He looked at the open journal. At the words It looks like my mother. At the date: 1932.
She flew away. The silence was enormous.
“That’s not a compass,” Delilah said, frowning. “That’s a burden.”
“It’s broken,” Elias said, trying to hand it back. -C- 2008 mcgraw-hill ryerson limited
And he thought of the thing that wore his mother’s face, screaming as the valley collapsed. He wondered if it had been trapped there for centuries, wearing the faces of a thousand lost people. He wondered if throwing the compass away had freed it—or simply sent it somewhere else.
Elias held up the compass. The needle pointed northeast across the tundra.
Ninety years. Tivon had been here for ninety years, trapped by a thing that wore the faces of the dead. He looked at the open journal
But that was a question for another summer.
“I hoped not.” August reached out and took Elias’s hand. His fingers were cold as stone. “But some doors don’t want to be closed. They want to be fed.”
She smiled, and her smile was perfect, and that was the problem—it was too perfect. No crow’s feet. No chapped lips from the arctic wind. She hadn’t aged a day in thirteen years. She flew away
“You’re not my mother,” he said.
The valley shuddered. The sky cracked. And then, like a dream ending, the valley folded in on itself—the steep walls collapsing, the black river vanishing, the cabin crumbling into dust.
“Where did the biologist find it?” Elias asked.
Elias remembered his grandfather’s pale eyes. The way August had said, The needle points to Tivon’s last camp. Not “Tivon’s body.” Not “Tivon’s remains.” Camp. As if Tivon was still there.