Mr. Echo walked the copse before dawn because that was where the silence was thickest. He carried a brass box the size of a lunch pail, wired to a pair of copper cones. The box measured sound that failed to return. Three years ago someone close to him had called out, and the echo came back wrong, then not at all. He had followed that missing sound ever since. Tonight it was pulling him toward the hill the town would not climb, where he believed a warren of rabbit-shaped people once lived before they were driven out. He meant to lead them home. Half a mile in, the needle on his box dropped to zero. His boots struck the dirt and gave nothing back. No crunch. No soft thud. The sound of his own steps was being eaten before it could leave the ground. He stopped under a cherry tree still holding its blossoms out of season. Petals fell past his face without a sound. Something was behind him. He could tell because the quiet had a shape now, a pocket moving through the trees at his pace. When he walked, it walked. When he stopped, it waited one breath longer than he did. He could not turn and look. If it closed the gap, he would not hear it. He would only feel the door close in the empty house. He set the brass box on the roots and unlatched the lid. Inside was a glass jar sealed with an old rune-band, the last thing his teacher had given him. The jar held a sample of true sound, saved from before the silence started. He had never opened it. He twisted the seal. A single clean note rang out, the pitch of a struck bell. The copse gave it back. Every trunk answered. The pocket of quiet behind him broke open, and for one second he heard what had been following him. Not footsteps. Breathing. Long ears turning. A shape the size of a man, waiting. Then it bolted, and he heard it go, brush snapping, dirt kicking, alive and afraid of him now instead of the other way around. He stood over the empty jar. The seal was spent. He had used his one sample to make the woods speak, and the woods had shown him the thing he came here to find. A Bunnyman. One of them, still out here, still hiding. Ahead of him on the path stood a woman he knew from town, holding salt and a candle and a folded list. Kate Bush had come to climb the hill. She looked at the shaking trees, then at him. "You heard that," he said. "I heard something." "I need you to come with me before it stops running." She put the candle in her pocket. "Then walk."

They followed the broken brush uphill. Kate walked a step behind him, salt in one fist, candle in the other. Mr. Echo held the brass box out in front of them like a lantern. The needle jerked toward the Bunnyman's trail, then jerked again toward the peak above. Two hungers pulling on the same wire. He kept them on the trail. Ahead, between two trunks, he saw it once, clear as ink on paper. A tall shape with long ears, standing sideways, watching them come. Then it was gone. "It stopped to look," he said. "It wants us to keep up," Kate said. The silence from the peak began to slide down the slope. He felt it before the needle showed it. His own breath thinned in his ears. The copper cones on his box stopped humming. When Kate's boot cracked a branch, the crack came to him late and soft, as if heard through a wall. The device's needle drifted toward zero. He shook the box. The needle stayed dead. Without it he could not tell the Bunnyman's silence from the hill's silence. He would lose the trail inside a minute. He stopped under a peach tree in strange bloom. Pink petals hung still in the dead air. He set the box on a root and thought. The hill was eating sound from above. His device measured what was eaten. If everything went quiet at once, the device could not point. He needed one small sound the hill was not yet eating. A sound close to the ground, close to them. "Pour the salt," he said. "In a line across the path. Now." Kate did not ask why. She knelt and poured. The grains struck the dirt, and each grain made a tiny tap he could still hear. He turned the cones down toward the salt line and reset the needle against that small living noise. Now the box had a floor to stand on. He swung the cones slowly. The needle twitched left, toward a gap in the brush. Faint, but there. The Bunnyman's quiet, cut against the salt's small speaking. Above them, between two branches, a pale face showed for one breath. A woman's face, moon-round, hair moving in no wind. Her eyes found Kate. Kate did not look up. Kate kept pouring salt. The face drew back into the leaves. Mr. Echo felt the pull from the peak sharpen and knew what climbed the hill did not want them to have this trail. "Left," he said. "He went left. Move before she comes down." Kate pocketed what salt was left. They stepped over the white line and into the gap. Behind them the peach tree stood in its wrong bloom. Ahead the needle held steady on the Bunnyman, and Mr. Echo followed, tuned now to the smallest sound the hill had not yet taken.

The needle held on the Bunnyman's trail, but the trail was thinning. Mr. Echo could feel the shape ahead pulling away. Kate stayed close behind him. The salt in her pocket rattled with each step. They came into a small clearing where a raccoon crouched on a fallen log, its white mask bright against the dim wood. It watched them and did not run. Mr. Echo stopped. The Bunnyman stood past the log, one long ear turned toward them, one turned toward the peak. Ready to bolt. "He hears us but not our words," Mr. Echo said. "If I speak, he runs." He thought about what the Bunnyman would trust. Not a human voice. Not the brass box. Something already at home in these woods. The raccoon on the log had not moved. A collie stood at the clearing's far edge, tongue out, calm, as if it had been waiting for them. A pink butterfly turned once above the grass and settled on the collie's ear. The animals were not afraid. The Bunnyman was watching the animals, not him. Mr. Echo knelt and set the brass box on the ground. He turned the cones toward the raccoon and opened the small intake wide. The device could measure sound going missing. It could also, if he reversed the coils, hold a sound and send it back. He had done it once, in his workshop, with a bird call. He pulled the pin, flipped the plate, and waited. The raccoon chittered at the collie. The collie huffed. The butterfly lifted and dropped. The box caught each small noise, layered them, and pushed them out again a beat later, softer, from the ground between him and the Bunnyman. The Bunnyman's ears both turned forward. It took one step closer. Mr. Echo did not move. He fed the box more. The collie whined. The raccoon scraped bark. The butterfly's wings clicked. The box gave it all back in the shape of woodland talk, the shape of a warren at ease. He borrowed the animals' trust and lent it to himself. The Bunnyman crossed the log. It came within an arm's reach and looked down at the box, then at Mr. Echo. He raised one open hand, slow. He did not speak. He tapped the box twice. The box answered with the collie's soft huff. The Bunnyman tapped the dirt once in return. They had a signal. Not a language, but a door. The Bunnyman turned and moved back the way it had come, slower now, glancing over its shoulder to check that Mr. Echo followed. Kate breathed out. Above the trees, the silence from the peak thickened, and somewhere in the leaves a pale face watched, patient. Mr. Echo picked up the box and went after the Bunnyman. The warren was close now, and for the first time it would let him in.

