Whit

Well, at least it's their heads anyway.

Our parents' photos are on a twenty-foot billboard, their faces looking lost and lonely in this abandoned rail yard. And below their mug shots are words that never cease to chill our bones: THREE MILLION B.N. REWARD

For Information Leading to the Apprehension and Arrest of BENJAMIN ALLGOOD and ELIZA ALLGOOD for Heinous Crimes Against Humanity and the New Order Text messages to "Informant2020" or visit your local N.O. Intelligence Office

Sure, we know our parents are wanted criminals-for the same bogus reasons we are. But having it in black and white for all the world to see-and slapping the pathetic price of three million beans on their heads!-is a cruel reminder that this nightmare may never come to a happy end.

Wisty, as usual, reads my mind and throws me a semihopeful bone. "They're still free," she points out quietly.

"At least they were," I say, "whenever this poster was put up." The paper does look a little weathered-faded, frayed, and even torn at the edges. We both fall silent as the powerful smell of aging books' brittle pages-full of dreams, stories, tragedies, laughter, and imagination-seems to swirl out from the open door of the trailer and smother us with the bittersweet memory of home.

How can you make peace with something when you don't even know what that "something" is? We can't know whether our parents are alive or dead or being interrogated in a New Order prison or… banished to the Shadowland like Celia. Are they suffering? Is there anything we can do about it? Or are we as helpless and useless as I feel right now?

I punch the billboard so hard my fist goes right through the pressboard backing.

Then I pull my hand out and try to pretend it didn't happen. Wisty gives me a concerned look, and I shrug. I'm sure my knuckles are bleeding, but I don't feel a thing.