25

Without hesitation Brad ditched the truck at the side of the road again. The three Pupils jumped into the snowbank, clambered over it and started towards where the others were gathered. They were waiting at the edge of the forest.

Marith had put the Sunshine in the paper bag that Brad’s fast food had come in at the drive thru a few days prior. Jonathan had found it on the floor. He carried the Perpetual Arrow and its bow. The other Runners were holding the practice bows and arrows Keymaker had handed them, less than two weeks ago.

“You guys got any arrows left?” Brad informed.

Each Runner had less than five to show him.

“Should be enough,” Brad said, suppressing a sigh, subtly scanning their surroundings.

“We’ve got the real deal,” Jonathan shared, triumphantly holding up the giant bow and arrow that held the markings of an ancient time.

The group had been waiting alongside a deserted gravel road, that had split off from one of the main roads of the tri-lake area a while ago. The pine trees grew abundant and thick. The rocks looked sharp and their direct surroundings sloped at an unfortunate angle.

The mountain peaks deceitfully looked down on them. The Pupils were mere specks of dust amongst these giants.

“So which way do we go?” Jonathan asked enthused. Now that he had recovered from the attack he was hungry for revenge.

Amber turned her arms heavenward and shook her head, indicating they had, in fact, no clue.

“Well, which way did the Birdman go?” Jonathan informed with slightly bulging eyes.

“That way, I guess.” Kyle gestured vaguely at the trees behind him.

The other three Runners were awfully silent.

“You guys lost him?” Jonathan now asked with a blaming undertone.

“Yeah, do you know how high and fast that thing goes?” Vanessa asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Do you know how big he is?” Anton, who had met the monster for the first time that day, wondered.

“Yeah, I know,” Jonathan said, pointing at his haggard outfit, sounding as if he was going to give them a piece of his mind.

“Guys,” Brad tried to calm the group down, “Jonathan cut and stabbed that thing with the blade Keymaker gave him. He won’t stop bleeding. That’s how we’ll find him.”

“Yeah, I got him good,” Jonathan proudly shared.

“Then we need to find a trail of blood first…” Anton started.

“And we haven’t, so far,” James finished expectantly, with his hands on his hips.

“He flew so high over the trees, all of his blood might be stuck on the canopy. It’s so thick, it’s basically an umbrella,” Juliette explained.

“And we can’t fly,” Kyle brought up, rather redundant.

“We’ve got no lead,” James clarified.

The courage Marith had shown earlier in the back of the truck, when the flying bat had returned for Jonathan, couldn’t believe what it was hearing and buried itself deep amongst her insecurities again. An uneasy sensation played with her insides. If they wouldn’t find the beast before the Kid did then only Keymaker, Will and dr. Sybling could protect Etienne and, from what she had heard about this immortal Runner, that was not going to be enough.

“I remember his smell,” Jonathan informed.

“Do you smell it now?” Juliette inquired.

“No, but it wasn’t pleasant. I would recognize it if I came across it again.”

“Let’s get to it then,” Brad urged. “That way?” He asked the Runners who had scared him off, pointing at the mountains.

Jonathan handed Brad the magic bow and arrow. Brad swapped them for his handgun.

The group started their hunt. Jonathan walked up front with Anton. The Mages wandered in between, besides the two youngest Prophets of their Chain. Kyle and Amber were the eyes and ears of Oracle during the hunt. Supplying her with the status of current events, while Nate and Lisa informed her about the likeliness of how the near future would unfold, even though that was nearly impossible when the Kid was involved. James and Juliette closed the ranks.

Now that the sun had reached its apex the snow glittered as if it was a nice day.

The clinic remains clear. They haven’t met yet, but they could, any moment now, Anica informed. The Kid must know his anchor is being hunted.

I see, Oracle said.

Anica had fiercely grown into her role and possessed the power to pick almost anything up that Oracle was receiving, as well.

“Get me another bird,” Oracle instructed the Mage.

Watchmaker went to work. The floor in the centre of the Clock in the Sky was partially opened up. He was working by himself, hunched over the opening, aided by his toolbox.

He had to, very locally and quite temporarily, alternate the Web in such a way he could catch a, not too dim-witted, bird and then send it on its way again when Oracle was done with it.

What had started as a great day had rapidly turned into the worst idea Harold’s master had ever had and that included eating sparrows. He had stalked and observed his prey like any decent predator did. He had done so fairly craftily, if he did say so himself.

He had kept a respectable distance until he possibly couldn’t wait any longer. His target had almost reached the habited parts of these mountains again.

He had folded his wings behind him, attempting to create some sort of aero-dynamic shape, which was nearly undoable, but his weight functioned in his advantage. His body had plummeted from the darkness, that had lingered around, with the finesse of a tractor.

Then that two-legged mammal had pulled out a talon of his own to wield. For some reason the Birdman couldn’t stop bleeding after that unfortunate encounter. The skin on his claws failed to heal and streams of blood kept hurrying out of him.

He hung from a few trees he had grabbed and inspected one of his clutches. The wounds were emanating a slicing pain and the leathery skin showed no desire to stick together.

Where was his master? He had told him it was time to gather some intelligence. He might have a solution for his leaking in return for the child he had seen while he had mutilated that Runner.

The Birdman came to the thorough conclusion he couldn’t afford to lose energy on flying anymore. He continued to clamber from tree to tree, damaging the bark and shearing off branches. Once in a while he opted for a chunk of rock to rest on.

The problem wasn’t just the loss of blood. The sun was weakening him as well. He usually hid monstrously in the shadows during daytime, hanging from some cathedral-like tree-formation or wrapping himself in his wings, rolled up in a cave or grotto of some sorts.

Harold decided he needed to hang upside down for a while. That might encourage the blood to flow back to his reptilian brain and spark some great ideas and initiatives in him.

Lucille welcomed another bird into her apartment. Another blackbird, and as it turned out, the female half of the one that had passed along a message that very morning.

The word she carried, in short, said there wasn’t enough time for the Chain to leisurely scan the area, hoping to find a trace of blood, before the Kid would find his anchor, and then soon the successor of Watchmaker.

Lucille knew what to do after the brown, vexed bird had done her part in the grand design of happenings.

She stood in the middle of her modest apartment, covered in old newspapers and cut pieces of linoleum, clutching the handles of her walker, while exerting her mind.

Her apartment had gotten so frozen during recent weeks, even her winter coat couldn’t keep the cold out of her body, but the windows had to stay open. More and more birds gathered inside, on the windowsills and even in the trees circling the building, called to the Bellevue complex by the bird-whisperer of Sweet Lake.

