We lost our home and never went back. Trackers and dogs arrived first, poking about the camp, uncovering what we had left behind in our evacuation. Then men in black suits came to take photographs of the holes and our footprints left in the dirt. A helicopter hovered over the site, filming the oval perimeter and well-trod pathways into the woods. Dozens of soldiers in green uniforms collected every discarded possession and carted them off in boxes and bags. A few souls shinnied underground, crawled through the network of burrows and emerged blinking at the sky as if they had been beneath the sea. Weeks later, another crew arrived, their heavy machinery rumbling up the hill, cutting a swath through the old trees to collapse the tunnels, dig them up, and bury them again, turning the earth over and over until the top ran orange with thick wet clay. Then they doused the ring with gasoline and set the field afire. By the end of that summer, nothing remained but ashes and the blackened skeletons of a few trees.
　　Such destruction did not temper the urge to return home. I could not sleep without the familiar pattern of stars and sky framed by branches overhead. Every night-sound—a snapped twig or a woodrat scrabbling through the brush—disturbed my rest, and in the mornings my head and neck ached. I heard, too, the others moaning in their dreams or straining behind the bushes to relieve the growing pressure in their guts. Smaolach looked over his shoulder a dozen times each hour. Onions chewed her nails and braided intricate chains of grass. Each swell of restlessness was followed by a swale of listlessness. Knowing our home was gone, we kept looking for it still, as if hope alone could restore our lives. When hope faded, a morbid curiosity set in. We would go back time and again to worry over the bones.
　　Hidden in the top of tall oaks or scattered in pockets along the ridge, we'd witness and whisper among ourselves, descrying the loss and ruin. The raspberries crushed under the backhoe, the chokecherry felled by a bulldozer, the paths and lanes of our carousals and mad ecstasies erased as one might rub away a drawing or tear up a page. That campsite had existed since the arrival of the first French fur traders, who had encountered the tribes at their ancestral territory. Homesick, we drifted away, huddling in makeshift shelters, lost for good.
　　We wandered rough country into early autumn. The influx of men, dogs, and machines made moving about difficult and unsafe, so we spent hard days and nights together, bored and hungry. Whenever someone roamed too far from the group, we ran into danger. Ragno and Zanzara were spotted by a surveyor when they crossed in front of his spyglass. The man hollered and gave chase, but my friends were too fast. Dump trucks brought in loads of gravel to line the dirt road carved from the highway to our old clearing. Chavisory and Onions made a game of finding gems among the rubble; any unusual stone would do. By moonlight, they picked over each newly spread load, until the night when they were discovered by a driver sleeping in his rig. He sneaked up on them and grabbed the girls by their collars. They would have been caught if Onions hadn't snapped free and bitten him hard enough to draw blood. That driver may be the only man alive with a faery's scars lined up like beads in the web of skin between his thumb and finger.
　　On the construction site where the men dug cellars, Luchóg spotted an open pack of cigarettes resting on the front seat of an empty truck. Quiet as a mouse, he skittered over, and as he reached inside to steal the smokes, his knee hit the horn. He grabbed the Lucky Strikes as the door to a nearby outhouse burst open, and the man, tugging up his trousers, swore and cursed as he came looking about for the trespasser. He hustled over to the truck, searched about i he cab, and then ducked his head behind the dashboard. From the edge of the forest, Luchóg could not resist any longer and struck a match in the lingering darkness. After the very first drag, he had to duck when birdshot peppered the air above his head. The man fired the shotgun again, long after my friend had disappeared, laughing and coughing, into the heart of the forest.
　　After these incidents, Béka clamped down on our freedoms. We were not allowed to travel alone, nor could we be on any road during the daylight. He restricted any forays into town for supplies out of fear of detection. By day, the hum of engines, the staccato of hammers echoing from our old home to wherever we had camped. By night, a haunting stillness invaded. I longed to run away with Speck to the library and its comforting privacy. I missed my books and papers, and my materials were few: McInnes's fading composition book, a drawing of the woman in the red coat, a handful of letters. Numbed, I was not writing, either, and time passed unrecorded. In a way, it did not exist at all.
　　To gather food, Ragno, Zanzara, and I sewed together a crude net, and after much trial and error, we managed to capture a brace of grouse, which we then killed and took home for dinner. The tribe made a ceremony of plucking feathers, tying them in bundles, and wearing them in our hair like the Huron. We dressed the birds and risked our first large fire of the season, allowing us to roast our meal and providing comfort on a cool night. Assembled in a small circle, our faces glowed in the flickering light, signs of anxious weariness in our tired eyes, but the meal would prove revitalizing. As the fire burnt down and our bellies filled, a calm complacency settled upon us, like a blanket drawn around our shoulders by absent mothers.
　　Wiping his greasy mouth on his sleeve, Béka cleared his throat to summon our attention. The chitchat and marrow sucking stopped at once. "We have angered the people, and there will be no rest for a long, long time. It was wrong to lose that boy, but worse still was bringing him to camp in the first place." We had heard this speech many times before, but Onions, his favorite, played the Fool to his Lear.
　　"But they have Igel. Why are they so mad?" she asked.
　　"She's right. They have Igel. He's their Oscar," Kivi said, joining the chorus. "But we don't have ours. Why should they be mad? We are the ones who have lost."
　　"This is not about the boy. They............