"I don't have the answer," his father said. "There may be no answer. You may never know."

Adam let go of Marci, let his arms fall to his sides.

"No," he said. "No!" he shouted again, and the stillness was broken. The wind blew cold and hard, and he didn't care. "*NO!*" he screamed, and Marci grabbed him and put her hand over his mouth. His ears roared with echoes, and they did not die down, but rather built atop one another, to a wall of noise that scared him.

She was crying now, scared and openmouthed sobs. She splashed him and water went up his nose and stung his eyes. The wind was colder now, cold enough to hurt, and he took her hand and sloshed recklessly for the sh.o.r.e. He spun up the flashlight and handed it to her, then yanked his clothes over his wet skin, glaring at the pool while she did the same.

In the winter cave, they met a golem.

It stood like a statue, brick-red with glowing eyes, beside Alan's mother, hands at its sides. Golems didn't venture to this side of his father very often, and almost never in daylight. Marci caught him in the flashlight's beam as they entered the warm humidity of the cave, shivering in the gusting winds. She fumbled the flashlight and Alan caught it before it hit the ground.

"It's okay," he said. His chest was heaving from his tantrum, but the presence of the golem calmed him. You could say or do anything to a golem, and it couldn't strike back, couldn't answer back. The sons of the mountain that sheltered -- and birthed? -- the golems owed nothing to them.

He walked over to it and folded his arms.

"What is it?" he said.

The golem bent its head slightly and looked him in the eye. It was man-shaped, but baggier, muscles like frozen mud. An overhang of belly covered its smooth crotch like a kilt. Its chisel-shaped teeth clacked together as it limbered up its jaw.

"Your father is sad," it said. Its voice was slow and grinding, like an avalanche. "Our side grows cold."

"I don't care," Alan said. "*f.u.c.k* my father," he said. Behind him, perched atop their mother, Davey whittered a mean little laugh.

"You shouldn't --"

Alan shoved the golem. It was like shoving a boulder. It didn't give at all.

"You don't tell me what to do," he said. "You can't tell me what to do. I want to know what I am, how we're possible, and if you can't help, then you can leave now."

The winds blew colder, smelling now of the golem's side of the mountain, of clay and the dry bones of their kills, which they arrayed on the walls of their cavern.

The golem stood stock still.

"Does it...*understand*?" Marci asked. Davey snickered again.

"It's not stupid," Alan said, calming a little. "It's...*slow*. It thinks slowly and acts slowly. But it's not stupid." He paused for a moment. "It taught me to speak," he said.

That did it. He began to cry, biting his lip to keep from making a sound, but the tears rolled down his cheeks and his shoulders shook. The flashlight's beam pinned him, and he wanted to run to his mother and hide behind her, wanted to escape the light.

"Go," he said softly to the golem, touching its elbow. "It'll be all right."

Slowly, gratingly, the golem turned and lumbered out of the cave, clumsy and ponderous.

Marci put her arm around him and he buried his face in her skinny neck, the hot tears coursing down her collarbones.

Davey came to him that night and pinned him in the light of the flashlight. He woke staring up into the bright bulb, shielding his eyes. He groped out for the light, but Darryl danced back out of reach, keeping the beam in his eyes. The air crackled with the angry grinding of its hand-dynamo.

He climbed out of bed naked and felt around on the floor. He had a geode there, he'd broken it and polished it by hand, and it was the size of a softball, the top smooth as gla.s.s, the underside rough as a coconut's hide.

Wordless and swift, he wound up and threw the geode as hard as he could at where he judged Davey's head to be.

There was a thud and a cry, and the light clattered to the ground, growing more dim as its dynamo whirred to a stop. Green blobs chased themselves across his vision, and he could only see Darren rolling on the ground by turning his head to one side and looking out of the corner of his eye.

He groped toward Davey and smelled the blood. Kneeling down, he found Davey's hand and followed it up to his shoulder, his neck. Slick with blood. Higher, to Davey's face, his forehead, the dent there sanded ragged by the rough side of the geode. The blood flowed freely and beneath his other hand Danny's chest heaved as he breathed, shallowly, rapidly, almost panting.

