival in The Commons. And there were only two choices for a place to rest: roadside gravel or nearby hardwood.

“Too soon. No more jumps until you’re used to them. Anyway, we haven’t identified our destination.”

The boy sighed. He wanted better answers than Porter could give him.

In his lap was a book-sized video gadget meant to be an icebreaker—an introduction to his situation. Envoy best practices called for a crisis counselor to handle intake duties in the office, but there were no counselors here or anywhere. It was a field situation, so Porter was stuck with the portable solution—a device he’d never used playing a video he’d never seen.

“Welcome to The Commons,” a man in the video said. “Right about now, you have a lot of questions. That’s normal. As a Journeyman, you’re free to ask your Envoy as many as you like.”

Paul sighed again.

“Your Journey through The Commons is a big adjustment, so be patient. You have the full strength of the Envoy Corps on your side. We’re here for you, and we know what you’re going through.”

Half-true, that. The boy did have the full strength of the Corps on his side: Porter. But as for knowing what they faced, his years of dusty desk duty meant The Commons was a black box. He would have felt guilty, but his time stuck in the office was unavoidable.

The administrative infrastructure of The Commons—what remained of it—operated under the disuse protocol, better known as the “use it or lose it” or “into thin air” rule. Someone had to be in the Envoy office every day even if there were no Journeys in progress. Otherwise, the office would cease to exist. Sustaining its presence required a great deal of Essence. Essence was everything, and The Commons would reassign the office to something more useful if ever the Envoys stopped using it.

When there had been thousands of Envoys and Journeys, there was no risk of that happening. When it was just Porter and no Journeys at all, disuse was his biggest worry. Thus, he had a spotless attendance record—one which, documented on blotter calendars, would have stacked up high enough to hide a tall man standing.

Bravo for him. Tough luck for Paul Reid.

Porter was rusty. He’d only just managed to change the bullet’s course, as his inner judge reminded him.

You nearly missed.

I did not miss.

But you nearly did.

Belief. The power of an Envoy ran on it. Belief in one’s strength, in the integrity of the calling, in The Commons itself. The power remained while one served, and it faded the longer one went without an assignment.

Every Envoy enjoyed a unique ability, and it was up to each one to make the most of what he or she had. Carl Levy could change attitudes at will. It seemed a silly talent early on, but Carl’s file was a perfect record of success. Porter never heard what had become of Carl. He, like many, failed to report for work one day and was never seen again.

The attitude around the office suffered.

Audra Farrelly warmed things, which also didn’t sound like much. Yet it made the difference on many a Journey. A woman who looked to be in her seventies—age was slippery in The Commons—Audra never revealed to anyone what temperatures she was capable of attaining. “Hot enough,” she’d say.

When they came for Audra, she burned two square miles and took dozens of them with her. Believe that.

“Fear is not your friend,” said the man in the video. “It’s understandable to be afraid. As a Journeyman, you’re here to determine your fate, and that can be frightening. But you have powerful friends in your corner.”

And more powerful foes in the other guy’s, Porter wanted to add. “Who is that?” he said instead, walking over to the boy.

“Mister Desmond—a life coach who volunteered at New Beginnings. But he didn’t dress like this.”

Paul paused the video, freezing the black-and-white image of a chubby man who sported slicked-back hair and an argyle sweater vest. He sat stiffly on the edge of a blonde-wood table in a 1950s-era school classroom.

“These intros are a mish-mash of your memories,” Porter said. “Some real, some seen only in dreams, like The Commons itself. Memory and imaginings are its clay.”

The boy pressed play. The fifties Mr. Desmond went to great lengths to assure Paul that his Journey, tailored to his needs and his alone, would be a hard challenge but a fair one.

Porter longed for an intake counselor. Experience taught him you couldn’t get someone to believe their situation until they’d learned the particulars for themselves.

Beliefs. Knowledge.

After a string of pleasantries, the screen went blank. Paul hit the play button several times, to no effect.

Porter took the device from him but had no idea how to fix it beyond staring at its logo. It really had been a very long time. “What’s a Newton?”

The boy shrugged.

Porter handed the gadget back, and Paul tossed it over his shoulder, disgusted. It landed in the rushes.

“I’m a Journeyman.”

“Yes.”

“I’m here to determine my fate.”

“Yes.”

Paul plucked a tall piece of curled grass from the roots of his tree and chewed the end of it. “I’m dead.”

“Not necessarily. Not yet.”
***

Hours later, Porter and Paul still had no ride. They couldn’t tell how many hours, as tracking time hadn’t worked since—well, Porter didn’t know. He was back in the center of the road, trying to will a car to appear.

The boy sat in his spot under the tree, twisting his ring and occasionally pulling up a piece of grass. “I don’t need your help,” he said.

At least, that’s what it sounded like. “I’m sorry?”

“I don’t know you. So I don’t need you.”

Porter’s old director referred to that as “Ar” in her periodic table of Journeyman reactions: angry rejection. It was common, especially in the younger ones. Recognizing their situation, they tried to gain control over it. Many rejected the only people who could help them, thinking that was a route to independence.

“Where are you from, Paul?”

“You know.”

“Humor me.”

He considered his answer with a dark look and executed another grass stalk. “Nowhere. All over.”

“Well, in your hometown of Allover, did you ever see a man get shot in the back with his own bullet?”

The boy hesitated, then shook his head.

“Ever blink and wind up somewhere else? Were you ever told that a fresh injury was gone—and just like that, it was?”

Paul prodded the area around his eye.

“Doubting me is a luxury you can’t afford.” Porter peered down the road again. “It’s already difficult enough to reach Journey’s End.”

“Where am I going?”

“That’s up to you.”

Paul sighed and pulled up another piece of grass.
***

“Jonas.”

A woman’s voice—one Porter knew well. He turned and saw only Paul, who was dozing. “Audra?”

The boy opened his eyes and blinked his sleep away. Before he remembered to don his street veil of toughness, he was but a child waking in a strange place. “Anything coming?” he said.

Porter shook his head and resisted the urge to shush him. Was it really her? If so, had Paul heard? He hadn’t woken up until Porter spoke.

“Audra?” Porter said in a stage whisper, facing the road again.

“Return me from the wilderness, Jonas. Unless you don’t want my help.” If it was Audra, she was having a jolly time at his expense—which had been a favorite hobby of hers. “You always were the loner. And you were never careful with Corps property.”

The Newton.

Porter checked Paul again. He was oblivious. He couldn’t hear her.

“Don’t let the boy see,” she said. “I mean it. That’s as important as anything else you do.”

Porter concentrated on the device, picturing it in his mind where it lay in the rushes. He gave his walking staff a twitch, and the Newton appeared in his free hand. He curled it under his sleeve, blocking the device from Paul’s view, and dropped it into his coat