There’s only one way to get where you don’t want to go. At least that’s what Katherine’s father always told her whenever she stood in the arching doorway of their old stone cottage, with her back to the sunrise, and pleaded not to have to make the long walk to school in the first place. “Katherine,” her father would say, “there’s only one way to get where you don’t want to go - you just have to put one foot in front of the other and start walking.” And then he would turn her about by her shoulders and give her a little pointy-finger nudge in the back and stand there in the doorway smiling and waving goodbye as she looked over her shoulder and frowned.

“And what will you do when you get there?” Katherine’s father would call after her as she stepped into the dooryard.

“Whatever it takes to get home,” Katherine would mutter over her shoulder.

Such was their morning ritual.

And then she would shuffle along slowly, one foot in front of the other, up Collywobble Lane to the top of the hill, to where the dirt lane forked into three roads. The first was the High Road, which was paved in smooth stone, but wound for seven miles before passing the schoolhouse and more often than not was patrolled by Hobnails. The second was the Low Road, which was only two miles to the schoolhouse, but led through the upper boglands where they said just three sniffs of bog gas could drive you stark raving mad. And the third was the Middle Road, which was nice and safe and wound for five miles toward the schoolhouse through a pleasant and flattish part of the island that was covered with tall grasses and occasional wildflowers and dead fish picked from the sea and dropped from the sky by a clumsy gull.

So, really, there were three ways to get where she didn’t want to go.

Each day, Katherine took the Middle Road, which ended at the door to the tin-roofed schoolhouse, where, each day, she took her seat in the back row of class to do what it took to get home - listen for hours and hours to nothing but story after story, tale after tale, of the many great and heroic deeds of the Objectively Wonderful Leader, for which, she was told, again and again, she could never be thankful enough.

And then, every day after school, at two-o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun was high over Mt. Heable, which loomed over the center of the island, Katherine walked home. Often, because they lived in the same direction, she walked alongside Penelope Furkin, who lived in a cottage on a hilltop that poked up from the flatland, not far from Katherine’s house.

That day, the day Ms. Prurock was taken, they walked along in silence. The rain had stopped falling. Patches of grass among the lava rocks, with the occasional wildflower that wasn’t already picked and boiled and put in a daisy or poppy or purple thistle soup. There were however, jutting up from the volcanic soil, plenty of Farflungian flytraps, which were tall and prickly, and extremely inedible, and until the past few years had a been a pretty reliable place to look for fireflies caught inside the closed fist of their fingerlike petals.

They didn’t talk much.

Penelope Furkin was tallish, pony-tailed, and wore a pink patch over her left eye. The patch, like the pony tail, was held in place by a thin rubber band tied through little holes at either side of the patch. The eye was lost to a fishhook cast absentmindedly over the broad shoulder of her twin brother Pudge, as they trolled for picklefish on the River Zugzwang when they were five. Katherine heard, secondhand, that the eye came right out with the hook with a wet slurp as Pudge cast it into the river, and it was swallowed whole by a leaping picklefish making its way downriver and out into the shallows of the Collywobble Sea. Whether Pudge reeled in the picklefish or it got away, Katherine couldn’t say. No one asked that question, even though it was an obvious question, and everyone wanted to know the answer.

“Could you see the inside of the fish? At least for a second or two?” was another of the questions that no one ever asked.

As for Pudge, he’d since gone missing in the Endless Bog. Some time the year before last. What happened? No one asked. It was impolite. But more than that, it was dangerous.

Katherine knew better than to ask questions. Even on the Middle Road, between two fields of tall grass and the occasional unpicked wildflow, with no one to hear children talking but lava rocks and flytraps and a few dead fish. But the look on Ms. Prufrock’s face was stuck in Katherine’s mind. The fear in her eyes. And what Ms. Prufrock whispered through her teeth as she was led out of the classroom. That was stuck there too.

Don’t pass this test…

That day, as it happened, Katherine McLarkey and Penelope Furkin were joined by a boy named Tom Rigg, a quiet boy with a kind of quiet confidence, which was uncommon among the children. He had a great mess of brown hair and two good eyes, but they were different colored eyes, one blue and one green.

