Chapter 1 — Not Like the Girls

The bucket floated up the wall. Nothing was attached to it. It simply went up.

It went up the outside of Ms. Finish-Your-Plate's house, slow and steady, with no rope on it and nobody near it. It stopped when it reached the gutter, as high as the roof, and it stayed there, just floating in the air.

Koby Ashar stood in the road and watched it. He was eleven years old. He had lived on this street in Vellin his whole life, and in all of that time nothing had ever simply gone upward.

He waited for the wind to come, because wind was the only thing he could think of. No wind came. The laundry on the line across the road hung straight down. The dust in the road stayed in the road. Nothing he could see on that street was moving at all, except the bucket, and the bucket had already stopped.

There was something Koby could do that he had never told anybody about, because he did not really understand it himself, and his mother had told him he had a good imagination.

He could feel where people were.

Not with his eyes, and also not with his ears. The way you can feel the weight of a person lying on top of you — he could feel people like that, even when they weren't next to him. He simply knew, through walls and through houses, as if they were pressing onto his body like in a wrestling match. It worked about as far as a shout carries, and no farther. Nobody had taught it to him. It was always just there.

So standing in the road with the ball under his arm, he already knew that every single person on his street was doing something they never did.

Ms. Finish-Your-Plate was behind her own house, running away from it. She was seventy years old and Koby had never known her to run. The man across the road was standing at his front window, not moving at all, which was somehow worse. The woman three doors down was underneath her kitchen table with three children pressed in beside her.

They were all scared of something.

And coming through all of it, from a couple of streets over, there were four people he had never felt before, and they were not doing any of that.

Koby counted them twice, because he wanted to be wrong. Four. He could feel each one on its own, four separate weights, and no two of them were alike. They were spread out wide, and they were walking. Not running, not hiding. Walking, the way people walk when they are going somewhere they are allowed to go.

They were walking toward his street.

Then, all of a sudden, the green car came flying through the air, an arm's length off the ground.

It was the car that had sat outside the corner house for a year without moving. Now it was traveling along the street on its side, wheels turning slowly, doors still shut. It wasn't spinning. It was as steady as if an invisible hand were carrying it. It went the whole length of the road. Then it went through the wall of a house and into somebody's dining room, and the noise arrived a moment after it did.

Koby stood still and worked it out, and working it out was worse than the crash.

The bucket had gone up. The car had gone sideways. Something was deciding gravity — not for the street, but for each separate thing on it, one at a time.

He ran.

---

His mother was in the kitchen, and she was not surprised to see him. He made note of that. Her hair had come loose from its pin and there was a towel in her hand, and she looked at him standing in the doorway holding the ball like somebody who had been waiting for him.

"Good," she said. "Now."

His father came past her with the small green tin off the top shelf, cramming more things into it than it was ever meant to hold. He took Koby's coat off the hook and put it on him, warm day or not, pushed the tin down into the inside pocket and held his hand flat against the outside of the pocket for a second, and said nothing about it at all.

There was a man in the doorway behind them.

Koby had called him Donkey-Laugh since he was six, because of the noise he made at his own jokes. Koby had a name like that for everybody on the street, and he had almost never said one of them out loud. This one had escaped somehow, years ago, and now even the man's own wife used it.

"Take him up the back way," said his father. "Not the road."

"Not the road," said Donkey-Laugh. He was not laughing, which was odd, because on every other occasion he couldn't say a sentence without laughing as he said it.

His mother knelt down on the kitchen floor in front of Koby and took hold of both his wrists. She only knelt in front of him when it was serious.

"Some people are coming to this house," she said. "They are looking for children who can do what you can do. When they find one, they take him, and they have been doing it for a very long time, and they do not stop."

"What do you mean, what I can do?"

"You can feel people and know where they are with your eyes closed and ears covered," she said.

Koby did not say anything. He had never told her. He had never told anyone.

