I thought about that book on Mr. Bowditch’s bedtable, the one with a funnel filling up with stars on the cover. What if I’d found my way into the world matrix it was supposedly about? （I wished to God I’d put it in my pack along with food, Radar’s pills, and Polley’s gun.） The idea made me remember a movie I’d watched with my mom and dad when I was very young—The NeverEnding Story, it was called. Suppose Empis was like Fantasia in that movie, a world created out of collective imagination? Was that also a Jungian concept? How would I know, when I didn’t even know if you pronounced the guy’s name Jung or Yung?
I wondered about those things, but what I kept coming back to was more practical: my dad. Did he know I was gone yet? He might still be ignorant of the fact （and ignorance, so they say, is bliss）， but like Woody, he might have had an intuition—parents, I’d heard, were prone to them. He would have tried to call, and when I didn’t pick up, he’d text. He might just assume I was too busy with school shit to respond, but that wouldn’t hold for long, because he knew I was pretty responsible about hitting him back as soon as I could.
I hated the idea of him worrying, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I had made my decision. And besides—I have to say this if I’m going to tell the truth—I was glad to be here. I can’t exactly say I was having fun, but yes, I was glad. I wanted answers to a thousand questions. I wanted to see what was over every next rise and turn. I wanted to see what the boy had called the haunted city. Of course I was scared—of Hana, of the night soldiers and something or someone called Flight Killer, most of all of Gogmagog—but I was also exhilarated. And there was Radar. If I could give her a second chance, I meant to do it.
Where I stopped to have lunch and rest for awhile, the woods had closed in on both sides. I saw no wildlife, but there was plenty of shade. “Want some chow, Rades?”
I hoped she did, because I hadn’t gotten any of the pills into her that morning. I opened my pack, got out a can of sardines, opened them, and tilted the can toward her so she could get a good smell. She lifted her nose but didn’t get up. I could see more of that gummy stuff oozing out of her eyes.
“Come on, girl, you love these.”
She managed three or four steps down the slope of the cart, and then her rear legs gave out. She slid the rest of the way, sluing sideways and uttering a single high-pitched yelp of pain. She hit the hardpan on her side and lifted her head to look up at me, panting. The side of her face was smeared with dust. It hurt me to look at that. She tried to rise and couldn’t.
I stopped wondering about the whole people, the gray people, even my dad. All of that was lost. I brushed away the dirt, picked her up, and carried her onto the narrow grass verge between the road and the bulking masses of trees. I laid her there, stroked her head, then examined her back legs. Neither appeared to be broken, but she yipped and bared her teeth—not to bite, but in pain—when I touched them high up. They felt okay to me, but I was pretty sure an X-ray would have shown badly swollen and inflamed joints.
She drank some water and ate a sardine or two… I think to please me. I had lost my own appetite but made myself eat some of the fried rabbit Dora had given me, plus a couple of cookies. I had to feed the engine. When I picked Rades up—carefully—and put her back in the cart, I could hear the rattle of her respiration and feel every rib. Woody had said she was dying, and he was right, but I hadn’t come all this way to find my dog dead in the back of Dora’s cart. I grabbed the poles and moved on, not running—I knew that would blow me out—but at a fast walk.
“Hang in. Things might be better tomorrow, so hang in for me, girl.”
I heard the thump of her tail against the cart as she wagged it.
3
The clouds darkened as I pulled the cart along Kingdom Road, but there was no rain. That was good. I didn’t mind getting wet but getting soaked would make Radar’s condition worse and I didn’t have much to cover her with. Also, pulling the cart might be difficult or even impossible if a hard rain turned the road to muck.
Maybe four or five hours after Radar took her spill, I breasted a steep rise and stopped, partly to catch my breath but mostly just to look. The land fell away before me, and for the first time I could see the towers of the city clearly. In this dull light those towers had a sullen olive cast, like soapstone. A tall gray wall ran into the distance on both sides of the road, as far as I could see. I was still miles away and it was impossible to tell how high it was, but I thought I could make out a monstrous gate in the center. If that’s locked, I thought, I am truly fucked.