The man fixed Unthank with a perplexed look. “No,” he said. “The Dauphin. The young king.”
“And I would be, like, his main guy?”
“If that is what you wish.”
“Who is he, this Dauphin? And why doesn’t he just order this thing made?”
“Because he is currently indisposed. But this is unimportant information. I ask you: Will you make this cog, Mr. Unthank?”
Joffrey, his elbows resting on the arms of his chair, wove his fingers together in front of his lips. He looked down at the schematic of the Möbius Cog and back at Roger. Finally, he spoke. “How much time do I have?”
“Five days.”
“Five?” Unthank’s hands dropped to the desktop. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, it’ll take that long just to let the metal cure. I need a week, at least.”
“A week is not an option. There are others, Mr. Unthank, who would seek to make this piece as well; if they should succeed, all is lost. I have seen your work; I’ve been apprised of your abilities. I do not think five days is beyond your capability.”
“I mean, if I worked through the night—if I shut down all other operations…”
“If that is what needs be done, then it should be so.”
“But I’ll accrue costs—it’s going to cost a fortune to turn everything over to this. And what about my clients? I’ve got fifteen hundred dishwasher intake valves to make by Tuesday.”
Roger cleared his throat politely. “You will be more than compensated, Mr. Unthank, for whatever costs you accrue. I cannot stress enough how much this is worth your while. I’m promising you a world at your disposal, Mr. Unthank. Please consider that.”
Unthank lifted his hands to his face and tapped his lips with the tips of his fingers. “And what about these others—your competitors? The ones who want to make it too. What happens if they manage to create it before I do? What then?”
“That is not an option. Besides, I’ve taken steps to—how shall I say—hamper their progress, if not stop them altogether. But that is none of your concern, Mr. Unthank. Yours is simply the manufacture of this piece. That is all.”
Joffrey’s gaze wandered from the strange man in the leather chair to the line of windows above the shelf of blinking transponders. The wall of trees, the sight that greeted him every day as he walked into his office, was still there, standing vigilant in the gray light. A bird wheeled about one the tallest conifers. Somewhere, Unthank surmised, in that knot of forest, were the three girls he’d wantonly sent into its strange world, along with the dozens of others who’d suffered a similar fate. He imagined them frozen in place, like statues, victims to the terrible enchantments of that alien place. Or worse: being slowly digested by the very trees. And to what end? It had been a long, arduous voyage for Joffrey Unthank, but he felt as if he’d finally arrived at his just reward, though in a way he’d never, in his wildest dreams, anticipated.
He looked back at Roger. “It’s a deal,” he said.
“Rachel!”
The forest gave up nothing.
“RACHEL!”
Still, not a sound. A tremendous panic was welling up in the pit of Elsie’s stomach. She’d never been so terrified in her life. The tall trees seemed to bow around her like a concave mirror, and she grew flushed and light-headed as she ran. She didn’t know where she was running. She didn’t know where she’d end up. She only knew what she’d promised: that she would find her sister. She thrashed through the heavy underbrush as fast as her little legs could muster, having to contend with the thick wool of the several-sizes-too-large trench coat she’d been given. She’d had dreams like this before; tired, confused, and running through an endless wilderness while her legs moved like molasses. The thought occurred to her, briefly: Maybe this was a dream. All it took was a particularly angry thorn scratch to her left hand, as real as pain can get, to remind her that she was, in fact, quite awake.
She tried again, this time stopping to catch her breath before cupping her hands around her mouth. “Rachel!” She listened in the quiet that followed.
The whisper of a breeze. A branch swaying in the slight wind and rubbing against a neighboring tree.
