by Rory Power
And then he’s on a gurney, and they’re taking him away, and me, I’m still here.
HETTY
CHAPTER 13
I wake to the sound of my name and Reese shaking me lightly. My skin is damp, sweat soaked through the back of my shirt, and my throat hurts, like I’ve been trying not to scream.
“It’s time,” she whispers. Around us the house is quiet, no sliver of sound from the other dorms to puncture it, and the moon is so high I can’t see it out the window. We must be past midnight. Sun won’t hit the sky for a few more hours this time of year, but the lawn is glassy and bright with frost. We should be able to see well enough in the woods without a flashlight.
We get up, moving slowly to keep our footsteps soft. I hesitate at the door to our room. Right now, Byatt’s alive. That’s what I know. If I go out there, I’ll be taking that thought in my hands, bending it to see if it breaks.
“Ready?” Reese says behind me.
Byatt’s alive. She’s alive and she needs me now, like I’ve always needed her. “Yeah.”
Out the door and down the hall, Reese with her hood drawn up over her hair to keep the light in, and walking so close I can feel the backs of her fingers brushing against mine. Nobody else is awake, or if they are, they’re being quiet, so we make it past the other dorms and out onto the mezzanine free and easy.
We crouch at the top of the stairs, my eye straining to find the girl usually stationed guarding the front entrance. I wonder if she’ll help Welch take Byatt out to the Harker house or if Welch will do it alone.
I can’t see anybody, even with the silver light streaming through the stacks of windows, but maybe it’s just my blind eye, so I nudge Reese. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” Reese says. I look back, and she’s frowning. “Someone should be on duty.”
“She must have changed the schedule.” We both know why, even if we’re not saying it—Welch doesn’t want anybody seeing what she’s about to do. An advantage for her, but for me, too, and I’m not about to pass it up. “Let’s get outside.”
I stand and take the first few stairs slowly, my eye struggling to make edges out of the dark. Step by step, Reese at my elbow, until we hit the ground floor. And still nobody—no guard girls to catch us, no sign of Welch. Are we too early? Or too late?
Reese opens one of the double doors, and I slip outside after her, hesitating under the porch as the chilled winter air burrows into my jacket. I have a feeling the Gun Shift girls have been pulled off duty just like whoever was supposed to be guarding the door, but I can’t be too careful.
Gun Shift always keeps a lantern lit after sundown. I wait as Reese tugs her hood tightly over her hair and ducks out into the night, peering up to the roof deck.
“Nothing,” she says, clouds of her breath drifting in the dark. “We’re good.”
All of this happening in secret. I can’t think about what that might mean for Byatt.
Out, then, along the flagstone path and to the spruce copse by the fence. Reese waits for me as I dig for the shotgun with numb fingers, frozen dirt clumping under my nails. Right where we left it, and I should be glad, but I never wanted any of this. Not a gun in my hands, not the life of my best friend on my shoulders.
For a moment I wait, think of the note pinned to the bulletin board in the main hall. Keep the quarantine, they said. Follow the rules and we’ll help you.
A knife in my belt, and the shotgun in my hands. A year and a half of empty sky, of not enough medicine, of bodies burning behind the school. We have to help ourselves.
* * *
—
At the gate I go first, open it as gingerly as I can to keep from cutting my fingers open on the shards of glass we’ve bound to the bars. Anybody can open it from the school side of the fence, but it will lock behind us when we leave, with the key hanging from Welch’s belt the only way back in.
“You sure about the north edge?” Reese says. She means my plan for getting back home. Not really a plan so much as our only option, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to boost ourselves up over the fence where it hits the cliff on the north side of the island.
“As sure as I’m getting,” I say, and it has to be good enough. There’s no other choice.
Reese leads the way as we head out into the pines. Trees clustered close, needles a carpet of green rot, wet and sweet. Even though the island’s changed, even though I’m the one who’s been out in the wildwood since it turned strange and cruel, I think she still knows it best. We’re all Raxter girls, but not like Reese.
Sometimes she’d tell us about the island. About the secret places she’d found—the beaches you could only get to at low tide, the trails through the spindlegrass. She’d tell us about her father waking her up in the middle of the night and taking her down to the rocky shore, to see the waves glaze the stone with a bioluminescent glow, a cool white like the light of her hair. Those first few days back at school after summer break she’d stare out the window, still freckled and tanned, a look in her eyes like she was trapped.
If only it were like that for me out here. Instead, everywhere I look, there’s something to be scared of. Every noise an animal coming up behind us. I shoulder the shotgun and remind myself I only have two shots to take.
We’re in deep enough that I can’t see the fence if I look back. Above us, the canopy letting only the barest stripes of moon through. I want to ask Reese to take off her hood, to let the light off her hair show me the path, but we can’t risk being seen by Welch, or by whoever she’s heading to meet. So I stick close to her, trust that her eyes are making more sense of the dark than mine.
In the distance a branch cracks, and we stop, press ourselves behind a pine and wait. Welch, maybe. Or something else, something worse. My heart racing, nerves alight. Whatever it is, we’re safer in the dark than I was that day on Boat Shift. We must be.