They weren’t friends, the three of them. Not really. Not anymore. At least not in the sense that they talked about things and did things and shared things that they didn’t share with anyone else. When they were young and curious and didn’t know any better, they did those things. They had all spent days together when they were little, scouring the beaches, combing the lowlands, picking flowers for soup. Not any more.

They used to talk. They talked all the time. About who knows what anymore? Kid things. They told stories. Played games. Like Would You Rather? Would you rather be captured by a Farther-flunger or eaten by a snaardvark? Would you rather swallow a stinkbug or take three sniffs of bog gas? That kind of thing. They were, for lack of a better word…friendlyish.

Not now. Who could call anyone a friend in Farflung? There were no friends. Friendship wasn’t worth the risk. Anyone could rat you out at any time just for saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong questions, reading the wrong newspaper. It was best to just keep quiet. Keep to yourself. Watch your back.

Tom Rigg was different. And not just because of his eyes - one pale blue and green as tree moss. Both bright as picklefish swimming in the nightwaters. Kids used to tease him that having different colored eyes was the sure sign of a Farther-flunger, just to get Tom’s goat. But it never worked. Tom’s goat couldn’t be gotten. He was calm, measured, and Katherine knew he was smarter than he let on. She knew this because he used to talk quite a lot while they scavenged for trinkets.

Now, all these years later, Tom had a job at Blackhollow Manor. So no one teased him anymore. A job at Blackhollow Manor meant status. Not that he talked about it. He didn’t need to. Katherine wasn’t even sure what he did there. He was probably an errand boy or something. She wanted to ask him about it. But she didn’t.

“So…” Katherine said, breaking the silence slowly as they made their way. “Did you…notice anything unusual in class today?”

“Unusual?” Penelope asked, looking over her shoulder.

“Anything…strange,” Katherine repeated.

Penelope raised the eyebrow over her good eye. “No,” she said. She looked over her shoulder again. Penelope whispered as they kicked pebbles down the dirt road leading from the schoolhouse. “I’m sure I didn’t.”

Tom said nothing. He had spotted a peanut patch in the overgrowth just off the road. He stepped across the ditch and pulled a clump of vine from the volcanic soil, which came out slowly, with nothing but a single peanut attached to the end. That was a find.

He put the peanut in his pocket.

They walked on. Katherine knew better than to press too hard. Loose talk got people in trouble. But she couldn’t help herself. As they climbed a small hill, the sea came into view in the distance, calm and blue, with an unbroken horizon, but for the island of Farther-flung which floated like a green pebble between the clouds on the horizon.

“How do you think you did on the test?” Katherine asked.

What you could talk about and what you couldn’t wasn’t always black and white. The most acceptable conversations celebrated the wonderfulness of The Objectively Wonderful Leader, the terribleness of Farther-flungers, and the hope that everything stays exactly as it is, because everything is fine. Better than fine, actually. Everything was wonderful.

Other than that, if you had something to say, it was probably best to keep it to yourself.

“I don’t know,” Penelope said. “The questions were kind of…strange.”

Two gulls hung in the wind overhead. It was enough to make Katherine lower her voice. “So you did,” she said.

“Did what?”

“Notice something strange.”

Penelope looked as if she’d stepped in a snaardvark trap. But then, after a moment’s thought, she decided this question was safe enough to answer.

“I guess,” she shrugged.

A breeze came. Katherine thought she’d better let it go. But it was like an itch that was driving her crazy. She needed to scratch it. The problem, more than anything, was that Katherine was curious. Not just about what happened to Ms. Prufrock. That was very curious. But Katherine was curious about lots of things.

“Did you notice anything else?” she said.

Penelope didn’t answer. Neither did Tom. So they walked on in silence. Their sandals slapped against their heels. Katherine spotted a lone yellow blossom still clinging to a branch on a low-hanging bough on the far side of a honeysuckle tree. She stepped through a hedgerow and from her tiptoes she snapped off the Y-shaped end of the thin branch that held the little blossom and sniffed it. It was still sweet. She could tell it was the non-poisonous kind, with a good amount of nectar, and with a pot of boiled water it would make a fine cup of honeysuckle tea. She quickly put it in her pocket and stepped back to the road.

