The bird suddenly explodes into flight, squawking, crying, singing a song that makes no sense, has no rhyme, has no end. Malorie grips Tom’s wrist harder as the bird flails through the barn and strikes a wood wall. It falls to the hay, rises, and flies madly into the wall again.

It falls. Again. Rises. Again.

Flies madly into the wall.

“There’s one in the loft,” Tom says.

Malorie stands up.

“Now,” she says. “Now.”

The teens rise without argument. Tom finds his bag quick in the darkness, but the few seconds he’s away from Malorie are bad ones. Like the thing from the loft could come down.

Like it wants to touch him.

Malorie says, “Why are the pages out of my bag?”

As he moves, Tom imagines himself living in Indian River. He imagines waking in a town with other people, people ready to invent.

“Tom?” Malorie says.

“Mom,” Olympia says. “It’s moving.”

It is. Tom hears it, too.

“Go,” Malorie says.

Then Tom asks it. Because he can’t not.

“Are you bringing the pages with you?”

He has to know. He can’t leave them here.

But Malorie doesn’t respond. Instead, Tom feels a hand on his wrist. Her hand. Her fingers ride up his arm, to make sure he’s rolled down his sleeves. He has.

But it reminds him of being touched.

He shudders.

This time, though, he forces the feeling, the fear, out. And, for a moment, it works. For a hideously unfamiliar moment, Tom feels fearless in the face of so many creatures, as his mom pulls him toward the barn door, as Olympia breathes steadily beside him.

Malorie slides the door open. Tom feels the cold night, colder yet, rush into the barn, touching his nose, his mouth, his chin.

“Olympia,” Malorie says.

It’s obvious that she isn’t looking to Tom for help. Why not? Can she tell he was touched by something? Does she think he’s going mad?

“There’s one blocking the door,” Olympia says.

The loft behind them creaks.

“Back up,” Malorie says.

“Wait,” Tom says. “It’s moving.”

He hears it stepping out of the way.

“Go,” Olympia says. “Now.”

Malorie moves first, Olympia right behind her. But before leaving the barn, Tom turns his blindfolded face to the loft.

The ladder creaks.

Footsteps in the hay.

He thinks of Athena Hantz just as a hand, Olympia’s, reaches into the barn and pulls him outside.

“Cover your faces,” Malorie says. And her voice is unabridged hysteria.

As he listens to her, as he moves, fleeing the barn, he tries hard to hang on to the feeling he had, the fearlessness, that moment, just now, inside the barn when he felt brave.

It was extraordinary.

And now it’s gone.

But he believes he can feel it again.

Indian River.