“Hey,” Reese whispers. She’s crouched low, leaning around the tree trunk. “I think it’s okay.”
What could be okay out here? “Really?”
“Yeah.” She stands up, beckons to me. “It’s just some deer.”
I peer around her shoulder, and there, ambling toward us through a patch of moonlight, a pair of bucks. From here they look fine, almost normal, but up close, I know I’d see their veins raised out of their skin like patterns of lace. And I know if we sliced them open, their flesh would twitch like it’s still living.
When I was on Gun Shift we’d shoot them like the other animals, like anything that got too close. To be safe, that was what Welch told us. But they are only deer, and I always wondered what they could really do.
“Let’s go,” Reese whispers. “They look harmless.”
I shake my head. “Not until they pass.”
“Fine,” she says too loud, and their heads swing around, considering the shadows with eyes washed over white. I hold my breath. Maybe they’re blind.
We’re not that lucky. One of the deer takes a hesitant step toward us, and as it opens its mouth, I gasp. Incisors long and gleaming wet, sharp like a coyote’s.
“The gun,” Reese says, trying to sound calm, but she’s hitting my arm, dragging me out in front of her. The deer cocks its head. “Shit, Hetty, get the gun.”
“Someone might hear the shot.”
She scrambles back. “It was your idea.”
Just like on the roof, I think. Like I always used to do. The shotgun snug against my shoulder. My eye squinting through the sight. Even in the dark it’s not a hard shot, but the deer’s moving now, coming closer, and I only have the two shells.
“Reese,” I say. “We should’ve stolen more ammo.”
“What?”
I take the shot. The recoil sends me stumbling back, but I hit home, the shell striking deep into the deer’s flank. It wails, back legs collapsing, and behind it the sec
ond deer darts a few yards into the trees, fur bristled and raised.
The deer thrashes weakly, crumpling with a whimper as the wound begins to ooze, blood pooling thick on the frost-covered ground. I step closer to its prone body, and it lifts its head. I swear it’s looking right at me.
“What do you think?” Reese asks. “Put it out of its misery?”
“No,” I say. There’s no room to feel bad. If I feel that, I have to feel everything else.
We continue on into the gloom. When I look over my shoulder, the second deer is back in the moonlit clearing, standing over the first with its head bent. I watch as it rips a bite out of the wounded deer, coming away with a mouthful of flesh, blood staining the white fur on its throat.
I should be surprised. But I only feel a flicker of recognition. We’re all like that on Raxter. We all do whatever it takes to survive.
I balance the shotgun on my shoulder and keep after Reese. We’re not far from her house.
* * *
—
It took until spring of my first year for Reese to invite us over. We’d spent third-quarter break on campus, all three of us together—Byatt didn’t want to go home, so I didn’t either—and when school started up again Reese was easier somehow. Still never smiling, still quiet and closed, but at lunch she started letting me cut ahead of her in line. In English she lent me her copy of The Scarlet Letter when she saw I’d lost mine, said she’d read it already even though I knew she hadn’t.
One night she showed up to dinner and she wasn’t wearing her uniform. We were supposed to wear skirts and collars from sunup to sundown on weekdays, but there she was, jeans and a ratty old sweatshirt, and she said, “Thought we’d eat at my place.”
We followed her out through the double doors, down the walk to where two bikes were leaning against the fence. I never had one, never learned to ride, so I waited and tried not to look anxious as Byatt climbed onto hers. I remember wondering if they’d leave me behind. Reese hadn’t technically invited me. She hadn’t named names.
“Come on,” Byatt said. “Get on the handlebars.”
“People only do that in movies,” I said. But I straddled the wheel, eased myself onto the bars.
It was starting to stay light out in the evenings, and as we flew down the road there was sun everywhere, glare reaching in off the ocean. I wanted to be the girl who closes her eyes, tips her head back. Instead, I asked Byatt to slow down.
Reese’s house backed onto the beach, low-slung and weathered, like it grew up out of the reeds. As we got nearer I could see a dock behind the house, stretching out into the waves, and two rowboats bobbing at their mooring. And on the front porch, waving to us, Mr. Harker. Tall, broad. Hair trimmed neat, like my dad’s Navy cut.
“You made it,” he said, and came down the steps to help me off Byatt’s bike. It made me nervous, I remember, seeing him so close up. We saw him through classroom windows, and we saw him across the grounds as he mowed the lawn and cleaned the gutters, but this—a man, his calloused hand on my arm. I forgot I could be afraid of them.
It’s only a moment, though. A prick in the cloth. We went inside, to one long room, the whole of the house right there at our feet. And the food smelled good, better than the dining room food, and there were photos of Reese on the wall. Reese learning to swim. Reese halfway up a tree, grinning down at the camera. I couldn’t take my eyes off her the whole night. It was like she made sense, finally, in her father’s house, with mismatched furniture and the back door thrown open.
“I hope the place looks okay,” he said to us when Reese took the plates to the kitchen. “We don’t have much company over.”
“It looks great,” I said, and I meant it. I never missed my house much, but that night I did.
