Black River Falls (18 page)

“Tell me,” he said. “What raw materials did you use to build Cardinal Cassidy?”

“I'm not—”

“I know you're not infected.”

Freeman waited, his sea blue eyes never wavering.

“I thought you said that you could just look at someone and see their past and their future.”

He studied me a second longer, and then a slow grin softened the lines of his face. He closed the book and set it in his lap.

“What were you doing at Mr. Addad's house?”

“Who's Mr.—” Then it hit me. The man in the house. The man who had taken Mom. “How did you know I was there? Were you following me?”

Freeman said nothing. I shrugged and picked at a stray bit of carpet. “I thought I knew the woman there.”

“Sara?”

The word hit me with a jolt. So that was her name now. Sara. I nodded.

“She's been good for him.”

I made myself look up. “What do you mean?”

“Sara found Fred wandering in the woods two weeks after the outbreak. He was alone. Nearly starving. She got him to the Guard. It turned out his mother had died a week before the outbreak and he was in town for her funeral. That's her house they're staying in. He and Sara have been together ever since.”

“So he didn't . . .”

“What?”

I swallowed back an ache in my throat. “He didn't . . . take her?”

An even greater intensity flooded Freeman's eyes. “So
that's
why you came,” he said. “You wanted to rescue her.”

Freeman assured me that Fred wasn't that kind of man. That he was gentle and seemed to love Mom. Every bit of the exhaustion and pain I'd felt over the last few days came surging back at once. Maybe I should have been happy to know that Mom wasn't with some monster, but all I could think about was how she had gone to the Guard to get some stranger his name back, and had left her own behind.

When Freeman was done, I forced myself up and started toward the front door.

“Did you know her?”

I turned back. Freeman was still sitting on the floor, surrounded by his books.

“Sara,” he said. “Did you know her?”

From where I was standing I could see down a line of shelves to the front desk and the windows behind it. While we'd been talking, the sun had begun to rise, filling the library with a blueish early-morning light. Near the desk was a small round table surrounded by four plastic chairs. I saw the four of us sitting there that first week in Black River when we came with Mom and Dad to get our library cards.

“No,” I said. “I didn't know her. Thanks for the help, Freeman.”

My legs shook as I made my way through the stacks. But I didn't go straight to the front door. I veered off into the dimmer sections of the library, wandering aimlessly until I decided to stop lying to myself. I knew where I was going.

I found all four volumes of
Cardinal and the Brotherhood of Wings
on a shelf toward the back. Their scarlet spines seemed to glow in the low light, standing out against all the others. I ran my finger down the length of them. A bell tolled in my chest as I read each title:

V
OLUME 1.
 T
HE
R
ADIANT
C
ITY AND THE
E
MERALD
H
ORDE

 

V
OLUME 2.
 S
ALLY
S
PARROW
D
ANCES
A
MONG THE
S
TARS

 

V
OLUME 3.
 B
EHOLD,
A
BADDON

 

V
OLUME 4.
 E
XILE IN THE
G
ARDENS OF
N
ULL

I picked up the first volume and became lost in it immediately. The pain of my injuries faded as I breezed through the Brotherhood's battles with Madame Night, Slim John, and Professor Hurricane. I was right there when Blue Jay learned what being a leader meant on the day the Brotherhood was trapped in the Gray Waste. When Black Eagle and Rex Raven survived the three trials of the King of the Molemen. When Sally Sparrow danced among the stars.

Before I knew it, I was at the end of the second volume and staring at
that
page, you know the one, the panel everybody said won Dad his Hugo. The one that made him famous.

The Rose Prison.

I'd seen it a thousand times, but it still stopped me cold. It was so simple. Cardinal and Sally Sparrow imprisoned at the heart of an immense rose of coral-colored steel. I'd looked at the panel a thousand times and still couldn't understand how Dad had managed to make something that was so beautiful and so horrifying at the same time.

The sun was fully up by then and the room was bright and warm. The green curve of Lucy's Promise showed in one of the south-facing windows, but I knew I couldn't go back there, not yet. There was somewhere I needed to go first.

I took the Brotherhood comics off the shelf and tucked them under my arm as I walked out of the library.

Sun-bleached trash blew across the parking lot of the Seeger Museum. Trees that had once been trimmed into lollipop rounds like something out of
Willy Wonka
were overgrown and leaning.

I pushed aside the Guard's yellow
NO TRESPASSING
tape and ducked through a gap in the chainlink fence that surrounded the property. The building's glass front doors and the steel roll-down barrier had been smashed, maybe the night of the outbreak, maybe by people looking for shelter later on. I found an opening big enough and squeezed inside.

Sunlight filtered down through the skylights. Most of the artwork had been evacuated by the Guard long ago, so the walls were empty. Just ghostly rectangles where the paintings used to hang. I felt my way through the darker hallways until I came to a door set in a concrete wall. The metal sign riveted beside it read R
ICHARD
S
ERRA
:
T
ORQUED
E
LLIPSES
.

I stepped through the doorway into that immense room.

The first time I'd seen the sculptures, that day we came to Black River on a house-hunting trip, I didn't even understand what I was looking at. Twenty-foot-high walls of rust-colored steel all lined up in a concrete room. So what? It wasn't until we got closer to the first one that I saw that its walls were curved. The wall was actually a ring with an opening on one side that led into an empty space that was easily as big as our apartment in Brooklyn.

I ran to the second ellipse—two rings, one inside the other. I got to the third one before any of you and discovered a maze of rings within rings, three or four of them, the openings staggered around their circumference, making a kind of spiral. It was bright inside when I first entered, but the way the walls leaned into or away from each other as they curved sent me from day to twilight and back to day again. I staggered along like I was on the deck of a sailing ship. When I was finally let out into the heart of the ellipse, I was so dizzy I fell right on my butt. The walls soared over my head, bending up and away toward the skylights. The sun made their brown steel seem warm and alive. I felt sure that if I laid my hand against one, I'd feel a pulse moving just beneath the metal.