The Bunnyman led them along a low ridge until the ground softened underfoot. Mr. Echo felt the trail thin again, not from silence this time, but from the Bunnyman's own slowing. Kate walked at his shoulder. Ahead, the woods opened around a cherry tree in full bloom, out of season, pink against the gray trunks. The Bunnyman stopped at its roots and turned. It tapped the box once. Then it pointed past the tree, where the ground dipped into a hollow. It shook its head. It would go no further with him. Mr. Echo understood. The warren was down there. The elders were down there. A stranger walking in unannounced would be driven off, or worse. He needed to give the Bunnyman something to carry back. Proof he meant no harm. He had no words the elders would trust and no gift he could name. He knelt and opened the box. The reels inside were nearly empty. He had spent the true sound days ago. He had spent the warren-at-ease already. What he had left were scraps caught on the way in, and one thing he had not meant to keep. A pale shape drifted out from behind the cherry tree. Not the woman from the peak. Smaller. A child in a plain white dress, barefoot, her hair the color of paper. Beside her hung a second ghost, rounder, softer, a drifting hood shape with wet eyes. Both watched the box. Mr. Echo had recorded them by accident, two nights back on the hill, when the device caught what his ears could not. They had followed the sound of themselves ever since. "You can speak to him," Mr. Echo said to the little girl. He set the box down between the Bunnyman and the ghosts. "He hears animals. He'll hear you." The girl knelt by the box. Her mouth moved. No sound came for Mr. Echo, but the Bunnyman's ears both swung forward and stayed. The rounder ghost hovered close and touched the reel with one soft edge. The box hummed. From it came a picture in sound, the shape of children playing under a tree, the shape of a warren no one had hurt, the shape of Mr. Echo kneeling and not moving when he could have. The dead spoke to the animal in a language the living did not own. The Bunnyman listened for a long minute. Then it tapped the dirt twice, hard, and slipped down into the hollow alone. They waited under the cherry tree. Petals fell on the box. Kate did not speak. The two ghosts drifted at the edge of the clearing, quieter now, as if lending them had cost them something. When the Bunnyman came back, it was not alone. Three older shapes stood behind it at the rim of the hollow, long ears low, watching Mr. Echo. One of them raised a hand. The warren had agreed to hear him. The glade was still far, and the elders had not said yes to anything else. But the door was open.

The Bunnyman led them down into the hollow. Mr. Echo carried the box under one arm. Kate walked behind him with the salt pouch open. The three elders waited in a shallow ring of scraped earth, ears low, eyes fixed on his mouth. He opened his mouth to greet them and stopped. He had no word they would know. His voice would land on them like a stone thrown into a pond they did not swim in. He knelt and set the box down. The little ghost girl drifted to his shoulder. The rounder hooded ghost hung back at the rim. The girl had helped him once already. She could not help him now. The elders were awake, listening, and any voice that came from the box would be his voice, not theirs. He needed a Bunnyman voice. He did not have one. Kate crouched beside him. "Play them something," she whispered. "Anything they know." He spun the reel back. He had scraps left from the hill and the trail. A snatch of rain. A branch cracking. And under those, faint, the tapping the Bunnyman had made on the box lid two nights ago, when it first agreed to trust him. One tap. Two taps. A pattern. He had recorded it without meaning to. He set the reel to that spot and pressed the lever. The box gave out the taps. One. Two. One. Two. The elders' ears rose together. The Bunnyman at the rim stepped forward and tapped the dirt back. One. Two. The nearest elder crossed the ring and put a paw on the box. Mr. Echo stayed still. The elder tapped once on the wood. He tapped once back with his knuckle. The elder tapped twice. He matched it. The little ghost girl watched from his shoulder and did not move. The rounder ghost drifted closer. The tapping went on for a long minute, back and forth, the elder setting the pace, Mr. Echo answering. No word was spoken. No word was needed. The elder lowered its paw. It turned to the other two and made a soft sound in its throat. They answered the same way. Then the first elder faced Mr. Echo again and tapped three times, slow and even, on the wood. A yes. Kate let her breath out beside him. The Bunnyman came down from the rim and stood at his side. It pointed north, past the hollow, toward the far dark where the ground climbed again. The glade. The elders had heard him. They would send guides. They would not send them yet. One of the elders lifted a paw and drew a shape in the dirt. A circle. Then a line across it. A closed door. It tapped the line twice, hard. Something was in the way. Something the warren feared more than they feared him. Mr. Echo looked at the shape and understood. The petition was won. The road was not.

The elders melted back into the hollow. The Bunnyman stayed at Mr. Echo's side a moment longer, then turned and followed its kin. Mr. Echo lifted the brass box. It felt lighter than it should. He spun the reel and pressed the lever. Nothing came out but a thin hiss. He pressed again. Still nothing. The gift to the warren had emptied it. Every scrap of animal calm, every stored tap and branch-crack, gone into the ears of the elders. The box was a shell now. Kate watched his hands. "How bad?" "Empty," he said. "If she finds us on the path north, I have nothing to throw at her." He did not need to say who. The pale woman ate sound. The box was the only weapon that had ever made her flinch. Without it he was a man walking uphill with a tin can. He climbed out of the hollow and stood on the rim. North, the ground rose again toward the far dark. That was the path the elders had granted him. He could not wait for the box to fill by chance. He had to record something now, in this ground, before he stepped onto open trail. He turned in a slow circle, listening for anything the box could hold. The warren was already quiet behind him. Ahead, only wind in the pines. The little ghost girl drifted off his shoulder and pointed. A short way down the slope stood a cherry tree in bloom, out of season, its pink canopy bright against the black pines. Under it, two shapes waited. A tall rabbit man and a tall rabbit woman, ragged at the edges, glowing faintly blue. Dead Bunnymen. Old ones. They watched him without moving. The girl tugged his sleeve and pointed at the box. He understood. The dead speak to animals. The dead speak in a register the living cannot hear, but the box can hold. He walked down to the tree and set the box in the grass at their feet. He tapped the lid once. The ghost rabbit man leaned close and spoke into the brass, a long low sound Mr. Echo felt in his teeth but did not hear. The ghost rabbit woman spoke after him. Petals fell on the box. When they stepped back, Mr. Echo pressed the lever a hair. A dense pressure came out of the reel, thick enough to bend the grass. He shut it off fast. Loaded. Not with calm this time. With something older. He picked up the box. It weighed right again. The ghost pair bowed once and faded into the trunk of the tree. The little ghost girl settled back on his shoulder. Kate came down the slope to meet him. Above the pines, a thin bright moon watched from a face he did not want to name. He turned north and started walking.