Elsie took stock. She was standing in the middle of a deep, dense wood, one that had been known to swallow its explorers whole. A quick survey of her body, however, taught her that she was still very much intact. Her feet were cold and her nose felt chapped. Otherwise everything seemed to check out. She looked at her hands. They were red and glistening with melted snow. She blew on them, which seemed to bring some warm feeling back to the tips of her fingers. She didn’t know how long ago she’d dropped the twine, the length of brown string Unthank had instructed her to carry—it seemed like a bit of a blur in her memory. She now questioned whether she’d willfully dropped the twine or if it had simply fallen away from her hand. However, her intent remained clear: She had to find her sister.
“RACHEL!” she hollered again. Still, no answer. She squinted into the distance; a break in the trees allowed a clear view. She walked toward the break and saw, on the other side, a wide meadow amid the woods. In the middle of the clearing was a small white rabbit.
The rabbit paused in its activity—it seemed to be munching on some kind of foraged root—and looked directly at Elsie. She’d seen rabbits at pet stores before, and her friend Karma had a small hutch in her backyard, but there was something about this particular rabbit that struck Elsie as being strange. There was a kind of bright intelligence in its eyes she hadn’t seen before in other animals. It twitched its nose a few times, shook its ears, and hopped away from the girl, toward the edge of the meadow. Before it left Elsie’s view, however, it stopped and looked back at her, as if willing her to follow. Elsie complied.
She wandered after the rabbit in a trance. It seemed her best option at present. She’d already become hopelessly turned around in this labyrinth of trees—therefore, she reasoned, it didn’t really matter what direction she went in. Also, she found it unsettling that the rabbit seemed to keep waiting for her: Anytime she fell too far behind and thought she’d lost its trail, she’d see the rabbit standing by a clutch of ferns, wiggling its nose and looking at her. Once she’d drawn closer, the rabbit would continue moving.
They hadn’t traveled very far before a noise came from the surrounding woods; Elsie held her breath, trying to silence the sound of the blood beating in her ears. The white rabbit had stopped too; its ears perked to listen. The sound came again. It was, distinctly, someone yelling Elsie’s name. The rabbit startled and dove into the underbrush, disappearing from Elsie’s sight.
“Don’t go!” called Elsie. She’d felt strangely compelled to follow the rabbit. She’d intuited that it wanted to show her something.
The voice came again, this time clearer. It was her sister. Elsie stood there for a moment, knee deep in the bracken of the woods, torn between the two aims: the anchor of her sister’s voice, or the strange call of the rabbit’s trail.
“Elsie!” the cry came again.
“Rachel!” yelled Elsie. She turned and ran in the direction of her sister’s voice.
Breaking through a screen of young pines, the two sisters were reunited in a crash of arms and green trench coats. They hugged each other for a long time before finally pulling apart.
“Are you okay?” asked Rachel.
“Yeah,” said Elsie, “I think so.”
Rachel searched her sister’s face. She saw the welts on her cheek, the little pinpricks of blood on her hands. “You’re all scraped up,” she said.
“I was running. I was so scared. I was looking for you.” Elsie found she was trembling wildly.
“It’s okay, sis,” consoled Rachel, straightening Elsie’s hair. It had become wild and tousled in her scramble. Little twigs jutted out here and there like antennae, and Rachel tenderly removed them. “Listen: You’ve got to help me find Goggles.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She was right behin
d me. We managed to meet up just after she made it in. We had a plan: We were getting ready to look for you. I thought I heard you yelling earlier, so I went walking in that direction, and the next thing I knew Martha was gone. Just disappeared.”
Elsie looked up at her sister. “You’ve got something in your…”
Rachel guessed at what her sister saw. “Ugh,” she said. “That gunk in my nose. I thought I got it all out.” She turned and, holding a finger to one nostril, executed what Elsie’s dad had always called a “farmer blow.” Little bits of brown paste spackled the fronds of a nearby fern.
“C’mon,” Rachel said. “Let’s go find her.”
They stayed close by each other as they searched for their friend, their twin voices echoing each other’s as they hollered the girl’s name to the surrounding trees. They moved slowly, methodically, not wanting to miss a single sound. What if she’d fallen and hurt herself? Elsie imagined Martha lying on the ground, her leg pinned beneath a fallen tree. It gave her the shudders.
