Don't Make Me Wait

Kou and Mori went out over the sill first, and Ryu went with them, to find out whether anyone had thought to watch the quad. That was the plan, such as it was. If the lawn was empty, we crossed it and kept going. If it wasn’t, we had no second one.

Kathi-1 still had my hand. She got as far as the sill with it, and stopped, and let go, and went back across the paper to take Kit by the sleeve. “Come with us,” she said. She said it quietly. “I’m asking one more time.”

Kit looked at her. Kou-3 pressed closer against his neck. “I can’t,” he said, gently, and then he looked at the bench.

Two lidded boxes stood on it, repacked, with their napkins folded beside them. He looked at the boxes, and at the tray, and at his own two arms. He set the wire tray down. He let go of it one finger at a time. Kou-3 climbed onto his shoulder without being asked, which left a hand free, and Kit pressed a box into each of ours, flat against the chest, hard enough that we had to hold on.

“It’ll be cold,” he said. “It’s still food.”

“Kit—” said Kathi-1.

“Wherever you’re going, there’ll be a father.” He touched the brim of his hat. “Kit wishes you luck. Ask him. Father always knows what to do.”

Kathi-1 thanked him. I had objections. I kept them.

Two short notes came up from the lawn, thin enough to slip under the drone of the voice on the walls. Clear.

Kathi-1 and I looked at each other. Neither of us said anything. Then we went out over the sill, and the last I saw of the room was Kit at the bench with Kou-3 on his shoulder and the tray in both hands, looking at the door.

***

Low along the hedge and then the long shadow of the dormitory wall, Kou led us, and at every gap he waited for us to catch up. There was nobody at any window.

We went in at the edge of the trees and kept going until I could no longer see the lawn, and then a while after that, until the trunks stood close and the light came down green and thin and nobody walking a path would think to look. Kathi-1 was the one who decided it was far enough. She stopped, looked at a patch of moss, said “Here,” and lay down on it.

We made no beds. There was nothing left to make them with. I found the next patch of moss and lay down on that, with my staff along my side and the two boxes set on a stump between us, napkins and all, and I was asleep before I could remember why that should worry me.

***

The light had gone low and orange and was coming in sideways when I woke, and the trees had stopped being green. The air still held the heat of the day. My mouth tasted of old moss.

Kathi-1 was lying precisely where she had gone down. She had Ryu on her chest, and her face turned into the moss, and she was crying. There was no sound to it, only her shoulders, and her breath catching and starting over. Ryu had his chin on her collarbone and did not move at all.

I looked away, at the stump. The boxes were where we’d left them. Kit had folded the napkins into triangles.

He folded the napkins.

I looked at them for some time. Then I wasn’t looking at anything, because my eyes had stopped working properly.

I did not decide to. I would like that on the record. It simply began, and went on beginning, and when I tried to put a stop to it my breathing went somewhere I couldn’t follow.

Something small and warm climbed up my sleeve and wedged itself under my jaw. Kou said nothing. He pressed one foot against my throat, lightly, and kept it there, and I let him, and that was all of it.

Mori had woken at some point and been sitting on a root. He looked at the two of us once. Then he said to the nearest tree that he would see whether anyone was searching this side of the wood, and went up through the leaves without a sound.

It went on for a while. Then it ran out, with a few last gulps, and I sat up and wiped my face on my sleeve.

“Right,” I said. My voice came out thick. I cleared it. “I only needed a quick refresher. That’s done. We should start looking for Kathi-4, and we can’t go on campus now, but we can start triangulating from here.”

There was no answer. Kathi-1 had turned her head, and she was looking up through the branches with Ryu rising and falling on her chest. She didn’t say anything. She also didn’t get up.

“We have a lot to do,” I said.

Ryu looked at me. That was the whole of the reply.

“Fine,” I said, and stood, and took my staff. “Come on, Kou.”

He unhooked from beneath my jaw and went up onto my shoulder. “Small first, Kathi,” he said, into my ear. “If anything leans on it, close it. Widen it only when it’s quiet.”

“I know. I don’t need the reminder.”

I walked clear of the stump, planted the staff, and did not open anything yet. “Ready?” I asked.

He turned his head and looked at me before he answered. “Ready.”

The window came up the width of a coin and held. Nothing leaned on the far edge. Kou sent the pulse through, and it went out and came home inside a breath, and he told me what it said without my having to ask. “Campus. The far side, past the halls.”

I closed it, walked a few minutes to the north, and did it again. The line leaned a little. I walked east, through bracken that came up to my knees, and did it a third time, and the line leaned more.

I stood with my staff in the ferns and went over the three of them in my head. They did not cross over the halls. They crossed short of them, nearer the trees, and each return had come home faster than the one before.

“Kou,” I said. “Are you sure you’re reading this correctly?”

“How long do you think I’ve been doing this?” His wings opened halfway. “The bearings agree. Whatever it is, it’s coming this way.”

I ran. I did not decide that either.

Kathi-1 was already sitting up when I came through the ferns, with her staff in her hands and a long white line of seam hanging unfinished in the air in front of her. Ryu was on her shoulder with his wings half open. Mori dropped out of the branches above a moment later and landed on the stump, between the boxes.

“No one is searching the wood,” he said. “Not this side of it.”

“Then who—”

“Kathi-4,” I said. “I think she’s coming to us.”

No one asked how. We all took up some place, without discussing it, and none of us knew what we were preparing for. Kathi-1 had her seam and Ryu had his fire, and Mori and Kou had their ears turned toward nothing, and I stood with my staff held out in front of me. The sun went from orange to red in the tops of the trees. A mosquito found my neck, and I shooed it with one hand without turning my head.

The window opened with hardly a sound.

Wide as a door, it hung between two trunks at the height of my head, and there was another wood in it. The trees were bare. Gray mud lay at their roots, with a rag of old snow along the north side of one, and the light behind it was the same low red as ours, which made the cold look stranger. And in the middle of it, with her boots in the mud, stood a girl in a forest-green jacket and a high ponytail of fiery red hair.

I knew her at once, from the face. It was mine, again, and I had stopped being surprised by it. But the jacket had creases across the sleeves, where it had been folded on a shelf, and her walking boots were laced to the top and not yet scuffed. Not one strand had come loose from the ponytail. In a forest, that takes effort. She had dressed for it.

Her lips moved. Nothing came through.

Kathi-1 had stopped breathing. I found I had too.

Then the window flickered and was gone, and a second one was opening close by, low and flat against the top of the stump. It was there before I’d turned my head. The boxes sank into it, both at once, without a splash, and Mori hopped clear a moment before, as if the stump had turned to water.

A folded piece of paper rose out of it and settled in the place where they had been. The window closed.

Nobody moved.

I had been taught that windows were for looking. Dornstadt had said it, and Sikorska, and every book I’d ever worn out, and I had never in my life got so much as a pebble through one. Neither had Kathi-1, and she’d have said so by now. This girl had just done it twice, from the other side, between one breath and the next.

Kou was the one who reached the stump first. He held the paper down with one wing, and I read it over his head.

The note said ‘Don’t make me wait, come over already.’

It was my handwriting, with the loops tidied.