The community’s name sparkles in his personal darkness. As if the letters that make up the words are forged in fire, enormous bright squares beckoning him, telling him, hey, hey, we’re scared, too, but either you live a partial life or you experiment.

You test.

You invent.

Indian River.

We’re allowed.

Come on.

Come on.

“Tom!” Malorie calls. “Come on!”

Then he’s moving, the stealthy sounds of what swarms the barn receding. He catches up to his mom and his sister as their shoes crush the gravel of the shoulder before leveling out on the old unused country road.

They walk. They don’t speak. They listen. They move fast.

And when enough space has gotten between them and the place they hoped might provide a night of sanctuary, Malorie’s voice cracks the silence.

“No,” she says.

Tom knows what she means. He knows she’s answering what he asked before they left the barn. She’s saying she didn’t take the pages.

But Tom hears something in Malorie’s voice that she claims to hear so often in theirs.

A lie.

He hears the crinkle of paper in her bag, too.

And as the three continue toward a place that may or may not harbor a mode of transport large enough to carry them north, Tom feels gratitude, to the pages, for teaching him, already, that while it’s okay to be scared, you’ve got to push back while you tremble.

He’s in the big world now. This isn’t Camp Yadin.

In the distance, behind them, he hears the creaking of the barn, as if more creatures now walk on its roof.

Do they look to the fleeing trio? Do they know what they do?

It doesn’t matter to Tom. Not right now. As he walks, in step with Malorie and Olympia, it doesn’t matter what the creatures mean to do.

All that matters is what he means to do.

From here on out. In the big world.

He’s not mad.

He’s fearless. He’s fighting back.

He’s allowed.

ELEVEN

Olympia is keeping secrets.

She’s done it for years now, almost as long as she can remember. She was doing it at the Jane Tucker School for the Blind, and she thinks it’s possible it was even before then. In the house she was born. Maybe even the minute she was born. She’s read enough books to know that it’s not totally shameful to keep secrets and that some secrets are better kept in the interest of maintaining balance with the other people around you.

Yet, every day, it feels worse.

She knows Tom was outside the barn, reading, when the creatures came last night. She doesn’t think they were drawn to him just because they saw him; she believes they can sense the fact that her brother wants to figure out how to beat them.