“What?”

“Good,” it repeated. Then it jumped to the floor and grabbed the handle on one metal box, opening a little door and reaching inside, and with an expert’s precision it selected another delicious meal.

The fingertip was pale and dead to the eye.

Diamond knelt and picked it up. The skin was loose and sloppy between the fingers of his left hand, and the dead fingernail was long, and he could feel the little bit of bone in its center. For a few moments he stared at the glossy and slick and beautifully white joint. The living piece of his finger had stopped bleeding. A warm sensation was building, and he flexed his hand, feeling something that wasn’t pain but wasn’t pleasant either. Then because it seemed right and smart, he touched the severed fingertip to the stump, and within twenty breaths some kind of seal had joined him to what used to be him, and after twenty more breaths the fingertip was part of him again.

The monster ignored the marvel. A bowl of pickled cling-onions needed to be eaten, each with the same two-bite relish. When Diamond moved again, the monster looked up and lifted its fur, just enough for the warning to be understood. Then it belched and went back to its feast, and Diamond passed the rest of the way through the kitchen, moving into the next hallway.

For almost a thousand days he had listened to the voices inside this house, to the sounds people made as they moved. Every sound had been a clue, revealing shapes and proportions. Noise let a boy imagine the shape of this place. In that sense, Diamond already knew the general layout of the rooms and hallways. Yet he knew nothing. Nothing looked exactly or even close to what he expected, and nothing smelled right, and no place was as clean and pretty as he had imagined it to be.

Diamond walked slowly, calling to his mother. He watched for windows. He watched for the same window that he had seen before, making himself ready to give the world a long look. But the hallway insisted on taking him past nothing but tiny rooms and miniscule closets, plus one space that might have been inhabited once but was now jammed with young wood, golden and sticky to the touch.

His finger had healed. No mark showed on the smooth new skin, and the tip’s feeling was fully restored. He might have been astonished, except nothing about the experience seemed extraordinary. Putting the finger to his tongue, he tasted tree sap. And then he called out again. “Father?” he said this time. “Papa? Are you home yet?”

In the kitchen, something substantial fell from a high shelf, and then the animal threw another high-pitched shriek at the world.

Diamond walked on.

Rooms had furnishings, closets did not. Most rooms wore doors that opened with the first push, while closets were hidden behind fabric curtains full of lines and color. No other door wore a lock, and the furnishings looked newer than his chairs and bed. Walls and ceilings were stained white, making the spaces bright. Yet every room was very crowded with belongings. A large bed nearly filled one space. Stepping inside, Diamond smelled his parents. A wide room was down the hall, perhaps half as large as his room but full of long chairs and tables hanging from the ceiling by ropes. There was room for ten or twelve adults to sit close together. When had his parents ever had so many visitors?

“Mother?” he asked the room.

Stepping back into the hallway, he called out, “Father?”

The air had grown brighter. Diamond followed the hallway around a sharp right turn, and then it straightened. Waiting on his right was a very large closet. He looked inside and gasped at the human bodies hanging high in the air. There were at least six bodies, none with feet or hands or heads. He took a full step back before realizing that these were only clothes—his father’s special gray work uniforms—dangling from the ceiling, waiting to be needed. One massive shelf was filled with armored helmets and goggles and gloves, and on the floor was a row of reinforced boots battered by hard long use.

Just the idea of hanging bodies unnerved the boy. He didn’t call for anybody now. He backed slowly out of the closet. Waiting farther down the hallway was a large window full of light. It was the same window he had seen that one day with his mother. When he thought about Mother, there was no space in his head for anyone else. He was focused and worried about her and distracted about everything else. One more door remained to be looked behind, and for no reason but hope, Diamond decided that she was waiting for him there.

The last door had a lock, but it had been left unlatched and partway open. Unlike other doors, it swung into the hallway. He stepped around it. A brief tunnel stood before him, cut through a different kind of wood—a dark dry fibrous wood—and at the tunnel’s end was a glimmer of light and a heavy curtain with some kind of face embroidered into the fabric, staring at him.

Diamond walked forward and pushed at the curtain, a deluge of brilliant green light pouring up his arm and across his astonished face.

Then he pushed again, and that was how the boy finally stepped outdoors.

THREE

A flat solid surface lay under his feet. The world before him was built from motion and shifting mysterious sounds along with fixed shapes that could be anything. Daylight blinded. What he saw was blazing and relentless, every detail washed away by the fierce glare that had no source, no destination. Eyes squinted down to slits and still the light slashed into his skull, filling his head with scorching green-white fire. The boy sobbed—a sad little sound washed away by raucous noise rushing down on top of him. A million mouths were shouting, none human: rattling barks and wild long passionate hoots, melodies and brilliant shrieks. Then something overhead let loose a string of bright rhythmic chirps. He shouted, “Hello.” The chirps stopped. Then he took his first breath, tasting water. But the rain was finished, why was the air wet? One blind step led to another. The floor beneath gave a patient creak, and he stopped. Beyond the voices, filling some distant space, was a rumbling roar. He heard it and felt it in his bones, and tipping his head to gauge its source, Diamond turned his nearly closed eyes toward the heart of the great sound, seeing nothing that made even the barest sense.

Fixing his hands beside his eyes helped stifle the glare. The flat smooth face of the landing reached out several more steps before ending with a high railing and open space, and slicing through the air beyond was a column of silver light, brighter than anything else in this baffling, wondrous place.

Diamond took another step.

“I know, I know,” a voice called out.

He stopped walking.

From above, a girl shouted, “But I’m looking for my bracelet.”

Then someone else spoke, a stern voice falling from a greater height, the sense of it drained by distance.

“I can’t hear you,” the girl shouted.

Diamond tipped his head, listening.

“Hey you. Do you see my bracelet?”

Her voice had grown louder.

“It’s copper, with a face and blue shells,” she said. “I dropped it last night. Look around. Maybe it hit your landing.”

“A bracelet,” Diamond said.

“Kid,” she said. “I’m screaming at you. Do you see my bracelet?”

“I can’t see anything,” he said, dropping to his knees, eyes closed before he rubbed them with his knuckles.

The girl said something else, something quiet.

For several moments, nothing happened.

Then the curtain to his house moved. Diamond smelled the little monster. Stepping up beside him, the animal gave a hearty belch, and from someplace close, the girl asked, “Who’s your ugly friend?”

Diamond opened his left eye, then his right. Pupils and the light-starved retinas were adapting to the piercing morning light. This time he could make out the wood slats of the landing and his hands and his feet. Wood railings stood on three sides, and behind him the same stranger’s face that rode the other side of the curtain. The well-fed monster was near enough to touch, giving him a stern glare before looking up where the girl’s voice had fallen from.