When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

  That didn’t make it any less real.

  I sucked air through my teeth as the weight built, the light unfurling into the bedroom where the piano sat as we slowly edged into it.

  I couldn’t hold it much longer. I needed to release my grip, little by little; dropping it all at once seemed as risky as if it had actually been a dumbbell.

  I closed my eyes and pictured the kitchen below us, traced the outreached energy all the way to its farthest point until it was like I was holding that bulb over the kitchen sink in my hand.

  I released my grip, and the feeling of the energy drawing back was a relief. I checked the other bulbs, loosened my hold on them, the pressure lifting, the hum lessening as the not-muscles retracted into me.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the living room went dark, and then the stairs, and then the hallway where we stood, and the bedroom right in front of us, my eyes splotching as they adjusted.

  “Oh my God,” Sofía whispered. “It’s real.”

  Nick laughed uneasily. “My Gah, indeed.”

  A shiver passed through me as I met Remy’s dark, worried gaze. It was real, and it was really inside me.

  “Think about everything we can do with this,” Arthur whispered.

  “Everything Franny can do with this,” Sofía said.

  “We could make money off this,” Nick said.

  Levi had his camera out, trained on me. “Not to mention, be famous.”

  “It’s bigger than all that,” Arthur said. “We’re going down in history. People are going to remember our names. We’re doing something important.”

  “We still need to keep this to ourselves until we understand more,” Remy said tensely, looking away from me.

  I understood his anxiety, but I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to bask for a second, to pretend this was as exciting as the others seemed to think it was, without worrying about what the thing in me might do, or any of Bill’s warnings, or anything else.

  “We’re going to have bank vaults we can dive into,” Nick said.

  “We’re going to win awards,” Levi said.

  “Only if we actually figure out what’s going on here,” Sofía said.

  “This is like . . . like power,” Arthur went on. “Like purpose.” He lit up a cigarette in the house. “After everything that’s happened to us, it’s like . . . we’re finally getting something. We finally are something, that matters. An alien chose us, for something important.”

  The six of us looked at one another for a long, laden moment. Goose bumps had sprung up beneath my damp clothes, but the knot of anxiety that had been building in my chest all week loosened a bit.

  Maybe he was right.

  We had the video from the cave, and soon we’d know who’d dropped those bullets. We’d have proof that they’d taken the debris, so we’d have leverage to make sure our secret was safe (if we even needed it). We were figuring out what had happened to us and how to control it. The investigation was winding down.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actively thought, Things are going to be okay.

  But it honestly, truly looked like they might be.

  “Nick,” Sofia said, nodding through the doorway to the little red piano against the wall.

  Nick drifted forward, and we hemmed in after him. He ran a hand along the dusty top of the piano.

  I hadn’t noticed last time that chunks of it had been gouged out, that every bit of surface that hadn’t been carved or chipped had been graffitied in Sharpie. “It’s the same one from your dreams?” I whispered.

  His fingers played on a massive chip in the corner. “This was there,” he said, brow furrowed. “But the rest of it wasn’t.”

  “It looks like a regular piano,” Levi mused. “Except . . . you know, small.”

  “Definitely doesn’t look like a secret spaceship or anything,” Remy agreed.

  “Well, he hasn’t played it yet,” Arthur said, without a hint of irony. Levi even nodded. After everything else we’d seen, why shouldn’t this be something spectacular, some alien secret?

  Nick slid onto the undersized bench, examining the keys wordlessly as his fingers trailed over them too lightly to make sound.

  “It’s kind of sad,” Sofía said, walking a half circle around it. “It’s so small. It’s like—hard not to think of it like an abused puppy.”

  “Nicky Jr.,” Arthur pressed. “We don’t have long . . . someone could have seen the lights again.”

  Nick depressed one of the keys, and it brayed gracelessly.

  “Yikes,” Levi said.

  Nick pressed another key with his pinky. In the dim light, the blurry bird tattoos on his fingers blended into the words scribbled over the ivory keys. He tapped the highest key, then went down the line playing all the rest in quick succession. Every once in a while, a saggy, deflated noise rang out, but for the most part they sounded okay.

  Levi poked a key too. Without looking up, Nick swatted his hand away.

  Remy snorted. “Now you know how the rest of us feel when you pet us, dude.”

  Nick set both hands on the piano, slowly, carefully.

  No one moved; we held our breath.

  Nick played a note—or was it a chord? It required at least three keys and it rang out low and calm, the slightest bit dissonant but not at all ugly. His hands moved position and he played another, and then his fingers began to move more quickly, skating across the keys with ease, pulling notes from them expertly, apart from the occasional honk of the more severely out-of-tune keys.

  The smile slid off Sofía’s face, morphing into an awed O.

  “What the . . .” Remy breathed.

  Levi lifted his camera and hit Record.

  It wasn’t proficient . . . it was enchanting. Nick’s hands danced over the keys. The song was felt, tender and melancholy and haunting. His eyes closed, his brows knit together, and his lips pressed tight. As the song sped, it became hard to tell where his fingers ended and the keys began, he and the piano fading into each other.

