Black River Falls (14 page)

“Wow. You have such a cool family. Are they all—” Hannah cut herself off. “Sorry. I was going ask if they were all . . . it's none of my business. I shouldn't have—”

“Tennant was away at college when Lassiter's hit.”

There was a rustle as Hannah shifted position. Water lapped against the shore.

“Oh. Well, that's good,” she said. “Lucky.”

I nodded and pushed the rocks around in my hand. They made a click like bones knocking together. There was a splash out on the reservoir. I looked up and saw another white
V
streaming across the surface toward us.

Hannah stood up on her rock. “How was it?” she called.

“Cold!”

Greer pulled himself to the shallows and strode toward us, naked and shivering.

“You know, I take it back. I wasn't a professional swimmer. But I'm pretty sure I might have been a nudist. Seriously, this is the way to go. Hannah, give it a try.”

She laughed, untied the hoodie from around her waist, and threw it at him.

“Dry yourself off. You're indecent.”

Not long after that, we were on our way back to camp, barefoot, our shoes hanging over our shoulders by the laces, as if we'd just come from a long day at the beach. I felt unbelievably light, like each step I took was covering miles. The talk flowed effortlessly, rising and falling, punctuated by laughter. At some point Snow Cone and Hershey Bar came running out of the woods and trotted alongside us. It was one of those times when you felt like there was some sort of current running through the world and you had stepped into it and been carried away.

Firelight from the camp appeared as a glow in the trees ahead, along with the faint sounds of the kids' voices. Hershey Bar and Snow Cone ran off down the trail. No one said anything, but I felt the three of us slow down until we were just barely drifting along, trying to delay the inevitable. Still, the end came. We hit the junction where the trail branched off to Hannah's and my campsites. Greer pressed on ahead, raising his hand in farewell.

“Maybe Carrie's still up!” Hannah called out. “You should go say hi.”

Greer flipped her off over his shoulders with both hands. She laughed as his footsteps faded away. I looked down the branch of the trail that led to my campsite. Suddenly everything there—my tent, my books, my clothes—seemed stale and flat, an eddy off the current, circling endlessly.

“Walk me home?”

Hannah was standing across from me on the trail. Her skin glowed a ghostly silver in the moonlight. When we got to her camp, she passed the tent and went out to the edge of the mountain. The borders of the QZ were never so obvious as they were late at night. Since it was long past the time the state turned off the electricity, inside the fence was nothing but inky blackness. Outside was a map of light and movement. The highway that ran along the western edge was like a glowing artery, red blood cells streaming one way, white the other. The neon billboards for gas stations and fast-food chains were so bright you could almost read them from where we stood. Beyond, a constellation of small towns stretched into the darkness.

“Weird, huh?” I said. “There's a whole other world out there.”

Hannah's hair whipped in the breeze. She tucked it behind her ears. “What's it like?”

I came up beside her, watching the lights move out into the dark. “A mess mostly.”

“So we're not missing anything.”

“Maybe not.”

She was quiet a moment, watching the lights. “Greer thinks your friend Gonzalez can find out who I am.”

“Is that what you want?”

Hannah turned her back on the valley and settled onto the rocks. “He said sometimes, even when he's happy, it's like there's this hole that runs right through him. All because he doesn't know.”

“Greer said that?”

She stared down at her hands, almost as if she hadn't heard me. “When I found out that I did it, that I came here to—it was kind of a relief. You know? Like something must have happened that made me want to, made me
need
to do it. But then I thought, I had to have a family, right? And friends? What could have happened that was so awful I'd just leave?”

“The note you wrote didn't . . .”

Hannah shook her head. “It said I should decide who I am instead of worrying about who I
was.
”

“That's not bad advice.”

“Maybe. But the whole time I was reading it, even though I knew it was my handwriting, I kept thinking,
I don't know this person. Why should I trust
her?
”

Hannah took hold of the key and drew it back and forth across the leather band.