Birds she had never seen before hurried to her call, birds that hadn’t needed her help so far or had come by occasionally for shelter and hadn’t taken up permanent residency in her apartment, but did know who she was, and her fixed group of feathered housemates all assembled and landed where-ever they could find a spot.

I need you to do something for me, Lucille spoke. I know how you’ve been hunted. I also know by whom. I provided you with food and shelter. Now I want you to do me a favour. Help my grandson… and his friends. It will be fairly safe, I promise. They will finish him for you.

The sparrows and starlings tweeted, the parrots babbled, the blackbirds chirruped, the birds of prey screeched. Wings were clapped and feathers were ruffled. Some were scared, most were jittering with anticipation, all were looking forward to this reign of terror coming to an end.

They seemed to lift off simultaneously and emptied the apartment in a matter of minutes. From the outside it looked like the apartment was on fire and smoke was billowing out of Lucille’s windows. This dark cloud ended in the same way as it had begun, with a little plume.

Samuel had felt his anchor wanted him, needed him. Even when he left his wrecked garage out of consideration he sensed Harold was in some sort of distress.

When he had left the lake house he had thought it would be a transaction of information. While he was running around trying to locate the damn bat he started to feel Harold may be in some sort of trouble.

When he reached their spot, a wide clearing in the forest, in the heart of the area, he knew the animal was wounded. He wasn’t there, but his blackened blood was all over the plane of virgin snow. Buckets of thick, syrupy blood had seemingly dropped from the sky. Samuel knew he had fled to their place hoping the eternal Runner would be there, but he hadn’t been.

The fact Harold hadn’t waited for him told him he must be hunted.

He already knew what the problem was. Those snakes in tracksuits, those naïve, muppet wizards and their holier-than-thou visionaries. They were the only ones in the world that could think they were a match for him.

He traced the trails of blood and followed the scent of his wounded anchor.

“My sense of direction might be lacking, but I definitely feel like we have been here before,” Marith commented fatigued and with a frown, after what felt like hours. She checked her clockwork. It had, in fact, been three hours.

They had alternated hiking, jogging and running at full strength – at least, for the Mages and Prophets it had been maximum speed – with abruptly stopping and bumping into each other, when Jonathan thought he smelled something or when any of the other Runners thought they heard or saw an unusual occurrence from the corner of an eye.

The group felt free, excited, elated and anxious at the same time. This was what they were made for, this was why the first few decades of their lives had sucked supremely and this was why they had gotten their Rebirth.

They were living up to their full potential that day and it was the greatest feeling in the world, even though none of them could shake off their worrisome nature entirely. The occasional doom and gloom stuck with them, they couldn’t fight that off.

“Why is your sense of direction lacking?” Brad, who couldn’t fathom such a deficiency, asked. To him that equalled not being able to read a book or drive a car.

“I have other qualities, okay?” Marith defended herself.

They had stopped again, to take a breath, even though Pupils technically didn’t need to take a breath. If they were honest with each other their task started to look a little dire, but they weren’t honest, because nobody wanted to admit this had become an impossible task. They didn’t want to acknowledge that if they wouldn’t succeed killing the Birdman they would surely never accomplish anything as daunting as sending the Kid back to the Empty.

The heated bodies of the Runners were steaming in the frozen landscape. They breathed clouds of vapour and looked at each other, the sky and the trees with less and less hope and anticipation and more and more despair and grieve.

The Sunshine kept Marith warm, but the other two Mages and the two Prophets present were getting so cold they felt like they were wearing no clothes at all. If they wouldn’t have been Rebirthed their fingers and toes would undoubtedly have frozen off.

“That doesn’t answer the question,” Juliette brought in curtly.

Marith didn’t know what Juliette’s deal was, but it was getting incredibly hard to ignore her tone and attitude.

“Maybe I just miss that part in my brain that seems to be working sooo perfectly in others,” she sneered at Juliette. “Maybe that’s the reason my people wandered through the desert for forty years. They could have done it in two weeks, but hey, we can’t orient ourselves!”

Juliette rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.

Growing up Marith had expected moots with piranha’s and swamps with quicksand to be more prominent parts of the struggles in her adult life. Little had she known that getting lost in the mountains of her place of birth was just as dangerous.

“I am not doing it on purpose,” Marith lamely defended herself to the rest of the group.

“Why can’t you orient yourself using the Sun?” James suggested.

“Because the damn thing won’t stop moving!” She pointed frantically it the sky, eyes bulging, her mouth slightly opened in disbelief.

How could anyone determine a course based on the Sun? Every time she looked at the star it had shifted across the heavens.

Behind her she heard Kyle and eventually even Anton and Jonathan snickering and then bursting out in laughter. Marith was glad at least some of them were having fun.

“So, you don’t know which way is east right now?” James teased.

“No!”

“Why not, though?” Brad wondered.

“Because I am not a bleeding Canadian goose!” How was she not getting that point across?

“Those fly south,” Vanessa remarked behind her, barely raining in laughter.

“You see! I didn’t even know that. This is hopeless,” Marith concluded. “I’ll just follow you guys, like I’ve been doing since the start.”

“No, I can’t let you do that. Let me teach you.”

Brad started off about the Earth’s rotation around the Sun and how the Sun’s path across the sky is different per season and per hemisphere. This fact alone convinced Marith his whole explanation was a waste of time. She would never remember or apply any of it. He then went on about shadows, sticks and geometry. When he uttered the words ‘Earth’s axial tilt’ she was lost beyond saving.

“Okay, so the Birdman is officially leading us in circles so that somewhere on the circle he can meet with the Kid and pass the visions along, without us knowing it or finding out who the Kid is,” Kyle summarized, interrupting Brad as he came to the final stage of his lecture.

“The Kid is here?” Amber asked with a shudder.

“I expect he’ll be somewhere in these woods as well right now,” Vanessa shared, not too happy.

“What circles though?” James asked. “We’ve found like five small lumps of blood in the past three hours.”

“It’s still a circle,” Vanessa spoke.

“Must be a bloody big circle then,” the Runner commented recalcitrant.

He could be hiding anywhere on the circle or he could have left it already, without them realizing. They would have to walk it again to find out if the meagre trail of blood globs ventured out anywhere.

“Maybe we should split up,” Juliette suggested, considering the fact that this could take them another three hours.

“An then? What if the group without the Perpetual Arrow finds him first?” James said.

“That could end nasty,” Jonathan shared.

“Why? You look fine.”

“Well, this morning I did not,” Jonathan retorted sharply, not sure how to explain what had happened in the Corridors.

