“Why?” George asks, slamming his hand down on the picnic table. His breath puffs out in angry billows. His hands are already turning red and numb with cold, as if he’s too distracted or defiant to use the Variants.
His mother, of course, has already collected every scrap of available news by the time he reaches her on the telephone. “She heard that the Disappearances struck Charlton,” he relays.
“Where’s that?”
“It’s the town just beyond Sheffield.”
“Today?” I ask.
“Yesterday. Around the very same time as our Disappearance.”
My chest lightens a little at the sudden sight of Will, his hands shoved into his pockets. He approaches our table and stops there, leaning his weight against it. Beas is a half step behind him. She slides onto the bench next to me.
“Just the voices disappeared in Charlton, then?” I ask George.
“No,” George says. “They got every Disappearance we have. It hit them all at once.”
“That’s even worse than what happened to us,” Beas says, picking at the pills on her wool gloves. “Not our gradual descent. Just—?one day you have everything, and the next . . .” Her gloved fingers flutter.
“I heard the Council is heading to Charlton to brief them about what we know—” Will begins.
“They’re bound to be a bit disappointed that we haven’t solved it in the past thirty-five years,” George mutters.
“—?and to see if they have any clues that could help us . . .” Will continues.
“And to make sure they stay quiet about everything, I’m sure,” Beas says.
“Your father is going?” I ask Will, and he nods.
“This has to be making the Council nervous. The Curse almost seems to be mimicking a virus or an infection now,” George says absently. “To spread like this, in such close quarters?”
“Why jump, suddenly, to a new town?” Will says. He squints away from us. “And why disrupt the cycle of seven years?”
“This deviation should not be happening. Everything up until now has always been so ordered,” George says. He fumbles in his backpack for his Variant research notebook. “Do you reckon this means . . . the Disappearances will start speeding up?”
I clasp my hands together and rub them under the table. To me the Curse is acting less like an infection and more like a fox I’m trying to hunt. Every time I think I’ve caught a scent, it veers off and loses me again.
Beas shivers and scoots closer to me. “I never realized there was something rather comforting about the seven years,” she says. “Depressing, yes, because we knew it would just keep going—”
I try to brush off the settling doubt and focus on what Beas is saying. “Maybe a new pattern will emerge now. Something new that could help us solve it for good,” I say, trying to sound hopeful.
“Or maybe it’s just warped into something unpredictable, with no sense of rhyme or reason anymore.” Beas fixes her gaze on something beyond me, far in the distance. She whispers, “That would be the most terrifying thing of all.”
When I come out of Stars practice that afternoon, it’s the first time in three months that Will isn’t standing there waiting for me.
All over town, the same debate is happening in waves: whether the tournament should be held is argued in the halls of the school and in Council meetings. At home, the Clifftons scribble notes to each other between bites of breakfast, wondering whether they should cancel their tournament party.
Perhaps we should just announce the music discovery now.
Today?
People would like to hear it.
I suppose it would give some encouragement.
I leave for school before they reach a decision.
“The Clifftons might cancel their party,” I tell George and Beas.