Katherine could hear her father’s voice in her head. Actually it wasn’t his voice, it was that look he gave her without saying anything. The look that said “Don’t say anything more.”

She couldn’t help herself. She took a deep breath of the salt air and said, “I noticed something else unusual. I’m sure you did too?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Tom made a face that was neither agreeable nor disagreeable. It was an expression many on the island learned to display, in order to let you know they heard what you said without letting you know what they were thinking. The trick is to pull your eyebrows sideways, apart, not up or down…the forehead is pulled back, without raising the eyebrows. The ears go up with one corner of the mouth, while the other corner pinches slightly downward. And then you squint your eyes, but just a little. It was some combination of a frown and a smile. An expression that said both yes and no. It said “Maybe “ and “maybe not”. It was an expression that said something… and yet nothing at all. It was a look you learned early and practiced often if you wanted to stay out of trouble.

“About Ms. Prufrock?”

Penelope’s voice was low and cold. “We shouldn’t be talking about this,” she said between her teeth.

The shriek of gulls echoed over the sloping fields. A porcupine rustled somewhere in the hedgerow. They passed over the old arch bridge that spanned the banks of the River Zugzwang’g, which flowed gently down into the River Zigzag, which wiggled its way, snake-like, back and forth, down the lower slopes of Mount Heable to where it emptied into the Collywobble Sea.

“What do you think she did?” Katherine went on, ignoring her father’s voice in her head.

“I’m sure, if anything strange did happen today, it only seemed strange to someone who doesn’t trust in the O.W.L.” Penelope said flatly. “He’s saved us from the Farther-flungers before. He’ll do it again. Ms. Prufrock, probably, is a Father-flunger spy.”

Then Penelope’s eyebrows went sideways. One corner of her mouth went up and the other went down. The expression tightened the rubber band and shifted her eyepatch, which she tugged back into place as she stared straight ahead.

Katherine pressed on: “Did you hear what Ms. Prufrock whispered? About the test?”

The breeze picked up, bending the tall grass and the drooping flytraps on the uphill side of the road. Voices carry in the wind. Tom turned his head in both directions, to make sure no one else was near enough to hear them.

Penelope had had enough. “Trust the Leader," Penelope said, a little anger in her voice. “He has made us prosperous. We owe our good fortune to him.”

Katherine was pressing too hard and she knew it.

She let it go.

By then, Penelope had already decided the conversation was over. She quickened her pace and walked ahead, her ponytail swaying in a wide arc. She disappeared around a bend. When Katherine and Tom reached the bend, they found her standing there, not moving. Just ahead, standing in a ditch on the side of the road, two Hobnails stood in front of a falling-down farmhouse set back from the road behind a weathered, split-rail fence, the top rail sagging under a layer of moss.

Oh, lubberworts, Katherine thought to herself. She rarely saw Hobnails on the Middle Road. Mostly they kept to the High Road. One of the Hobnails was big and round and bearded, the other small and bald and bony. Their uniforms were the color of dried mud and palm tree leaves - jackets with padded shoulders and deep-pocketed pants tucked into shiny black hobnailed boots.

The children began to walk slowly past them, with quiet steps.

“Stop!” The bald and bony One called to the children, his voice deep and serious. He clambered up into the road. “You there. What do you know about this?” He pointed to the fence post. A circle had been painted on it. And another below it. And another below that. Three O’s. In white paint. Maybe eggshell. The first O had two dots for eyes and no mouth. The second O had a mouth and no eyes. The third O had no eyes or mouth. As if the painter had been caught in the act and run off before finishing. The paint was still wet.

The children looked at each other, their five eyes darting back and forth furtively. But they were just children walking home from school. They’d done nothing wrong. There was no reason to worry. But then, there was always a reason to worry whenever a Hobnail looked in your direction.

When that happened, Rule Number One was: don’t look guilty. Rule Number Two was: don’t speak until spoken to. And Rule Number Three was: when spoken to, don’t say anything stupid. And use only a single word if possible.

“Nothing,” Katherine said.

“Nothing,” Tom said.