The path north climbed through thin pines. Mr. Echo walked at the front with the loaded box against his chest. Kate walked behind. Two Bunnymen guides padded ahead, quiet on the needles. The elders had warned him of a closed door on this path. He did not know where it lay. He only knew that if he led the guides past it blind, they would step into whatever waited on the other side. He had to find the door before the door found them. He stopped at a flat stretch and knelt. The little ghost girl slid off his shoulder and stood in the pine straw, waiting. "A closed door," he said to her. "On this trail. Somewhere ahead. Can you find it?" She shook her head. She did not know. But she pointed up the slope, where a small pale shape drifted between two trunks. Another ghost. A round, drifting one, no bigger than a lamp. A hill ghost, thin from the peak's hunger. It watched him with wet eyes and did not come closer. Mr. Echo set the box in the dirt. He did not press the lever. The sound inside was for the pale woman, not for a child. Instead he tapped the lid, the same rhythm the Bunnyman had taught him. Three light, one heavy. He tapped it again. The hill ghost drifted one tree closer. He held out his palm, empty. The little girl at his knee copied the tap on the ground. The hill ghost came down the slope and stopped an arm's length away. "There is a door on this path," Mr. Echo said, slow. "Closed. The rabbits are afraid of it. Show me where." The hill ghost turned in the air. It drifted uphill along the trail, then stopped and looked back. He followed. Kate followed him. The guides came last, ears flat. They passed a leaning pine, a stump, a bare patch. The hill ghost stopped at a place where the trail bent left around a boulder. It pointed at the boulder. Then at the ground in front of the boulder. Then it faded. Mr. Echo crouched. The pine needles lay in a neat curve, too neat, brushed flat in a half circle. He picked up a pebble and rolled it onto the flat place. The pebble sank without sound. No thump. No skitter. He drew his hand back. There it was, the shape of a door in the dirt, closed against the living. One more step and the lead guide would have dropped through. He marked the edge with a line of salt from Kate's pouch and stepped the party wide around it. The guides breathed out. Above the pines, a thin bright moon watched with a woman's face. She had not caught them yet. But she now knew where they were.

Past the marked door, the trail opened into a small hollow ringed by thin pines. The two Bunnymen guides stopped at the far edge of the salt line and would not cross. Their ears lay flat. One tapped the ground twice, then stared at Mr. Echo. He understood. They had crossed one hidden door. They would not walk into a second without proof the way ahead was clean. Above the pines, the moon still wore a woman's face. Standing still made them a target. Moving blind killed them. Mr. Echo knelt and set the box in the needles. Kate crouched beside him. "They want a sign," he said. "Something living that goes ahead and comes back." Kate looked up the trail. "Send a scout." "I have no scout." She pulled a folded scrap from her coat. A paper cutout of a swallow, cut for a child's window long ago. "Will kept this," she said, and put it in his palm. Nothing more. He did not need the paper. He needed what it meant. He turned to the little ghost girl at his knee. She was small and light and could not fall through a closed door the way a living body could. But she was alone, and he would not send her alone. He tapped the lid of the box, three light and one heavy. He waited. From the trees on the uphill side, two shapes stepped out. A tall rabbit man and a rabbit woman, both dead, both scarred with pale lines that glowed under the moon. The dead of the warren. They had heard their own kind inside his box for two chapters of walking. They had come to look. Mr. Echo held out the paper swallow to the little girl. "Carry this up the trail," he said. "Stop at anything that eats sound. Come back." He looked at the ghost rabbits. "Go with her. If a door opens under her, pull her out." The rabbit woman nodded once. The rabbit man tapped his own chest, three light, one heavy. The guides at the salt line lifted their ears. The three dead moved up the trail together. The little girl held the paper bird in front of her. The ghost rabbits walked on either side, heads low. They passed a leaning trunk. They passed a stand of young cherry, its blossoms pink even under the cold moon. They stopped once. The rabbit man crouched, sniffed the ground, and steered the girl a step left. They went on. They reached the ridge and turned, and the little girl raised the paper swallow over her head. Mr. Echo looked at the guides. He tapped the box. Three light. One heavy. The lead guide crossed the salt line. The second followed. Kate came after, then Mr. Echo, the loaded box against his chest. Somewhere above the pines, the moon's face turned to watch the ridge. She had seen the paper bird lifted. She knew now that Mr. Echo was moving his party forward, and she knew which ridge to come down.

Past the ridge the trail ran straight and open. Thin grass on both sides. No trees, no rocks, no ditch. Kate walked ahead of Mr. Echo with the salt bag on her hip. The glade lay maybe a quarter mile north, a dark line of oaks he could just see. Above the pines behind them, the moon's face had turned. Mr. Echo felt the pressure in his ears drop, the way it did when sound began to go missing. She was coming down. He stopped Kate with a hand on her sleeve. "She's on the ridge," he said. "If we run, she takes you before the trees." Kate looked at the open ground. "Then I don't run." "You don't stay either." The two Bunnymen guides crouched low in the grass, ears flat. They could vanish into it. Kate could not. Mr. Echo knelt and opened the box. Inside were the two dead Bunnymen voices he had recorded at the warren. His only weapon. He had planned to save them for the glade itself. He looked at Kate's white face and changed his plan. He called the ghost rabbits back down the trail. They came at a run, the little girl behind them with the paper swallow still in her hand. "I need a shape that walks," he said to the rabbit woman. "Something living, on the trail, moving north. Not Kate." The rabbit man tapped his chest. Three light, one heavy. Then he pointed off into the grass, and a black cat stepped out, thin and sleek, green eyes on Mr. Echo. A dead thing the rabbits knew. It sat by the box and waited. Mr. Echo pressed the box against the cat's side and played one dead Bunnyman voice, low, at walking pace. To the pale woman above, it would read as a living throat moving up the trail. He pointed the cat north. It went, tail up, the voice going with it. Then he took Kate's wrist and pulled her sideways into the grass, flat, with the guides. The little girl and the ghost rabbits lay across them like a blanket of cold air. The silence came down fast. He felt it pass over the grass in a long slow wave, the way a door closes in an empty house. It followed the cat. It followed the voice. Up the trail, a hundred yards on, the recorded voice cut off mid-word. Eaten. The cat did not come back. The pressure in his ears eased. She had taken the bait and gone up the trail after it, north, past the glade's mouth. Mr. Echo lifted Kate to her feet. The box was lighter now by one dead voice. The oaks were close. "Move," he said, and they ran the open ground while the moon's face still looked the wrong way, and reached the first trees of the glade before she turned back.

