Time had no shape inside the black cloth sack.
There was only the engine's low growl, the sway of the car on winding roads, the smell of damp wool, and the small, shaking weight of Mark pressed against her side. Someone had thrown him onto the same seat, and Maya had found him by touch, blind, her bound hands scrabbling until his cold fingers curled around her thumb.
"Teacher," Mark whispered. "I can't see."
"Me neither, sweetheart. It's all right. Come closer."
She could not lift her arms to hold him, so she tilted her body until his small head rested against her shoulder. Somewhere in the front seat, the heavyset man was humming an old jazz tune off-key, and the gloved man was silent. Neither of them stopped her from speaking.
"Do you remember the story of the cotton bunny?" Maya breathed, as quietly as a leaf falling. "The one who got lost in a very big, very dark forest?"
"...The one who couldn't find his house."
"That's the one. Well, the bunny was scared too. But the bunny had a secret." She felt Mark's breathing slow and stutter against her collarbone. "Whenever the forest got too dark, the bunny closed his eyes and counted the stars he knew were above the trees. One star for every person who loved him. And he found out that if you count well enough, the dark gets very small."
A tiny sniffle. "How many stars did he have?"
"Hmm. At first only one." Maya's voice cracked, and she steadied it. "But the bunny kept counting, and counting, and every time he met someone kind, there was another star."
She heard Mark whisper, so softly it was almost a breath: "One. Two..."
"Two," Maya said, "is you."
The road turned from asphalt to gravel. Pine needles scraped the roof, a gate groaned, and the car crept uphill for a long, long time before the engine finally cut out.
Hands dragged her out. The wet night air slapped her face when the sack came off, and she gulped it, blinking against a blur of yellow lamps. A courtyard. Overgrown hedges. A fountain that had gone dry and green. And above it all, a great old villa of dark stone and rotting wood, its windows narrow and shuttered, its roof sagging with age, rising out of the wild garden like something that had been dead for a century and had never quite noticed.
"Move."
A rifle barrel nudged her shoulder blade. She was marched up a flight of crumbling stone steps, through carved double doors, into a grand hall where a candelabra hung unlit and the smell of damp plaster mixed with something else, something thin and coppery that made her stomach clench.
At the far end of the hall, two men dragged a third between them.
He was bare to the waist. His head hung limp. His heels left two long, shining streaks along the marble, red and wet, and a trail of drops that followed behind like stitches. They passed within three feet of Maya without looking at her. One of them was whistling.
Mark pressed his face into her skirt. "Teacher, don't look."
"I'm not looking," she lied. "I'm counting stars."
They were taken apart in the next corridor. A man in a leather jacket pulled Mark's hand out of hers, and Maya lunged, got a rifle butt across the shoulder for it, and was shoved down a hallway of dark paneling and portraits whose painted eyes seemed to follow her. The last thing she saw of Mark was his small face looking back at her over a stranger's arm, mouth open, soundless.
The door at the end was oak, black with age. It swung open.
The room beyond was small and warm. A fire crackled in a stone hearth. There was a leather armchair, a mahogany table, and a single green-shaded lamp throwing a pool of light across a leather-bound file. The room smelled of cedar, and old cologne, and something faintly floral that Maya could not name.
A man sat in the armchair.
He was old. That was the first thing, and it was the least important thing. Seventy, perhaps older, white hair combed straight back from a high forehead, a close white beard trimmed to a razor edge. He wore a dark velvet smoking jacket, and he held a tiny porcelain cup in one hand, and when he looked up, his eyes caught the lamplight and held it like a pair of black mirrors.
"Please," he said. "Sit."
His voice was gentle. Soft as warm milk. It was so gentle that Maya's skin crawled.
She did not sit. A guard shoved her into the wooden chair opposite, and the old man waited, sipping, until the rifle barrel withdrew.
"You have my apologies for the manner of your arrival, Miss Maya. My men have a talent for enthusiasm and none for etiquette." He set the cup down without a clink. "You are cold. Someone bring the lady a blanket."
"Where is Mark?" Maya's voice rasped. "What have you done to him?"
"The boy is in a warm bed with a hot drink, and a woman I trust is keeping him company. No harm has come to him." The old man smiled. "Nor will any, as long as I live. You may take that as the single most reliable promise you will ever hear in this house."
"He doesn't know you."
