“What about the gray people?” Eve asked in horror. “They’ll get her!”

Nix smiled. “No, honey. They gray people won’t get Lilah. She’s smart and really strong, and she’s quieted a lot of them.”

“Quieted?”

“Put them to sleep.”

“Pretend sleep or forever sleep?”

“Um . . . forever sleep,” Nix assured her.

Chong leaned close to Benny again. “This is fascinating,” he said quietly. “If there are other settlements out here, then they’re probably like islands or distant countries used to be in the days before the world was mapped. So isolated that their own phrasing and references—all the slang and jargon that we’ve used since First Night—is going to be different.”

“But . . . the way-station monks travel all over, don’t they?”

Chong shrugged. “Sure. Like the Irish monks did during the Middle Ages and the Jesuits did a few centuries later. The Shaolin did it in China, too. Traveling, recording, spreading information, and making connections among the learned. Kind of a theme with traveling monks.”

“The way-station monks don’t travel to spread their religion, though.”

“Not every monk or priest is an evangelist, Benny. Some were scholars and historians. Though, shocking as it is, you’re right about one thing. If we find people using the same post–First Night slang, then it’s probably going to be because of the monks.”

“Gosh, Encyclopedia Chong. Thanks for throwing me a bone.”

“It’s a small bone. Chew it well.”

Benny elbowed him in the ribs, but he did it discreetly. He didn’t want to scare the kid.

Chapter 12

12

EVE EVENTUALLY FELL ASLEEP. NIX WAVED EVERYONE AWAY SO AS NOT TO disturb the child. Benny drifted off to stare at the zoms in the ravine.

Chong saw Lilah sitting on a fallen log, sharpening the blade of her spear in preparation for setting off to find Eve’s parents. Not feeling in the mood for another rebuke, he sank down with his back to a slender pine, closed his eyes, and began wandering slowly through the library of his mind. That was how he viewed it. A library, with shelves of books and rows of file cabinets in which his thoughts and memories and experiences were neatly filed.

The only mental file cabinet that was not as neatly and precisely ordered was the one labeled LILAH.

That one leaned with an awkward tilt, its sides were dented, and none of the drawers rolled smoothly out.

Lilah was the storm that swirled around Chong’s life, and he dwelt in its calm eye, awed by the power and beauty of it, but not at all sure he understood it. Chong was relatively sure he would die of old age before he ever understood her completely.