Cole's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

They walked back the way they had come. The fox kit rode in Cole's coat, quiet now. Veronica kept pace beside him, staff in one hand. The cabin grew from a smudge to a shape to a building with a door hanging open on one hinge. No sound came from it. That was worse than sound. Cole stopped at the edge of the yard. "I go first." "No," Veronica said. "Together. If it's still in there, one of us won't be enough anyway." He did not argue. He handed her the fox kit. She set it in the grass behind a stone and told it to stay. It stayed. They crossed the yard. Cole led with the staff. The porch boards were split in two places, punched through from inside. He listened. Wind moved in the eaves. Nothing else. He stepped through the door. The front room was wrecked. The table was on its side. A chair had gone through the wall and left a hole the size of a head. Dust hung in the light from the broken window. In the middle of the floor, Boulder sat with his back against the stove. A long crack ran from his shoulder to his hip. Chips of him lay around him like spilled gravel. His eyes still glowed, but low, like coals under ash. "It ran," Boulder said. His voice was quieter than before. "Out the window. Took a piece of me with it." "Your heartstone?" "Still gone. It only came to see if I was standing." He looked at the crack in his side. "Now it knows." A small movement came from the back of the room. Petra stepped out from behind the overturned table. Her scarf was gray with dust. A cut ran along her jaw. She held her staff in both hands and a stone the size of an apple under one arm. She looked at Cole the way a person looks at someone who has come back for a debt. "You came back," she said. Flat, no lift. "We need you," Cole said. "The middle seal is breaking. A reader told us. She said we need a stone that remembers being sealed, and someone who can hear it." Petra did not answer right away. She looked at Boulder. Boulder looked at the floor. "He remembers," Petra said. "He was sealed once. Long ago. He hasn't said it out loud, but the stones near him have." Cole looked at Boulder. Boulder did not deny it. "Then we take him north," Cole said. "If he'll go." "I can't stand," Boulder said. Veronica set her staff down. "Then we carry what we can." Petra tightened her grip on the stone under her arm. "I'll come. But he needs his heartstone before the mountains, or he won't reach them whole." Outside, in the grass, the fox kit dropped a white flower and waited.