When it arrived at last, flung onto their lawn in the dim morning hours, Tiburon herded the whole sleepy family to the cement-walled patio enclosure, where he and Terra sat in the crooked Adirondack chairs and Markos knelt awkwardly at their feet. Kit leaned against the doorjamb, swaddled in her pink flowered blanket, and Ansel climbed onto Terra's lap. This is the way it always was, on Sundays.

But this time, when Tiburon unfolded the newspaper and shook it open, Markos saw that it was covered in what looked like white-out, drizzled over all the pages so most of the text was obscured. Terra scratched at it with her thumbnail, and the white came off in a fine powder, but the words underneath were still illegible.

"Well, hell," Tiburon said. "Well, that's that, then."

"Someone's playing a trick on us," Markos suggested, because he was old enough that they sometimes took him seriously.

"This isn't a trick," Terra said. "It's the real thing, it has to be. All the signs are here."

"And it's no surprise." Tiburon said, in a low voice. "We've known it was coming. We've been planning for this, for years and years."

"I know," Terra said. "We'll be fine, of course. It's just unbelievable, really."

"Well, believe it," Tiburon said. "Because communication's the first thing to go."

"What can I do to help?" Markos asked.

"For now, or for daylight at least, keep indoors. You'll be working hard tonight. And I mean all of you: Kit and Ansel, too."

Tiburon and Terra rose from the old chairs, and the younger children followed them, swiping the sleep from their eyes.

Markos remained on the patio. Through the high-up windows he stared at the fragment of dark blue hanging over the neighbor's tile roof. He fingered the worn rubber bottom of his sneaker—on Sundays they dressed early, just in case—peeling it back and letting go, snap. After a quarter hour of snaps and silence the sky looked no lighter.

He had known that time could seem endless, especially when he was anxious, and the moth-wings of fear were beginning to shimmer in his stomach. It felt that way every Saturday night, while Markos lay awake in bed and the minutes fell like feathers in the dark. What would the next morning's newspaper hold? Would tomorrow be the day?

And now it was the day. The day the mysterious thing dreaded and worried over and whispered about ever since his mother had married Tiburon would happen, or start happening at least, that very evening. But evening would only come after an everlasting arc of daylight, Markos thought, as he drifted into his bedroom and opened a musty book, preparing for a long, dreary, and anxious wait.

He was wrong. For when the sun finally arrived and bleached the sky, daytime moved like a whirlpool with the dark and the moon at the bottom, drawing him in long before he was ready, and it seemed minutes only before his mother came into his bedroom and said, "Markos. Put on your jacket. It's time to go."

The deep blue shadows of evening had stretched out and faded into the dark when Tiburon led them past the stucco houses to the edge of the canyon. It was only a block and a half away, a great woodsy scar running alongside a street and curving under the overpass, eventually disappearing in the crease of the hills. He led them to the very place where the asphalt crumbled off and dropped down into the tangled wilderness. They stood in a line with their toes on the edge, looking into the soft, hazy void.

"So, here," Tiburon said after a moment. "This is where we dig."

"But why this place? There's houses up there," Kit said, and gestured to the other side, where the canyon wall rose up to a row of houses brilliant with tiny lights. "And behind us, on the other side of the street. Can't they see?"

"Don't worry," Tiburon said. "We'll dig by night. We've planned everything perfectly."

A bird chuckled somewhere in the deep. Far-off, another replied. The wind ruffled through the undergrowth, and the whole canyon seemed to shift and groan. It seemed like the longer Markos stared, the less he saw. He put his arms around Kit and gathered her to him, her yellow hair tickling his chin like duckfeathers.

"We've got lots of work to do," Tiburon said, "and God only knows how little time. We might as well go down now, anyway. I think standing here looks suspicious."

"All of us will help. Even you, my little pet," Terra said to Ansel, tickling him in the side. He wriggled and laughed and grabbed at her with his doughy baby arms.

"How do we dig?" Markos asked. "We haven't any shovels."

