He looked at her, a flicker of uncertainty in his green eyes, an unmistakable hesitation in his effort to respond. “I’m not sure where to start,” he said. “I’m not even sure how to start.”

“Start with what happened at the compound,” Sparrow suggested. “I saw that strange light flash from where I was standing on the rooftop just before I went down the ladder and found Panther and we had to run from the Croaks to . . .”

She stopped, smiling sheepishly. “Start there,” she finished.

“Where did you go?” asked River, dark eyes already wide with wonder.

“I went into these gardens,” Hawk said. “Tessa and I were thrown from the wall and everything was suddenly blinding and I must have lost consciousness. Then I woke up in these gardens and there was this old man. Real old. He said he was a Faerie creature.” He caught a glimpse of Panther’s smirk. “I know, Panther. It sounds crazy. I thought so, too. But that’s what he said, that he was a Faerie creature. He called himself the King of the Silver River. He said the gardens were his and that he had brought me there to learn about myself. He saved me because he said I had something I needed to do.”

“You went into the light, is where you went,” Panther insisted. “I heard about people doing that. You died and came back, is what you did.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Hawk replied, shaking his head. “I don’t know for sure where I was. But the old man didn’t seem to think it was anything big. He told me the same thing Logan Tom told me in the compound cells—that I was a gypsy morph, that I was made out of a kind of magic. But I was a boy, too. Just like everyone else,” he added hastily. “Except that I had to do this thing. I had to come back and find you and all these other kids, and then I had to take you to this place where you would be safe.”

“Safe from what?” Panther wanted to know at once.

Hawk hesitated. “From the end of the world.”

“The end of the world,” Fixit repeated.

“Oh, man,” whispered Chalk.

The others muttered similar pronouncements, glancing uneasily at one another and then back at Hawk. This caught even Owl off guard. “Are you sure about what he told you?” she asked him. Hawk nodded. “It gets stranger. He told me that others would be coming with us. I mean, besides the children. He said there would be Elves.”

For a moment, no one spoke.

“Sure there will,” Panther declared, nodding soberly. “Probably trolls and pixies, too. Maybe some dragons. Just like in that book Owl read once, the one with all those magic things.”

“He knows what he was told,” Tessa insisted, coming to Hawk’s defense. “This isn’t what you think. He’s serious about this.”