“Nothing,” Tom said.

All three knew the punishment for vandalism. Graffiti like this could get you sent off to Heable Deeps, where, if you were lucky, you’d be left to scratch out all the words and pictures you would like, on the wall of your prison cell, with the end of a gruel spoon, for the rest of your life.

“Mr. Suggs, check their fingers,” said the bald and bony One.

“Hold out your hands,” said the big Hobnail called Suggs.

Katherine, Tom and Penelope held out their hands. Each of them could feel their heartbeat in their fingertips as big Hobnail lowered his sunglasses to the bridge of his nose and sized up their hands. One by one, he examined them, licking his teeth and scrunching up his face.

“No paint,” he said, after he’d inspected all six hands.

The bald and bony one - the name of the pocket of his shirt was Krupp - pushed his sunglasses down on his nose. He unrolled a poster on which was printed an image. It was the face of a man, under the word WANTED. Beneath his face was the word SUBVERSION.

“Have you seen this man?” Krupp asked.

The children looked at the man’s face. He was square-jawed, with thick eyebrows. His hair was tied in a bun atop his head. His name was printed in smaller letters just below his face: Zero Kopeka.

“No.”

“No.”

Katherine knew the square-faced man. A little. He was a riverfella. A healer. She hadn’t seen him in quite some time. Years. Not since the time he’d patched up her knee with ginger and saltwater paste and a bandana after she’d gashed it playing Follow the Leader in the Whale Boneyard. And then he’d given her half a loaf of bread to chew on while she limped home. She decided that was more information than she needed to share.

“No,” she said.

“Have you seen anyone… acting suspicious. Asking too many questions, say?”

“No.

“No.”

The fact that Penelope Furkin paused before answering was not good. It aroused suspicion. Katherine began to regret pushing on the Ms. Prufrock thing. Loose tongues and all that. Why do you have to ask questions? Better to just keep your mouth shut. A wink and a nod. A glance. That’s all it would take. All Penelope Furkin had to do was give a sideways glance with her one good eye and that would be it for Katherine. She’d be taken away right there and then to be questioned somewhere else, probably deep in the Department of Administration.

After the briefest moment, which seemed much longer to Katherine and Tom than it really was, Penelope said “No,” without winking or nodding or giving anyone the side-eye.

Katherine didn’t exhale. The two Hobnails exchanged looks.

Krupp eyed the poster and sai: “Well, you don’t escape from The Deeps without an accomplice.” He looked at Penelope. “ Or two.” He looked at Tom.” “Or three.” He looked at Katherine. “Empty your pockets.”

Katherine reached into her pocket and pulled out the Y-shaped branch with the honeysuckle blossom. Penelope produced an extra rubber band, a spare for the one holding her eyepatch to her head. Tom held out a single peanut.

Suggs collected them and gave them to Krupp, who looked down at the items in his hand.

He looked up at the children.

He frowned.

“This isn’t good,” he said. This isn’t good at all.”

“You see what we have here, Mr. Suggs?”

Mr. Suggs did not seem to know what they had there.

“What we have here are the disassembled parts to a munitions ejection contraption.”

Mr. Suggs said: “Mmm.”

“You realize this is a class two violation?” Krupp continued.

“What?” said Katherine.

“Why are you carrying a handheld projectile armament?” Krupp shot back.

“Armament?” said Tom.

“A weapon,” said Hobnail Krupp. He held the bottom of the Y-shaped branch in his fist. He looped the rubber band around the forked end of the Y at the top. “This is obviously what is more commonly known as a slingshot.” He placed the peanut against the rubber band in the crook of the Y, and with two fingers pulled it back until the rubber band was stretched good and tight. He held it like that as he aimed it back and forth from Katherine to Penelope to Tom.

“At least that’s what civilized people call them. On Fartherflung, they call them farther-flingers. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, because everyone already knows it, that the farther-flinger is the preferred weapon of a Farther-flunger.”

At this, Penelope let out a little gasp. Katherine swallowed hard, but her mouth was dry. Tom shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

“There’s nothing worse than a Farther-flunger with a farther-flinger,” said Mr. Suggs.