"What do you take me for?" Tiburon said. "Everything is at the bottom waiting for us."

"Stay close," Terra added.

Markos unwound himself from Kit. Taking his her hand in his and squeezing it, he stepped off the road behind his family.

None of them, not even Tiburon, had really considered what digging into that coarse dirt would mean. It was difficult. The canyon was overgrown with every kind of foliage, and digging meant first slashing through the snarled roots with a dull shovel blade; ripping away rough handfuls of leaves; yanking off wiry branches that would not give; and then holding onto the plant's base with both hands and leaning back, until it at last tore from the ground and sent you flying into something thorny. And although there were five of them, the unusual nighttime labor filled each with a strange loneliness. Kit chattered until she ran out of breath, and then the silence was broken only by her small complaints that sounded alien in the silence. Everything was the crunch of roots, the rasp of dirt sliding off the shovels, panting.

And in the shovel-fulls of dirt were living things: awful things that crawled and squiggled off and onto your bare feet. Kit shrieked at a centipede, a sound that echoed off the canyon walls and caused them to crouch down in the brush and hide until they were certain no one had heard. It was an outburst which, afterwards, provoked Tiburon to whack her on the back of the head and send her tumbling. "Never again," he told her.<.p>

Ansel did not like violence, and he whimpered, not knowing who to approach for comfort. Finally, he went to Terra, who kissed his forehead and crooned, "My boy. My little baby boy."

Kit remained on the dirt pile where she had fallen and watched, while Terra watched her right back, solemn-faced.

"They'd think it was a bobcat, I'm sure," Terra said, shrugging. "Sounded like one."

"There aren't any bobcats left," Tiburon said. "But it's all right. Most people don't know that. They ignore the important things."

"Thank God we don't," Terra said.

Markos was thankful for the moon, which was full and milky-pale like a blind man's eye. Without it, Markos' own eyes would never have grown used to the darkness at the bottom of the canyon. Yet he could never be completely comfortable with the jagged outline of cliffs against the sky, the scritch-scratch of bushes in the night breeze, the musty-sagey smell of canyon bottom.

Kit dug silently next to Markos, her eyes large and vigilant, while Ansel lay down at Terra's feet and fell asleep.

As the hours went by, Markos felt heavy, as if the night was a black mountain of dirt draped upon his shoulders. His hands were raw and bleeding. He tried to picture what his mother, or Tiburon, would do if he himself lay down and slept; then he shook the picture out of his head and tried not to think about it.

At the end of the first night there was little to show for their sleepless exhausted hours. Nothing but a lopsided tunnel, infested with roots and crawling things, which led four feet downward with a tilt to the west. Maybe two of them could have curled up in the hollow and pulled the dirt in after them, but there would be no room to move or breathe.

Before they went back to the house, Tiburon insisted that they uproot brush from the other side of the canyon and replant it, haphazardly, around the mouth of the hole—an enterprise that took yet another hour. "So no one can see it from the road, or if they're walking along the edge," he said. "We can't be too careful. Things are more obvious in the light."

Terra lifted Ansel in her arms, and followed Tiburon up the side of the canyon. He chose a different path than that they had climbed down with, for he declared he did not want there to be any suggestion of a trail. Markos pushed Kit in front of him and staggered up the hillside behind her, marveling at the way her small limbs kept moving, where his own were sore and throbbed and felt useless, like sacks of flour or dirt.

Terra unplugged the refrigerator four days later, and Markos helped her throw away anything that would rot. "We should begin to get ourselves used to this, this hibernation," she said. "We won't have anything cold to eat once we're there."

"Means no milk?" Kit asked. She was sitting on the bench seat below the kitchen window, admiring her pink, pleated skirt. All three children were home-schooled, and Terra let them wear whatever they liked, even skirts in autumn.

"It means more than that," Terra said. "It means no meat, no fresh fruit or vegetables. Nothing that can't keep in a jar, or a can. Or on a shelf."

