caught the tom. She chose a pair of the larger feathers and knitted them into her hair. "Last of the
Mohicans," she said, and ran whooping into the lightening morn as I gave chase, and so we played away
the day. When Speck and I returned late that afternoon, we found Béka angry and pacing. The girls had
not come home, and he was torn between sending out a search party or waiting inside the mineshaft.
"What do you mean, keeping us here?" Speck demanded. "You told them be back by dawn. Do
you think Onions would disobey you? They should have been back hours ago. Why aren't we out
looking for them?" She divided the eight of us into pairs and mapped out four different approaches to
town. To keep him calm, she went with Béka on the most direct path. Smaolach and Luchóg circled
around our old stomping grounds, and Ragno and Zanzara followed well-worn deerpaths.
Chavisory and I took an ancient artery, blazed by the Indians perhaps, that ran parallel to the river,
bending, dipping, and rising as the water twisted in its course. It seemed more likely that Onions, Kivi,
and Blomma had taken another trail with better cover, but we stayed vigilant for any movement or other
indications they had passed this way—such as fresh footprints or broken branches. The brush sometimes
choked off passage, and we stepped out onto the exposed riverbank for short stints. Anyone driving
across the high bridge that linked the highway to the town could have spotted us in the half-light, and I
often wondered while on this path what we must look like from so far above. Ants, probably, or little
children lost. Chavisory sang and hummed to herself a wordless tune at once familiar and strange.
"What is that song?" I asked her when we stopped to get our bearings. Far ahead in the river, a tug
pushed a chain of barges toward the city.
"Chopin, I think."
"What is Chopin?"
She giggled and twisted a strand of hair around two fingers. "Not what, silly. Who. Chopin wrote
the music, or at least that's what he said."
"Who said? Chopin?"
She laughed loudly, then covered her mouth with her free hand. "Cho-pin is dead. The boy who
taught me the song. He said it is Chopin's mayon-naise."
"What boy is that? The one before me?"
Her demeanor changed, and she looked off in the distance at the receding barges. Even in the dim
light, I could see she was blushing.
"Why won't you tell me? Why doesn't anyone ever talk about him?"
"Aniday, we never talk about changelings once they are gone. We try to forget everything about
them. No good to chase after memories."
A far-off cry went out, a brief alarm that signaled us to make haste and rendezvous. We dropped
our conversation and followed the sound. Ragno and Zanzara found her first, alone and crying in an
empty glen. She had been wandering half the day, too confused and distraught to find her way home.
The other pairs arrived within minutes to hear the news, and Béka sat down beside Onions and draped
his arm around her shoulders. Kivi and Blomma were gone.
The three girls had seen the fog roll in and sped their way into town, reaching the lonesome outer
streets as the worst weather fell. The streetlamps and storefront signs cast halos through the misted dark,
serving as beacons for the faeries to navigate through the neighborhoods. Blomma told the other two not
to worry about being seen by people in the houses. "We're invisible in this fog," she said, and perhaps
her foolhardy confidence was their ruin. From the supermarket, they stole sugar, salt, flour, and a netted
sack of or-anges, then stashed the loot in an alley outside of the drugstore. Sneaking in through the back,
they were surprised by all of the changes since their latest visit.
"Everything is different," Onions told us. "The soda fountain is gone, the whole counter and all those
round chairs that spin you around. And no more booths. No candy counter, and the big tubs of penny
candy are gone, too. Instead, there's more everything. Soap and shampoo, shoelaces, a whole wall of
comic books and magazines. And there's a whole row of things just for babies. Diapers made out of
plastic that you throw away, and baby bottles and cans of milk. And hundreds of those tiny jars of food,
all gooshed up, and on each one the same picture of the cutest baby in the world. Applesauce and pears
and bananas. Spinach and green beans. Sweet potatoes that look like red mud. And smooshed turkey
and chicken with rice. Kivi wanted to taste every one, and we were there for hours."
I could picture the three of them, faces smeared with blueberries, bloated and sprawled in the aisle,
dozens of empty jars strewn across the floor.
A car pulled up outside and stopped in front of the picture windows. The flashlight shone through