“I don't know. Maybe nothing happened to me at all.”

I found a place a little farther down the ledge and sat. “What do you mean?”

“I mean sometimes when I think about, you know,
before,
I get this feeling like maybe
I
was the one who did something. Something awful.”

“No,” I said. “No way.”

“You don't even know me, Card.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that I did, but I knew it wasn't true. She was as much a stranger to me as she was to herself. I sat there staring at the ground, feeling stupid, wondering what to do or say. If things were normal, I could have put my arm around her, hugged her, told her it was going to be all right, but of course I couldn't do any of those things. Not then. Part of me wondered if I ever could have.

“What was her promise anyway?” she asked.

“What?”

Hannah was looking out to where the trees rose over the mountain's highest peak.

“Lucy must have promised somebody something pretty big for them to name a whole mountain after it. What was it?”

How strange was it that in all that time, I'd never asked the same question? There must᾿ve been a town legend about it, something they would have taught us in school, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't remember what it was.

“I don't know,” I said.

Hannah thought for a moment, and then she turned to face me. “So I guess it can be anything we want.”

We were sitting so close, closer than we should have been. Her eyes were dark and huge, twin universes. For what felt like a very long time, neither of us moved or said anything or looked away. The cabins in the camp below felt very distant. Black River was another world.

Hannah laid her hand on the rock between us. In the moonlight it was this pale, beautifully curving thing, like a dove. I moved closer. My hand shook as I reached out and placed it on top of hers, covering it. I thought I could feel a little bit of her warmth through my glove, and the gentle tapping of the pulse in her wrist. My breath grew hot under my mask as something rushed into the space between us. I didn't know what it was or where it came from, but it was there, warm and alive, connecting us both.

And then, just like that, it was gone. She drew her hand back, and time spun forward again. The air was just the air.

“I should probably get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice as thin as a slip of paper. “Me too.”

I started to go but stopped at the trail and turned back. Hannah was standing at her tent, holding the flap open.

“My dad used to read me and Tennant all these Greek myths,” I said. “Gods and heroes and monsters and all that stuff. Penthesilea was the queen of the Amazons. She was a great warrior and one of the most beautiful women in the world.”

The treetops whispered in the high wind. Hannah smiled.

As I walked back to my tent I expected the world to come crashing back over me—my worries about the Guard leaving and the Marvins taking their place, my confusion over seeing Mom again. But some remnant of that moment with Hannah clung to my skin and kept it all at bay. I stopped at the bluff that overlooked the kids' cabins. They were silver and black in the moonlight. I could feel Greer and the others inside them, asleep on their cots, breathing as one.

Before I went into my tent, I looked down the path that led to Hannah's. There was another light out there in the trees. She'd gone inside with her flashlight, making the skin of the tent glow a greenish yellow. I watched the dance of shadows inside as she got ready for bed. And then the light winked out and everything was dark.

I lay down on my sleeping bag and closed my eyes. I could feel the in-and-out pulse of the camp's breath. Hannah's too. I fell into rhythm with it, imagining the air in their lungs flowing into mine and mine into theirs. We'd built an entire world out of ourselves and all the cast-off things around us. Right then it felt as if it would go on forever.

It felt unbreakable.

T
HE NEXT THING
I knew, I was standing in my bedroom back home. It was late. I was still wearing the shorts and Captain America T-shirt I'd gone to sleep in. I thought I must have been dreaming, but I looked down at my feet and saw that they were caked in mud from my walk down the mountain. My hand went to my face and I felt a little thrill of fear when I realized I'd walked all the way through town without my mask or gloves.

The room was dark, but the little bit of moonlight coming in through the window revealed that it was just how I'd left it the night of the sixteenth. A pile of comic books lay at the foot of my unmade bed. The laundry Mom had done earlier that afternoon sat in the basket beside my desk—pants and shirts folded into neat squares, socks rolled into balls the size of fists. The air tasted like dust.

