Except, of course, that there was no point stealing anything in Anchorage, where everyone took what they liked from the hundreds of abandoned shops and houses. As she picked her way through the heaps of half-dismantled machinery behind Caul’s shack, she tried to think of a more likely explanation for his nighttime wanderings. Maybe he couldn’t sleep, like her. Maybe he was worried about something. Wren’s friend Tildy had told her that years and years ago, way back when Anchorage first came to Vineland, Caul had been in love with Miss Freya and Miss Freya had been in love with Caul too, but nothing had come of it because Caul had been so strange, even in those days. Maybe he wandered the streets of the engine district every night, yearning for his lost love? Or maybe he was in love with someone else and was going to meet her for a moonlit tryst out on the city’s edge?

Pleased by the idea that she would have something really juicy to tell Tildy in the morning, Wren quickened her pace.

But when he reached the city’s edge, Caul did not stop, just hurried down a stairway that led onto the bare earth and started up the hill, sweeping the lantern beam ahead of him. Wren waited a moment, then followed, jumping down into the springy heather and creeping after him up the track that led to the humming drystone turbine house of old Mr. Scabious’s hydroelectricity plant. Caul did not stop there either, but kept going, climbing between the apple orchards and across the high pasture, into the woods.

At the top of the island, where the pines filled the air with the smell of resin and crags poked up through the thin turf like the spines on a dragon’s back, Caul stopped and turned his lantern off and looked around. Fifty feet behind him, Wren crouched among the crisscross shadows. A faint wind stirred her hair, and overhead the trees moved their small hands against the sky.