"There's still good things, though," Markos interjected. "All kinds of grains and beans. For a long while there'll be bread. With jam and honey. And potatoes; you love potatoes. With grated parmesan."

"But no butter," Terra added.

"And it'll be my birthday when we're there," Kit said, tapping her heels on the wooden floor, watching Terra pack perishable foods into a casserole pan; cheese, mayonnaise, deli slices of ham. "I'll be seven. But how will I get a cake?"

"We'll figure something out," Markos said.

Terra clicked on the oven and slid the sloppy pan inside. She glanced over her shoulder at Kit. "Stop that tapping," she said. "Can't you do something useful?"

Kit crossed her ankles under the bench. She sat silently for a few minutes, while Terra wiped down the counter and Markos finished off the last of the orange juice. Then she asked, "What's it going to be like once we're there?"

Terra tossed the sponge in the sink and leaned against the edge of the counter. She crossed her arms and said, with a sudden kindness: "It'll be nice."

"Nice like how?"

"It'll be warm and cozy. You and me and Stepdaddy and your brothers, all cuddled up. Comfortable. No matter what terrible things happen overground, under we'll be safe."

"Will it be boring?" Kit asked. Markos listened hard, for he had been wondering the same thing.

"Of course not. You'll have all your coloring books, and regular books, and you can read the Bible all by yourself so when it's all over, you'll know you're among the righteous. You can bring a game or two and a deck of cards. Even your watercolor set."

Kit nodded, and she looked pleased. But Markos felt something sour begin to simmer in his stomach. Decks of cards and coloring books? It sounded like they were preparing for a road trip, or just a rainy afternoon; not for weeks and months of hibernation. What could he himself bring to occupy his time?

Ansel toddled into the room, and Terra picked him up and swung him around, his face crinkling with pleasure. "Here's my favorite boy!" she exclaimed.

Markos said nothing. He just threw the orange juice carton away and went back to his room for a nap, for his skull was stuffed with dry leaves and he could never get enough sleep.

After the first night the family dug in mittens, and wrapped bandanas around their mouths so they wouldn't breathe the dust. They couldn't see it, but it was there, floating toxic among the molecules, and it scratched their throats relentlessly, making them rasp and cough.

It affected Kit the worst. She always sounded as if she had a mouthful of sand, and this was a concern. Terra gave her cherry cough drops to numb her throat, and this helped a bit, but she finished them off in one night.

Maybe it was because she was small, Markos thought. Though Ansel was smaller by far, he kept out of the way. Kit's size was an asset in the beginning, when they sent her into the tunnel to pick out the roots and pebbles. She could bend into tight places, work out the offending debris with her tiny fingers. Yet on the sixth night she had been overcome with a terrible fit of coughing, barks like bullets rasping from her throat, rendering her crimson-faced and useless underground. After that her new job was to fill buckets of dirt and dump them out far away.

Each night, when they were finished digging, it seemed no time between until they were down there again, back in the shadowy scribble of branches and the overwhelming smell of dirt. As the nights piled up, innumerable and endless, something began to take shape. And the something grew larger and more elaborate until Markos held his breathe every time he saw it, for even though it terrified him, he felt an irresistible sense of accomplishment. For out of the hidden hard-packed earth they had created something massive, substantial and life-sustaining.

As far as a room went, it wasn't very big; it was no larger than his bedroom at home, with a low ceiling that he could brush his fingertips across. They had packed hundreds of rocks into the dirt walls so that they looked cobblestoned, and were sturdy. Two thick hardwood planks stood from ceiling to floor, in the center of the room, like totems.

Jammed into the south wall among the stones were two broad, wide boards, one placed about three feet above the other, to serve as beds. Terra had covered them with layers of blue and yellow blankets, and had glued a little acrylic painting to the rocky wall above the place their heads would rest. It was an angel Terra had painted herself, when Markos was still a child.

