Location:The North Road — The Long Shoulders, two days above the last camp
Date/Time:TC1857.04.13 – TC1857.04.17
They heard the children before they saw them, and that was the first thing that was wrong.
It came up the shoulder on the wind in pieces — not words, nothing you could take a word out of, just the pitch. High and thin and ordinary. Somebody small was saying something to somebody else small, at conversational volume, a kilometer away on open ground, and had been doing it for long enough that nobody had told them to stop.
Mei went flat on the grass beside Jace and did not understand for a moment why her hands had gone cold.
Then she did.
A person being taken somewhere by a thing that kills people does not chat.
***
They lay on the crest for the better part of an hour, and Jace would not let anybody move.