Marith stood by with her mouth somewhat agape and her mind racing. She couldn’t explain it either.

“The Duchess did her heart thingy to help me. To stabilize me, I guess… and it turned out she helped me a lot more than I ever thought she would.”

“More than I thought I could,” Marith brought in, not continuing to explain further, since her attention was yanked somewhere else.

“What?” Vanessa wondered, remembering the first time they had encountered the Birdman.

“Not the Birdman,” Marith mumbled, her eyes racing past the snow-covered branches around them, intently listening to their surroundings and then closing her eyes, putting her talent to use, “but birds. Just ordinary birds.”

She opened them again and stared at the eight members of the Chain she was out hunting with. “Hundreds of them.”

The Pupils stopped their bickering and focused on what was happening in the forest.

First only Marith could sense their fluttering heartbeats rushing through the pine trees, like bullets. She received bigger and smaller heartbeats, beating faster and less fast, belonging to birds of all plume. She didn’t have enough strings bundled up in the core of her mind to reach out to them all. Her chords alternated swiftly and operative, informing her about all the different kinds of flying comrades swarming towards the Pupils.

When Brad actively thought about them he could localize the flock speeding towards them. Then they flew close enough for the senses of the Runners to pick them up.

“More are coming,” Anton whispered, putting his advanced hearing to the test.

“They must be send by my grandmother,” Jonathan realized. “They’re here to help us,” he stated, almost baffled.

A couple of blackbirds perched down in a fir tree close by, chirping rebellious.

Anton noticed the blackbird Lucille had been talking to earlier that day, when he had burst through the door uninvited. “I recognize that one,” he pointed out.

Others joined the couple. The great grey owl and the young hawk, the budgerigars and all sorts of chickadees, the sparrows and the starlings, followed by meadowlarks, red crossbills, gray jays and pine siskins. The birds ranged from the size of walnuts to that of kites. The rainbow of birds perched down in the trees all around the group, bustling with something to tell.

“I recognize all of them,” Marith said. She noticed how she was smiling in disbelief. “This is amazing,” she stated, knocked breathless by the notion that they might find this beast in time after all.

Without warning the birds took off like the wind, fiercely clapping their wings and uttering battle cries in their own avian language. The group didn’t hesitate and ran with them, scraping their waning strength together to keep up.

They sped through powdery snow, over planes of frozen ice, between pines, firs and larch trees, all covered in layers of white glitter.

Their speed turned their surroundings into a hazy blue, their legs ran too fast for their bodies to keep up and their faces were cut by branches, but none of it mattered. The birds knew where he was.

The Kid followed pale and skinny in their wake.

“Blood!” Jonathan yelled elated after about ten minutes. “I smell it!”

They kept running until the birds fanned out, like a school of fish hunted by dolphins, giving the Chain a chance to fulfil their duty.

The Pupils halted expectantly, looking at one another without uttering a word. They had frozen in place for a few undecided moments, while the tiniest vibrating particles of the world did their utmost best to create waves of terror and distress.

Do you remember the first time? Marith’s eyes asked Vanessa.

Vanessa’s head nodded back at her.

The anchor was an optical illusion. Humans wouldn’t notice him if any would walk past him, or underneath him, especially not in an overgrown patch of nature, but when pointed out nobody could un-see the beast.

Vanessa grabbed Marith’s clammy, right wrist. Brad shuffled over with the bow and the Perpetual Arrow and clasped her left.

Marith tried to control her heart and her lungs after the run they had just had by closing her eyes and breathing slowly in and out, creating smoke signals that hid her face from view.

The Birdman was hiding somewhere in the shadows, which had become harder and harder to do now that miss Parker had inserted her foster-birds into the hunt.

Marith let herself be guided by the Web. The tentacles of her mind scouted the vicinity, giving Vanessa and Brad a front seat to the sensations that her moving antennas received.

The sinuating strings raced past the frozen components of the icescape and fairly quickly noticed something in the woods that stood out. An unhealthy pounding of a massive heart. The blood was rustling and swishing though the muscle and the veins around it. She recognized this as a bird’s heart, but this had to be one humongous bird then.

It was different from the heart the Birdman had carried in his chest that morning, but so were Marith’s and Jonathan’s. The beating muscle also wasn’t struggling too far away from where they currently stood, connected to each other.

Kyle had opened his timepiece and had attracted the attention of the remaining five Pupils, but the clouds hovered pale and lacklustre above the face of the clock. They wouldn’t be able to indicate any disturbance in the Web this time around, since they hadn’t been behaving in their usual ways, since the Kid had awakened.

Brad and Vanessa had helped Marith pinpoint the exact location of the wounded beast. Brad’s talent was like a satellite, zooming in on the subject, which he hadn’t been able to do when it regarded the Birdman, unless he was aided by Marith. Vanessa just felt a large object existing. Localizing creatures wasn’t really her talent, but, like any Mage, she possessed an above average sensitivity when the Kid or his anchor were involved.

“Guys,” Vanessa whispered after disengaging her fingers from Marith’s wrist, “follow us.”

Kyle closed his clockwork and shoved it back in the pocket it had come from.

“It isn’t far,” Brad breathed to the group.

The Runners followed the Mages. The Prophets floundered around them.

They no longer ran. They even creeped and crawled the last part. It soon became clear the Web was leading them towards an open space. They could see the blotted plain waiting through the trees. They halted at the edge of the forest, kneeling, squatting and stooping behind the low hanging branches of the pine trees.

Puddles of blood were splattered all around the clearing, in various stages of congealing.

“This blood is much older, he has been here before,” Jonathan commented quietly, hesitantly pointing at a splash close to where he had ensconced himself. “And now he has come back,” James whispered, eyeing a fresh trail that couldn’t have fallen from the sky too long ago.

Even the hearing of the Prophets and the Mages was well enough to hear their fellow Chain-members through the frozen greenery. They didn’t have to look at each other to receive the whispers loud and clear.

Marith understood now what Jonathan had meant when he had talked about a smell. She hadn’t noticed it that morning, but the concentration of blood around here was so high, she could smell it too.

The stench was foul and black. Marith swallowed some burning acid back to where it came from. She pulled her scarf over her nose and breathed through the fabric. It didn’t help much and the scarf turned moist and mushy under her breath rather fast, but it was better than breathing in the unfiltered air.

The woods grew silent, the birds held their breath and so did the Prophets, the Mages and the Runners. Marith’s chest tightened, her breathing stalled, her own heart was telling her something.

A large shadow moved amongst the trees opposite their ambush. It was equally vague as distinct, like a whale drifting to the surface of the ocean for oxygen.