Inside the first oaks, Mr. Echo pulled Kate down behind a trunk. The pale woman was north up the trail, still chasing the cat and the dead voice. They had minutes, maybe less. The glade lay somewhere in this stand, but the oaks all looked the same. Nine trunks in a rough ring. One of them hid the true entrance. The other eight opened onto grass where she would find them when she turned back. Kate whispered, "Which one." Mr. Echo shook his head. He opened the box and listened for the shape of the quiet under each tree. All nine sounded the same. Even ground, even air. The warren guides crouched at his knee, ears flat. They did not know either. They had never been this far. He called the ghosts in close. The little girl came first, then the rabbit man and woman, then the pale boy with white hair who had followed them up from the salt line without asking. Ollie. Mr. Echo had not planned on him. The boy stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the oaks like he was reading a page. "The dead know paths the living can't," Mr. Echo said. "One of these trees is a door. I need which one." The rabbit pair split and walked the ring, passing through each trunk in turn. They came back and shook their heads. Nothing pulled them. The little girl tried and shivered and stepped back. Ollie had not moved. "There," Ollie said. He pointed at the fourth oak from the left. "That one's angry." Mr. Echo looked at him. "Angry how." "Like the argument's still going," Ollie said. "I only know my name when I'm angry. That tree sounds like my name." He said it flat, the way he said everything, and did not look away from the trunk. Mr. Echo pressed his palm to the fourth oak and opened the box against the bark. The quiet there was not even. It bent inward, the way a throat bends around a word held back. A door closing, but from the inside. He signed to the guides. They slipped around the trunk and vanished. He took Kate's wrist and stepped through after them, and the bark gave like a held breath letting go. They came out in the glade. Grass to the knee, a low stone at the center, oaks closed behind them in a full ring with no gap. The pressure in Mr. Echo's ears steadied. Above the trees, the moon's face was still turned north, following a cat that no longer walked. Kate sat down in the grass and put her hands flat on the ground. Mr. Echo looked at Ollie, who stood at the ring's edge with his mouth a little open, listening to something none of the others could hear. The glade was theirs. Only now did Mr. Echo see it held someone already waiting.

The glade held its breath around them. Kate sat in the grass with her hands flat. The warren guides pressed against Mr. Echo's boot. At the ring's edge, Ollie swayed. His outline had thinned since they stepped through the oak. Mr. Echo could see the far trunks through his shoulder now. The pale boy was fading into the glade's air, and he was the only one who could read this place. Mr. Echo opened the box and held it near Ollie's chest. The quiet around the boy was wrong. It pulled inward, the way a throat bends around a word held back. The same shape as the oak door. The glade was drinking him. Ollie's mouth moved but no sound came. His hair lifted in a wind none of them felt. "Say your name," Mr. Echo said. Ollie's lips shaped it. Nothing left them. The sealed jar in Mr. Echo's coat had held the boy's name once, on the salt line, when the Fen tried to take it. He pulled the jar out now. The stopper was still tight. He set the jar in the grass at Ollie's feet and cracked it a finger's width. A thin sound came out. Two syllables in a child's voice. Ollie. The boy heard it and his edges pulled back toward solid. The ghost rabbits stepped in on either side of him, ragged and stoic, and set their spectral hands on his shoulders. The little ghost girl took his wrist. Their older quiet braced against the glade's pull. It was not enough. The jar's sound was thinning already. Kate stood up. She walked to Ollie and put her palm flat on his cheek. "Your sister is Lily," she said. Flat. Plain. "She found her body. She's breathing again in the chalet. Your brother Will helped her. Will is my brother." Ollie's eyes found her. "He's alive. Changed, but alive. You did that. You went into the Fen with her because Will told you to." Mr. Echo watched the shape of the quiet around the boy change. Kate's words were plain facts, and facts had weight the glade could not eat. Ollie's outline firmed. His hand closed on Kate's wrist. The jar in the grass went silent, empty at last, but the boy stayed. He drew a breath he did not need and let it out. "The stone," Ollie said. His voice was his own. He pointed at the low stone at the glade's center. "That's where they were driven from. The path in starts there. I can hear it now." The warren guides lifted their ears. Mr. Echo closed the empty jar and put it away. Above the oaks, the moon's face had begun to turn back south. She had lost the cat. She was looking for them again. But Ollie was anchored, and the glade had opened its first door.

Ollie stood solid again in the grass. The warren guides watched the low stone at the glade's center. Mr. Echo crossed to it and knelt. He set the brass box against its face and opened the lid. The device should have caught the shape of what left this place, the direction the ancestors were driven, the notch their absence cut into the air. The dial did not move. The stone gave him nothing. It was not silent the way a quiet stone is silent. It was silent the way the door by the boulder had been silent. A closed thing. He tried the salt. He poured a thin line across the stone's top and listened for the grains. The grains landed and made no sound at all. The stone ate them. Mr. Echo pulled his hand back. Above the oaks the moon's pale face had drifted closer. Lady Moon had found the ring again. Her light pressed flat on the grass and did not reach the stone. "It won't speak to the box," Mr. Echo said. Kate came and crouched beside him. Ollie stayed at the ring's edge with the rabbits. "They sealed it when they left," Ollie said. "So nothing could follow them out." Kate put her hand on the stone. She spoke in her flat voice. "Which way did they go." It was not a question the way she said it. It was a fact she was waiting for. The stone did not answer her either. She did not ask again. Mr. Echo opened the box's second chamber. One dead Bunnyman voice remained inside, the older sound he had kept back. He held the box mouth to the stone and let the voice out. The recording rasped into the grass. The stone drank the first half and then, for one breath, gave something back. Not a direction. A shape. A hollow in the air pointing away from the ring at an angle Mr. Echo could feel in his teeth. West of north. Into the Fen. His dial jumped once and settled. He marked the angle in the dirt with his finger. The box went quiet. The last dead voice was spent. He closed the lid on an empty chamber and understood he had nothing left inside it to trade. Ollie watched him understand this and said nothing. A warren guide's ears turned. Beyond the oaks, somewhere on the trail they had come up, a woman's voice was calling a name. Kate's shoulders locked. It was Lily's voice, and it was not Lily. Marrow Fen's warning came back to Mr. Echo then, the notices she had pinned in town about things pulled from the north pass in burial patterns. The pale woman had learned a new mouth. Mr. Echo pointed at the angle in the dirt. "We go now," he said. The guides were already moving. The ring did not open behind them. It opened ahead, west of north, into the Fen.