And then the three of you came in, you and Mom a little giddy, Dad quiet. I remember how we all ended up on our backs in the middle of the floor, taking turns describing the ellipse. You said it was a carnival funhouse. I said it was the hull of a ship we were sailing through a storm. Mom said the walls were like the petals of an immense rose. When Dad's turn came, he was quiet for a long time before he said that it wasn't a rose, it was a prison, and we were all trapped inside.

Now I made my way through the dusty room, passing the other ellipses and going straight to the third. I found the rift and walked inside, curving around the spiraling walls, the palm of my hand skimming along the rough steel. When I reached the center of it, I dropped the Brotherhood comics in a pile and sat on the scuffed concrete floor. The skylights overhead were frosted with dust and bird droppings, turning the light into a spoiled-milk haze.

I pulled off my mask and lay flat on my back. The walls towered above me. I heard Freeman's voice in my ear.
What raw materials did you use to build Cardinal Cassidy?

The trip to Lake George was supposed to fix everything. I know it probably seemed out of nowhere when I first mentioned it that morning at breakfast, but the truth was I'd been planning it for weeks. Six full days in a two-bedroom cabin a hundred and fifty miles from Black River. All of us packed in together just like it was when we were back in Brooklyn. At first I was pretty sure Dad was going to flat-out refuse, but I guess the nudging from Mom helped.

I got more and more excited as the weeks stretched by. It was kind of like when you buy someone the perfect Christmas present and it feels like you'll jump out of your skin if the day doesn't hurry up and get there so you can give it to them. I think I drove you a little crazy, didn't I? Admit it, in the weeks leading up to Lake George, the decision to save money by living at home instead of in the dorm your first year in college was seeming like a truly terrible one.

Anyway, the day finally came, and there we were, you and me and Mom. We'd loaded our bags into the car and were standing at the end of the driveway, waiting for Dad. Autumn had turned the slopes of Lucy's Promise and the rest of the Highlands scarlet and gold. The air was crisp and smelled like dry leaves and fireplace smoke. I felt like there were fireworks going off inside my chest. I couldn't stop talking.

“Did I tell you guys about the boats? You can rent them at the place and then take them all the way across the lake. They have rowboats and motorboats and those ones that have the pedals, like bicycles. Oh! And there are horses.”

Mom put her hand on my shoulder, as if she were trying to keep me from leaping into the air. “Yes, you told us about the horses.”

You rolled your eyes as you tapped away on your phone, probably texting that girl from your art class. “
And
all the great antiquing opportunities. Seriously, Card,” you said, “what sixteen-year-old kid gets pumped about looking at antiques?”

You were messing with me, but I didn't care. Right then, I was invulnerable to it.

“You'll see. You and me, bro. We've got us a date with some reasonably priced mid-century modern home furnishings!”

“You are such a freak.”

“I can see you're a tough sell, kid. That's why I saved the best for last. Did I mention the twelve miles of hiking trails? Or the generous daily breakfast prepared to order by a genuine French chef?”

Mom pulled out her phone, checked the time, and then put it back. It was the third time she'd done it in the last twenty minutes.

“Dad just has a few things to finish up,” I said. “And then he'll be ready.”

Mom tried to smile, but it was a poor effort. She kept her eyes locked on the front door. I pulled out my brochures and put the finishing touches on the plan. We'd probably all want a little rest after the drive, so I thought naps first and then we could cook out on the charcoal grill the place provided. I'd already talked to the manager about the best grocery store to go to in town for steaks and things. After that I figured you and I could go over to the main house and grab a whole bunch of board games. Day Two was definitely horseback riding and then maybe a trip into town. Day Three was—

Footsteps on the sidewalk. My heart jumped into my throat. When I looked up, though, it wasn't Dad coming out of the house, it was Mom going in.

“Mom, no, wait! He just needs more time! He'll be here in—”

Mom slammed the door behind her, and the fight started almost immediately. Mom yelled. Dad yelled back. I could hear every word, almost as if there were no walls between us at all. It was a familiar enough sound by then, but standing there with those brochures clenched in my fists, I felt like there was this iron bar running down the middle of me and someone had taken it in both hands and shaken it.

I turned to you, but you had your head down and your fists jammed in your jacket pockets so hard I could make out the peaks and valleys of your knuckles through the black corduroy.

“We can still get there before dark,” I said. “We can take one of the boats out on the lake. Or maybe Mom and Dad can. I brought the Xbox. Me and you could hook it up and—”

You looked up from the sidewalk. Your eyes were angry slits, rimmed in red, and your jaw was clenched. I found myself stepping back, moving away from you.

“It's going to be fine,” I said. “We'll be away six whole days. By the time we get back, everything will be the way it—”

“You're just like them.”

“Tennant—”

You turned your back and walked away, your body framed by Lucy's Promise, which autumn had turned into a wall of flames. I wanted to say something. I wanted to call out to you, to stop you, to tell you that everything was going to be okay, but I couldn't talk and I couldn't move because that iron bar was still rattling inside of me. You turned a corner and were gone, leaving me alone on the sidewalk as the house and the street and the world shook with Mom's and Dad's voices. I didn't see you again until late the next night.

October sixteenth.

I rolled up off the floor and knelt before the ellipse. You were all there, pressing in closer, surrounding me until I could hardly breathe. I pulled my arm back and drove my fist into the wall as hard as I could. It was like punching a downed power line. I hit the floor and curled around my throbbing hand, waiting for the pain to burn you all out of my head, knowing that it never could.

A
T SOME POINT
I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, Hannah was across from me.