“Guys,” Amber hissed.

“We see it,” Vanessa answered flatly.

Marith closed her eyes and let the sensations flow towards her. She could distinguish branches shifting and even shearing off, as something large brushed past them.

The waves the Web was emanating turned into a tsunami, as if the heart, pounding in anguish, was the epicentre. It felt as if the Web was pointing out this creature didn’t belong in this world by constricting around it, like a womb in labour.

The beast moved to the edge of the clearing, struggling, almost dragging himself. He was limping and used his wings as extra paws, like actual bats did.

The trees gave way to his size, snapping like twigs under a boot. The breaking tree trunks made an ear-shattering, echoing noise in the quiet mountains. A drumline moving through would have caused less rumpus.

The monster had grown into the size of a reasonably sized passenger airplane. His yellow-striped claws, now dripping with his own blood, had grown into horrifying, deformed pillars that could crush any human.

A red robin that had just landed on a low hanging branch next to Marith hastily departed again.

Harold could not hide anymore and he knew it. He was done concealing. It was suffocating. The pain and the hatred made him less vigilant, but more combative.

The anchor crawled into the open space, as if he was done with their hunt. He was taunting them, ready to go down with a final battle that would be discussed for ages. Not in books, universities or college rooms, but on rolls that would end up in the courtroom, down in the Corridors, or around campfires amongst Pupils.

He stood on the opposite side of the clearing, waiting for the Pupils to show themselves. He knew where they were. He always knew where they were.

He screamed an outrageous scream to release the torturous agony in his claws and to commence the fight. A sound so shrill and horrid it had the same effect on the brain as ten thousand knives scratching ten thousand porcelain plates.

He perked himself up. His head was at the same level as the treetops, blustering and huffing. The last birds, surrounding the Chain, decided it was time for them to withdraw and see how this whole thing would unfold from a safer distance. They fluttered away, into the greenery.

The Pupils didn’t feel compelled to enter the clearing or to get any closer to the beast than was absolutely necessary either.

“Can you hit him from here?” Kyle hissed through his teeth at Brad.

“Not accurately,” Brad whispered back, his voice strung. “I only have one shot,” he reminded the Prophet.

“What do we do?” Vanessa asked quietly, hoping the strategic minds of the Runners were sprouting ideas.

Marith hadn’t quite reigned in all her strings yet. Some lingered around the edges of the clearing, while leisurely travelling back to their host.

One of the chords was struck by something lively, or rather, some things that were alive. The feelers kept retracting, until Marith forced them to stay there. She wanted to know what or who was unwise enough to get that close to the livid bat.

Brad made the decision not many people would have made, but he knew it was the only way. He stepped forward, the Perpetual Arrow placed in the bow, still pointing at the ground, but ready to be put to use.

The Birdman had to be lured into the clearing for them to have a chance at success.

“Brad,” Marith whispered breathless, while her head jerked to the left and the vibrating strings kept looking for whatever was at the edge of the forest on the right.

While Harold trampled the snow in an unsettled manner the gaping, knife filled hole in the centre of his deformed skull kept producing hellish sounds.

The Chain was called a Chain for a reason. The others rose up and followed Brad, shaking and trembling. They faced the beast with the trees in their backs and the spotted plain, looking like a reversed agaric, ahead.

Harold looked down at them, leaning on his horrific claws, that continued to seep blood and took a step forward. From his point of view they looked like mice, the size of the sparrows and red robins he had occasionally sucked inwards mid-flight when bigger birds were successfully evading him.

Marith could see the arrows from the Corridors sticking out of his feathered torso. His body and paws were dark red and sticky, his wings looked torn and he kept pinching his eyes, which made his face, as far as it could be described as a face, look beaten and defeated. It was a sad sight.

“Now what?” James mumbled under his breath to the rest of the group.

“How is this better?” Kyle added, almost humorously, if the circumstances weren’t this grave.

Both parties had advanced a few metres into the battlefield. That was it.

Birds! Marith noticed several big ones in conclave, badgering each other in the shadows of the pine trees. These birds of prey didn’t usually cooperate. They had their own territories and hunting grounds. When they did come across one another they would either ignore or harass the other party. The latter game was only played when they thought they could get away with it. Their shelter at Lucille’s place had been an absolute necessity, a survival tactic.

The falcon and the great grey owl the group had seen in the hallway of the Bellevue complex, before descending into the Corridors to meet Keymaker, were among these quibbling hunters.

They were scraping together the courage to engage the thing they had went into hiding for. None of them was convinced what they were about to do would end well, but that didn’t mean it didn’t had to be done.

The great grey owl decided that if he wouldn’t do it now he could never bring himself to do it later. He had been one of the last ones to leave these forests and it felt only right to be the first to insert himself into this situation.

As if unaware of the terrorist standing on four legs and two arms in the clearance, with streams of blood leaving his body, the great grew owl entered the silent battle field and marched over it.

He almost disappeared against the white and woody backdrop, until he was well in the open space. The owl walked in the funny way most birds did, his wings folded neatly behind his back, wobbling slightly to the right and subsequently to the left with every step.

He lazily looked around at the individual Pupils and then at the Birdman with bright yellow bedroom eyes. Marith was surprised at how long his legs were. She only ever saw owls in nature documentaries, hunched on branches or hidden in the hollow parts of trees.

What was this feathered vermin thinking? Harold was surprised to notice five birds of prey, in total, wandering over the flat area like they were enjoying the clear skies and the wintry sun. The audacity to not show any signs of fear or alarm in his presence was a form of profanity he could not tolerate.

His chest heaved, as his lungs slowly drowning in their own blood.

The present members of the Chain watched the five brave feathered soldiers speechless, as if they were seeing birds for the first time.

The Birdman hunched, screeched and jumped forward, determined to crush that affable owl first. He leaped halfway across the open place, as if he was on the winning hand in a board game.

He wasn’t.

The great grey owl, the falcon and a blueish common kestrel and a pair of red-eyed black-shouldered kites, soared up in one smooth movement, out of harm’s way, and back into the woods with the speed of fighter jets.

The Runners raced around the monstrosity in a heartbeat, bows and arrows drawn and ready, in blurry lines that were hard to follow for Marith, without deploying the chords of her mind.

The anchor anxiously spun on his relatively unharmed hind legs in half-rounds, trying to keep an eye on every Runner, which was near impossible. He was making the noises of fire alarms, air horns and medieval battles all at the same time, while trying to wipe the clearance with his stretched out wings.

