A Grave Tree by Jennifer Ellis Page B

said, guiding his hand to the thin trunk of a tree, which he clutched as if his life depended on it (which it probably did, but he didn’t want to think too much about that). “Now we stand.”
    Mark rose unsteadily to his feet, leaning against the tiny tree for support, his head spinning.
    “Put your hands on my shoulders,” Abbey said. “We’re going to start walking slowly. Just keep your hands on my shoulders and make sure you always feel with your foot to make sure there’s ground beneath you.”
    Mark felt for Abbey’s shoulder with his left hand. Her shoulder was surprisingly delicate. Her bones felt like he had imagined the bones of a hummingbird would feel, small, fluttery, and almost yielding. He tried not to hold too tightly. When he had his left hand in place, he reluctantly removed his right hand from the tree and dropped it onto her other shoulder.
    Abbey started inching forward. Mark followed, his feet clumsy and uncertain. He was afraid he would misstep and pull them both to their deaths. He wanted more than anything to be back in the safe confines of one of his rooms, any of his rooms, at the cabin, at the Sinclair residence, or even at his home on Coventry Hill, with his walls of comforting maps of rivers, lakes, and oceans.
    He’d been fascinated by the geography of the Moon River before, its sinewy narrowing as it passed through Skull Canyon before it widened out and started to loop lazily through the orchards of Coventry. He’d always wanted to visit Skull Canyon. Now he just wanted to be back in his room studying his maps.
    The more he thought about it, the more he felt like he actually was in his room in his house, seated at his desk, the crisp edges of his map of Coventry and Granton unfurled. He traced the winding path of the Moon River with his eyes and then looked around the room, gazing at the array of blue maps that covered every inch of his walls. His eyes fell on his captain’s bed and his blue world map bedspread that his mother had special ordered online from eBay.
    The bedspread was rumpled, pulled aside, exposing the blue sheets that lay underneath.
    Someone had been sleeping in Mark’s bed.
    He jerked back to reality again—his stumbling, tentative footfalls, his hands on Abbey’s shoulders, their interminable, blind trek forward, the terrifying thunder of water so close by.
    His head had been flying again. What was happening to him? Had he been dreaming? Had his brain, normally so alert to danger of any sort, really dared to fall asleep on this treacherous cliff? Or had he really been in his room, where someone had been sleeping in his bed?
    He focused on putting one foot in front of the other, staying with Abbey, and quashing his panic.
    But after a bit, he felt his mind reaching out again, imagining himself back in his room, reveling in the safety of the place where he had spent so much of his life. His hands automatically reached out to straighten his bedspread—but his fingers didn’t appear within his line of vision. He tried again, moving them forward to smooth the rumpled bed, but no hands came into view. It was like only his head, or maybe his eyes, were present. But he had heard Ian and the bad man speaking the night before when his head had seemed to be in the other room. So. His eyes and his ears were present. He concentrated. The sound of the rush of the river faded, and was replaced by the ordinary sounds of birdcalls and distant traffic. He tried once more to use his hands, but they remained absent.
    He looked again to the map of Coventry and Granton rolled out on his desk (he had not left it there—he always put his maps away in his map drawer) and realized with an aghast gasp that someone had drawn on his map… with ballpoint pen. The Granton Dam had been circled—twice, no less. Messy, overlapping circles, not drawn with a compass.
    Mark let out a yelp and crashed hard into Abbey’s back.
    “Ow! Mark, be careful. Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
    “My