Two men, one fairly dragging the other along, suddenly entered the clearing and, their eyes trained behind them, ran headlong into the owl’s creation and knocked it, every maple branch and every twig of dogwood, to the ground in a splintering crash.
The owl fell backward, devastated.
The two men seemed to not even have reckoned what damage they’d done, as they were gone from the clearing within the bat of a wing.
The forest floor lay littered with little scavenged sticks; a single pinecone rolled to a stop at the base of the owl’s broken tree. And then, some moments after, adding insult to injury, a group of kids came charging through the clearing and sent the piled remains of the tower cracking and spinning into the surrounding bracken.
The owl put his wing to his brow and sighed.
When the fog and smoke had cleared and the trees seemingly materialized on the horizon before them, as if conjured, Elsie immediately knew where the man was taking Carol. Inwardly, she knew that her path, and her sister’s, would eventually lead back into the Impassable Wilderness. She just hadn’t anticipated it quite happening like this. Once they’d come to the end of the barren, scrubby skirt of land that served as a sort of buffer between these two I.W.s, they knew what to do.
“Nico,” shouted Rachel. “Grab hands!”
“What?” called the saboteur, his breath labored from the pursuit.
“Just do it!” called Elsie from the front of the pack.
The group locked hands, with Nico in the center and Rachel taking up the rear. They recalled how they’d left the Periphery, so many months ago; they could only hope that the enchantment remained.
They heard a shout from behind them; jerking her head around, Elsie saw that the sound had erupted from an enraged mob of stevedores, some two dozen in number, that were steaming toward them at full speed. The burning remnants of Titan Tower smoldered behind them.
“Quick!” yelled Elsie. Mindful to keep a tight grip on the hand of the soul behind her—who happened to be Oz—Elsie led the troupe beyond the veil of trees and into the forest. The rumble and yell of the stevedores grew louder; they were getting closer.
Rachel, being the last in the line, glanced back at their pursuers just as they crossed over; the hulking shapes of the stevedores seemed to blur and shimmy in the dim light until they disappeared completely. Perhaps she saw a single maroon beanie fall to the ground behind her, or perhaps it was just a trick of the light.
The woods surrounded them. The trees seemed, in a way, to swallow them whole.
A rustle from ahead, a strangled shout, alerted them to Roger and Carol’s trail; they pressed on, stepping through the knee-deep vegetation. Once they were certain they’d crossed far enough, they unlocked hands. Nico retrieved a flashlight from his knapsack and stepped up to the front of the pack. He and Elsie, together, led the team forward, ever watchful of the ground at their feet and of the path of disturbed undergrowth that the two men ahead of them left in their wake.
“Carol!” shouted Elsie when they’d taken a wrong turn.
A holler came from their right; it was immediately choked off.
“This way!” shouted Nico.
The forest crowded around them, hampering their every step. The dark spaces in between the trees loomed menacingly, and Elsie thought she heard strange rattlings in the underbrush. She kept her eye trained on the bouncing ray of Nico’s flashlight as if it were a rope and she was dangling from a cliff. She feared that were she to leave the safety of the light’s bare glow, she would be lost forever in a wood that felt more inhospitable and more threatening with every step they took.
A light danced off the branches ahead of them, giving away Roger and Carol’s location; they were making their way up a steep slope some ten yards distant. The children and Nico had no sooner seen the two men, however, than the light disappeared and the two were gone again, deep into the bushes. They followed the path, scrambling up the hill and through a dense clutch of ivy vines. They tore through a small clearing, their feet trundling over what looked to be a massive stockpile of sticks and branches scattered about the forest floor; Elsie looked down at this in horror, briefly, wondering at the sort of obsessed animal that would make such a bizarre collection as this. They’d already gone farther, she guessed, than she’d ever ventured before into the Impassable Wilderness.
They’d grown close enough now that they could hear the two men as they crashed their way through the trees; Nico stopped the rest of the Unadoptables with a wave of his hand as if to say, Listen.
They stopped. Silence. It was evident that the two men, Carol and Roger, had paused in their escape.
“Mr. Swindon!” shouted Elsie. This was the name Desdemona had used describing the man; she guessed it was the same gentleman who had initially demanded Carol be delivered to him, back when they’d had the standoff with the stevedores during the orphanage rebellion. It was a hunch, anyway.
“How did you . . . ,” came the shout in response. “Who are you?” It was the voice of a fatigued and very confused man.
“We want Carol back, that’s all!”
“Well, you can’t have him!” was the response. Then: the two men’s noisy retreat started up again.
The six Unadoptables and Nico continued their pursuit.
The forest here felt older, more ancient. The tree trunks they rounded were the heft of midsize automobiles, and the fern glades they stumbled through looked straight out of some computer-generated cut-scene from a dinosaur documentary. Elsie felt her attention being drawn in a million different directions. Her eyes were fixated on the way ahead, the bouncing glow of Nico’s flashlight and the sound of the two men’s shambolic running in the distance; her heart and her mind were constantly being drawn to the crowding forest, to the sounds that sparked in the night, strange and alive.
Nico screamed, once, suddenly.
“What is it?” shouted Rachel from behind.