Marith’s anxiety and insecurities made a prompt and distinguished comeback. The muscles around her arms and shoulders tensed, her stomach jumped through rings of fire and her mind froze like a computer with too many open tabs.

She witnessed the Runners circling around the beast, fulfilling their purpose by occupying him, attacking him and lining him up for Brad to have a clear and honest shot. The Prophets stood at the rim of the treeline, taking in every detail, to fill Oracle in. Vanessa cast protective domes over the Runners if the Birdman would single one out and attempt to crush that unblest soul into oblivion. Brad was waiting for his moment supreme.

Everybody played their part, except Marith. She looked like a rebel with the lower half of her face covered, some primal madness burning behind her eyes and her hair pulled back in a thick braid, like Viking women would for battle, but she didn’t feel like one.

The Birdman had to die. She knew that. He was a danger to local wildlife and he had become a danger to the persistence of the Chain. Why did it feel so wrong then? Why was this such an incredible sad sight? Maybe because the Birdman had never chosen to be here?

The anchor was just serving the Kid. That decrepit creature that had preyed on all of them, had also preyed on and enslaved the Birdman. Marith wished they could send him back to his own dimension to be reunited with his fellow monsters, like the Kid would have to be send back to the Empty.

The Empty, the Kid’s deserted netherworld, which wasn’t ready for this devil yet.

On her left Brad was hesitating as well, slightly, while some kind of restraint came over him. Were they doing the right thing? Was this the only way? What would the implications be?

While the battles within Brad and Marith raged, the tangible battle, the only one that mattered, went on unimpeded.

The Birdman lurched towards Anton, simultaneously launching Juliette off the playing field with a torn wing. James and Jonathan had been able to duck at exactly the right moment. Anton, the quiet and composed, stared into the smelly, gaping hole of death and fired an arrow right in between his horrendous collection of scissored teeth.

The beast pulled back and gurgled, making choking movements and sounds.

Juliette had been lifted by one of his wings and tossed into a pine tree, like a discarded stuffed animal. She skilfully and elegantly glided off the branches, as if on a snowboard, and joined the battle again. She winked at Vanessa, who had wrapped her in a bubble and had prevented her from breaking any bones.

The female Runner ran over the snow, stooping and squatting, together with James and Jonathan, when the beast turned around his own axis again. As soon as one of his yellow eyes came into vision, she knew what to do. She loaded her bow with one of her last arrows, drew back, aimed and fired, blinding his right eye instantly.

Do they have unicorns in the Neverlands? Marith could hear Etienne’s voice as if he was standing next to her in the frozen clearance and they weren’t fighting a hellish interdimensional creature. And do they have the bird-eater?

Etienne, the likely successor of Watchmaker. He was the one that could strengthen the Empty for the Kid’s return. They did this for the orphaned child in the clinic and for all the other affected children in the area.

Marith’s face hardened. Her eyes blazed with newfound resolution. She looked at the male Mage she had been on several adventures with. She dared to call him a friend now.

He was wavering. She eyed him intently.

“I’m out!” She heard James scream.

Jonathan fired his last arrow with a strained face, hitting the Birdman in the neck. “Me too!”

Juliette and Anton tried to keep the fight going, until Brad was ready, but they wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long.

The Birdman looked like a pincushion, a very angry pincushion, that didn’t show any signs of surrender. He hunched again, ignoring the last arrows that entered his flesh. He had stopped feeling about an hour ago.

His wings were now firmly planted in the red mush. He took his time looking at the emptyhanded Runners. He arched his head so that his one good eye singled out Jonathan. He seemed to remember. He blinked with the yellow dinner plate that still saw, the transparent membrane moistening his eye, while remaining focussed on the Runner.

Didn’t I kill you? The eye seemed to ask.

Jonathan was at a loss, a loss for words, a loss for arrows and a loss of options.

“Brad!” Marith yelled, simultaneously pulling her scarf down.

He didn’t look at her, but it had woken him up from the same contemplations that had been plaguing the minds of Vanessa and Marith.

He brusquely shook his head, to get the doubt out, and walked forward, further onto the clearing. His legs disappeared into the thick, reddened snow, until his knees.

The male Mage pulled the zipper of his bomber jacket down and fished a pair of shiny aviator sunglasses out of an inside pocket that he put on his face.

James had sought eye contact with Marith and came scampering towards her. She instantly remembered there was another piece of the puzzle, another tool to beat this creature. The corked Erlenmeyer had created a bulge under her coat and had kept her comfortably warm during their quest so far.

Now she opened her coat and got the paper bag out.

“Out!” She heard Anton and Juliette scream in the distance.

Darkness spread its wings and blossomed, shooting up in the sky. When he clapped his leathered arms it was as if walls of thunder were hurtled at the Pupils.

Kyle and Amber fell back into the forest, looking up at the winged monstrosity and the sunshine that fell through the lacerated patagium, against the azure blue sky, informing Oracle and Anica about the airborne colossus.

Brad had withstood the blow, his legs firmly planted in the tief schnee, but he imagined laying under an ascending helicopter to be more pleasant than these beating wings forcing air onto the ground, and into his eardrums.

Marith threw the Sunshine at James in a perfect bow, like the path the Sun lapsed daily in the sky. He caught it mid-run and curved back to where the Birdman was hovering over the plain in a bow.

Brad raised the ancient weaponry, praying every old tail and myth around Armsmaker was right and the equipment wouldn’t fail them. His muscular shoulders tensed under his leather jacket. His blue eyes flashed with determination under his exerted forehead, temporarily crowded with fine lines.

He held the bow with his left hand, clasping the cool materials of the grip, feeling ascertained in what he had to do now. With his right hand he pulled the arrow back and aimed.

Shooting a normal sized arrow at the monster that was now the size of a lorry truck with wings was like throwing darts at a building. It sounded easy, but it was hard to execute perfectly.

Time slowed down again for Marith, just like when they were chased in the truck that morning, and all that happened was crystal clear.

The beast soared. Brad pulled the Perpetual Arrow back in the peep tube, that Marith knew as ‘the stretchy rope’. She could hear the recently attached material lengthen under his strength.

His short, blond hair shone golden in the fierce sunlight. His sunglasses reflected nothing but darkness.

James looked over his shoulder, still running. He only needed a glance at the Mage to know he was ready. He found himself in the middle of the opening, on the other side of the beast, and halted.

The Pupils barely communicated with each other. The proceedings were too straight forward to open a loud discussion and waste time.

James uncorked the Erlenmeyer as if he pulled the pin from a grenade and handily tossed it at the furious mass diagonally above his head.

