by Emily Henry
I am offering you help at great personal risk, so PLEASE be cautious with what I’ve told you. Again, share with NO ONE—not even family—what we’ve talked about, and waste no time in erasing your tracks.
Stay safe.
Bill
My mouth had gone dry. My throat felt tight. There was no definite proof. This man could still be a conspiracy theorist, someone who wore tinfoil hats and believed the senators were all reptilian shape-shifters.
The scars, the energy, the strange images in your head and impulses to do things that are utterly unfamiliar to you—commands, as it were, from the presence you are hosting.
He knew exactly what had been happening to me.
Minus the impulses. I hadn’t had any of those.
Yet.
I braced myself against the desk, waiting for the dizziness to pass. The white was tugging at my mind, trying to pull me back, but I sank my fingernails into the gloves, rooting myself in the present.
I flinched at the sudden vibration against the counter and swiped up my phone, expecting to find another e-mail. Instead there was a barrage of incoming texts.
It took me a second to parse out where they were coming from.
I had an individual message with each of the five other Ordinary regulars, along with various group texts. One with just Remy and Sofía. One with just Remy and Levi. One with Nick and Arthur.
That made communicating (while wearing rubber gloves) tricky enough, and then there was the fact that everyone—Nick and Levi especially—was constantly renaming the group messages, making them especially hard to track. The new messages mostly seemed to be coming into a conversation named “Big Old Scientist Brians” that hadn’t existed at the start of my shift.
I would’ve bet money if I went far enough back there’d be an autocorrect typo where someone had been trying to type the word “brain” and wound up with “Brian” instead.
I checked the members of Big Old Scientist Brians. All six of us. The last three messages came from Arthur.
Did you see the Cheryl Kelly report?
Things winding down at Jenkins.
It’s time to find the wreckage. Tonight. 8:30 PM, our house.
As I was reading, Sofía’s reply came in: About the wreckage. I have an idea, but we’ll need compasses.
Levi’s buzzed in next. Handsome R’s still grounded, but I’ll be there. (You guys should sleep over after.)
And then came Nick’s one-word answer to all of it: No.
I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to go back either.
Levi sent him a bunch of crying faces mixed in with kissy faces.
No, Nick said again.
Fine, Arthur said. Fran?
My stomach churned.
I’m in, I typed. I didn’t know what I was going to say or do about Black Mailbox Bill’s e-mail just yet—I hadn’t given him my name or even used my real e-mail account to contact him, and I sure as hell wasn’t inviting him to Splendor—but until I figured out whether I could trust him enough to ask more specific questions, I needed to focus on finding that necklace and anything else I might’ve left behind. Before it was too late.
ELEVEN
“MAGNETISM,” SOFÍA SAID.
“Magnetism,” Levi repeated eagerly. He was dressed in all yellow and looked like a giant banana.
“Compasses are powered by magnetism,” Sofía said. She, Levi, Arthur, and I were standing astride our bikes in a square, front tires pointed in. I’d intentionally put my back to the barbed wire fence at the back of our field.
The sun wouldn’t set for another fifteen minutes, so he wouldn’t be out for hours, but Droog had tried to bolt onto the hermit’s property again when I took her out after work, and I’d been paranoid he might appear ever since.
“It’s magnetism that makes a compass’s needle point to the North Pole,” Sofía explained. “Only, sometimes, when lightning strikes, it can magnetize the rocks or soil or metal it hits. If any of that light struck the debris, it might work the same way. But we’ll have to get pretty close to the wreckage before the compass’s magnet could respond. Otherwise it’ll just pick up the Earth’s magnetic field and point north.”
“What if it wasn’t the same thing as lightning?” I asked.
Sofia frowned. “Maybe it will have the same effect? Or maybe nothing.”
“Just keep your eyes open,” Arthur said impatiently. “Watch for burns, or anything suspicious, and we’ll find the wreckage, whether the compasses work or not.”
He pulled the Walmart bag off his handlebars and fished out a compass, handing it to Sofía, who seemed uncertain. “Did Nick . . . get these for us?”
“He’s trying to pull his weight in his own way,” Arthur said, as if we were some kind of military outfit. Sofía took the stolen compass between two fingers, like it was covered in toxic waste, and Arthur went on. “We’ll go the long way, through the woods behind the Jenkins House. That way we can make sure there’s no one around the power plant or the field before we spread out.”
Art handed a compass to Levi, then pulled one out for me. My chest tightened. My mouth went dry.
What if the needle starts to spin now?
What if I’m magnetized by the thing in me?
Black Mailbox Bill’s warnings sizzled through my mind. I reached out fast, bumping Arthur’s arm so hard the compass went flying.
“Jeez!” he yelped.
“Sorry!” I hopped off my bike and discreetly checked the compass before picking it up.
Thank God.
It wasn’t spinning. Whatever else that thing had done to me, apparently it hadn’t turned me into an outright magnet.
“Be more careful with any evidence you find,” Arthur said, and kicked off as I boarded my bike again.
The sun had set by the time we reached the back of the Jenkins House, but I left the headlight off as we edged around the siding.