  As far as I knew, the closest Nick had come to playing an instrument was three weeks with a trumpet in seventh-grade band class. He swore he’d quit because the teacher hated him, which I’d always assumed meant he’d taken advantage of the opportunity to make a lot of well-timed fart noises until finally, he’d been asked to drop the class.

  Maybe this should have been less shocking than what I’d done, but to me, it wasn’t. This thing Nick was doing was entirely foreign. It was from outside himself.

  It was a gift.

  The song ended.

  Nick opened his eyes and drew his hands back from the keys. The whole room seemed to draw its first breath in minutes.

  And then something thudded heavily to the floor behind me.

  All of us spun toward the sound.

  Remy was on the ground, his eyes rolling, his back arched and limbs contorted in odd, sharp angles.

  A low, horrible sound gurgled from his throat. The others were running toward him.

  Nick screaming Remy’s name.

  Sofía calling out for someone to dial 911.

  Arthur shouting that we couldn’t, we were trespassing.

  Levi screaming that it didn’t matter.

  But I was frozen in place, all my floaty optimism turning into ice inside my chest as my best friend lay writhing on the floor.

  “What’s happening?” Levi shouted through tears, trying to hold Remy down.

  “He’s having some kind of seizure!” Sofía said.

  “The song!” Nick yelped. “The song did it!”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Arthur snapped.

  The pressure inside me was building, and I wasn’t strong enough to hold it in. The lights shivered overhead and the hum rose until everything in the room was quivering.

  A
nd then, all at once, the tension left Remy’s body. He slumped to the floor. His pupils reappeared, and he blinked sleepily up at all of them gathered over him. Recognition filtered into his gaze and he shifted, started to push himself up.

  The lights went out and an inhuman sound scraped out of me as my relief hit like a wave. My knees buckled, bringing me down beside Remy’s legs, a strangled sob spearing through me.

  I thought he was going to die.

  “It’s okay,” Levi said, touching both my shoulder and Remy’s elbow with the same anxious pressure. “It’s okay. It’s all over now, whatever it was, and everything’s fine.”

  “We need to get him to the hospital,” Sofía said.

  Remy shook his head. His dark eyes were wide and his mouth had a grim set to it. “I know what caused it.” He looked at me. “I thought they were just dreams, but they weren’t. I think . . . I think I just saw the future, and if I did, everything most definitely isn’t fine.”

  He staggered to his feet. “We need to get out of here, before anyone turns up.”

  NINETEEN

  “IT WAS THAT FREAKING song,” Nick said as we were running past the cave, back toward the car. “I’m telling you.”

  The rain had picked up, and thunder was booming overhead as we sprinted through the forest. With any luck, anyone who might’ve seen the light show at the Jenkins House would’ve mistaken it for lightning.

  Either way, I doubted it would be safe to go back there again.

  “So it was like a nuclear code!” Levi said. “It unlocked Handsome Remy’s brain!”

  “It didn’t unlock my brain,” Remy said. “I’ve been having these dreams ever since we found the disc, but they were shorter, little pieces.”

  “What about the seizure?” Sofía asked. “Has that been happening?”

  “I—don’t know,” Remy said.

  “How can you not know?!” Levi demanded.

  “I don’t know!” he shouted back. “There were a couple of other times I woke up on the floor or the couch, but I didn’t remember what had happened—I felt like I’d just drifted off and had the dream. I don’t remember having a seizure.”

  “But you remember what you saw?” Arthur yelled over another thunderclap.

  We’d just made it to the edge of the woods, legs drenched in mud, heads sopping wet, and Remy stopped halfway between the trees and the car, his hair plastered to his face with rain. “I thought they were dreams.” He looked haunted, shaken. “Get in the car. I’ll tell you everything.”

  We moved toward it, but I stopped short at the sight of something white and rectangular tucked into the windshield wipers.

  “You guys!” I shouted. “What’s that?”

  Arthur came to the hood of the car to see. “Religious tract? Who cares?”

  But when I reached for the soggy fold of paper, something small and solid slid out of it and nestled into the bottom corner of the windshield.

  “Is that a rock?” Arthur asked.

  My teeth had started to chatter. It wasn’t a rock.

  Remy came to stand beside me as I reached for the small, blue-gray circle and the long chain attached to it.

  An uncanny tingling oozed down my spine as I lifted the nautilus shell. Its smooth, resin-covered surface felt at once familiar and foreign in my palm, and revulsion rose through my stomach as I turned it over.

  How did it wind up here?

  “Your necklace?” Remy murmured.

  I dropped it into my pocket and pried the soggy paper open.

  It was so wet the blue-ink words had blown apart into smoky Rorschach blots, but I could still make out the two words scrawled there, oversized and jagged.

  I KNOW.

  “What is this?” Arthur asked, brow furrowed.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. My throat felt like it was collapsing.

  “Just get in the car,” Remy said calmly, quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear, but they were still standing at the car doors, watching us. “We’ll figure this out. It will be okay.”

  He was lying again, pretending we had any real control over whether everything ended up all right or not.

  Sofía’s gaze dropped to the note, and her lips pursed. “Whoever dropped the bullets must’ve written that. They must’ve been following us.”

