Page 5 of His Human Believer

How is this even possible?

He lets go after exactly the correct number of seconds.

“You’ll take the lower guest quarters,” Hannibal tells him, like it’s already settled business.

Vidar glances at me. Then back at Hannibal. “You have room for us both?”

“Yes. We have two guest rooms on separate floors. Yours is the one on the lower level. It has its own entrance.”

“Good.”

That’s his entire reaction to the news that he’ll be sleeping one floor beneath me for the next two weeks. One syllable.

Across the room, Avery catches my eye and mouths, Sorry. I didn’t know.

I give her the smallest headshake back. It’s fine.

“May I ask why a member of the Science Academy is here?” I question because I’ve always been insatiably curious about anything out of the ordinary.

“It’s because of that thing I mentioned,” Avery says, a beat too fast. “With the kids. At the wall.”

I look at her. “You said it was nothing.”

She shrugs. “Well, it was nothing, at first.”

I let that sit, because I’m going to come back to it and we both know I am. Then I turn to Vidar.

“I’m here,” he tells me, “because the residents along this stretch of the wall have been reporting anomalies.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Heh. I’d been told it was just odd sounds?”

“Yes, sounds at night, scratching against the stone, always after full dark. But then there was eye-shine in the canopy that matches no species in the regional catalogue.” He says it the way another male might read off a grocery list. “Domestic beasts refusing to enter particular corners of particular gardens. Repeatedly. The same corners.”

Skylo shifts against my feet.

“That’s four separate categories of report,” I say.

“Five. Children’s belongings, left out in yards overnight, have been recovered afterward inside the preserve.”

My eyes widen. “Inside?”

“Past the wall. Yes.”

Hannibal crosses his arms. “This is when several of us reported the happenings to the Academy.”

“How far past the wall?”

“Between two and nine nanco, in the four instances that were documented well enough to measure.”

Documented well enough to measure. He measured them. Of course he measured them.

“And who are the witnesses who saw the eyes, for instance and heard the noises?”

“Several children in this community have independently reported seeing something at the wall. They do not socialize as a group and yet their accounts are consistent.”

“How many children have seen something?”

“Six.”