In a large hollow carved into the west wall kegs of water were stacked four high and six deep: the exact amount of water, in gallons, Tiburon had calculated would last them two months. The water closet, as Terra had jokingly called it, was almost half the size of the room itself.

Fashioning a real water closet was the difficult part. Tiburon had finally decided to expand part of the north wall into a tunnel that hooked to the left, ending with a deep pit. The pit was cropped by a board with a hole in the center, to be used as a toilet. An air hole was bored straight above to take care of the stink.

The next step, of course, was gathering supplies. They brought them into the canyon by the sackload, three, four times a night: innumerable boxes of candles, chenille blankets, squashy body-pillows, paper towels and cloth towels, gallons and gallons of water, cans of Vienna sausages and meatballs and sardines, of green beans and pears in light syrup and tuna fish. And of course, several containers of lemon-scented baby wipes to keep the family lemon-scented. No showers once they were sealed in.

The shelter had seemed larger, somehow, when there was nothing in it. After filling it to the brim with supplies it was suffocating. It was a madhouse of objects, a turbulent swirl of stuff.

In the remaining space of the shelter was an old card table and three folding chairs. Markos couldn't help imagine himself sitting in one of the chairs until his hair turned grey and his skin turned white, paled by the darkness.

Their careful planning was not without fault. The first time they attempted to light a fire, the whole shelter had filled with smoke, and the family had scrabbled out coughing and gagging. Tiburon despised the idea of boring another hole through the ceiling for the smoke to escape. There might be some kind of fallout, he said. But after careful pondering, they decided doing so was the only option, other than living without fire. And that was no option at all, Tiburon said, because after the hot winds the cold winds would come.

With Ansel sleeping, and Kit off across the canyon, Markos was usually alone with his parents. And every once in a while, when his mother and Tiburon had relaxed into a steady pattern of banter, he would gather the nerve to ask them a question.

It was the shelter's one-month anniversary, when Terra had brought a bag of ginger-snap cookies down to celebrate their progress, that Markos asked his biggest questions of all. Anything is easier when there's cookies, he knew, and work that night had been lighthearted by comparison, although working with the brush at the mouth of the opening was tricky.

Markos waited for a lull in the conversation before he spoke. "Mother?" he asked.

"Yes?" Terra answered.

"I've been wondering why—I mean, I know something bad is coming..."

"Yes," she said again. Tiburon stopped uprooting plants and leaned on his shovel, listening.

"And I know we've talked about it, from time to time," Markos went on. "But I'm still not sure, exactly—the reason we're hiding, for example, and so quickly, and the newspaper? And how will we know when—"

"Markos," Tiburon said.

"Yes?" he said. Then, "Sir?" and he felt childish.

"You trust us, don't you?"

"I do," Markos said.

"The world is a terrible place," Tiburon said. "Everyone's values, morals, principles have been completely destroyed. Nothing left but corruption and greed. And there's bound to be a confrontation."

"What sort of a confrontation? What do you mean?"

"Just listen, Markos. You're correct, in that you need to know. I've been making predictions, predicting this for years, long before I met your mother. Ten, fifteen years. Even before you were born. Can you understand? This has been long, endlessly long in the making. The world is simmering. It has been simmering for ages and ages now, and it is certain to explode."

Markos shook his head. "I don't understand. What's going to happen, when the explosion comes? Do you mean a real explosion—literally?"

Tiburon shrugged and looked mysterious. "There's no way to predict exactly."

"But why now? What are all the signs you and Mother always talk about?"

"Haven't you noticed the soldiers? They're everywhere, now. Even when they're not in uniform, you can tell them by their haircuts. And the rains this past winter—there were more rains than there has ever been, torrents of rain, like the great flood. Dozens of things. But the newspaper. That was the final indication."

"Why?"

"Because, I've told you," Tiburon said. "Communication's the first thing to go."

Markos forced back the tears that bubbled behind his eyeballs, the sob that scorched his throat like a hot stone. He had been terrified for months, even years, of this shapeless, nameless evil, forever approaching, and this was the first time he had learned anything worth knowing. Some of the answers he had ached for. But now he was trying not to cry. And why? Was it because the reasons simply weren't good enough?