  Every beat of my pulse seemed to shake the whole world. My mouth had gone dry, and there was a ringing in my ears.

  Someone knew what had happened to us, and Remy was having seizures and visions, and everything was coming apart.

  “We need to go,” Remy said, touching my arm. “We’ll figure this out later. Please.”

  But I stayed rooted to my spot. “What did you see?” I asked him.

  Levi, Arthur, Nick, and Sofía all floated out into a semi-circle around us. Their gazes traveled between the note (threat?) and Remy. The muscle in his jaw leapt.

  “The end,” he said. “I think I saw the end of the world.”

  TWENTY

  “IT WAS SPLENDOR,” HE said. “I saw your house.”

  Arthur pushed forward. “Our house?” Thunder boomed, and the raindrops sliding down his freckled face shivered. “You saw our house? In a vision, from the alien?”

  “Not just your house,” he said. “I saw Levi’s too, and the old movie theater, and the steel mill.” He shook his head. “The whole town was being destroyed. The roof was ripped off Wayne Hastings’s house. Its whole top floor was destroyed, and so was yours. Beams, hubcaps, pieces of refrigerators were everywhere. There was . . . this thing. This big metal thing. A machine, I guess. I think it was causing it. Like maybe it was a weapon.”

  He tipped his chin toward Nick. “Like you talked about with the piano, except . . . something huge, and made of steel.”

  Sofía sank onto the hood of the car, her face paling, and creases etched between Arthur’s eyebrows.

  He took a step, rubbing his chin. “The E.T. must want us to stop it. That’s got to be what all this is about. It’s given us some kind of—coded information, and Franny’s ability because it . . . it wants us to save Earth.”

  Remy gave me a dark look.

  I wondered if he was also thinking about Bill’s e-mail:

  Impulses to do things that are utterly unfamiliar to you—commands, as it were, from the presence you are hosting.

  I swallowed a knot. “Or maybe it wants us to destroy the planet.”

  Arthur shook his head. “That’s not it. That’s not what’s going on.”

  “Of course it is,” Nick said, voice uncharacteristically restrained. “Think about it, Arthur. Remy’s got the overview, and Levi’s wandering around at night, probably doing that thing’s dirty work, and Franny’s probably like . . . a freaking battery.”

  “And what about you?” Arthur poked Nick’s chest. “And Sofía? You’re playing the piano like an angel, and Sof’s able to watch over us from anywhere! Those are gifts, Nick!”

  Nick scoffed. “For all we know, I’m just here to operate some alien control panel, and as for Sofía—she could be your precious E.T.’s security feed, keeping track of our progress! That thing didn’t come here for us! It came here for steel, and we’re the poor saps who happened to cross its path and get roped into this! Fifty bucks says when we watch that video from the cave”—he whirled around to point at Levi—“it’s him lugging those beams out of there.”

  The blood drained from Levi’s face.

  “He wouldn’t have had time,” I argued, though I wasn’t sure. “I heard him leave the house.”

  I clutched the shell in my hand, but it was no comfort.

  Someone knew what happened to us, and if they’d told anyone . . .

  Another crackle of thunder shook the puddle-heavy asphalt, the hood of the Metro, the misty woods behind us.

  Maybe it was for the best if someone found u
s, someone took us away before we could do . . .

  Whatever that thing wants us to do.

  The whole world seemed to kaleidoscope in front of me.

  I felt sick again. Actually, the nausea had been building for some time, along with a sharp, cramping pain down my center. I leaned into the car, trying to hide the jolt ripping through my spine.

  “This has gone far enough,” Sofía said. “We have to tell someone!”

  “No,” Remy snapped. “Not yet. That’s a last resort, only.”

  “Well, we’ve officially reached the land of last resorts!” Nick said. “Haven’t you been listening? We’re possessed by an evil alien!”

  Possessed.

  The word sent shock waves through me. Was I? Possessed? And what about the others? Micro-possessed? Tainted by alien shrapnel, as if it had whittled itself down to a size that could fit inside me, and stored the final slivers in them?

  Was that why Sofía could see through our eyes?

  Because that thing was in all of us, in some capacity?

  Levi looked as queasy as I felt. He rocked between his feet, swaying like a redwood considering just packing it in as a tornado spun toward it.

  “You want me to prove you’re wrong?” Arthur said sharply. “Let’s go watch the video.”

  “Fine!” Nick stormed to the car’s back door. Arthur stomped around to climb in on the opposite side, and Sofía sighed and followed. Levi still hadn’t moved. His bottom lip was trembling, from cold or fear.

  “We don’t know anything,” I told him.

  I’d meant it to sound comforting; it didn’t.

  “The video will help,” I added.

  Remy bumped his elbow. “We’ll get answers,” he said for the second time that night. “This is good.”

  “Sure,” Levi said. “Answers.”

  The problem with answers was you almost never got the ones you wanted.

  Sometimes it was better to float through that liminal space that came before you found the truth. If I could go back to the hospital waiting room, and stand there, alone, inside those sliding glass doors, and exist forever in a world where I still might hear that Mark was okay, I would.