“Hey!” came a voice from a nearby stand of dogwoods.
“Martha?” called Rachel.
To Elsie and Rachel’s great relief, the leafless red sticks of the dogwood parted and Martha appeared, goggles perched on her forehead and a green goo dripping down her cheek. “What happened to you guys?” she asked. As she spoke, she absently wormed her finger in her ear canal, trying to clear it of Unthank’s concoction.
“You were right behind me!” exclaimed Rachel. “What happened to you?”
“I thought you’d ditched me,” said Martha. “I kept yelling your name, but you were just gone into the woods. I got totally turned around.”
“Are you okay?” asked Elsie, the image of Martha caught beneath the fallen tree still fresh in her mind.
“Yeah, fine.” She wiped her hands on her trench coat. “Now that we’re all accounted for, we’ll just need to follow one of you guys’ strings back to where Mr. Unthank is. Freedom is in our reach, ladies.” As if to underscore what she’d said, she pushed her goggles over her eyes and flashed a smile. Rachel looked at Elsie.
“Where’s your string?” Rachel asked.
“I was going to ask you the same,” responded Elsie.
Martha, goggled, stared at them both. “You don’t have your twine?”
“Well, I don’t see you have yours either,” said Rachel.
“I dropped it somewhere,” said Martha defensively. “Or something.”
“Then don’t, like, get in my face about it,” said Rachel.
“I wasn’t getting in your face about it,” shot back Martha. “I just thought at least one of you would’ve had the sense to hold on to your string.”
“You guys,” said Elsie softly.
Rachel took up the bait. “How about this good sense: I’d like to knock you in the nose right about now.”
“I’d like to see you try,” said Martha. She was brushing off her hands.
“You guys!” Elsie said, louder. “Are you crazy? Don’t do this.” She stepped between the two girls, her arms raised. When they’d settled back, she spoke again. “This is exactly the sort of thing that Intrepid Tina warns against, you know. You know what she’d say? She’d say something like …” Here she tried to mine the collected bons mots of her doll for the appropriate comment. She was drawing a blank. “She’d say, ‘Friends should stay together and be friends.’” It wasn’t an actual Intrepid Tina quote, but she figured it was a sentiment Tina could probably get behind.
“She never says that,” said Rachel.
“It’s true, though,” said Martha. “We shouldn’t get all freaked out here. We need level heads.”
“Right,” said Elsie. “Level heads.”
“So what do we do?” asked Rachel.
“Well, I figure we just try to find our way back out of here,” said Martha, “back to Unthank. Demand our reward. We just need to decide which way to go.”
The three girls paused as they stood, their eyes casting over the knot of green, all dusted with white snow, for a suggestion of which direction might be the way out. Just then, Elsie remembered the rabbit.
“Hey,” she said. “This is going to sound crazy, but over there a little ways, when I was still on my own, I saw a rabbit. A white rabbit. But he didn’t run when he saw me. Instead, he kinda waited for me, like he was leading the way.”
Rachel looked at her sister askance. “You did get too wrapped up in that book we were reading over the summer.”
“This is not a joke. I’m serious. I feel like he was wanting me to follow. Maybe he was going to show the way out.”
Martha shrugged. “It’s as good an option as any. Show the way.”
It was fairly easy for Elsie to retrace her steps to the meadow where she first had seen the rabbit; she could even find, here and there, the little indentations that her boots had made in the fine, light snow. Once she’d found the place where she’d heard Rachel calling for her, she began tracing the rabbit’s little paw prints through the bushes. She’d never done something as careful as tracking wild animals, and it required all her concentration. After she’d walked this way for a while, she heard her sister speak up behind her.
“Hold up,” Rachel said. “Where’s Martha?”