"No." Something passed over the smooth, elderly face. "No, he doesn't. That is a pity. That is something we shall fix."
He opened the leather folder under the lamp and turned a page, and in the lamplight Maya saw the glossy corner of a photograph: a girl in a graduation gown, young, smiling, a girl she knew, a girl who stared out of the picture in front of her own bathroom mirror each morning.
Her stomach dropped through the floor.
"Maya," the old man read, in the voice of someone reciting a favorite verse. "Twenty-three. Raised in the Sunflower House Social Protection Center. Forty-two rejections in two months. Hired by St. Jude Academy on the strength of a file somebody... pushed... rather high up the pile." He glanced up. "You were never meant to be brave, you know. You were meant to teach quietly. To be near the boy. To be safe and unremarkable and there. And then, tonight, you ran down an alley with him in your arms and nothing in your hands at all."
"I didn't—" Her mouth was dry. "I don't know what you're talking about. I only wanted to protect a child."
"Yes." The old man's gaze lingered on her face, and then, slowly, traveled lower, to her chest, with a strange, patient attention she could not interpret. "I rather think you did."
The door opened again.
A guard carried Mark in on one arm, then set him down. The little boy was wrapped in a blue wool blanket, his hair damp, a half-eaten cookie crushed in one fist. He saw Maya, and he made a small, broken sound, and ran across the room to hurl himself at her knees. The old man did not stop him.
"Teacher!"
"I'm here. I'm here." She could not hold him with her hands tied. She lowered her head and pressed her cheek against his hair, and her tears dripped into it. "I'm right here, Mark."
Mark's eyes, ash-grey and enormous, turned toward the white-haired man in the leather chair. They did not look at him as a child looks at a grown-up. They looked at him the way a small animal looks at a trap that has already closed.
"Come here, child," the old man said.
Mark did not move.
The old man rose, with some effort, and crossed the carpet slowly, leaning on a black cane with a silver wolf's head. He knelt before the boy with a quiet crack of knees. His thumb came up to touch Mark's cheek, trembling very slightly, and Maya, watching, saw something she had not expected on that cruel old face. It wasn't gloating. It was hunger, naked and aching, the hunger of a man who has been standing in the cold outside a lit window for a long, long time.
"Look at you," he whispered. "Look how tall you've grown. Look at your eyes..." His voice broke on something and mended itself. "My grandson."
Grandson.
Maya's breath stopped.
Mark's grandfather? But Travis has no father living, he said...
She did not know what Travis had said. She had spoken to him barely ten times. She knew nothing. She knew only that a man who carried a rifle-toting army and a bloodstained hallway was kneeling in front of a five-year-old with tears in his eyes, and that the boy was shaking so hard his blanket had slipped from his shoulders.
"I don't have a grandfather," Mark whispered.
"You have a great deal you do not know, little one. That, too, we shall fix." The old man straightened with a grunt and turned back to Maya, and just like that, the old man's tenderness was folded away like a handkerchief, and what was left behind was something very old and very sharp.
"Now, Miss Maya. You are an intelligent young woman, so I shall be plain with you. You have seen my face. You have seen my house. By any ordinary rule of business, you would not leave it."
Maya's blood ran cold.
"But," he continued, "the boy trusts you. He clings to you like a limpet. And I have learned, in my long life, that it is wasteful to break a useful tool when a gentler use can be found for it." He lifted two fingers. "So. Two choices."
He waited, savoring the silence.
"One. You remain in this house. You look after my grandson. You teach him, feed him, comfort him in the night, and keep him from screaming the walls down while I... prepare a few things. You will have a room, and meals, and my protection. In return you will not leave, you will not use a telephone, and you will not ask me questions I do not wish to answer."
"And the second?"
"Two." The corner of his mouth rose. "You go home. Today. Alive and whole, with my promise. I will even have you driven to your door. But you will carry something for me first. A letter, for a man whose name you know better than you should. A little message of business between old enemies. You deliver it. You wait for his answer. And then you return to me, with that answer, within a week." His eyes dropped toward Mark. "The child remains here until you do."
The fire popped in the grate.
Maya's gaze slid down to the small boy at her knees, who was staring up at her with a face that had stopped being a child's face somewhere between the school and this room.
One road is a cage. The other is a leash.
And Mark is in both of them.
The old man leaned on his silver wolf and waited, unhurried, smiling like a host at a dinner table, as if the choice were as simple as tea or coffee.
