The Semaphore

Since passing the towering metal carcasses of the granary ruins, Pontis and Varia had seen only yellow hills.

The cool breeze that swept the grass around Hummel’s house, they realized, belonged to the Lowoods. Out here, hot, stagnant air dominated. The sun bore down, forcing them to drape their blankets over their faces like hoods to keep from burning.

Laszlo’s compass aided in maintaining a northwesterly course across the empty and silent plains, and Hummel’s map afforded a reminder that they were not wandering through an infinite expanse, as it appeared. They calculated that it would take roughly seven days to reach the edge of Allegewi Forest, barring unforeseen obstacles.

As they walked, Varia asked Pontis who he’d written his letters to. He handed her his voice pad, which she read and returned to him.

“I wrote three too,” she said. “One to my Mam, one to my Pop. And one to Harper.”

Pontis pictured Harper opening two letters at the kitchen table.

They walked on until the sun settled on the western horizon and their shadows stretched over the plain like two gashes in the earth. They set up camp in a low pocket between two hills and built a fire, feeding it dry grass out of the ground.

As the sun slipped away, the temperature plummeted. The two were huddled together, sharing their blankets and body heat, drawn as near to the fire as possible without getting singed. Despite the cold, Varia took the time to give the girl water, then wrapped her again in her new satchel of fresh white cloth and held her tight. She and Pontis slept sitting up, leaning against one another with their heads down, and shivered through the night. The sky was a forest of stars, and if either had been awake and looking up they would have noticed the Migrant—a rare sight—drifting brightly through its static siblings from horizon to horizon.

#

The next day was hotter than the last. Varia remarked that the cold of the night and the heat of the day reminded her of a story she’d heard as a child, about a girl who got eaten by a bear. Pontis asked what that had to do with the temperature, but she merely shook her head and shrugged, unable to elaborate.

They found it impossible to build a fire hot enough to warm them at night. The grass—their only source of fuel—burned too quickly to produce sustained warmth. They piled it into the flames by the handful, their fingers and toes numb and their teeth chattering. They tried tenting the blankets over them with Varia’s walking stick, to trap some heat. But the cold air found its way along the ground. They spent their second night shivering and half-dreaming of yellow hills crashing and swelling into further yellow hills.

The next morning, after giving the girl water and eating a small breakfast of seeds and bread, Varia stood for a long moment looking out to the northwest.

“Further we go, colder the nights,” she said, faint pale creases around her eyes where yellow dust hadn’t clung.

They walked onward.

#

The sun assailed them. Their only escape was beneath their blankets, which they wore over their faces as they trudged on. As noon approached, the hills appeared bleached. Before them, the brittle dunes quavered, producing the strange illusion that an enormous body of water lay ahead, always just out of reach.

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They sweated through their clothes. Their feet blistered in their shoes. The constant up and down—from hill to hill—made them dizzy. By the afternoon they walked in a daze, their hands clasped to keep from drifting apart. Pontis set one foot in front of the other, sensing the incline of each hill, its crest, the ensuing decline, the dip of the nadir, and the following incline.

Over and over.

Down and down.

At one point he realized his eyes were closed. When he opened them he was walking alongside Ien, holding his hand. His mess of hair pooled with moonlight. He smiled and led Pontis across the hills toward a pond, its still water reflecting the moon’s icy face, bullfrogs barking from its muddy shore.

“I love to swim in this pond,” Ien said, his mouth unmoving. “I’m sorry I’ve never brought you here before. Just wasn’t the right time.”

Pontis smiled.

Ien’s hand broke from Pontis’s. “Come on,” he said, jogging toward the water.

Pontis took off after him, anticipating his plunge into the dark, cool water, Ien’s dark, cool body against his.

“Pontis…”

A voice, calling him away.

“Pontis!”

Pontis looked up. The sun cut through his vision, and the heat clawed his skin. He squinted toward the voice. Varia called, at least forty yards away. He had wandered from her—or she from him—out alone across the hills. He rubbed his eyes. The brittle yellow grass hummed. He slogged back to her, a hazy shape, Ien calling him silently back from the moonlit water.

“There’s smoke,” Varia said when Pontis was close enough. She shielded her eyes and pointed to the east.

Halfway to the horizon, a wall of gray smoke billowed. It could have been a mile long from end to end. Along its base, the glimmer of flames lapped from the grass.

“Let’s cut out west for now.” Varia’s voice was hoarse. “Makes no difference. Allegewi curves way around the western edge of Rapidan. We’ll just come out down some further south than we meant.”

The smoke whorled into the white sky. Laszlo’s compass helped reorient their direction due west. They went briskly, their fear of the smoke overwhelming their exhaustion. After a couple hours the wall of smoke appeared smaller, and they determined that it was moving northeast, away from them, driven perhaps by some imperceptible air current. They permitted themselves to slow their pace, even pausing for a few minutes to hydrate. Neither of them brought up that they’d become separated earlier. They held each other’s hands and walked on.

#

The hour before and after sunset offered a brief window of reprieve. The heat waned, and it was not yet cold. They set up camp in the flat lull between two hills, this time using Varia’s walking stick and a couple carefully arranged bags to erect one blanket as a tent beforehand. They piled grass into the fire in handfuls, trying, desperately, to coax coals. They faced east, watching the curdling red glow on the horizon.

“The hills are burning,” said Varia softly, as if to herself.

Pontis breathed on his fingers and huddled closer to Varia. The bottoms of his feet felt hot and raw, and his neck and cheeks tingled from where the sun had chewed his skin. He felt weak in a way he had never known. He thought of his Pa, unable to stand in his final days. He leaned his head onto Varia’s shoulder and drifted off at once.

Varia grabbed Pontis’s arm, startling him awake, and pointed eastward.

In the middle distance, two hundred yards or less, a pair of white lights—enormous glowing eyes—shined from the dark. The light spilled across the hills, making strange, arching shadows. They seemed to stare directly at Pontis’s and Varia’s camp.

The two held each other, frozen by cold and fear.

“Should we run?” Varia whispered, holding the satchel tightly to her chest.

Pontis watched the eyes. They could run. But where? There was nowhere to hide out here. Not from the sun. Not from the cold. Not from whatever watched them in the dark. In fact, with their unwavering stare, Pontis felt that the eyes were daring them to run. He felt that the eyes wanted them to run, so that with terrifying speed they could chase, and catch, and tear to pieces.

There is nothing not of this world.

The cold belonged to it.

The heat belonged to it.

The eyes in the dark.

Pontis and Varia held each other as the night deepened, sleep now a distant and ungraspable concept, waiting to flee or fight, or be eaten alive.