Elsie turned to look at her sister. There seemed to be a kind of notable absence in the space next to where Rachel stood. The two Mehlbergs blinked and stared at the spot.
“She was just here,” said Rachel. “Just a second ago.”
Without saying another word, they both turned and began retracing their steps, all the while yelling Martha’s name. They followed their own footmarks in the snow; conspicuously, there were only two pairs of them. Martha’s seemed to have dropped away long before they’d come to the meadow. After a time, they arrived back where they’d started, where the flurry of their combined footprints made a wide crater in the snow.
“Goggles!” shouted Rachel.
There, sitting on a felled cottonwood tree, sat Martha. She was picking mud from her boots. “You guys,” she said when they arrived. “You can’t ditch me like that.”
“We didn’t ditch you,” said Elsie. “We thought you were right behind us.”
“I was until you just disappeared. I called your name. Didn’t you hear me?”
Rachel and Elsie exchanged a glance. “No,” they said in unison.
“Did you see the meadow?” asked Rachel. “Did you make it that far?”
“Huh-uh,” Martha responded in the negative. “You guys just took off, right outside this bunch of trees.”
“Let’s try again,” said Rachel. There was an uneasy hitch in her voice.
“Just don’t run off,” warned Martha as she pushed herself up from her seat.
They hadn’t traveled very far, though, before Martha had again vanished from the group. Determined to keep her in sight, Rachel had been looking back every couple of seconds. After they’d lost her, Rachel explained that it was like Martha had stepped briefly behind a tree and then did not appear on the other side. The sisters returned to find the missing girl standing, bemused, in the middle of the little clearing by the fallen cottonwood.
“You did it again,” she accused.
“What is happening?” Rachel said, clearly at her wit’s end. She was massaging her temples with her fingers.
Just then, a dog ran past them.
They all froze.
The dog, perhaps following the specter of a woodland creature, tore through their clearing with the speed and obliviousness that only a canine could muster. It leapt over the fallen cottonwood without giving a second glance at the three girls and disappeared into the bushes.
“Did you see that?” asked Martha.
“Yeah,” said Rachel. “That was a dog. I think it was a retriever.” She paused before adding, “I don’t really like dogs.”
“Oh,” said Martha. “Still, that was strange.”
The girls barely had a chance to wonder where the dog had come from and w
here it was running off to in such a hurry before another dog, this one a large malamute with light gray fur, came tearing across the clearing. It, too, leapt the cottonwood and vanished on the trail of the first dog. In a matter of seconds a third and fourth dog, each different from the ones before, appeared from the one side of the clearing and ran after the other two. When a fifth appeared, Elsie tried to step in its way.
“Hey, boy,” she called. “Here, boy.”
The dog, a collie, merely dashed around Elsie; it was gone in a flash.
Then came the deluge.
It was like a buffalo stampede. This was the first thing that sprang to Elsie’s mind as she saw what could only be described as a clamoring herd of dogs crashing through the edge of the clearing and running toward them. There were easily thirty dogs, of every breed imaginable, and they were sprinting after their forerunners with gleeful, slobbering abandon.
Martha let out a scream and nearly fell from her perch on the tree; Rachel, exhibiting a show of athletic prowess Elsie’d never before seen, hurdled the cottonwood in a single bound and began sprinting away from the charging tide of dogs. Elsie, for her part, stood stock-still. The furry wave crested and spilled around her; it was clear that the three girls were the least of the dogs’ concerns. They were too busy chasing after the disembodied thing that had so enticed the preceding five dogs. One of them, a black pug who was taking up the rear on account of his stubby legs, even stopped and slobbered a little on Elsie’s boot; she petted him, and he yipped appreciatively before continuing on his way.
“Rachel!” she hollered, having recovered from her shock. “Martha!” Elsie vaulted the fallen tree and found Martha in a clump on the forest floor, trying to wipe mud from her goggles.
“What was that?” she asked.