"Markos," said Terra, who had been silent this whole time, and put both hands on each of his shoulders.

He glanced over her shoulder at a sudden sound, a cough. It was Kit, her silhouette plodding through the growth. Terra saw too, and for some reason began to speak more quickly.

"We need you," she said. "We need your strength more than anything else. Without strength, we'll have nothing at all when it's time. Time to come out again."

"It's almost time," Tiburon said over dinner. Dinner was Vienna sausages mixed with pinto beans and old, tired bread. The getting-used-to-it process was now under way; but Markos already felt ill at the thought of more metallic-tasting provisions.

"I don't want to," Kit said suddenly. "Don't want to be buried in the ground with the worms. Isn't there anything else we can do?"

Tiburon raised his thick, hooded eyebrows. "You're kidding, right?" he said.

Kit looked down and prodded at her sausages. "Not kidding," she said. "Don't want to."

"Well, kid, you better believe you're going to."

Markos stared at Kit, hoping to catch her eye. Why was she starting this now, at the dinner table, where there were forks everywhere and steaming things to throw? She knew better.

But Kit began to cry, thumping her small fists on the table. "You can't make me!" she said. "You can't bury me alive! I won't go, I won't—"

It was Terra, not Tiburon, who silenced her with a hard smack across the face. Kit fell backwards in her chair, the sleeve of her pink sweater catching on the edge of the table and tearing, her head striking the wooden floor.

"My God!" Markos said, standing up so fast his chair fell over, too.

"Sit down, boy," Tiburon growled. "Unless you want one too. Can't you see she's okay?"

And Kit was, or seemed to be—she had already collected herself and scooted away from the chair. She rubbed at her wet face with both hands, crying harder, but soundlessly.

"Listen here, girl," Tiburon said. "Your mother and I are saving your life. Do you want to burn out there? Be shot into pieces? You should be grateful. Hell, you must be grateful, or we won't have you. Hear me?"

"I hear," Kit said before she scuttled away.

The sting from that night's slap followed Markos into his dreams. In his first, he was alone in the canyon with his mother, who was holding out a great mixing-bowl full of dirt. "I need you to eat this," she was saying. "You must get used to it." So Markos opened his mouth and let her scoop handfuls of the dirt inside, and he felt the bitterness, the grit between his teeth even when he woke up.

In the next dream, the five of them were safe inside the shelter. Everything was silent and comfortable. He was having a conversation with Kit, and they were all eating ice cream and laughing, and Terra was singing to Ansel like she had to Markos when he was little, and Tiburon flickered in and out of the room like a faulty television station. Then there was a rumble, and suddenly the ceiling began to cave in. They all were screaming, and the rocks and bugs were falling on top of them, and Markos was reaching out for Kit's hand, but the thing he grasped was a thorny branch, and he screamed into consciousness.

The third time he fell asleep, there were no dreams at all.

Terra came into Markos' room early the next morning, and there was something in her face that made the room stagger and sway.

"They took her," she said. Markos could see that her eyes were swollen and red.

"They took her? They took who? They took Kit?"

"Yes. They took her away."

Markos leaped out of bed. "Where'd they take her? We have to go get her!" He swung out of bed, the wooden floor cold and rough, and his covers tangled around his legs like weeds. "Was it them? The soldiers? If we're fast enough, we can—"

Terra grabbed his shoulder. "There's nothing we can do."

"But we can't just sit here! What's going to happen to her? We can't do nothing!"

"We are doing something. We're digging every night, to save ourselves."

Markos dug his fingers into his cheeks, kneading his flesh like clay. "But Kit—she's only six! She can't… what if she's…"

"No one feels worse than me, her mother," Terra said , but to Markos she sounded false, artificial. "We tried to stop them, we tried so hard. We hid Ansel."

