บททั้งหมดของ The Transfiguration Christmas Vow: บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 8

Tobias Holloway had a rule about mornings. He didn't think until he'd had something hot in his hands.It wasn't much of a rule. Most days the hot thing was just water boiled on a dented camp stove, with a pinch of pine needles dropped in so it tasted like something. But he stuck to it. Thinking came after. If he started thinking first, the day got away from him, and he ended up lying on his back for two hours staring at the water stains on the ceiling.The ceiling today was a rust-colored mess. He'd found this place, an old rail maintenance shed, about fourteen months ago, and it was solid at least. Steel walls, one working door, a stove he'd rigged to vent through a hole he'd cut himself. He'd stacked old train ties against the north wall for insulation. It was ugly, and it kept the cold out, and he'd stopped asking for more than that a long time ago.He cupped the tin mug and let the steam wash over his face."Okay," he said. "Okay, Toby. Up."Nobody had called him Toby in years. Hi

There were rules for going outside, and Mara had written every one of them down.Don't walk in the open. Stay where the walls are. Never go out at dusk, never go out at dawn, never go out without a way back. Don't touch anything that's growing. And if you see one of them, don't run, don't wave, don't talk. Just go still. Wait for it to pass. Then go the other way, quietly, like you were never there.She'd added that last one in her second winter. It had cost her a lot to learn it.The street outside the pharmacy was white with ash, ankle deep in places, and the buildings on either side leaned in like tired old men. A bus on its side. A line of cars frozen bumper to bumper, as if the whole city had tried to leave at once. Somebody had spray-painted a message across a brick wall in shaky red letters, long ago. WE ARE STILL HERE. Under it, in different handwriting, newer: NO YOU'RE NOT.Mara walked close to the wall with her cloak pulled up over her mouth and her eyes on the ground. She

The subway entrance was three blocks away, behind a bakery with its sign still half lit in memory, and Mara counted every one of those blocks like a prayer.She didn't tell him. That was the first decision she made, running, with the cold tearing at her lungs and the motorcycles growling somewhere behind. The woman only matters as long as she's useful. She turned it over like a stone in her hand. If she told Tobias, he'd stop. He'd fight. He'd do something stupid and noble and get himself killed, and then there'd be no door for Wren. Better that he didn't know. Better that she was just useful.She was good at being useful. It was the only thing she'd ever been good at."Left," she hissed. "Here. Down."The stairs dropped into black. A metal gate hung half off its hinges, and she shouldered through it, and Tobias came after her, pipe in one hand, breathing hard. Mara pulled a flashlight from her pack, a little crank-up thing with a cracked lens, and thumbed it on. The beam made a weak

Wren had stopped counting the minutes. It was too hard. Every time she looked at the clock on the control desk, the red numbers seemed to crawl, and the crawling made her chest tight.Nine hours and forty minutes. Nine hours and thirty-nine.She forced herself up out of the chair and did a lap.It was the only thing that helped. She walked the long middle corridor with her flashlight bobbing, past the numbered doors, past the big steel sign that said SECTION C: LEGUMES, and the smaller one under it that someone, years ago, had taped up as a joke. Beans, beans, the magical fruit. She'd laughed at that sign the first week. She hadn't laughed since.She had a rule about the laps. Three trips, no more. Down the hall, across to the east tunnel, back along the air shaft. Then the notebook. Then the radio.She had just reached the bend in the east tunnel when she heard it.A knock.It was far away and soft, and it came from somewhere inside the mountain. Wren froze with one foot in the air.