“We have to raise the third watch.” Kirsten drew her two best knives from her belt. August disappeared among the tents. She heard his muffled voice—“I don’t know, a sound, maybe a voice down the road, I need you to take our places so we can go check it out”—and two shadows emerged to replace them, yawning and unsteady on their feet.
August and Kirsten set off as quickly and quietly as possible in the direction of the sound. The forest was a dark mass on either side, alive and filled with indecipherable rustlings, shadows like ink against the glare of moonlight. An owl flew low across the road ahead. A moment later there was a distant beating of small wings, birds stirred from their sleep, black specks rising and wheeling against the stars.
“Something disturbed them,” Kirsten said quietly, her mouth close to August’s ear.
“The owl?” His voice as soft as hers.
“I thought the owl was flying at a different angle. The birds were more to the north.”
“Let’s wait.”
They waited in the shadows at the side of the road, trying to breathe quietly, trying to look everywhere at once. The claustrophobia of the forest. The first few trees visible before her, monochrome contrasts of black shadow and white moonlight, and beyond that an entire continent, wilderness uninterrupted from ocean to ocean with so few people left between the shores. Kirsten and August watched the road and the forest, but if anything was watching them back, it wasn’t apparent.
“Let’s walk farther,” August whispered.
They resumed their cautious progress down the road, Kirsten gripping her knives so tightly that her heartbeat throbbed in the palms of her hands. They walked far beyond the point where the scouts should have been, two miles, three, looking for signs. At first light they returned the way they had come, speechless in a world of riotous birdsong. There was no trace of the scouts, nothing at the edges of the forest, no footprints, no signs of large animals, no obviously broken branches or blood. It was as though Dieter and Sayid had been plucked from the face of the earth.
23
“I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND,” the tuba said, midmorning, after several hours of searching for Sayid and Dieter. No one understood. No one responded. The disappearances were incomprehensible. They could find no trace. The Symphony searched in teams of four, grimly, methodically, but the forest was dense and choked with underbrush; they could have passed within feet of Dieter and Sayid and not known it. In those first hours there were moments when Kirsten caught herself thinking that there must have simply been some misunderstanding, that Dieter and Sayid must have somehow walked by them in the dark, somehow gone the wrong way down the road, that they’d reappear with apologies at any moment, but scouts had gone back and forth on the road for miles. Again and again Kirsten stopped still in the forest, listening. Was someone watching her? Just now, had someone stepped on a branch? But the only sounds were of the other search teams, and everyone felt watched. They met in the forest and on the road at intervals, looked at one another and said nothing. The slow passage of the sun across the sky, the air over the road unsteady with heat waves.
When night began to fall they gathered by the lead caravan, which had once been an extended-bed Ford pickup truck. “Because survival is insufficient,” words painted on the canopy in answer to the question that had dogged the Symphony since they’d set out on the road. The words were very white in the rising evening. Kirsten stood by Dieter’s favorite horse, Bernstein, and pressed her hand flat against his side. He stared at her with an enormous dark eye.
“We have traveled so far together,” the conductor said. There are certain qualities of light that blur the years. Sometimes when Kirsten and August were on watch together at dawn, she would glance at him as the sun rose and for a fleeting instant she could see what he’d looked like as a boy. Here on this road, the conductor looked much older than she had an hour earlier. She ran a hand through her short gray hair. “There have been four times,” she said, “in all these years, when Symphony members have become separated from the Symphony, and in every single instance they have followed the separation protocol, and we’ve been reunited at the destination. Alexandra?”
“Yes?”
“Will you state the separation protocol, please?” It had been drilled into all of them.
“We never travel without a destination,” Alexandra said. “If we’re ever, if you’re ever separated from the Symphony on the road, you make your way to the destination and wait.”
“And what is the current destination?”