The new ring closed behind them and the Fen began at their feet. Mr. Echo held the angle he had marked in the dirt inside his head, west of north, the shape the last dead voice had cut into the air. He walked ten steps into the wet grass and stopped. He could not remember why he had stopped. Kate stood beside him with her mouth open a little. One of the warren guides was already turning in a slow circle, ears down. The Fen was taking the map out of them as they walked. Mr. Echo touched the brass box at his hip. Empty. He had traded every voice inside it for passage this far. He had nothing tied to the ancestors' path to hold against this place. He tried to say the word north to Kate and the word came out but the direction did not come with it. A rabbit stepped out of the reeds ahead. Not a warren guide. This one wore a hood and a belt with brass buckles, and carried a pack across one shoulder. Clover Wanderpaw looked at the group without surprise. "You are losing it," Clover said. "I can see it going. I have been losing things for three weeks. Seven days in I stopped counting." Mr. Echo knelt to Clover's level. "We are going west of north. Into the Fen. I need to hold the direction." Clover nodded once. "I knew a market by a river. Every stall. A baker who sold me a raisin bun every morning. Never the same words twice. Then it was gone. I keep the bun. The raisins were soft. Nine of them." Clover tapped the side of their own head. "Small things. Numbers. A taste. The Fen slides off those. It only eats the big shapes." Mr. Echo understood then what he had been trying to carry wrong. He had no relic of the ancestors. He had the shape their absence made in his box, and the box was empty. But he had Clover, who had walked three weeks through this and still knew the count of raisins in a bun. He opened the box's empty chamber and held it out. "Speak into it. Nine raisins. The baker's stall. The river noise. Any small thing you still hold." Clover leaned in and spoke, plain and short, until the chamber was full of a market that did not exist anymore. Mr. Echo closed the lid. The box hummed low against his palm. It was not the ancestors' path. It was one rabbit's refusal to forget. When he turned west of north again the angle sat clean in his teeth. Kate's eyes came back. The warren guide stopped circling. They walked. Behind them, past the closed ring, a woman's voice tried Lily's name again and could not find them. Ahead the reeds thinned toward dark ground, and something low and round waited in the bank, a burrow mouth open to the Fen.

The burrow mouth waited in the bank ahead, a round dark opening framed by wet roots. Mr. Echo stepped toward it and Clover did not follow. The hooded rabbit stood in the reeds with the pack still slung across one shoulder, ears flat. "I can't go in," Clover said. "Not yet." Mr. Echo turned back. The angle west of north still sat clean in his teeth, but the box hummed only as long as Clover kept walking with him. If Clover stopped, the market inside it would stop too. He knelt in the wet grass. "Tell me what you need." "A sister," Clover said. "Longear. She came in a week before me. I lost her on the second day. I kept the raisins. I did not keep her." Clover's voice went thin at the end and then stopped. "I am not walking deeper until I know if she is standing somewhere." Kate crouched beside the burrow mouth and looked in. Pale roots hung from the roof. Something grew inside in a tidy row, carrots so faint they were nearly clear, their tops the color of old glass. "There's a patch," Kate said. "Ghost carrots. Someone planted them straight." A rabbit did that, Mr. Echo thought. A rabbit who still remembered how a row was supposed to look. He opened the box and thumbed the chamber halfway shut, holding back Clover's market so it would not spill. Then he walked into the burrow alone. The tunnel widened into a hollow lit by the faint roots. Six or seven rabbits sat against the walls in cloaks and scarves and belts, packs at their feet. None of them looked up. They had the same quiet as Clover had in the reeds, the quiet of people counting small things to stay whole. On the far wall, propped against the earth, sat a dark cutout shape, ears long, body human, the kind of shadow a warren pins up to mark that one of theirs is missing. A name was scratched under it. Longear. Mr. Echo brought Clover in. Clover looked at the shadow on the wall and put a paw against the scratched name. One of the seated rabbits lifted her head then, an older doe with a green scarf, and said, "She left three days ago. West. She said she would not sit anymore." The doe's voice was flat, but the fact held. Clover pressed the paw harder against the wall and breathed out once, long. "West," Clover said. "That is our way too." Clover turned to Mr. Echo and opened the pack. "I will walk deeper now. Take the rest." Small things spilled into the box's chamber, a bell, a button, the count of raisins, a baker's greeting. The hum came back full. Behind them the shadow stayed pinned to the wall, and one of the lost ones stood up to follow.

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.

Mr. Echo sat with his back to the wall of the burrow and counted the time by his own breathing. The ghost girl had walked west with the box, past the pinch where he could not follow. Without the hum against his knee, the tunnel was only dirt and dark. Clover Wanderpaw sat beside him. Kate crouched at the passage mouth, listening. The standing rabbit did not move. He had no way to call the girl back. If the pull took her further than she could remember, she would keep walking, and the box with her. He worked the problem out loud. "She has no name I can shout. No thread back." Kate looked at him. "Then make one." Mr. Echo turned that over. Sound was what he had. Sound was what he had spent. He had given the box every voice it ever carried, and now he had given the box itself. He felt through his coat. In the inside pocket he found the small tin cup he drank from on the trail, and a spoon. He pulled them out and set them on the dirt. Kate watched him. Clover watched him. He struck the spoon against the cup. The sound was thin and clear. It did not fill the tunnel. It marked it. "She followed us from the salt line," he said. "She followed because we kept moving and she wanted to see. She will follow a sound she knows is mine." He struck the cup again. Three taps, a pause, two taps. The pattern he had taught the first Bunnyman in the clearing weeks ago. He struck it once more, then waited, then struck it once more. A beacon on a five-count. The standing rabbit's ears turned toward the pinch. Kate leaned in. "Something," she said. Mr. Echo did not stop tapping. He kept the count steady. His arm ached. He heard nothing back, because he never heard sound coming, only sound going missing. He listened for the wrongness instead, the shape of the tunnel changing as a body moved inside it. The wrongness came. The long throat past the pinch tightened in his hearing, then softened, then tightened again. Something walked back toward him against the tap. The black cat came out first, low to the ground. Then the ghost girl, the box held in both hands. Behind her, bent almost double in the small space, a rabbit in a brown hood pushed through the pinch on her elbows and dropped into the hollow. Her ears were long and scarred at one tip. She looked at Clover and said, "You came." Clover said, "You left." Neither moved for a moment. Mr. Echo set down the cup and spoon. The tin cup would ride in his pocket now, not the pack. He had a signal. He had the girl back, and the box, and Longear, who had walked west three days and turned around for a sound she recognized.

