Tasha K. Rookswater

The city was covered that day in a layer of new clean snow. Caden spent the morning at the kitchen table, making notes, going back and forth to the bookshelves all over the house to look things up in his favourite stories. At eleven-thirty he ate a banana-and-cheese sandwich, put on his coat and boots, and headed out the door, Paz trailing behind him. The seven of them had agreed to meet in the parking lot on the east side of the university campus. It was near enough to Ruth’s school that she could walk there easily, it was close to where the Nouns had been spending their time, and it was spacious enough for Caden’s plan--his old plan, that was. But his new plan would need lots of room too. Masami and Hunter were already there. Ruth turned up a few minutes later. They waited. Duck and Mushroom were nowhere to be seen. “Could they have gotten lost?” Hunter wondered. “Or gotten the time wrong, maybe? Can Nouns tell time?” “They managed it yesterday,” Ruth pointed out. “I think they

Caden woke, thrashing, tangled in his blankets. He was breathing hard, and he thought he might have cried out, but he wasn’t sure. The nightmare was already fading at the edges, in the usual way of dreams, but the last image stood out sharp and clear in his mind. Craters in the ground, huge and black, their edges melted into glass. Ruined buildings on the horizon like broken teeth. A setting sun, red in a smoky sky. And there’d been somebody with him, standing behind Caden’s shoulder so he couldn’t see them. He’d asked: “How long has it been like this?” And the answer had come: “Since always.” His breath was steadier now, and he could look around the room in the dark and see the safe, familiar shapes of his furniture, and the outline of the window, and the bar of orange light from the streetlight that shone across the foot of his bed--but none of it was reassuring. Caden knew it had just been a dream, but he also knew, or felt like he knew, that it could easily be real. If they we