The effects were explosive. The Sunlight wasn’t considered harmful to humans, yet the entire Chain, minus Brad, felt compelled to shield their eyes.

Brad would describe it later as a detonation of white rays, glitter and heat. More or less a colourless firework show.

The Birdman was a screaming, blazing ball of anger and fury. Marith continued to feel sorry for it. This dark monster was not responsible for its own creation and it had acted on impulses and plight its entire existence.

Unfortunately, it had to be done, even if it was a dirty and unfair job.

When Brad released the bow the satisfying zooming sound of the arrow rippled through the clearance and Marith dared to look up again. Most of the extreme light was fading, but its stunning effects on the anchor were lasting.

Initially the Birdman had soared up and angled away, when James had deployed the Sunshine, but the result was instant and unavoidable. It didn’t only rob the raging beast of his strength, but also of his senses.

Now he was plummeting back to Earth, numb and lost. To Marith this happened at the rate of a scarlet red maple leaf idly whirling down from a branch in a mild autumn breeze.

Marith could see the path it was forcing through the Web. A brief preternatural insight came to her and she could actually see the course of the descending Birdman and the Perpetual Arrow intercept, before it was happening.

The Web didn’t look so pale and lacklustre those fractional moments. She noticed its vibrancy, its coding. It looked rapturous. A sense of order was about to be restored to their world.

She checked his heartbeat with her restive strings, pattering inside her to be put to work. It failed to beat with the vigour necessary to keep him floating through the air.

His massive, damaged wings hung limply aside his soft body. The monster looked like a North-Korean rocket plummeting back to Earth, an involuntary abortion of a big project.

The Web didn’t decide the outcome of the hunt, but the presence of the Pupils gave the arrow a little nudge, or a tug, into the right trajectory.

Then it hit the Birdman, right in the heart. Marith was the only Pupil to notice that specific detail.

As he drew his last breath he let out a sound so obscene Marith thought it was almost as shocking as the Dutch language.

At the impact of the arrow the distasteful creature ceased to exist. They had brought an end to his obscenities.

“Where did it go?” Brad wondered.

Was this it? Was he really, actually gone now? They looked from one to the other with a hangover of incredulity.

Samuel had to admit he had allowed his mind to wonder before what would happen if Harold would come to pass. He was somewhat curious, in a morbid way, but mostly devastated.

The Kid saw his anchor, his supply of energy and information, getting killed and he was sure he would make them pay.

Harold, the only one who would never leave him, control him or betray him, had died. This creature was his only real, trustworthy companion. He had even returned to their meeting place for a second time.

They didn’t have these nifty clockworks and they couldn’t communicate through time and space. They had to physically meet. He hadn’t even known it was time to go find him, until that affable Mage and the police officer had rammed the door to his garage to save the Runner.

There was nothing he could do but watch his loyal and beloved informant get taken down by a bunch of losers, underdogs who had seized the opportunity to play God.

The Kid stood watching from a safe distance like the tall, pale worm that he was. He saw his companion shoot up into the sky, followed by a blast of light and the lethal arrow. He plummeted back to their clearing almost immediately, before disappearing forever.

Tears rolled from the corners of his eyes and froze on his cheeks. A disastrous turn of what could have been a triumphant day.

There was nothing left for him to do, except to return home and do some more coding. He was pretending to be a software engineer after all. The only option that remained was an attempt to beat them with their own technology.

Funny word, home. He had never had one, running between dimensions and his parents. Yet, he craved one and this place had felt more like the definition that humans tended to give to it than anything else in the world. Maybe it had something to do with his body being physically stored there for a hopeless amount of years.

The Web was a continuous sinuous blanket that flowed and vibrated. It connected everything with everybody and after Brad connected the arrow with the anchor it did an exalted and happy dance.

This, however, didn’t bring any clarity to the Pupils. They had grouped into a crescent around the spot the Birdman had met the Earth. It was empty, vapid, unoccupied. The clearance was wiped from evil, but the lack of a corpse puzzled the group to a few moments silence.

“Did you guys see that?” Vanessa wondered, breathless, very unsure of what she had just witnessed.

“Yeah,” Jonathan sighed.

“The glittering wind?”

“What? No.” Jonathan frowned and tore his gaze from the place where the Birdman had met the snow again to look at her.

“What are you talking about?” Kyle wondered.

“It was like a whisper of air, except that I could see it.” Marith shook her head, telling herself and the others to forget about it. There were more pressing matters. Such as where the anchor had gone to.

“What do we do now?” Jonathan asked no one in particular.

“I guess we could go have something to eat?” James proposed.

“I could go for a bite,” Amber agreed.

“Shouldn’t we go check on dr. Sybling and that boy in the clinic?” Anton wondered.

They discussed the best way to spend the rest of their afternoon, until a loud, colourful and cacophonous bang made them jump. Out of the travesty of nature came an array of specifically pissed off birds.

Lucille’s parakeets flew skywards, screaming about murder and fire. A puffin, a gannet, some city pigeons, a rainbow beak toucan and a kingfisher or two. Followed by a bunch of flamingos, a pelican and a snowy egret.

Where had this thing been?

The Pupils watched the occurrence like a bunch of kids bamboozled by a magic performance.

The parade wasn’t finished yet.

Some local birds erupted from the feathery fireworks. A pawed booby, a spoonbill, a snipe, some thrushes, and many other birds Marith had seen on the drawings of the children in the clinic, marched around the clearing, surprised to be hurtled into a hellscape of snow and ice.

The group continued to stare at the spectacle with breathless amazement. Dozens of birds, from every corner of the world, with a wide variety of shapes, sizes and colours, ensued.

Finally a majestic couple of eagles erupted from the death of their murderer. They soared to the edge of the forest and landed in a tree, eyeing their surroundings, in the suspicious way birds of prey do.

The birds appeared to be returning to their dimension of origins in the order they had been eaten in.

A humongous mute swan, ruffling its feathers, marched from the chaos at last. Marith had been waiting for that one specifically.

He tottered towards the pine tree the eagles had perched in. They had been waiting for the young, white bird as well.

Halfway across the plain he started to walk faster. When he reached a pace that could be described as jogging he spread his wings and took off. Barely dodging the treetops he soared past the eagles that were airborne straight away. The tree of them flew off in a direction that could only by Sweet Lake’s.

The birds that had helped them find the Birdman had found their way back to the clearance and landed all around them, on branches and on the battlefield. They welcomed their fallen brethren back into this world, busily tweeting and babbling.

Marith had never seen so many birds in one place. There must have been over two hundred birds in total.

