“And if you have my baby, Olikea? What then?”

“Your baby? Your baby?” She laughed. “Men do not have babies. Women do. Your baby.” She chortled again. “When I have my baby, if it is a daughter, then I will celebrate and reward you. And if it is a boy,” she puffed her cheeks briefly, “I will try again.”

Her words gave me plenty of food for thought for several nights. I remembered a saying that my father had: “Don’t measure my wheat with your bushel.” He’d used it whenever our opinions differed so much that I could not predict what he was likely to do next. It suddenly seemed that that was what I’d been doing with Olikea. The Specks had a strange set of values, and I decided that despite my continued contact with them, I knew very little of their ways. Yet with each passing day, I knew that I was closer and closer to having to make a decision. Things were happening, and some of them were events I had set in motion. Sooner or later, I would have to stop balancing on the wall between my worlds and make a choice.

Some days I dreaded the idea that a letter from Yaril might arrive; at other times, I longed for it. As the days passed with no word from her, I suspected that my father had intercepted the letter and destroyed it. Then I decided it was equally possible that Carsina had received a letter from Yaril for Spink and kept it. I tried to decide what I must do next, but I could not think clearly. Little sleep and long hours of work interspersed with frantic coupling do not lead to clarity of mind.

Dr. Dowder, ever an advocate of alcohol as a means to soothe his own nerves, seemed to have come up with a balanced dose of rum and laudanum that deadened both workers and soldiers to the terror at the end of the road. Work was proceeding, not at a pace that would have caused rejoicing in any other circumstances, but with a steadiness that was nothing short of astounding given the record of the last few years.

It was, as Ebrooks had noted, a monumental task. Before the road could progress, the three gargantuan trees they had initially felled had to be cut to pieces and hauled away. According to what I heard from Ebrooks and Kesey, it was being carried out as if it were a military operation. The cutting crew, properly dosed with alcohol and laudanum, worked an hourlong shift of cutting chunks of the logs and hitching teams to them to haul the cut pieces away. Each piece was hauled beyond the “fear zone” to where a sober crew of prisoners would take it over. The forward men worked for an hour, then fell back to be replaced by prisoners and guards who had been freshly fortified against the fear. Slowly but steadily, the fallen trees were being diminished. A cutting crew had already been sent forward to mark the next trees that should fall. Morale in Gettys was improving, and not just because of the road progress. Colonel Haren, after consulting with Dr. Dowder, had decided that a milder “Gettys dose” was to be available to any man or woman who felt the need of fortification.