Z

The silo smelled of dust and old paste, of leather gone brittle with the years, and beneath it all, faintly, of the grain it used to hold. Ezra had never known it as anything but a library, but sometimes, when the light slanted through the high, narrow windows in a particular way, he imagined he could still smell wheat, ghosted into the wood of the walls, a memory the building refused to give up.

He came here the way other boys his age went to the creek to skip stones, or gathered behind the meeting hall to trade marbles carved from scrap glass. Every day, once his chores were done — the water hauled, the chicken coop swept, the solar panels wiped clean of the reddish dust that seemed to fall from nowhere and everywhere at once — he slipped through the gap in the fence behind the granary and crossed the yard to the silo's east door, the one whose latch had rusted loose enough that a quiet hand could work it without a sound.

No one ever asked where he went. That was the strange mercy of being a boy who could not speak: people stopped wondering about you after a while. They filled in your silences with whatever story suited them. Some in New Haven said the fever that took his…

The wind found its voice before Mara found her feet.

It came up out of the west in a long, tearing moan, the sound a thing makes when it is being pulled apart slowly, and the dust that had been lifting in lazy spirals suddenly flattened and ran, a red tide pouring across the yard toward the fence line. The doubled shadows of the two suns snapped and wavered like candle flames caught in a draft, and somewhere behind the meeting hall a shutter banged once, twice, then tore free of its hinge entirely and went cartwheeling into the dark.

"Ezra." Mara's hand closed hard around his wrist, harder than she'd ever held him, hard enough that he felt the bones of her fingers press into the bones of his arm. "Ezra, look at me."

He looked. Her face had gone the color of old linen, her mouth set in a thin line he hadn't seen on her before, not once in four years, not even the night his fever broke so high she'd sat up with wet cloths till dawn believing she might lose him. This was a different fear. This was the fear of someone doing arithmetic very fast and not liking any of the sums.

"We're going to the granary," she said. "Now. Do you understand me? Now."

He didn't need to understand…

There was no sensation of passing through anything at all.

One moment Mara felt the cold mineral breath of the arch's stone against her cheek, the grit of swept red dust beneath her boots, Ezra's small hand locked tight in hers. The next, both things were simply gone — the dust, the wind-scoured field, the thin pale light of two suns hanging low over a murdered town — replaced so completely and so instantly that her mind, for one long suspended second, refused to process the change at all. It was like waking from a dream mid-sentence, the old world snuffed out before the new one had finished arriving, and for that one second she stood in a kind of sensory blankness, deaf and blind to everything except the warmth of Ezra's fingers, the only fixed point in a universe that had just come unmoored from itself.

Then her eyes adjusted, and the blankness resolved into something so vast that she had to tip her head back to find its edges, and even then she wasn't certain she had found them at all.

They stood in a library.

Not a room with shelves in it — the word *room* felt suddenly inadequate, a child's word for a child's space, wholly unequal to what rose around them now. This was a…