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But they shouldn’t have.
    She touches the man’s fiery forehead. “I’m sorry.”
    He holds her gaze for a moment longer, then closes his eyes. A long, slow breath comes out of him and doesn’t come back.
    Nora stands up. “Addis, wait outside for a sec. I need to do something.”
    “Is he dead?”
    “Yeah. Wait outside.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I need to do something.”
    Addis looks at the hatchet clenched in her hand. His lips tremble a little and he backs out of the room.
    Nora stands over the man, staring at his shiny bald head. She has never done this before. Her mind moves ahead to the sensations that will vibrate up her arms through the hatchet when it cracks the skull and sinks into the dense, rubbery tissues inside. She raises the hatchet. She shuts her eyes. The toilet stall behind her creaks open and something groans and Nora screams and runs. She doesn’t turn around to see what’s there, she just runs. She grabs her brother’s hand and drags him down the hall at a full sprint. Standing in the elevator pounding the “door close” button, she sees movement reflected in the restaurant’s windows and hears a ragged howl, low and guttural but distinctl Sbutves y female. Then the doors slide shut, and they descend.
    • • •
     
    Addis is crying. Nora can’t believe he still cries so easily after all the things they’ve been through. He cried when his mother dragged them out of bed and hid them in the bathroom while their father killed a looter with a crowbar. He cried when their apartment and the rest of Little Ethiopia went up in flames, his snot smearing against the window of the family Geo. He cried all the way from D.C. to Louisiana and then again when he saw New Orleans, yelling at his mother that the Bible said God would never again destroy the earth with a flood. He cried when his father said God is a liar.
    Crying. Expelling grief from the body in the form of saltwater. What’s its purpose? How did it evolve, and why are humans the only creatures on Earth that do it? Nora wonders how many years it takes to dry up that messy urge.
    “It’s okay, Addy,” she says as the elevator settles on the ground floor. “We’re okay.”
    His sniffles don’t completely subside until the Space Needle is hidden behind buildings far in the distance.
    “What was that?” he finally asks as they trek north on Highway 99, the first words out of his mouth in thirty minutes.
    “Guess,” she says.
    He doesn’t.
    They cross the Aurora Bridge just as the sun disappears behind the western mountains. Nora stops, although she knows she shouldn’t. They are standing on a narrow sidewalk hundreds of feet above what was once a busy waterway, now a graveyard for sunken and sinking boats, million-dollar yachts floating on their sides, palaces for king crabs.
    “Where are we going?” Addis asks.
    “I’m not sure.”
    He pauses to think about this. “How far are we gonna have to walk?”
    “I don’t know. Probably a million miles.”
    He sags against the railing. “Can we go find somewhere to sleep? I’m really tired.”
    Nora watches the last red glow of the sunset glitter on the water. Just before the sky goes completely dark, she catches movement out of the corner of her eye and glances back the way they came. On the edge of the hill, just before the bridge leaps out over the chasm, she sees a silhouette. A big silhouette of a big man, standing in the street and swaying slightly.
    “Yeah,” she mumbles. “Let’s go.”

 
    The cloud of hands has grown so large and strong it has begun to feel like an extra sense. Some warped hybrid of sight and smell and intuition. The tall man feels it reaching through the forest, its wispy fingers brushing through ferns and poking under rocks, seeking whatever it seeks. He struggles to ignore its constant moaning, which has begun to form words but is still too simple to be understood.
    Get. Take. Fill.
    He tries to distract himself by remembering more things.