A Hidden Place

“In a way I made her out of parts. But I am A

“There was Creath. And Grant Bevis. And Travis Fisher.”

“Understand,” A

“Magnets,” Nancy said, “have two poles.”

“You are,” A

Nancy took a cigarette and gave one to Travis, the last of a dearly bought packet of Wings. She trembled, lighting it. The dampness of the air almost smothered the match flame. She allowed herself to look at him as he inhaled a lungful of smoke, held it a moment, released it like steam into the cold. His face was unreadable.

“Lost,” Travis said. “You said she’s lost?”

And Nancy felt a surge of hope.

Two of them had journeyed here together.

It was not traveling in any sense Nancy would recognize, A

She had needed a place to conceal herself. The elementary femaleness of the A

“But this Other,” Nancy said. “He’s looking for you?”

She nodded.

“Has been—since you moved in with the Buracks?” “Yes.”

“He’s like you?”

A frown had crossed her face. “No.” “A man.”

“In his human avatar, yes. Nancy, listen: among us male and female mean something very different. Apart, we’re very nearly two distinct species. Bone is not like me.”

“That’s his name? Bone?”

“The name he was given. His disguise is poorer and his nature is more elementary. He’s been searching, yes, but we’ve only just made contact. It’s easier,” she said faintly, “when the need is more profound.”

A tramp, drawn by the cigarette smoke, stood staring at Nancy and Travis. She had taken to wearing the whalebone knife as a matter of course and her hand strayed to it now. The tramp’s face was a cipher, eyes lidded and expressionless. His hands were buried in his pockets.

“Come on,” Travis said.

The rain had tapered off, though the thick gray clouds still tumbled overhead. The prairie was shrouded and wet-smelling, the horizon invisible. They walked a distance along the railway tracks, Travis scuffing up the gravel between the ties. She wondered what was going on in his head. Whether he believed her… but he must, she thought; it was no more fanciful than his own intuition,- it was Travis, after all, who had insisted that A

“He’s not like her.”

“She needs him?”

“She’s sick.”

“Sick how?”

“Sick with the separation. They were never meant to be apart so long. Their time ran out, and it’s hurting her.”

We can’t sustain ourselves this way, she had said: we can’t sustain our humanity. Or be sustained if we lose it. The changes must come. …

“This Bone: he’s sick, too?”

She said, “Yes, but it’s not the same kind of sickness. The need is intense in both of them. Bone is different: he doesn’t talk much, he has trouble with ideas, maybe doesn’t even know for sure where he is or where he came from. Only that he’s trying to find her. He’s like an animal following an instinct. He’s big, he’s very strong, but the time is ru

“Christ God.” He shook his head. “Nancy—”

“You saw some of it, didn’t you? You saw her Change.”

“I don’t ever want to see it again.”

The afternoon had edged on. The sun was headed down. Nancy felt cold, tired, hungry. Her flat-soled shoes were all scuffed up and there were burdocks clinging to her cloth coat.

“I don’t trust her,” Travis said, still, gazing back at Haute Montagne where it stood on the prairie, the towers of the granaries stark against the sky. How small it looked from here, Nancy thought. “She could be anything,” he said, “you ever think of that? We don’t know what she is or what this Bone is. Only what she tells us. And she’s lied before.”

“I believe her,” Nancy said.

“Maybe she picked us because we’d believe her. Not Creath, not Aunt Liza, not anybody else in town.”

“Because we’d understand.” Oh, Travis, she thought, I’ve touched her, I know—but how to explain that? “Out at the tracks that night, she saw something in you, a goodness—”

“Or a gullibility.”

“Travis, what is it? Why does she frighten you so?”

He was a long time answering. The answer had sprung up in him but there was no way to articulate it: because of what Mama was, he thought, because of how she died; because of what he had done with Nancy and what he had wanted to do with A

“It had to be us,” Nancy was saying. “She took a chance, you know, telling us anything at all. But she needs somebody. She can’t live out these two weeks without somebody to bring her food, somebody to help her through the Changes—somebody who’ll know and somebody who’ll do it anyway. You know anybody else who’d do that? Anybody else back there!”

“It’s only a town,” Travis said. “They hate us.”

He looked at her. She was ski

She straightened defiantly and her eyes went shiny with tears. “This town,” she said, “this goddamn town—I am too big for this town!”

And a look of surprise washed over her.

“That’s why she picked us,” Travis said gently. “We’re alone. Cut off.”

“Like she is.”

“Maybe.” He added, “When wolves go after a sheep, the first thing they do is cut it off from the flock.”

“That’s just crazy. She’s so weak!”

“What about this Bone? What if they do get together?” He thought of his vision of A

“Come tomorrow,” Nancy said. “Talk to her.” She said, her voice rising, “I told you what you wanted to know!”

“I didn’t make any promises.”

“Travis, the only goddamn wolves around here are the ones in Haute Montagne, and they are circling, and they have cut me off—both of us—and, Travis, maybe you can ride away from it all, but— goddammit—I can’t, and they’re go

He thought of A