"But I don't understand," Markos said. "How did you hide Ansel if you couldn't hide Kit? And does that mean you knew they were coming?"

Terra swallowed twice, hard, before continuing. "We heard their footsteps on the walkway. That awful clomping of their boots. And deep, male voices, we couldn't make them out. So we grabbed Ansel and hid him in the hamper, under all the clothes. Kit was too big. By the time we thought of another hiding place, it was too late. They came in and took her away."

"What about me? Why didn't they come in my room?"

"I don't know. You must have been too old for them. It was Kit that they wanted, or Ansel. The little ones."

Markos sat back down on the bed, his face hot and wet and painful. "I just don't see..."

"We did everything we could do," Terra said. "But what's important is that we're still here, and we're okay. And now the shelter's almost done. We have to finish it, quickly. Before they come back again."

"Will she be okay?" Markos called as she walked away.

"We don't know," Terra said, without turning around. "Maybe. Let's hope so."

Markos flopped down on his stomach, shoving his arms under the pillow and pressing his face on top of it. He closed his eyes and watched the colors change on the inside of his eyelids, pink to red to black. He felt numb and limp, like a rag doll stuffed with straw. Detached, yards away from a stream of boiling tears he neared but could not swim in. He could not cry. But with his eyes closed, he stared, and kept on thinking.

It had been weeks and weeks ago that he had woken early, aching with anxiety, listening for the soft thump of the newspaper hitting their lawn. A grey and black prophecy, smeared with something white. The beginning of those long, immeasurable nights, those foul coughing nights tangled in a snarl of weeds and darkness. Throbbing back, hands on fire. Now his hands were callused and shiny. The hands of a stranger, some man.

If the sound of a newspaper could wake him, he though suddenly, how come he had not heard the voices, or the clomping boots? Or Kit's screams? She would have screamed. He knew her well. She was feisty, a wildcat, and would have fought savagely. At last he began to cry, muffling his sobs in the pillow, tensing every muscle to keep from shaking. Why had they not come for him?

It was then that he realized Terra had not woken him earlier, as usual, summoning him to dig. It was the first night they had allowed him to sleep the whole way through. He wept, and he wondered, and he wept more.

On the final night, it was nearly four when they began their drowsy descent. Hours later than usual, but Tiburon had required them to sweep and mop the wooden floors before they left, wipe the windows from the inside and make the beds. He wanted the house immaculate.

They dipped in and out of the purple shadows made by their neighbors' stucco houses, and without hesitation they plunged off the edge of the asphalt the same as ever before. They wound their way down through the rocks and boulders, following one of the innumerable dusty trails that bore invisible cells from the bottoms of their feet.

"Can you imagine what it'll be like?" Terra whispered, holding Ansel with one arm and a duffel bag with the other. "Not in the shelter, I mean. But what it'll be like when they realize we're gone. When they finally come to get us, knock on our door and no one answers. The beds all nicely made. Oh, it'll be a riot."

"Truly," Tiburon said. "They'll have no idea; they could never guess. We'll never be found."

"We did well, didn't we?" Terra said, smiling wider.

Markos had to glance away from the heat of Terra's smile. His eyes were burning. He focused on blinking, on walking through the darkness like a marionette, with flaccid, stumbling feet.

The hole seemed to yawn out of the darkness, suddenly, like a dark mouth opening. It was a thick, round, tangible thing. Markos thought he felt heat radiating from its inside, and he took a step back as Terra and Tiburon moved forward.

"Say goodbye," Terra sang, waving Ansel's hand. "Say goodbye to all the houses, all the people and trees. It'll all be different when we come back out. Hopefully for the better. Say goodbye."

"Goodbye," Ansel said joyfully.

Markos looked at the great chaos of trees and bushes around him, the puzzle of crevices seeped with dark. The canyon wall in the moonlight looked like flesh, the blank houses on top like teeth.

He tipped his head back and looked at the stars. There were so many of them. But Markos knew that there would be more, out in the country, away from the house-lights and streetlamps corrupting the sky. He had never been in the country, had never left the grubby suburbs where he had been born. He had only really known the inside of his own house.