“Nothing worse,” repeated Mr. Krupp. He aimed the peanut at Katherine.

Katherine’s mind raced. She wanted to explain that what Mr. Krupp held in his bony little hand was nothing more than a honeysuckle branch with a blossom she’d just picked for an afternoon cup of tea. And a spare rubber band that Penelop Furkin carried in her pocket in case the one looped around her head gave out. And a little overlooked peanut that Tom Rigg had only moments before dug out of the ground. A slingshot, this was not. And it was definitely not a father-flinger. The three of them were not Farther-flungers. And they were certainly not sympathetic to Farther-flungers in any way. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But all of that was too difficult to say in only one word.

Katherine said: “Uh…”

“Now, we have three items of contraband here,” Krupp went on. He seemed to be enjoying this. “But it takes four things to make a genuine farther-flinger: a Y-shaped branch, an elastic band, a projectile…” Krupp aimed the peanut at Penelope. “A and a little piece of leather for the pouch to hold the projectile while you pull it back….”

Suggs reached out with an open hand, his dirt-caked fingernails moving toward Penelop’s face. He ripped off her eyepatch. The rubber band snapped behind her ponytail with a sharp thwip. Penelope stood, frozen in fear, her left eye staring wide-eyed into the distance. The other eye, well it simply wasn’t there. The socket was hollowed and closed over with a thick pale lid like a sea cave after a landslide. The skin all around it was much paler than the rest of her face, but for beneath where it was black as a lava rock beach. A small scar led down from the corner in the direction of her cheek.

Katherine and Tom looked away.

They stood there, the two of them, their backs to the sun, silhouetted against the pale blue sky. The children squinted at their silhouettes, and the shadows they cast at their feet, one that reached all the way to their toes, the other not quite.

“Where are you going?”

“Home,” Penelope whispered, her head down, titled away.

Krupp put the rubber band and the eye patch into the outside pocket of his dried mud and palm leaf jacket.

“Home,” Katherine said, an edge in her voice now.

Krupp plucked a blossom from the end of the Y-shaped branch, his eyes fixed on Katherine. With two fingers, he put it into his mouth, swallowed. He plucked and offered the other to Suggs who did the same.

Krupp turned to Tom. He put the peanut between his teeth and cracked it. He took out the nut, chewed as he looked Tom right in the eye, swallowed it with a great bob of his throat, then tossed the shell into the ditch.

“And you?”

“Blackhollow,” Tom said, staring blankly at Krupp.

Krupp frowned.

“Why?”

“Work.”

“What work?” Krupp shifted in his hobnailed boots.

“Kitchen.”

“Doing what?”

“Dishes.”

“Who’s your supervisor?”

“Baker.”

“Kitchen staff ID number?”

“Nine.”

Krupp and Suggs exchanged glances. Krupp thought for a moment. He seemed to be the one who did the thinking. He picked at a bit of honeysuckle blossom stuck in his teeth. At last he said: “Go on, then” and threw up a bony little hand and waved the children on their way.

There was only one exception to the one-word rule when questioned by Hobnails: “Forever Farflung” as you leave.

“Forever Farflung.”

“Forever Farflung.”

“Forever Farflung.”

And so they walked on, without speaking.

It was not much farther, just a half mile or so, before they came to the fork in the road where the Middle Road split into the High Road and the Low Road. There, between the two main roads, behind the sign post, on which was now tacked a WANTED poster with the face of the kindly riverfella named Zero Koepka, was the two-rutted footpath that led down a scrubby little hill and led to Katherine’s house, an old stone cottage at the far end of a long dirt road called Collywobble Lane.

A fat cloud slid over the sinking sun and cast a long shadow over the Middle Road. Without saying goodbye, Penelope turned up the Low Road, and walked off, her feet kicking up little clouds of dust. Tom turned and looked back at the two Hobnails far in the distance. They were much too far away to hear what he said, but he whispered it anyway:

“I noticed something else strange today, too,”

And then he turned up the High Road and walked off in the direction of Blackhollow Manor, making little splashes in the puddles as he shuffled along between the blossomless honeysuckle trees that arched over the road, under the suddenly cloudless sky.