There was nothing left for the Pupils to do than to witness the ecstatic and euphoric reunion of feathered relatives.

Amber’s infatuation with Brad seemed to have subsided somewhat, since their tour through the Corridors, but this public display of extreme manliness had her hooked again instantly, like an addict.

She couldn’t help herself. She stomped over to him, ploughing through the deep snow, and hugged him. Brad was beside himself, exulted and triumphant. He hugged her back.

Lucille’s refugee’s took off in pairs with the returnees, to get them reacquainted to this world and to guide them to their climate of origin.

They waited until all the birds had taken off in groups and pairs. The pelican left with some noisy geese and a stork. The thrushes and sparrows were guided by their peers and the blackbirds. The gannet, the puffin and the pigeons formed a group and the flamingos, the rainbow beak toucan and several other tropical birds another.

After it was done there was a certain springiness and freshness in the air.

All they had to do now was to wait for the Kid to become weak and sloppy enough, so that they could catch him at a minimalized risk.

“The Kid has lost his anchor. The decay will start soon,” Kyle commented on their way down from the mountains.

“He will get feeble and come for the junior Watchmaker as soon as he suspects who it is,” Vanessa said darkly.

“And now?”

“Now we wait.”

They were hiking back to the village. As it turned out the clearance was no more than forty-five minutes outside the centre of Sweet Lake at a regular pace. The group did it in under half an hour.

“In the Netherlands we say ‘You can only see who is swimming naked when the tide is low’,” Marith remarked.

“What does that even mean?” Amber informed with a giggle.

“He will start to stand out now that his main source of energy is gone.”

In the Clock in the Sky several sunsets and an equal amount of sunrises had passed. Daylight came peeking over the mountain ridges again, throwing golden lines over the panorama Watchmaker, Anica and Oracle gazed upon.

They had witnessed everything. That day’s events had been undeniably concerning, but the outcome was neither good nor bad. The Chain hadn’t won or lost. The status quo had changed, was all.

Under the circumstances, the obliteration of the anchor was the best case scenario. Etienne remained safely in the clinic with dr. Sybling, Iris and William, suggesting the Kid hadn’t reached the Birdman in time and had no idea about the identity of Watchmaker’s successor.

Retaliation, however, was imminent. They had to prepare for the fact the Kid’s next move would be grim, sudden and was likely to be lethal.

Oracle decided to shoot for the stars one last time.

“The odds of it being an actual child are small,” Juliette commented.

They were standing in the hallway of the psychiatric ward where the wallpaper was no longer covered and the doors led to the children’s bedrooms.

The Chain had postponed a well-deserved meal, and maybe even some drinks, to go straight to the clinic.

“Compared to what?” Marith asked defiantly. Was she doubting the instincts of Nate and herself?

“Huh?”

“The odds are small compared to what? Winning the lottery? Getting diagnosed with cancer? Ever going through a divorce in your life? Jesus Christ riding by on a unicorn?”

Some snickers, mostly from Kyle and Brad, followed. Juliette didn’t answer, but the look in her eyes was full of envy and disdain.

Marith ignored this and knocked on the closed, white door. “Etienne? It’s Marith… from the Neverlands.”

The group heard some running on the other side of the door and then it was abruptly and clumsily opened.

“Hi,” he said shyly, when he saw how many adults were standing on the other side.

“Can we come in for a second, sweetie?” Vanessa asked, slightly bending over.

They could come in, but they barely fitted in the confined space of the child’s bedroom.

He was drawing thrushes in blooming bushes, a duck pond and colourful flowers, embellishing them with the glitter markers Marith had gifted him. His room looked a lot healthier now. No more yellow eyes, fangs in gaping holes or deceased birds. One of the nurses must have removed those nightmarish drawings. The mirror on the other end of his bedroom wall was placed back. The Duplo birdhouses he had crafted, had been turned into other creations, such as castles and zoo’s.

“So,” James started, defiantly, “how can we know this child is the one?”

“Shhhj,” Vanessa silenced him. “Don’t speak of him like that out loud,” she hissed.

The nine Pupils connected quietly, not in a circle, but in a string, like pearls in a necklace.

Jonathan and Marith informed the group about Nate’s visions together, taking turns, finally taking the time to go over that mornings strange and violent processions.

How do the two of you know all this? James inquired, suppressing a mental sigh.

An awkward silence hung in the air for a few moments.

Nate is the strongest one... Marith deflected, leaving the synchronicity of Sophie introducing her to Etienne and her own hunches and natural tendencies to keep visiting the child every time she would come to see her father out of the equation, for now.

What was that? Juliette wondered with raised eyebrows.

That’s why he had to leave Sweet Lake, Marith added, looking at obstinate faces.

Aren’t we all equal?

I-It’s like in an orchestra, Marith started her defence. Every instrument, every person, is absolutely unmissable, but they are different. We are all equal members of the Chain, we have equal rights, we have an equal say in things, but we are not equal in talents or abilities, just diverse.

He really is and I am not too proud to admit that. Amber stared around the group.

She didn't really know how Nate knew more than the rest. Maybe he was so strong, because he could find his way further into the Web? Maybe the Prophets were like satellite dishes and Nate was the biggest one?

Anton, the most sensitive and perceptive of Sweet Lake’s Runners, looked at the child and frowned. “Do you have a clockwork?”

Etienne nodded, shifted in his chair, stood up and pulled the watch from under his t-shirt by lifting the chain from his neck, then over his head. He was holding a shining, rotund object that appeared to be ticking.

He sat down again and placed it in between them.

“Can I see it?” Marith asked, thrilled and tense.

Etienne nodded again.

She disconnected from the Chain and picked the smooth, cool instrument up from the low table and flipped it open. The hands of the clock appeared to be moving, indicating the exact right time of day, causing the ticking and clicking sounds it was emanating.

Marith stared at the group with big eyes. “Do you guys understand what this means?”

Etienne, uncomfortable with the overflowing attention, had returned to his drawing.

“He drew birds and he’s holding a clockwork that you gave him... such a profound genius!” James scoffed, out loud again.

“What else can he do?” Jonathan asked, more patient.

The rest of the group was also letting go of each other’s wrists.

“He fixed it! This is my old clockwork. It didn’t work before. Remember? Now it does!” Marith tried to convince the others, by pointing wildly at the child and raising the mechanical wonder in her hands.

“Maybe he just dropped it,” Brad tried. “Like those old television sets they had in primary school that just needed a good slap before it would stop snowing on the screen.”

“I can read air,” Etienne uttered after a deep breath and a sigh, not looking at anyone in particular.

