The Forest

She walked through the night with no plan other than east. Her mind rattled, her heart fatigued, but her feet still moving forward. The smell of blood from the dark creature lingered in her nose as she began murmuring out loud to herself, the only person she had to talk to.

The greenery was thicker here than anywhere she had walked before. Richer, and more full of life. She couldn't see it yet; the greater light had only just begun its ascent in the eastern sky. But the further she walked, the smell of blood was being subtly replaced by the smell of lush greenery, wet and alive. In the distance, creatures of every shape and size had begun their noisemaking, and she couldn't help but wonder if they'd had as eventful an evening as hers.

The signal.

She'd almost forgot to feel for it when she remembered she didn't have to. It always seemed to find her before she found it. It was just present enough to call for pause. How did she know which way she was going? She did not know. But it did. At this point, she decided, it would be easier to feel herself going the wrong direction instead of the right one. She resumed walking with the quiet comfort of knowing that something was leading her.

Had her mother walked this same ground?

In Kai's mind, her mother's world had always been small. Just as small as her own. Every day was more of the same: Father went off to the yard while Mother made breakfast, taught her girls how to keep the home, and sat by the windowsill with her cutting. She was a quiet woman. Beloved by her family, but not extraordinary in the same way travelers told stories of when passing through Donath.

Up until this point, she would not allow herself to consider whether there was even more to be discovered about her mother's life and death. But she knew, in her heart of hearts, that the world was not going to allow her to hold a small, idealized vision of Mother for much longer. A terrifying thought, and one she could not put back.

The ferns grew taller as she walked. Taller than her, then taller than anything she'd seen near Donath. Their fronds uncurled above her head in wide spirals, the stems thick as her wrist, and the color of them was wrong, too deep, ink-dark at the base, brightening to a green so vivid it looked deliberate. Between the ferns, flowering things she had no names for. White blooms with centers that pulsed a faint gold. A vine with leaves shaped into open hands. And moss that pulled away when she touched it, slowly, carefully, then settled back once she let go.

She stopped to drink from a stream that cut across her path. The water was cold and clean and she drank until her stomach cramped, then filled the skin and drank again. Her right hand throbbed the whole time. The flap of skin at the heel of her palm had dried stiff overnight and she couldn't make a fist without the pain going straight up her arm and into her shoulder. She rewrapped it with what was left of her undershirt hem. Running out of cloth to tear. Running out of a lot of things she had not thought to pack enough of.

The world's order. Designed. The dark.

With nothing to do but walk, Kai's mind replayed the last month. A picture was beginning to form, but to name it now would be to take something from it. It had a shape but no definition she could put words to. And Thuse had not been completely honest with her. That much was certain now. What she did not know was why. Why not just tell her what to do, where to go, and what it all means?

Mother.

Kai fell to her knees. Pain shook through her body in what felt a great fracture forming after a particularly violent Shake. Dread. Fear. The unmistakable sensation of being watched.

"Who's there?" she asked no one. And no one responded. But she had felt this feeling only once before in her life.

As her breathing recovered and she tried to make sense of what had just passed through her, she remembered an unusually warm day. The day's school work had concluded and Kailah and Mary were outside playing in the yard. Mother had gone to the shops.

"Girls!" It was Father, the moment just before their lives changed forever.

"She was here," Kai whispered under her breath. "She… is here."

By the time the light shifted to something she'd call midday, the forest opened up.

She stepped out of the trees and stopped walking, because there was nothing to walk into.

A clearing. The trees ended in a line so clean it looked drawn by hand, curving away to either side in what might have been a perfect circle. Inside the circle, the ground was different. Dark soil, black where the shadows hit it, fine-grained and soft underfoot. And in all forty paces of it, this dark, rich-looking earth, nothing grew. The ground just sat there, bare and still and waiting.

At the center of the circle, a stone.

Pale, waist-high, smooth on one side and rough on the other. Split from something much larger, a long time ago. It gave off a color she didn't have a word for, somewhere between white and grey, luminous without producing light.

She crossed the bare soil and put her left hand on it. The good hand.

And the signal did something it had never done before. It stopped whispering and spoke.

Everything she'd been straining to hear since the south window was just there. Clear. Present. The wall between her and it was gone. She could feel the whole shape of it now, all the depth she'd only caught pieces of. The damage from the Shakes running through the top. And underneath, something that had been there long before the Shakes. Ordered. Constant. Pointing east, but now she could feel why it pointed. There were paths in it. Branches. Forks where it knew which direction was toward and which was away, and the whole thing leaned with a certainty that made her own certainty feel small.

Mother was everywhere in this place.

She was saturated into it. The stone, the soil, the signal itself. Kai knew her mother. She'd grown up inside the shape of her. And this clearing was full of her. Her mother had spent real time here. She had sat with this stone for what must have been years, and she had listened, and she had gone deeper than Kai thought a person could go.

And then she had gone further still. East. Past the clearing. Into something Kai could feel the edge of but couldn't follow. At some point her mother had gone to a depth where Kai simply could not reach her. The signal was the same signal. But Mother had gone deeper into it than Kai knew how to go.

She thought about the woman at the windowsill. The quiet breakfasts. The cutting that never quite bloomed. She thought about "Girls!" and the warm day and the moment everything split in two.

Mother had been this. All of this, all along. And nobody in Donath had known.

Her throat tightened. She pressed her hand into the stone until the warmth of it steadied her.

And at the edges, the same wrongness she'd felt at the south window. Faint. Patient. Bound to the relay stone, leaning against the signal's flow without disrupting it. Sitting. Watching. A presence that had been here long enough to leave a stain in the signal's texture.

She pulled her attention back to the foundation, where the signal ran clean. The wrongness stayed above. It didn't follow her down. But it was there. It had been there before she arrived and would be there after she left.

Why did you stop?

The question sat where she left it, unanswered.

She made camp where the trees met the dark soil. The bare ground inside the clearing felt wrong for sleeping. Too exposed under the open sky. Too still. She built a fire with dead wood from the forest floor. Striking the flint took six tries with her torn-up hands before the tinder caught.

She ate the last of the dried fruit. The salt meat would last two more days, maybe, if she was careful. After that she'd be eating whatever she could find in a forest where the moss flinched and the flowers pulsed. That, she decided, was a problem for tomorrow.

She held Mary's stone and watched the clearing in the firelight. The pale stone at the center caught the flame and held it. She wondered if Mary could feel her out here, across all the distance between them. Probably not. But it was nice to pretend.

Tomorrow she'd go further. East, past the clearing, into whatever her mother had found and nobody else had seen. She'd follow until she couldn't and then she'd decide. But tonight this was enough. Tonight she was sitting where her mother had sat, and that was more than she'd had yesterday.

The signal leaned through her. Steady. Pointing east.

East.

Kai closed her eyes and listened.