His vision was coming back now. He took off his T-shirt and wadded it up, pressed it to Davey's forehead. They'd done first aid in cla.s.s. You weren't supposed to move someone with a head injury. He pressed down with the T-shirt, trying to stanch the blood.

Then, quick as a whip, Davey's head twisted around and he bit down, hard, on Alan's thumbtip. Albert reeled back, but it was too late: Davey had bitten off the tip of his right thumb. Alan howled, waking up Ed-Fred-Geoff, who began to cry. Davey rolled away, scampering back into the cave's depths.

Alan danced around the cave, hand clamped between his thighs, mewling. He fell to the floor and squeezed his legs together, then slowly brought his hand up before his face. The ragged stump of his thumb was softly spurting blood in time with his heartbeat. He struggled to remember his first aid. He wrapped his T-shirt around the wound and then pulled his parka on over his bare chest and jammed his bare feet into his boots, then made his way to the cave mouth and scooped up snow under the moon's glow, awkwardly packing a s...o...b..ll around his hand. He shivered as he made his way back into the winter cave and propped himself up against his mother, holding his hurt hand over his head.

The winter cave grew cold as the ice packed around his hand. Bobby, woken by his clairvoyant instincts, crept forward with a sheet and draped it over Alan. He'd foreseen this, of course -- had foreseen all of it. But Bobby followed his own code, and he kept his own counsel, cleaning up after the disasters he was powerless to prevent.

Deep in the mountains, they heard the echoes of Davey's t.i.ttering laughter.

"It was wrong to bring her here, Adam," Billy said to him in the morning, as he fed Alan the crusts of bread and dried apples he'd brought him, packing his hand with fresh snow.

"I didn't bring her here, she followed me," Adam said. His arm ached from holding it aloft, and his back and tailbone were numb with the ache of a night spent sitting up against their mother's side. "And besides, why should it be wrong? Whose rules? What rules? What are the *f.u.c.king*

rules?"

"You can feel the rules, brother," he said. He couldn't look Alan in the eye, he never did. This was a major speech, coming from Bobby.

"I can't feel any rules," Alan said. He wondered if it was true. He'd never told anyone about the family before. Had he known all along that he shouldn't do this?

"I can. She can't know. No one can know. Even we can't know. We'll never understand it."

"Where is Davey?"

"He's doing a...ritual. With your thumb."

They sat silent and strained their ears to hear the winds and the distant shuffle of the denizens of the mountain.

Alan shifted, using his good hand to prop himself up, looking for a comfortable position. He brought his injured hand down to his lap and unwrapped his blood-soaked T-shirt from his fist, gently peeling it away from the glue of dried blood that held it there.

His hand had shriveled in the night, from ice and from restricted circulation, and maybe from Davey's ritual. Alan pondered its crusty, clawed form, thinking that it looked like it belonged to someone -- some*thing* -- else.

Buddy scaled the stalact.i.te that served as the ladder up to the lofty nook where he slept and came back down holding his water bottle. "It's clean, it's from the pool," he said, another major speech for him. He also had an armload of scavenged diapers, much-washed and worn soft as flannel. He wet one and began to wipe away the crust of blood on Alan's arm and hand, working his way up from the elbow, then tackling the uninjured fingers, then, very gently, gently as a feather-touch, slow as a glacier, he worked on Alan's thumb.

When he was done, Alan's hand was clean and dry and cold, and the wound of his thumb was exposed and naked, a thin crust of blood weeping liquid slowly. It seemed to Alan that he could see the stump of bone protruding from the wound. He was amazed to see his bones, to get a look at a cross-section of himself. He wondered if he could count the rings and find out how old he was, as he had never been really certain on that score. He giggled ghoulishly.

He held out his good hand. "Get me up, okay?" Bobby hauled him to his feet. "Get me some warm clothes, too?"