She doesn’t say a word now.

“You cursed them?”

He doesn’t believe in personal curses.

“None of my business, I guess,” he says finally.

She turns away from him, looking off into the trees.

“What do they change into? Werewolves? Bats?”

“Various things,” she says, turning back toward him, blinking. “Shortlived things. One of them changes into a cat. She’ll live ten years.”

Ten years is a moment.

“I did that to them,” she says. “And I’m sorry. I want to help them.”

“What are you looking for from me?” he says. “How not to die? That’s the kind of advice you want?”

“How to live!” she shouts at him. “Yes!”

“I move things. Air toward me, water and fire away from me. But I don’t know why I keep on living.”

“Teach me how you live,” she says, “so I can teach them. And I’ll find out how you can die.”

WHEN they get back to the cabin, the kids are gone.

She says something under her breath and starts running down the path toward the lake, her boots wallowing in the snow. He begins to run too.

It’s three-quarters of a mile to the lake, and the footing is horrible, slushy snow over mud over frozen earth. For years he’s made his body into an old man’s. He slips and his arms windmill as he catches up to her.

“—foresaw this?” he pants.

She turns back to him, furious. “Are you a Talent? Does it always work for you? I was talking to you! And if you can push fire away, why can’t you push earth and just fly?”

“I don’t fly—”

He is a man. Men don’t fly. He is a man, like others; he had friends; he had a wife; he was in love. He is Mr. Green, Bill Green. He is not something fallen from the sky, doomed to be alone. He doesn’t fly.

He was mankind’s Protector once, and he is too lonely to go back to that lonely place. A Protector flies. A man doesn’t.

He hears screaming from the lake.

And he flies. Nothing superhero-like, rocketlike; he just pushes the force of gravity away. He’s awkward, rising, wobbling. Too far at first; he thinks he’ll be spotted and spends too much time scanning the sky for a plane. He ducks down into the trees, gets tangled and caught in a pine, flails at branches. He bullies his way through the treetops like a bear through shrubs, sticky with pine sap, whipped by branches.

There’s light in front of him, a plain that looks like a wide white field.

The lake is smoking with fog. He can’t see anything. He drops downward, shouting for her, for them, looking for the shore. In the fog, somewhere, they’re shouting for him.

When he hits the ice, it tilts.

Broken ice. Open water. He runs across them both, light as a skater. He’s never lost anyone on the ice, and he’s not going to start now. The ice bobs under his feet, and suddenly, out of the fog ahead of him, he sees the kids. They’re stupidly huddled all together by the edge of a fractured black hole, and thrashing in the water he sees two of them, the boy with the long hair and his father. Lan is already out on the ice, flattened on it, her red hair a shock in the grayness, holding her hands out to the boy. “I’ve got you,” Green shouts at her. “It’ll hold.”

But it doesn’t. He tries to extend a cradle of force all the way across the ice, over the hole, without trapping the boy and his father. But there are too many of them, the kids all together are too heavy on all that tipping ice, it’s too far, it’s been too long.

The ice cracks; she slips and flails and is gone. One by one the kids slide in after her and in a moment the ice is empty.

His giant invisible hands of force reach out and tilt the ice back, find a struggling body here, a furry parka there. His giant invisible fingers sieve the black water, hunting the kids. He shapes a globe of air and shoves a drowning kitten into it. A bear is grabbing at the ice, breaking more chunks away. A Red Sox hat, a Hello Kitty backpack, but no flaming red hair—

He touches something, touches her. Pulls Lan out of the water, her hair a river of blood down her back, her face blue. Throws her down onto the bank. How to get water out of lungs? He makes up something, moving air, moving water. Feels something in her dark and alien as death. Then feels her retching cough.

“What am I looking for?” he yells at her. Another part of him is a net, dredging. “Help me find them!”

In the end he recognizes them only because there are the same number of them as before. There were five girls, one boy, two men; now, one girl, a snake, a great brown bear, five little beasts. A bedraggled kitten stares up at him, a sobbing round badger clutches a girl’s glasses in one wet paw. The girl has a long braid. The bear has a Red Sox cap.

They look at him with adoration, as if he could solve all their problems, and their superhero is so lonely he could howl.

HE and Lan have sent the kids back to the cabin to bathe, and they stand outside to give the kids privacy. Lan says they want privacy. Lan’s changed her clothes, but she’s still shivering. He warms the air around her, moving it gently. Protector. They watch through the windows. Through the steamy glass he sees them, bedraggled, silt-smeared animals filing into his shower, little girls coming out wrapped in his towels. A kittenish girl, a round brown girl with a tilted chin and pointed nose. The bear has the lazy man’s lumbering, rolling walk, the boy has a girl’s shy smile.

“Cold water makes them—change. They change their shape. Hot water turns them back into human,” Lan says, her teeth chattering still.

“How did you do that to them?”

“I don’t know! As if I knew!”

“There’s got to be some way to undo it.”

“There was another spring. It’s gone.”

It’s another kind of Talent from anything he knows. “I don’t believe in this. It’s magic.”

“But you can fly,” she says, half laughing and half shivering.

“I don’t have to believe in myself.”

She watches the kids through the window. “Maybe all kinds of magic exist. Somewhere, in a cave, a family of werewolves is reading old Green Force comics and saying, ‘Of course he isn’t real.’ Ghosts are reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and saying what you’re a metaphor for. And the bats sleep through the day and dream of all of us.”

He thinks of the Bat in his Cave. “And we’d all rather be human.”

“I thought you could make them human again. Or at least give them time. You don’t get old—”

“No,” he says sharply. “No.”

When his parents began to get old, he thought about fixing their aging bodies. “There are stories about things I did. Humans getting old but not able to die. People turning into trees. They weren’t trees. You don’t want me messing with those kids.”

I want to die. I want to get old and older and oldest and die, and turn into a tree, into a rock. I’ve been a man.

She shudders, cold or dispirited. “What can you do, then?”

“When my wife got old, I did nothing. That’s what I could do for her. I did nothing.”

“No.” She turns toward him. In the half dark where they are watching, her eyes have turned dark as prophecy. “What can you do?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Move the light,” she says. “Move the light from the window. Can you do that?”

He moves it an inch to the right. Parlor trick.

“You can move light. But you got the kids to cover up the igloo because you were worried about satellites. You moved the water out of my lungs, but you didn’t move the fog off the lake. You heated the air for me, but you didn’t cool it for them. Here we are standing out in the cold. What can you do? I mean, have you ever thought about it? In an organized way?”

She’s shouting at him. I can get old, he thinks. I can be old like a bitter old man. I can be bitter.