Longear dropped into the hollow and did not sit. She looked at Clover, then at Kate, then at the standing warren guide. She did not look at Mr. Echo. He understood. He was the stranger here, and she had walked three days west to be away from strangers. The hum-box sat in the ghost girl's hands. He did not reach for it. He needed one thing from Longear: the ancestors' path through the Fen. The elders had pointed west of north. Longear had walked it. Without her map in his box, the Fen would eat his memory the way it had almost eaten Clover's. He would wander until his name went missing too. He had one chance to make her speak, and pushing would close her. So he did not push. He sat down against the wall and set the tin cup between his knees. He told Clover, plainly, what he had come to do. Lead the warren home. The glade beyond the Fen. The stone the ancestors had sealed behind them. He spoke to Clover because Longear was listening, and a thing overheard is not a thing demanded. Clover answered him in front of her sister. She said her market was in the box now. She said she had given it because he had gone into the burrow for her when she could not. Longear's ears turned. She crouched at last, and put her scarred paw on the lid of the box, and asked what else it held. Mr. Echo opened it. He played her the tapping pattern first, the one the ghost girl had followed back. Then the warren-at-ease he had built weeks ago from calm animals. Then Clover's raisins, counted in her own voice. Longear listened through all of it. When it stopped, she said, "You carried her market." Mr. Echo said, "I carried what she gave me." Longear said, "Then I will give you the rest." She spoke for a long time. She named turns by smell. A patch of moonseed dandelions where the ground went soft. A ring of ghost-pale blooms that meant water beneath. A bunny-shaped bed of leaves the old does had planted as a marker three generations back, still holding its shape. A butterfly patch that meant you had gone too far south. Mr. Echo held the box open the whole time and let it drink her. He did not interrupt. When she finished, the hum settled into a new weight against his knee, heavier than before. Longear stood. She said she would walk with them to the second marker and no further; her feet were done with west. Mr. Echo accepted this. He had what he had come for. Kate helped him up. The ghost girl closed the lid. Somewhere above them, past the pinch and the tunnels and the sealed stone, the Fen was still waiting to erase him. But now he had a map made of a rabbit's mouth, and he could follow it.

Longear led them up out of the burrow at first light. The tunnel opened onto a low ridge of packed dirt, and Mr. Echo stood there with the hum-box heavy against his hip and understood what he had not let himself think about since the glade. He had the map. He did not have a way to send it home. The elders back at the warren were waiting on word he could not give. If he walked the Fen for another week, they would count him lost and scatter before he returned. His whole path forward depended on a message he had no runner to carry. He set the box down and opened it. Kate crouched next to him. Clover and Longear watched from the ridge. The warren guide who had come with them from the oaks stood with both ears forward, listening for anything that was not them. "I need to send back," Mr. Echo said. "To the elders. Before they break camp." He looked at the guide. "You would take three days to reach them. I do not have three days of you." The guide tapped the lid of the box, the pattern Mr. Echo had taught the first Bunnyman in the woods. Then the guide tapped their own chest. I will go. I will carry. Mr. Echo shook his head. "Not you. The box." He looked at Longear. "You said your feet were done with west. Would they walk east?" Longear's ears turned once. She did not answer. He kept going. "I can put the path inside. Every turn you gave me. The dandelions, the pale blooms, the leaf-bed, the butterflies. I put it back in your voice. You carry the box to the elders. They open it. They hear you. They wait." Clover spoke before Longear could. "She walked three days to be gone. You are asking her to walk three days back with a stranger's errand." Longear put her scarred paw on Clover's arm and Clover stopped. Longear looked at the box, then at Mr. Echo. She said, "I will carry it as far as the oaks. From the oaks the guide runs it in. My feet stop at the oaks." Mr. Echo nodded. He copied her map out of the box into a second, smaller reel, and pressed the original shut around her voice and the tapping pattern and one clear sentence from him: "A safe path exists. Hold the warren. Wait." He handed the box to Longear. She tucked it under her cloak. She and the guide left down the ridge without ceremony. Kate watched them go until the ridge folded them out of sight. Mr. Echo stood on the empty ground with the small reel in his palm and no box around it. He had sent his map home in another creature's mouth. He had kept only a copy, and no case to hold it, and the Fen still ahead of him waiting to eat whatever he could not protect.

Longear and the guide were gone below the ridge. Mr. Echo tucked the small reel into his shirt pocket and pressed his palm flat over it. Then he heard it. Lily's voice, three ridges back, calling his name in a child's easy pitch. It was not Lily. It was the pale woman wearing her. The Fen ahead of them opened into flat reed and standing water for a mile. No trees. No cover. His group had no box to throw sound with, and the pale one tracked them by the noise they could not help making. Kate stood up slowly. "How long." "Twenty minutes," Mr. Echo said. "Less if we run and she hears us run." Clover's ears were flat against her skull. Longear — the scarred rabbit in the brown hood — had not left with her sister. She had stayed at the ridge to watch them across the first stretch. Now she stepped forward. Her hearing was the sharpest of any of them. She had caught the voice before he had. Longear pointed down the ridge, off the line they had planned. "Shadow cavern. Half a mile. Old burrow mouth cut into stone. My sister and I slept there once." She looked at Mr. Echo. "Stone eats sound. Inside it you make no shape she can follow." They ran. Kate went first, then Clover, then Mr. Echo with the reel against his chest, then Longear last because her ears would tell them when the voice moved closer. The reed hissed under their feet. Twice Longear caught his sleeve and made him stop breathing. The voice curled around them from the wrong side each time, testing. Then Longear turned them sharp left down a fold in the ground he would not have seen alone, and there it was: a black mouth in a wall of striped stone, ringed with loose rubble and old root. They went in on their hands. The dark closed behind them like a lid. Mr. Echo felt the change at once. The cavern did not return his breath. His device would have read the walls as a hole in the world. He set his back against cold rock and listened for what was not there. Lily's voice, when it came, came thin and confused. It circled the outside of the stone and did not find a shape to catch. It called twice more. It moved off. Kate exhaled. Clover pressed her forehead to Longear's shoulder. Mr. Echo felt for the small reel in his pocket and found it still whole. The pale woman had lost their trail on open ground. She would not lose it forever. She would circle back to any noise they made leaving. Longear spoke into the dark. "I know one more cavern west of here. After that, only reed." Mr. Echo nodded against the stone. They had bought hours, not days. The map in his pocket now had to move them from hole to hole until the reed ran out.

