"The Hypotheticals?"

A pause. "You could call them that."

"Then explain it to me, please, Isaac. You're part of it now, aren't you? In a way Esh never was. Tell me what's happening."

For a moment there was only the tick-scratch-tick at the walls of the fallen building in which they were trapped.

Then Isaac began to speak.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Turk navigated by the fractured remnants of pavement and sidewalk through the alien forest that had lately been a settlement for oil riggers. He managed to find the parking lot of the workers' mall—white lines, cracked blacktop—and from there it was a short hike to the complex where they had left Diane Dupree, Sulean Moi, Mrs. Rebka, and Isaac.

Except it wasn't there anymore. He came upon rubble where the trees had grown more densely, further obscuring the dim light of what was, by now, afternoon. Here was an embankment of broken tile, wall-board, wood, sheet aluminum twisted into unlikely shapes. Beyond that, in the dimness, steel beams stood in skeletal rectangles. Some of these beams and pillars had been entwined by the rootlike extensions of the trees.

"We'll angle toward the south end of the mall," he said. Where the food store was or had been. "Might be something still standing there."

* * * * *

The haunted forest, Lise thought.

Boy, was it ever.

She found herself silently reciting a line from a storybook her father had read to her when she was small, book and story all forgotten except (in her father's melodramatic drawl) Into the dark forest they stepped. Into the dark forest they stepped. Into the dark forest of trees that harbored birds that resembled sheets of torn paper, the forest from which (another fragment of the same story) they must escape, but that was easier said than done. Because here there were wolves, or worse, and night was coming, and she didn't know the way out. She wanted to lunge up from under the covers and grab her father's hand. Wanted it more than anything.

But couldn't. She scolded herself, in her mother's voice this time: Don't be stupid, Elise. Straighten up. Fly right, girl.

She nearly flew right past a heap of plaster-specked metal, until Turk pointed it out: it was the car Mrs.

Rebka had been driving when the two groups separated. She recognized the steel-mesh tires, on prominent display because a rod-like tree trunk had sprung up from the cracked pavement and tumbled the vehicle on its side. Useless now, the car, but any car would be useless until this forest shrank back into the ground, and that seemed unlikely to happen soon. If we leave here, Lise thought, we'll have to leave on foot. And that was a daunting prospect. The good news was that the car was empty: Isaac and the women weren't inside, hence might still be alive elsewhere.