Downstairs, the front door opened and closed. Heavy footsteps moved from the entryway to the living room. I left my bedroom and started down to see who it was. When I came to the landing and made the turn for the final run of steps, I saw that it was Cardinal. He was standing at the end of the couch, perfectly still. This was Dad's Cardinal, not Gonzalez's. He was a winged tank, nine feet tall, his armor the color of blood that had become glossy as it hardened into steel.

The living room windows filled with an orange light that sent shadows writhing across the walls and the floor. I smelled smoke and heard the ring of wind chimes. Cardinal turned and walked toward the front door. I followed him out onto the porch, but the porch wasn't the porch anymore. It was a shelf of rock at the peak of Lucy's Promise.

Cardinal sat down at the edge of the cliff and motioned for me to join him. When I did, he broke the seal on his helmet and set it in his lap. It wasn't Cameron Conner. It was Dad. He swept his hand across the landscape.

“Behold, the Gardens of Null.”

As the words left his mouth, the sun rose over our backs and spread across a world that had been consumed by an immense fire. From where we sat, all the way to the horizon, there was only silence and great dunes of oily gray ash. No buildings. No streets. The Black River had boiled away and the forests had become groves of limbless pillars, charred to cinder. Lucy's Promise sat at the center of it all. The flames had burned it down to bedrock, leaving its slopes a glossy black. Here and there, fissures showed the deep orange flames that seethed in the heart of the mountain.

I turned back to Cardinal, but instead of Dad's face he had yours. I asked how the fire had started, and you leaned in close and whispered to me the great secret of the world.

“It
wants
to burn,” you said.

The sun passed over our heads. The sky became a deep black nothing.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

A knife appeared in your hand. It was black-handled with a chrome blade. A kitchen knife. You placed it in my palm and closed my fingers around it.

“Forget.”

You took my hand and gently guided it until the tip of the blade hovered just over my right eye. The next second you were gone and I was alone. A hot wind moaned around the top of the mountain. I turned to my right. Even though the sun was gone, I could see tendrils of shadow falling down the face of the rocks beside me. I thought about the great secret of the world, and then I gripped the knife in both hands and drove it through.

A
ND THEN
I was standing in the middle of the woods. It was morning. I was barefoot. My T-shirt and shorts were damp with sweat. I looked for a landmark to get my bearings, but all I saw was that I was on a trail. I thought maybe if I kept going, everything would become clear.

The trail opened up to a small field. It was perfectly empty and quiet except for a low, moaning wind, but I wasn't sure if that was real or if it was in my head. I moved from the dirt trail to the grass. At the far end of the clearing were two gray boulders perched at the edge of the mountain. As soon as I saw them, everything snapped into focus. This was Hannah's campsite. But her tent was gone and so were all her things.

A wormy chill raced up my spine. Had I dreamed her? Dreamed everything that happened to us? And if I had, how far back did the dream go? Maybe there had never been any virus. Maybe you and Mom and Dad were still—

“Cardinal?”

Hannah was standing behind me, but I almost didn't recognize her. She was in shorts and a blue T-shirt with a picture of a rabbit on it. Her hair was pinned behind her ears, turning her face into a pale moon.

“You all right?”

“I . . .” I turned to look around at the barren campsite. “Where is everything?”

“I was just—I'm moving my things down into Astrid's cabin.”

There was an ache in my throat as I said, “You're leaving?”

“No, I'm just—”

“When did you decide to do that?”

“This morning. I asked her and—”

“You asked
her?
”

Hannah's jaw tensed. “They have a spare cot, and I thought  . . .” Her voice was like a steel wire that had been stretched too tight. “I thought it made more sense that way. For me to be down there with everyone else. I just came back for my—”

She pointed behind me. Her backpack was leaning against some bushes. I hadn't noticed it earlier. I picked it up, then returned to Hannah and held it out to her.