The pale woman's calling had faded off the stone an hour ago. Mr. Echo stayed with his back to the wall and counted his breath against the silence the cavern gave back. Kate sat cross-legged with the candle unlit in her lap. Clover Wanderpaw dozed against Longear's side. They had bought the hours Longear promised. Now Mr. Echo needed to know what shape the cavern was, and how far back it went, before they moved again. He took a pebble from the floor and dropped it. The sound went in and did not come out. Not the flat swallow of stone. Something further in was taking it. He sat up. He tapped his tin cup once with a fingernail. The tap went. Nothing returned. Then, faintly, from deeper in the dark, a soft shift, like cloth pulled across dirt. "Something's here," he said. Longear's ears came forward. "Down the throat. Two turns back. Breathing slow." She looked at him. "Not the pale one. Older smell. Warren smell." Clover Wanderpaw sat up. "How many." "Six. Maybe seven." Longear's voice did not change. "They know we came in. They have not decided yet." Mr. Echo understood then. If the cavern's keepers marked them intruders, they would push the group back out onto the reed, where the pale woman would be waiting on the noise of their expulsion. He could not speak his way past them. He had no shared tongue. He had a reel in his shirt pocket with Longear's voice on it, and Clover's market, and the route directions to the elders' camp. He set the reel on the floor between himself and the dark. Then he tapped his cup with the spoon: the pattern the Bunnyman had taught him weeks ago, the rhythm the warren used to mean at ease. He tapped it three times and stopped. For a long minute nothing came back. Then, from the dark, a tap. Not his rhythm. A slower one, four beats and a pause, four beats and a pause. Clover Wanderpaw's ears twitched. "That's a question," they said. "They're asking who." Mr. Echo lifted the reel and pressed its edge to Longear's paw. Longear leaned to the box and spoke her own name into it, and her mother's, and the name of the warren she had left. Mr. Echo played it back into the dark. The tapping stopped. Cloth moved on dirt again, closer now, and a lantern uncovered itself down the tunnel. Six rabbit folk came forward in worn cloaks and travel packs, ears back, eyes careful. The one at the front, gray at the muzzle, looked at Longear a long time. Then she said, in a voice like packed earth, "You are of the old line." She lowered her lantern. "Come in from the mouth. She listens at the mouth." Mr. Echo picked up the reel and followed her deeper, where the pale woman could not reach, and where, he understood now, the ancestors' road did not end at the Fen but had kept going, held by people who remembered.

The gray-muzzled elder led them past two turns and into a wider chamber where lantern light fell on packed earth. Mr. Echo set the reel down and knelt with a scrap of birch bark and a bit of charcoal. He had the map in his head only, the one Longear had spoken while walking: three smells, four turns, a stone that leaned north, a reed break shaped like a hand. He wrote the first line and stopped. He could not remember whether the leaning stone came before or after the reed break. One wrong turn in the Fen would erase the rest. Kate crouched next to him. "Say it out loud. I'll hold the parts you drop." He tried. The middle came out thin. Longear listened with her ears flat and said, "You have three of five. The other two are gone from you." She did not soften it. Clover Wanderpaw looked at the bark and then at the tunnel behind them, where the pale woman still waited above the stone. Something tapped once at the far wall. Not the warren rhythm. A single beat, dry, like a stick on a hide. Mr. Echo turned. A rabbit stood in the low arch of a side burrow, small, gray, with pale marks painted on the face and a crescent stitched on the tunic. The elder rose and bowed her head. "Tsuki," she said. "We had not heard the drum in a long year." Tsuki Usagiri stepped into the lantern light and looked at Mr. Echo's bark. "Your map is leaking," they said. "I carry the beat the clans forgot. It holds routes. It holds prey sense. It fades when no ear takes it." They tapped their chest once. "Take it now or lose it with me." Mr. Echo lifted the brass box. "I can hold sound. I can hold yours." Tsuki Usagiri shook their head. "Not the box. A living ear. The beat has to sit in a body that breathes." They looked at Longear, then at Clover, then back at him. "You have listened longer than the rabbits in this room. Sit." He sat. Tsuki Usagiri began to tap, palm on thigh, four beats and a rest, four beats and a rest, and inside the pattern were the smells and turns and stones Longear had named, arranged in an order he could feel in his teeth. He closed his eyes and let the beat take the map from the bark and set it under his ribs. When it stopped, he knew the five parts. He knew which came first. Tsuki Usagiri stepped back and grew fainter at the edges. "One listener is enough for now," they said. "Do not lose him before the glade." Then they were gone, and the lantern was only a lantern, and the road west sat whole inside Mr. Echo, waiting to be walked.

Mr. Echo followed the elder deeper into the cavern, the map humming under his ribs with each step. Longear walked beside him, Kate behind, Clover Wanderpaw at the rear. The tunnel opened into a low chamber where six scouts waited on packed earth. Their ears were up. Their eyes tracked him and did not soften. The elder said, "He carries the road west. He asks you to walk it with him." A scout with a scarred lip answered first. "He is not warren. Show us the road, or go alone." Mr. Echo set the brass box down. It held only Longear's recorded voice now, the copy already sent back to the oaks. He had nothing left to play. He tried to speak the five parts of the map aloud. The first came clean. The second tangled in his mouth. The scouts watched him fumble and did not move. "Words leak," the scarred scout said. "We have followed leaking maps before. We buried the ones who drew them." Clover Longear stepped forward from the tunnel mouth. She had come in quiet behind them, hood up, ears sharp under the cloth. She looked at Mr. Echo, then at the scouts. "His breath is even," she said. "He is not lying. But breath is not a map." She pulled back her hood. Two scouts drew in air. The elder said her name. Longear, the older one, nodded once to the younger, and the younger nodded back. Mr. Echo remembered the drummer's rule. The beat had to sit in a body that breathes. He turned to Clover Longear. "Put your ear against my chest. Count what you hear." She stepped close without asking why. He tapped the map's rhythm on his sternum, four beats and a rest, four beats and a rest, the same pattern the drummer had set into him. Her ears flattened, then rose. She listened for a long minute. When he stopped, she stepped back and faced the scouts. "Five parts," she said. "Smell of wet reed. A stone leaning north. A break shaped like a hand. A dry channel. A ring of low thorn. In that order." She said each part flat and short. "I heard it in his ribs. It is whole." The scarred scout's ears dropped. He looked at the elder, then at Longear the elder, then at Mr. Echo. "An ear we trust heard it," he said. "That is proof enough." He tapped his foot twice on the earth, the warren's yes. The other scouts tapped after him, one by one, until the chamber sounded like rain on a roof. The elder said, "We break camp at first light. You lead. She listens." Mr. Echo picked up the box. Clover Longear stayed at his shoulder. He had the warren now. He also had a witness bound to his chest, and if his heart forgot the beat, she would know before he did.