Temporary floodlights had been erected in a rectangle around the substation’s fence, washing the deep blues and greens from the night. A truck was parked on the gravel road, but there was no one in the cab, and the same went for the scuffed yellow Bobcats in the field to the left of the substation.
“No people,” Sofía whispered. “But there might be security cameras.”
“Stick to the shadows,” Arthur commanded. “And if you find anything, don’t get too close until the rest of us can join you.” He stood on his pedals and cruised down the slight hill, cutting a wide arc around the illuminated portion of road.
“Where should we look first?” Levi asked.
“The point was to split up,” Sofía said, and took off in the opposite direction from Arthur.
“Looks like it’s just us. Team Franvi. LeFra?”
I was dreading going into the house alone, but I really didn’t need an audience for this. “I was going to look around inside,” I said. “You should check the woods behind the house.”
Levi huffed. “Bunch of lone wolves.” He rode into the patch of woods where I’d found the bullets, and I left my bike against the house and headed for the axed front door.
I glanced over my shoulder to be sure the others were out of sight, then took out my flashlight and bushwhacked the darkness back as I scoured the shaggy grass for my necklace.
The pendant was a real nautilus shell. Mark had carefully sawed it open to reveal the many chambers within, arranged in their delicate spiral. He’d coated the whole thing in resin to protect it, then drilled a hole for the chain.
It was the shell that had started his whole obsession. He’d found it on the beach, on a family vacation when I was ten, Arthur was eleven, and Mark was sixteen.
“Do you know why logarithmic spirals matter?” he’d asked us.
We didn’t even know what logarithmic spirals were.
“They’
re everywhere,” Mark told us. “In pinecones and sunflower seedheads and hurricanes—even the way a hawk will approach its prey, if the prey’s running in a straight line. It’s a spiral where every turn gets bigger by the exact factor it takes to keep the spiral the same shape. It’s growing, fast, with each turn, but it’s still staying the same. Isn’t that amazing?”
“If by amazing you mean boring,” Arthur had said.
Mark had ignored the comment, or maybe he’d been so excited he didn’t notice the sand Arthur was flinging at him in an attempt to get him to play some rough-and-tumble game. Mom had looked up from the scientific journal she was reading and laughed. “How could the building blocks of all creation be boring to a child of mine, Arthur?”
Dad had ruffled Arthur’s sun-streaked hair. “Add enough math talk to anything, and you can take the joy out of it, right, Art?”
“Even the galaxy, the whole Milky Way is a logarithmic spiral,” Mark had forged on. “And there are always black holes in the middle of spiral galaxies, but there’s a huge city of them at the center of ours! Every one of those black holes came from a dying star—or a cluster of them. As the star loses fuel, it and its temperature change, its internal pressure can no longer resist the star’s own gravity. The whole star collapses, gets pressed into this tiny thing, smaller than an atom, but still with all the mass of the giant star. With all that gravitational force now fixed to this tiny point.”
Something about the description had made me feel vaguely sick. “Stars can collapse?”
I’d looked out across the water, the sand, the whole wild world I loved.
What would happen to all of it, to us, if the sun collapsed? It’d turn into a black hole. It’d suck us into itself and end the world.
“Listen, Franny.” Mark turned the shell like it was a Ferris wheel. “All those stars, hundreds or maybe millions, had to collapse to make our galaxy what it is.”
He lifted the shell to my eye. “It’s like this giant manual, telling everything in our universe and beyond how it should work, down to the smallest thing. Isn’t that cool? Doesn’t that make you feel like you’re part of some huge design?”
“Like a huge, boring quilt!” Arthur said.
Mom had sighed; Dad had laughed; Mark had said, “You little butthole!” and thrown a handful of sand at him; and my anxiety about the Inevitable End of All Things had frittered off.
I’d felt, right then, like the universe was in perfect order. Like I was a small part of a huge and meaningful design.
I stepped through the blood-red front door to the Jenkins House, emerging from the memory.
It had been so long since I’d thought about all that. Since I’d thought about Mark, period. Dad still visited him in the hospital every two weeks, and I went along every three visits like clockwork (Art had long since quit), but even when I was there, or when I clutched the necklace for good luck, I didn’t think about it.
The accident.
The months after it.
Standing on the balcony outside the master bedroom with Arthur, next to the telescope Mom had once loved, watching her pull away in the Voyager—just for a few weeks, to clear her head. Me waving until Arthur snatched my hand and threw it down to my side, snapping, Don’t do that. She’s not going to look back, and you’ll feel stupid. Don’t let her make you feel stupid.
The pounding that rose from the wall of my brothers’ bedroom whenever Dad was out, Arthur’s hands barreling into drywall until his knuckles busted open, Mark’s old Mucha print hung back up over the holes afterward so no one would ever know he’d put them there.
Sure, I used to feel like I was part of some huge design. That the world, and everything else that existed, was part of one seamless machine.