“What was that, honey?” Vanessa asked friendly.

All she knew was that kids often perceived the world differently, in a more unfiltered manner. This particular child was telling them about the world the way he saw it and Vanessa could tell he wasn’t making things up.

“I can’t read the books yet, but I can read the air.”

“Air?”

“Like in blank spaces?” Marith wondered. “The air between us?”

Etienne nodded.

“What do you see then?” Brad tried.

“He’s is in a psych ward,” James interrupted. “Of course he is seeing shit, otherwise he wouldn’t be here in the first place.” He hissed the last part through his teeth, after warning looks from Vanessa and Amber.

“Maybe it is his way of explaining time and space?” Marith wondered.

“What Oracle was talking about?”

“Yes, and I can see death people,” James mumbled sarcastically.

“Death people are on the Otherside. You can’t see them.” Etienne caught his lie.

“What?”

The air turned chilly. Everybody froze and stared at the child that kept on scratching his crayons and pens over the paper. Nobody was talking or interrupting one another anymore.

“I can see the pretty ladies and the old man,” Etienne informed, not taking his eyes of the paper.

“Can’t be Oracle and Watchmaker.” James shook his head in disbelief.

“Why can he not be the one?” Anton asked him, whispering the last words, as if that would make the difference.

“He’s five.” James gestured at the kid.

“Six,” Etienne corrected him.

Etienne took a deep breath, before speaking again. “I can see Nate’s garden.”

“How does he even know who Nate is?”

“What garden, though?” Amber wondered astutely.

“Marith, do you know what he’s talking about? He’s your Prophet...” Brad’s voice died away.

Marith swallowed. Shivers ran up and down her spine. She shifted her gaze from the child to the group. “Oh, it’s him.”

“What is going on in here?” Dr. Sybling’s stern voice rang. The group parted like a family of sea lions hunted by orca’s.

Cecile, Iris and William entered the room. The last un-Rebirthed Pupil immediately returned the rifle and the bag with munition to Brad.

“I haven’t used it,” he murmured.

The occupants of the tiny room, minus Etienne, quickly locked into a Chain.

Marith went on to explain all about how Sophie had brought her to Etienne, which Amber remembered must be the synchronicity Oracle had informed them about.

Then the Mage discussed her hunches regarding Etienne –how he knew about the Birdman early on, his drawings of the victims, but mostly how he must have fixed the clockwork somehow - and how Nate’s visions were seemingly proving her right.

Finally she touched on the subject of Nate’s world, but she kept it curt and factually. What they were doing in that modest dimension of theirs was a private affair, mostly born from loneliness and hopelessness and it was really nobody’s business apart from their own.

After that the oldest Prophet in the room took the floor, summarizing that day’s events, as she had received them from Oracle, her milky eyes dancing around at nothing in particular. Iris, however, shifted her gaze regularly from one person to the other.

So we send him to the Clock in the Sky now? Amber informed demurely after the debriefing was finished.

And how do you propose we should draw out the Kid if Etienne is no longer among us? Dr. Sybling asked her sternly.

Amber shrivelled, hearing the undertone in her voice. I don’t know, but… she didn’t finish her thought. Everybody understood the ‘but’ to what Oracle’s twin was suggesting.

So, we’re basically using him as bait? Kyle informed.

Dr. Sybling did not answer that open door.

It seems like a game with high stakes, but when you think about it, is it really? There are four Runners in Sweet Lake right now and he is living right under dr. Sybling’s nose, Jonathan brought in.

Marith nodded, nauseously. It sounded right, but it didn’t feel right. Her ineffable instincts warned her about the opposite of right.

But… Marith swallowed, considering whether or not to finish the sentence she had started. There sure were a lot of ‘buts’ involved in the conversation they were having.

We don’t know for sure if the Kid has met the Birdman after he attacked Jonathan. He could know, she said with telling eyes, nodding vaguely at Etienne, who was clamping one of his glitter pens. He was leaning over the low table in the middle of his bedroom, no longer drawing. She wondered how much of what was going on he was actually following.

Etienne took in an audible gulp of air, preparing to speak up to the adults cramped in his room. Then Anton came up with a strategic plan to keep the child safe, until the Kid had revealed himself. The Pupils all tore their gaze away from Etienne and the clockwork to look at the Runner.

Our locator has met him now, Anton started, so from this moment on you are able to locate Etienne under all circumstances, am I right?

Yes, Brad said, his mind stalling for a few moments. However… he cleared his proverbial throat, if the Kid would be to… you know, kidnap him, I am not sure if I could get a clear visual on his location any longer, he shared uncertainly.

With each passing sentence Marith was less and less on board with this plan. Vanessa started to feel queasy as well.

Etienne shifted in his tiny plastic chair and took another breath, still clasping his pen. The group turned away from dr. Sybling and her dog to look at him again.

“Nobody is coming for me,” he started.

Marith felt Amber’s fingers stiffen on the pressure points in her wrist. A wave of comprehension flowed through the Chain as it dawned on them that Etienne didn’t have to touch them to sense their Flow, their communications. Everybody understood the weight of this discovery. Everybody, except James.

“The air…” the child continued, taking another big breath.

“That’s the Web then, right?” James interrupted. If he was going to believe this minor would be the next concierge, and at times even an architect, of the Web he preferred to have the facts straight.

“Yes, James,” Vanessa answered curtly. “What’s with the air?” She asked Etienne in a honey-sweet tone.

“The air would tell me,” he said, looking at her intently.

“I guess that’s a good sign,” Anton brought in, attempting to pick up the plea for his plan.

The Runners would take turns, running in shifts, at night as well, to keep a check on the perimeters and also on the junior Watchmaker. The Mages and the Prophets would have to travel a little more to attend their own appointments, so that would free up the Runners.

The Runners would either get any essential epistles from Oracle by courtesy of dr. Sybling or from Kyle and Amber, who would meet the Runners before and after school, at a pre-arranged location. The structure of their Chain would be temporarily changed, to serve a higher purpose.

Nobody is going to believe the successor is going to be a six year old, Anton finished, but we cannot take any risks.

When Marith was in bed, late at night - drunk with sleep, but too restless of the mind to actually fall asleep immediately - she could see the Web again. Its dancing, vibrating particles. Its colours and glitters. Its shapes and movements. And in some strange, twisted way it made her feel at ease, knowing that this inanimate blanket of everything was neatly wrapped around her.

Deep down she knew she was on the right path, even if it didn’t seem like that on the surface. The fabric of reality had a cautious and tentative celebration and eventually Marith slowly drifted away.