Cole's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

Cole ran until the cabin was a dark shape behind them. Veronica slowed first. The fox kit squirmed in his coat and dropped a red flower into the grass. He stopped and put his hands on his knees. The wind carried no sound from the cabin. Whatever had happened at the door was over, or still happening quietly. He could not go back. He also could not go forward. He did not know which seal in the mountains was breaking, or how fast, or which one to brace first. Without that, walking north was just walking. "We need someone who can read them," he said. "The scholar left six days ago. She's ahead of us on the road, if she's alive." "Then we won't catch her," Veronica said. She was watching the grass behind them, not him. A voice spoke from a low rise to their left. "You're looking for seal-readers." Cole turned. A small woman sat on a flat stone with her boots off, wringing water from a sock. A blue-green stone hung at her throat. A tool belt lay in the grass beside her. She did not seem surprised to see them. "I heard you from a hundred paces," she said. "You're loud for people who are scared." "Who are you?" "Marina. I guide the coast ruins. I read seals there." She pulled the sock back on. "Different seals than yours, probably. But seals talk the same way. Marks, order, pressure. Show me what you have." Cole hesitated. Veronica watched him hesitate and answered for him. "Show her the journal." He knelt in the grass and opened it. He had copied the seal marks from an old book in the city, three of them, the ones the scholar's notes had named. Marina leaned down. She did not touch the page. "This one's already gone," she said, tapping the air above the first. "See the break in the outer ring. That's after. Not before." "Which one is still holding?" "The third. Barely. The middle one is the one moving now. If you want to slow anything, you slow the middle." "How?" "You put weight back on it. A stone that remembers being sealed. Not any stone." She looked up at him. "You'll need someone who hears them. I only read the cuts." Cole thought of the small woman in the cabin, the one who had spoken for Boulder. Petra. Stones at her belt. A staff. He closed the journal. "I know someone," he said. Marina pulled her boot on. "Then you have a problem. If she was in that cabin, she's in it still." Veronica turned toward the way they had come. Her jaw set. "We go back," she said. Cole looked at the fox kit, at the red flower in the grass, at the horizon where the cabin sat low and quiet. He knew which seal was breaking now. He also knew he had to walk toward the thing he had just run from.