The Game — Issue 2: Chapter Two, Let There Be Apples

In the grey field where the gatherers came to Earth exactly once, the Gift shows itself as making — and a small girl speaks the words "Let there be apples." An apple tree arrives whole, apples already on it, and the children of the playground learn the law of the field: a spoken making must be for somebody, and a thing that others take up and keep grows stronger with every keeping, until the strongest things are put in the Keeping grove, where kept ideas hang like lanterns and ripening fruit together. Tam, seven years old, makes music — a tune like a gold ribbon — and Wren dances it; the Listening opens a quiet doorway between them; and Tam grows to make the Thrill and the city of Noor across the water, where children arrive down ride-lines and keep what they find. But the price of the grove is a pebble on a shelf, and one child is left unkept: Sorrel, who sings a true song no one in creation hears, and watches the light across the world from her bitter garden — closely, completely, alone.