Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 15 of 25

The seated rabbits stayed where they were, but the one who had risen followed Mr. Echo and Clover past the shadow on the wall. Kate came behind with the ghost carrots at her back. The hollow narrowed. A second passage opened west, small as a mouth. Mr. Echo held the box near it. The hum pulled that way, clean. West of north. The trail Longear had taken three days before. He crouched and started in. The passage was tight at the shoulders. Ten paces on, it pinched. He turned his head and pushed. The walls held him at the ribs. He backed out and sat in the dirt. The box hummed against his knee, still pointing forward, into a space he could not fit. "I can dig," Mr. Echo said. Kate shook her head. "Roots. Look." She pointed. Pale roots knotted the walls in a lattice. Cutting them would bring the roof down on whoever was inside. He listened for a way around. The box read the space beyond the pinch as one long throat, no branches for a hundred feet. He could send the box ahead with a rabbit. He could not send himself. Clover watched him fail and said nothing. The rabbit who had risen from the wall stood at the tunnel mouth with her ears forward. Behind her, at the edge of the ghost carrot row, a small shape stepped out of the dark. A girl in a white shift, barefoot, faintly lit at the edges. She had followed them since the salt line and did not seem tired of following. A black cat wound around her ankles, tail up. "I can go," the ghost girl said. Her voice barely stirred the air. "I fit anywhere." Mr. Echo weighed it. She could carry the box past the pinch. She could not carry him. If he sent the box, he lost the hum for himself. He would sit here blind while she walked west. He looked at Clover, who tipped her head once. He looked at the tunnel that would not open for him. He set the box in the ghost girl's small hands and thumbed the chamber wide. "Walk until it stops pulling," he said. "Then come back. Bring the cat. Bring anyone you find." The girl nodded. The cat slipped ahead of her into the pinch, black on black. She followed, and the light at her edges went with her. The hum thinned to nothing at Mr. Echo's knee. He sat in the dark with Kate and Clover and the standing rabbit. The tunnel had beaten him. He had sent his tool ahead without him and kept only what he could hold in his own head, which was the angle west of north and the fact that Longear had walked this way alive. He waited for the ghost girl to come back or not come back. Outside the burrow, in the reeds, something large shifted its weight and went still.