"Turn here."
Headlights glared across a sea of silently shifting cornstalks.
"Are you sure? It's just-"
"Soren, do you still believe me?"
His eyes traced the undulating void, vast under a starless sky. He turned to see her eyes, to see the truth he had seen in them twenty minutes before, soothing her nightmares in the stark light of the refrigerator. Shadows cupped her face like a lover's hands. Her eyes were hooded and unreadable. The cold was seeping in and clouding in frosty puffs around her quivering mouth.
"Wren," he sighed, "you know I believe you."
"Then how come we're just sitting here?"
"How long ago did she disappear?"
"Meg didn't disappear," Wren snapped. "She was abducted."
Soren covered her icy hand with his warm one. Her face tilted away from him.
"Sorry," she whispered.
"It's okay," He kissed her hand. "We'll find her. So, you think her kidnapper is hiding her out here?" He gestured to the cornfield. She nodded.
"Alright then."
• • • • • •
Tall voices whispered, husky questions pressing close in the murky shadows thrown by the lurid light of a dying flashlight. Soren swallowed his heartbeat and squeezed Wren's hand. She glanced back, her face a small moon in vast black space. They rustled through the corn together as quietly as the November breeze.
Soren watched his shoes, crackling over invisible dried husks. He watched Wren, her flannel shirt flapping in the cold. He did not watch the sky; there was nothing there.
"Wren?" His voice splintered. He cleared his throat. "Wren, do you know where we are?"
"Yes," she called over her shoulder. "We're almost there. This is where it was..."
Rustling corn and darkness.
Wren halted, peering between stalks. She breathed a curse. Soren stumbled to her side and a bevy of shapeless crows erupted from the clearing just ahead. Their wings stuttered in the silent air and echoed away.
Soren saw a jagged shape, a glacial hulk, so gargantuan it split the formless sky with a razor-edged nose. His eyes traced the cylindrical bulk of thrusters that could topple a silo. Humming with energy, lit by the freezing blue glow of thousands of windows like staring, glaring eyes, it waited.
"Meg," whispered Wren.
