Free The Glass Mountains by Cynthia Kadohata

 
    “There’s the lake in the other direction,” exclaimed Jobei. He was excited, but I knew he’d really spoken to take attention away from Maruk’s embarrassment.  
    Maruk spoke breathlessly. “I don’t care what my eyes tell me. Something is wrong down there.”  
    “Perhaps it was a dream,” someone said. I felt sorry for Maruk, but I admired the way he refused to give in to what his eyes told him. The whole way back Maruk walked several measures to the side of my family. He walked quietly and inefficiently, kicking sand, hardly ever looking up, digging in his bare toes—no one had had time to put on shoes. Sian walked by his side. We’d run with abandon, and after our day of walking and night of celebration for the wedding, the run had exhausted us. We spent nearly twice as long just to get halfway back.  
    Except for the dogs, Maruk smelled it first, the smell of death, filling the air as the smell of wax had filled it just a short time earlier. “There’s danger,” he said simply.  
    Altogether there were about a hundred of us. Tarkahna and I held hands so tightly my knucklebones cracked.  
    We continued barefoot into the sand, which was still warm even at this hour, and I watched the sand ahead of me alertly. My parents walked holding hands. They were as attached to each other as a planet to the sun. When they fought sometimes, it was like arguing over which of them was the planet and which the sun. I prayed to the sand that ruled the lives of the Bakshami: Make my parents safe always.  
    We walked back to camp without talking. It was just starting to get light, the black sky filled with whispers of blue and red. With every step the sweet smell grew stronger, until finally it grew so overwhelming it seemed it couldn’t possibly have grown more. But it did.  
    When we got closer we saw that what we’d thought from the incline were candles burning had been the burning of many of our possessions. When we got closer still we saw that bodies had burned as well. Smoke now hung in the air like a raincloud over our camp.  
    “Hurry!” someone called to us. “There’s a lot of work to be done, and they may return.”  
    I felt I needed to pause a second to take it all in, the burnt shapes of my neighbors and some of their dogs and the camp. The camp, which had seemed so large when last I sat inside it, now seemed small and inconsequential in the vast desert.  
    We all gathered up the remains of our possessions: a few items of clothing, and, fortunately, a few slabs of meat. In certain ways the Formans had done a merciful job. There was probably not much suffering or forewarning. Under charred covers lay charred bodies, facing toward the sky. There was no screaming or groaning because no one was alive. Maruk said the Formans may have used some sort of heat-seeking bomb. He said this not as if he knew what he was talking about but as if he liked the sound of the phrase, “heat-seeking bomb.” Since the day we’d first seen the flea-bitten man with the weapon, Maruk had changed. But what the change would come to I didn’t know. I’d never heard of such a device as Maruk spoke of, but then I’d never even heard of any kind of bomb at all until the current troubles.  
    I worked quietly, breathing through my mouth and trying not to look around. I also tried not to think about who might have lived and who died. There were those I’d befriended who’d probably died, but I didn’t want to think about them now. We needed to work quickly. One family had gathered all the sleds the Formans hadn’t destroyed and lined them up so that we could all pile goods on them. I knew that nobody owned anything anymore, that there were no personal possessions. If one of us starved it would be because we all starved.  
    We went quickly through the whole camp. Sunlight bled over the horizon, through the clouds that seemed to ring only Bakshami but that for all I knew ringed the whole of Artekka, ringed Forma and