It was what Mom and Dad had taught us. Dad called the machine’s engineer Holy God and Mom called it Good and Miraculous Science, and as for us kids, we were allowed to call it whatever we wanted as long as our butts were in the folding chairs at Old Crow Christian Fellowship on Sunday mornings, supporting Dad.
Before the accident, Dad having married a “nonbeliever” might’ve been the biggest scandal Splendor had ever seen. A pastor and a wannabe-astronaut agnostic/atheist.
Most of the church didn’t approve, but they liked Dad enough to ignore Mom’s absence from prayer meetings and potlucks.
To my brothers and me, there was nothing weird about Mom and Dad’s different beliefs, and if it was ever an issue between them before the accident, I didn’t know.
Mom could be impulsive and restless like Arthur, insatiably curious like Mark. If you asked her about something she was excited about, she’d trip over the words, trying to get them out fast enough. She told stories out of order, always jumping backward to add bits of information she’d left out, and she was always gasping: when she saw her first lightning bug of the year, when she crossed paths with a rare bird, when she was reading articles in scientific journals, like surprising information had sneaked up on her and jumped out, screaming.
Like both my brothers, she was easily distracted; like Arthur, she was messy, impatient.
When Dad made dinner, the table was set and the serving dishes were loaded by the time the turkey was cooked and the noodles finished boiling, but when Mom cooked, pans caught on fire while she was busy reading about penguin mating habits on her phone.
Together, Mom and Mark formed a kind of feedback loop. She’d tell him about a new purpose just discovered for a specific organ in the human body. He’d tell her about a new artist using fingernail clippings in an interesting way. Tangents abounded.
The only way I knew to break her out of it was to put on Carole King. Then she’d grab my hands and spin me barefoot through the kitchen, singing, “Way over yonder . . . is a place that I know . . .”
She was still distracted from the task at hand, but in those moments, Mom was mine.
In the rest, she lived in a bubble I couldn’t quite permeate, and I sat outside, watching Mark move freely through it from the other side.
“They could shoot off into space and it’d be hours of them waxing poetic about the change in atmosphere before they even realized the ground was gone,” Dad used to say.
He was milder, calmer, the type to take a few seconds to think over his words before speaking them, sometimes so long you’d doubt he planned to answer.
Once I’d asked him the question the church busybodies so badly wanted answered. One night on the balcony, while Mom was taking Droog out to pee one last time before bed.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” I said. “That she doesn’t believe?”
Dad leaned against the wooden railing to stare down at Mom’s yellow hair whipping around in the night wind for so long I wasn’t sure he’d heard me.
“Everyone’s got to have faith in something, Franny,” he said finally. “No one knows all the answers to the universe’s questions, but I admire anyone who keeps looking up at the stars and asking them questions.”
They both believed in the seamless machine.
That a zillion pieces fit together to make something miraculous.
A beautifully ordered universe, where if you talked to the stars, they listened. Where things happened for a reason, be it the design of Holy God or Good and Miraculous Science. Something out there had a handle on this flimsy universe.
When the accident happened, it was like a loose bolt had slipped off and gotten caught in the universe’s cogs. One tiny piece had broken it all. That was what I’d thought.
Now I understood it had never worked to begin with.
Things happened. Random, horrible things no itty-bitty human could protect another itty-bitty human from. The machine was a black hole, a cold, lightless thing.
It did not have nerves or blood-filled veins.
It was not made for itty-bitty, ooey-gooey humans, and it did not care what became of us.
It was a disinterested force, a mass’s gravity pulling us toward its center, the point where all things ended.
The only thing you could do was to try not to stare at it as it pulled you closer.
I pushed the thoughts away, buried them in a box with that fierce white light.
I needed to find that fucking necklace and get out of here, forget all this.
My flashlight caught the HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner, the fake blood, the fireplace where Arthur had directed Levi to arrange the fake bones.
I paced back and forth, checking among the glass shards and cigarette butts for the shell, then went upstairs. My stomach tightened as I followed the hall to the bedroom where we’d watched the light fall from the sky.
Focus.
I swept the flashlight across the room.
Nothing.
We hadn’t gone into any of the other rooms—the meteor shower had distracted us. Which meant the shell necklace could only be by the fence or inside the substation. I turned back into the hall and headed for the stairs.
In the dark room at the end of the hall, something clattered.
Cold dread knifed through my middle. I froze, the flashlight beam shivering on the floor, my lungs pausing mid breath.
My body went rigid and still, but my heart thrummed at hummingbird speed.
The house was horror-film silent. I must have imagined the clatter. I was alone.
Or I’m not.
Or someone was in the room beyond the stairs, holding a chain with a blue-gray nautilus shell on its end.
My skin went cold. Why did I literally never carry the Mace Arthur gave me?
Defiance, an irritating voice answered me. To prove you don’t need his help.
I didn’t. Because I was alone. I’d imagined the sound.
I took another step. The floor creaked. The light in the hallway flickered on and off.
My heart leapt into the tight tunnel of my throat.
Had I imagined that?
This house couldn’t have electricity, after all these years abandoned. My eardrums pounded with my pulse as I waited, breath held, eyes fixed to the dark floor.