The scouts curled into sleep along the cavern walls, but Mr. Echo could not rest. He sat with his back against cold stone and pressed his palm flat over his sternum. The map's rhythm was still there, four beats and a rest, but softer than an hour ago. The drummer had warned him. A beat set into a body fades like ink on wet paper. He had until dawn. If the rhythm slipped before the scouts woke, they would smell the doubt on him and refuse the road. Clover Longear crouched beside him. She put one ear near his chest without asking, listened, and drew back. "Thinner," she said. "Not gone. Thinner." Kate came over with the brass box in her lap. Clover Wanderpaw stayed near the tunnel mouth, watching the sleeping scouts. Mr. Echo tapped the pattern on his knee. The second rest came a half breath too long. He heard it as a door beginning to close in an empty house, and his hands went cold. "I need to fix it back into me before it goes," he said. "I need a sound that will hold the shape." His box was almost empty. Longear's recorded voice was already sent north with the guide. He had nothing to layer under the beat. A small flutter moved past the lantern. A fairy stepped out of the shadow of a root, dark clothes, pale face, wings the color of wet glass. Melody Resonance. She had followed them since the burrow hollow two nights back and had not spoken until now. She set a metal case on the ground between them. Inside lay a theremin, silver, marked with runes that caught the lantern light. "It reads what a body already carries," she said. "It can put the reading back." Mr. Echo did not trust it, but he had no other tool. Melody raised her hands above the antennae. She told him to tap the map on his chest and not stop. He tapped. The theremin pulled a tone from the air that rose and fell with his beat. Kate held the brass box open to catch the sound. Above them, at the cavern's inner arch, two pale shapes drifted forward and stood still, a rabbit man and a rabbit woman in ragged spectral clothes. They did not speak. They watched, and the theremin's tone steadied, as if their attention gave it weight. He tapped the full five parts, twice through. The tone locked. Melody lowered her hands. Kate closed the box. Mr. Echo pressed his palm to his chest again and felt the rhythm sitting firm, deeper than before, roots under skin. Clover Longear listened and nodded. "Whole," she said. "Tighter than last time." The first gray light touched the cavern mouth. The scouts stirred. Mr. Echo stood. The map was his again, fixed until the glade. The two ghost rabbits were already gone. Melody was folding the theremin back into its case. Kate looked at him and waited. "West," he said. The scarred scout tapped his foot twice on the earth.

The scouts filed out of the cavern at first light. Mr. Echo kept his palm on his sternum as he walked. The map beat firm under his ribs, four beats and a rest, stronger than before. That was the problem. The theremin had pressed it in deep, and now the rhythm hummed loud enough that he could feel it thrumming in his teeth. On open ground, with no stone walls to swallow it, the pale woman would hear the trace of it long before they reached cover. Clover Longear walked beside him. She flicked one ear toward his chest and then toward the ridge behind them. "Loud," she said. "She will catch it inside an hour." Kate carried the brass box against her hip. The scarred scout tapped his foot twice, meaning go faster. Mr. Echo scanned the slope ahead. Bare grass. A thin line of gorse. No wall of trees for a long stretch. He heard the wrong echo starting in the space above them, a door beginning to close in an empty house. A gray shape stepped out from behind a low rock. Tsuki Usagiri, the drummer, wearing the crescent tunic and the shell collar. They did not carry the drum this time. They carried nothing. "The beat is too bright," they said. "You cannot walk it under sky." "I know," Mr. Echo said. "Tell me how to muffle it." "You cannot muffle a beat set in bone. You move it out of you into another vessel until you reach trees." Tsuki knelt and pointed at a dark opening under the rock, a rabbit burrow with cracked earth around its mouth and roots hanging over the lip. "Put the beat in the ground. The ground holds sound the way stone did. Then walk empty across the open. Pick the beat up again on the far side where the oaks start." Mr. Echo pulled the sealed glass jar from his coat, the one that had once held Ollie's name. Empty now, still marked with the old runes. He knelt at the burrow mouth. Tsuki placed both paws on his chest and then on the jar's lid. He tapped the five parts against the glass, slow, twice through. Each tap pulled the hum out of his ribs and into the jar. The glass warmed. When he finished, his chest was quiet. The jar buzzed faintly under his hand. He pushed it deep into the burrow and packed dirt over the opening. Kate watched the ridge. "Anything?" He listened for the wrong echo. It was thinning. The pale woman had lost the trace. He stood. His chest felt hollow and light, like a drum with the skin cut away. Clover Longear nodded once. "Clean," she said. "For now." They crossed the open slope at a run. The scouts moved ahead in a loose line. Mr. Echo carried nothing of the map inside him, and the far oaks were still an hour off. He would have to trust the ground to keep what he had put down, and trust himself to find the burrow again on the way back through this country. The rhythm was safe. He was not.

They reached the far oaks by mid-morning and stopped in the shade to breathe. Mr. Echo's chest was still hollow. The map beat waited in the buried jar behind them. The six scouts crouched in a loose ring. Kate set the brass box down. Clover Longear flicked her ears at every sound. Then the scarred scout stood up and said the thing Mr. Echo had been afraid of. "He carries nothing now," the scarred scout said. "No map. No hum. He left it in a hole. If the pale woman finds that hole, we are lost. If she does not, he still has to find it again on the way back. Why do we follow a man who cannot hold his own road?" Two scouts looked at the ground. One looked at Clover Longear. The other two looked at the scarred scout and waited. Mr. Echo heard the wrong echo start above them, small, a door easing shut in an empty house. Doubt made its own silence. If he answered wrong, the six would split here on open ground, and the pale woman would pick them off in pairs. He did not argue. He knelt and pressed his palm flat to the dirt. "Listen," he said. "Not to me. To the ground." He tapped four beats and a rest against the earth with two fingers. The scouts leaned in. Nothing came back. He tapped again. Faint, from a long way east, the buried jar answered — four beats and a rest, muffled through soil and root. Clover Longear pressed her ear to the ground and closed her eyes. "It is there," she said. "Where he put it. Clean." She lifted her head and looked at the scarred scout. "He did not lose it. He hid it. I heard the whole map beaten into his chest. I know the shape. He carries the shape still. The jar carries the sound." She tapped her own chest once. "Two copies. Safer than one." The scarred scout's ears flattened. He tapped the ground himself and heard the answer come back. He sat down slowly. "Then he holds the road," he said. "I withdraw." One of the scouts who had looked away nodded. The other three touched their noses to the dirt, the warren sign for agreement. The circle closed again around Mr. Echo instead of breaking away from him. Mr. Echo stood. His hands were shaking, which he had not noticed until now. Kate picked up the box. Clover Longear moved to his left shoulder, witness again, and the six scouts formed up behind them without being told. But he had spent something to keep them. The buried jar was now a known point — six scouts knew where it lay, and any one of them, taken by the pale woman, could give it up. The next problem was already walking with them west.