Afterward, Byatt and I waited at the end of the driveway while Reese said goodbye. She was leaning in, saying something I couldn’t hear, and then Mr. Harker laughed and laid his palm against her forehead.
Byatt looked away, but I didn’t. I watched Reese smile, watched her roll her eyes. “Still fits,” I heard him say.
My own father, tour after tour, day after day of being gone. We never knew each other like that.
Sky streaked rose, stars faint and new. We were quiet the whole ride home.
* * *
—
I have that day fresh in my mind, the image of her house so clear. Pale green siding and white trim, windows only just installed. New shingles on the roof—repairs after that year’s hurricane.
We crossed the road a while back, to the north side of the island, and I can tell we’re getting closer to the shore. Under our feet the ground is damp and full of give, and I can just catch a whiff of salt in the air. I adjust the shotgun where it’s balanced on my shoulder, flex my fingers to work the feeling back into them, and we keep going.
As the trees start to thin out, the light builds, moon gilding everything silver. Still no sign of Welch. We pick our way through the pines as they turn slender and leaning, until there’s a break in the tree line, and the shore opens in front of us, a wide plain of reeds. Out past the end of them I can see something skimming low across the water.
“Is that—”
“The dock,” Reese finishes. “Yeah.”
No boat moored there, and nobody on the horizon. For now, I think we’re the only ones here. Surely we’d have heard something if we weren’t, or seen some sort of light. After all, Welch has nobody to hide from, and neither does whoever she’s meeting.
It’s easier to follow the tree line than to fight through the brush, so we walk the edge of it, cattails snagging on our clothes. I’m thinking, still, of that first day, of the house as I remember it; that’s why I don’t understand when Reese stops, why I stumble into her. We aren’t there yet.
But I look again, and we are. Moonlight bouncing off the water, a haze of sea spray as the waves crash in that settles on my skin in a fine, freezing mist and steals the breath from me. And there’s the house, or what’s left of it, twisting up out of the reeds.
The porch, listing to one side like it’s taken a punch. Floorboards cracked, a hole yawning, lichen crawling up the walls. Siding covered in moss and trailing ivy. And in the middle, out of the heart, roof splintering around it, a paper birch, growing on its own. Trunk broad and splitting, branches reaching high.
I glance at Reese. Her whole face open and bright, a softness to it that I almost remember from the first days I ever knew her. “It’s beautiful,” I try. And I mean it, I do. “I’ve never seen a birch that big.”
But then, everything grows faster after the Tox. And everything falls apart faster, too, the Harker house practically in pieces after a year and a half alone out here. I wish I were surprised. I wish any of this were still strange to me.
Reese doesn’t say anything. I don’t think she’s blinked since we saw the house. I tuck the shotgun under my arm and nudge her elbow with mine.
“Do you think they’re here?” I whisper. “I don’t see any light.” Not to mention there are so many gaps in the wall that I can practically see straight through the house to the other side.
She still doesn’t answer me. Just stares at what’s left of her house. I’m wondering if maybe it was a mistake to bring her, if this is too much for one girl to take, when she breaks for the porch.
“Wait,” I hiss, but it’s no use. I hurry after her, adjust my grip on the shotgun. Only one shell left, and only my knife for backup. I have to be smart.
Termites have gotten to the house. Their trails run labyrinthine across the doorframe, so deep it would’ve collapsed by now if it weren’t for the way the birch has hooked one of its limbs underneath. Reese is already inside, so I duck through after her, part of the frame crumbling to dust under my hand.
Above me the birch splits and blooms, throwing down bouquets of silver light. Most of the roof is g
one, slabs of it probably lost to the storms we get come spring. Instead, the branches soar like rafters, and roots weave through the floorboards, and I keep thinking of the cathedral I went to in Naples, on vacation with my dad during his leave. How the whole place felt like it was lifting me off my feet.
A voice, suddenly, and a flashlight beam comes lancing through the shattered walls, splashes across the ground. Welch is here.
Fear breaking over me like a sweat, the shotgun slipping in my numb grip, and I grab Reese’s arm, drag her out the back of the house. We stumble, trampling a patch of Raxter Irises under our feet. Ahead of us, a thin strip of beach, and the dock off to the right. Welch is meeting someone, and they could come from anywhere. We could be caught any second, thrown onto our knees and shot.
Get it together, I think. We’re here. There’s no going back.
“Come on,” I whisper to Reese. There’s a clump of pines back in the tree line that should keep us hidden.
We get there just in time. I crouch down, my muscles stiff and hurting. Lay the shotgun across my knees and peer between the tree trunks at the house laid out in front of us. The flashlight beam is getting stronger, catching some of the reeds, turning them translucent. I squint, my blind eye throbbing. I think I can make out the shape of a person, but whoever it is they’re bent over, moving slowly. Is that Welch?
“Lift your end higher” comes Welch’s voice. I jump. She sounds so close. But who is she talking to? Byatt?
It feels like forever, but finally Welch steps out from the last of the trees, into the moonlight. She’s hunched over something, and there’s someone else with her, their face in shadow until they straighten, and it’s Taylor. Taylor, who left Boat Shift, and I guess this is why.
And between them. Carried between them, a body bag.