"It's time," Tiburon said.

Tiburon was the first one in, of course, the man of the shelter. He bent his knees and ducked his head and hopped down the short slope and then he was gone.

Ansel was next. Terra gently tucked Ansel into the space, Tiburon reaching up to lift him down. For a moment, both parents were holding him.

Terra teased the sky with one last smile. Markos thought he saw sadness in it, though he knew by then that things were tricky in the moonlight. But the moonlight was beginning to fade, the sky a shade lighter than it had been when they had been climbing.

It was his turn. The night was peeling off like a blanket and Markos felt the cold.

He thought, then, of the terrible winter Tiburon said would come on the outside, after everything that would happen had happened. The sky blotted out with white, then darkness. But first, a great heat that scorched the earth, turning everything wicked to ash.

Yet as he gazed at the empty space in the ground, he suddenly thought it might be hotter within.

He stalled. He stood there and looked at the hole but he didn't move, and all the while the sky was lightening, ever-so-slowly, the slightest hint of a gradient, darker away from the eastern edge.

"Markos, what are you doing?" Terra said. Her face appeared at the opening. "Get in here, right now."

"Okay," Markos said. His voice sounded like sand falling.

Still, he stood there, his stomach twisting in different directions, wringing around, pulling so tight he thought he would split open. The minutes throbbed on his temples. He wanted to ask about Kit. He needed to ask, to know what really happened. For Kit was there, inside his stomach, doing all the wringing and twisting. She was looking at him from the inside and he felt the tickle of her yellow hair and the blister of her tears.

"Wait," he said, in a low voice.

"Right now! The morning's coming! What the hell is your problem?" Tiburon's angry face appeared next to Terra's.

"I need to know something—"

"Know something!" Tiburon yelled. "You can ask when you're in! Move it!"

"But before I—I need to ask—"

"Now, you little shit, right now! Or you're in for the worst beating of your life!" Now Tiburon's face was crimson and the veins in his forehead throbbed. "Now!"

The first suggestion of light was reflecting in the windows of the way-up-high houses.

"But what about Kit?" Markos said. He said it aloud, but he said it softly. Not sand, but dust. The sound of something white, white-out, flowing on paper. Softer even than that.

"Now, you bastard!"

It was with that, Markos knew. He was not going in there. He was not going to bury himself in that muddy grave, shut out the light for God knew how long, sentence himself to forever with those people, his parents. The stone that had been lodged in his chest cooled and dropped into the bottom of his stomach, dissolved into the sweetest dust.

He felt Kit smile somewhere and it was dazzling.

They knew. They knew by his face. "Fine! Fine!" Terra screamed. "Stay out there and burn! Burn and rot! But if somehow you survive this, in the world after, you'll be dead to us! We'll never forgive you!"

Ansel was crying, his face streaked with dirt and tears. "Marko! Marko!" he wailed.

Markos thought for a second about darting over there and snatching his little brother from Terra's arms, holding him close and sprinting away, away from the hole and the canyon and all that madness. But he hesitated, and the moment was lost, for Tiburon had already begun to pull the dirt and rocks into the opening.

Markos watched. He felt like all the blood in his body had sunk to his lower limbs, rendering them so heavy he couldn't move.

He watched the oval face of his mother vanish, like a bit of smoke. He watched Tiburon's red face fracture into a pale triangle. Then there were nothing but fingers, like worms, tickling the last of the dirt and rocks into the opening, until black met black and nothing remained. Dusty rocks and weeds in between, upturned roots, blending into the natural disarray of the canyon.

Just as they had planned, by the time the hole was covered, you couldn't really tell there was anything there at all.

He stayed a little longer and listened. From the earth he heard nothing.

From the distance, however, he thought he heard a faint rumbling. But for all he knew it could be the pounding of his head, his own heart. Wearily, he made his way up to the canyon wall. He began to climb.