War Council in the Hayloft
The war council convenes in the hayloft at four o'clock: you, Finn, one encyclopedia (for note-taking, not publishing — Finn drew up an amendment to the pinky swear himself), and Sera, standing below with her head poked up through the loft hatch like the world's pinkest periscope.
The facts, as Finn's blackboard-neat notes lay them out:
One. The grey is spreading — meadow, town, always where the wolves have walked. Sera says it will keep on until it's stopped at the source, but slowing it down matters, because everything the grey holds for too long, it keeps.
Two. The grey can be pushed back. This they discovered by accident, when Finn — furious about his grasshoppers — stood at the meadow's edge and played his harmonica at it, badly, with enormous feeling. A patch of grass the size of a doormat flushed green again. Sera nearly fell through the loft hatch. “Brightness,” she said. “Made brightness — songs, colors, jokes, things done with your whole heart. It's the opposite of stopping-counting. It's insisting.”
Three. There is a new kid in town. Grey-eyed, polite, weird. He's been at the store, the library, the school fence — always asking, in his polite weird way, the same question: has anyone seen any unusual animals lately? “Nobody moves to town in summer,” says Finn, who moved to town in summer and knows the shame of it. “And nobody asks about unusual animals unless—” he taps the encyclopedia, “—they're hunting one.”