"I have always known," she said. "When you were three you used to tell me where your father was before he came through the door. I told you that you had a very good imagination. That was me keeping you quiet, and it worked, and I would do it again, and it is finished now."

Outside, one street over, something came down hard enough to shake the plates on the shelf.

"Listen to me, because I am only going to say this once and I should have said it years ago." She waited until he was looking at her. "Do not stop doing it. Not to be polite, and not to be liked. When you walk into a room, find every person in it. Find the walls. Find what is above your head and what is on the other side of it. Do all of that before you sit down."

"Why?"

"Because you can, and because nobody else is ever going to do it for you." Her hands tightened around his wrists. "And Koby — never let anybody watch you do it."

"They're at the end of our street now," said his father, from the front of the house. "This time, we make it look finished, so nobody ever comes back here looking."

"You know the plan," his mother said to Donkey-Laugh. "Not like we did with the girls. That's not safe."

He had two sisters. They had gone before he was born, and nobody in that house said their names if they could help it.

He asked now. "My sisters? What happened to them?"

His mother did not answer him. She looked at Donkey-Laugh over the top of Koby's head, and Donkey-Laugh moved his chin about a quarter of an inch, and that was the only answer anybody gave him.

Then his mother said, "Ahad."

It was not a line of the counting rhyme. It was the word that started it. Every child in the valley learned the rhyme before they could count, and when somebody said Ahad, you took your half of the four lines without deciding to, the way you answer to your own name. Koby was eleven and far too old for it.

He answered it anyway.

His father came in from the front of the house then, and the two of them got him in between them and held on to him harder than he could remember either of them ever holding him.

"Sav enar el harel," said his mother.

"Ha-adem zakhal shemi," said Koby.

"Ve im ein tahad," said his mother.

"Adem tahad ragli," said Koby.

She held on a moment past the end of it. Her cheek was wet against his. His father's face was wet too, and Koby had never once seen that.

"We are with you," said his mother.

"We are with you," said his father, and he put a hand on the back of his head, once.

Then his mother stood up and folded the towel and set it on the table, which was what she did when there was nothing left to do with her hands.

She did not turn around.

Donkey-Laugh had him by the arm and out the door.

Nobody said goodbye to him. Saying it would have stopped all three of them where they stood.

---

The back way ran up between the gardens and came out on the hill road. Donkey-Laugh went up it fast, with Koby's feet barely touching the ground.

"Don't look behind you," said Donkey-Laugh.

Koby looked behind him.

A truck fell out of the sky onto his parents' house.

It was not tumbling and it was not turning. It came down flat and whole, with its load still strapped on and its doors still shut, at the speed a thing reaches when it has been falling for a long way. The house was crushed underneath it. The dust came up all at once and in one piece, like a sheet shaken out over a bed.

Koby screamed. Tears rolling down his face, he reached for the house the way you reach for a step you know is there.

He had carried that house in his head his whole life without ever looking at it: four rooms, one step down into the kitchen, a low doorway his father ducked under without seeming to notice he was doing it.

Now there was stone. A great deal of stone, and all of it in the wrong place.

And underneath the stone he could not find his mother, and he could not find his father, and there was nothing underneath the stone at all.

He was already farther up the hill than a shout would carry, and that was as far as it had ever reached. He told himself that, standing on the hill road, and he went on telling himself that for years.

Nobody came out of the dust.

He watched the place where the front door had been for as long as the road let him.

Then the road turned at the top of the hill and took it away.

At the edge of the valley there was an empty house. Donkey-Laugh took him in at the front door and through every room, one after another, without stopping. Somewhere in the middle of the house, something changed under Koby's feet. He had no word for what.

In the next room, Donkey-Laugh flipped a light switch. No light went on, and none went off. And he did a stranger thing than not laugh — he sighed in relief when he flipped the switch, as if the danger had gone.

Donkey-Laugh did not look back once. His hand stayed exactly as tight on Koby's arm the whole way.