When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

“Wow,” Nick said. “Rude.”

  “But you have to respect his honesty!” Levi said.

  And so when we got to our house on Old Crow Station Lane, Sofía, Levi, and Nick stayed in the Metro to stake out the end of Wayne Hastings’s driveway, while Remy, Art, and I got out to search his property.

  “We should take Droog,” Arthur said as we headed across the field. “She hasn’t gotten out much since all of this started.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “If he catches us, he’ll shoot her without hesitation. No way. I’ll take her out to pee before we go, but I’m not bringing her with.”

  “He won’t actually shoot us,” Remy said, following us inside. Droog popped up from where she’d been sleeping on the rug inside the door, her tail thunking the wall. “Right?”

  “Are you asking me to guess?” Arthur replied.

  From upstairs, the dreary murmur of baseball commentary was leaking from the master bedroom.

  Dad was already asleep, or nearly there. Good. That was good. The last thing he needed was to find out about all this.

  “You live next to the guy,” Remy said.

  “Yeah, and do everything I can to pretend he doesn’t exist.” Arthur clipped the leash onto Droog’s collar and then handed it to me.

  “Is he really nocturnal?” Remy asked. “I mean, if this doesn’t work out tonight, we can go back in the morning.”

  “I work,” I said. “So does Arthur.”

  “And Nick,” Arthur said. “Not that he’s been much help.”

  As soon as we were out the door, Droog pulled me around the house to where she could see the woods. Usually, we just let her out and she did her business unsupervised, but all week she’d been like this. “See?” Arthur said. “She wants to go on our mission.”

  “Too bad.” I yanked her back. “This is basically the one thing on the planet I’m responsible for, and I’m not letting her get skinned and hung on a tree with a pentagram carved into it.”

  “What’s that?” Remy said, and bent to brush the fur on Droog’s haunch to one side, revealing the purple web of scars. “She got hit too?”

  I nodded. Somehow, she managed to keep straining as she crouched and peed, her nose sniffing wildly in the direction of Wayne Hastings’s forest.

  Remy shook his head. “Do you think she has an impulse too? Like Levi’s sleepwalking? That the . . . alien”—it was clearly a challenge for him to even use the word—“put something in her too?”

  Arthur scoffed. “Right, now even the dog is getting a superpower. Of course.”

  “Dude,” Remy said. “Will you stop acting like this isn’t the worst thing to happen to any of us?”

  “Maybe for you,” Arthur said coldly. He jerked the leash from my hand and pulled Droog back to the house. “Get the bolt cutters from the shed, Fran.”

  Remy made a pained expression as his eyes flicked toward me. “I didn’t mean to . . . I just meant that this isn’t a gift.”

  “I know,” I said, opening the shed.

  I’d been feeling nauseated and crampy ever since we left the Jenkins House, and now as I scanned the crowded shelves for the bolt cutters, a searing pain shot from my skull down to my tailbone, knocking me off balance.

  “Franny?” Remy stepped in close, and I grabbed his arm to steady myself as dizziness and pain pummeled me. The white unfurled across my vision, and for a second, I was falling through darkness again, light screaming past me. “What’s happening? Are you all right?”

  I blinked it back, and Remy’s dimpled face pieced itself together in front of me. “I’m fine.”

  The corners of his mouth twisted down. “You’re not,” he whispered.

  “I will be.”

  “Promise me,” he said.

  Tears sprang into my eyes.

  “Please?”

  I tore my gaze from him and grabbed the bolt cutters. “Come on. Arthur’s waiting.”

  We met him at the fence. The overturned posts had been righted since we were last here, but Arthur pried one loose and tossed it on the ground. I handed him the bolt cutters then stepped over the barbed wire, back into the perma-hush of Wayne Hastings’s woods.

  The three of us communicated in nods and waves. We kept our flashlights off until absolutely necessary, which meant we could barely see one another.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and Arthur gave a sharp, reproving look as I slid it out of my jacket. The screen glitched for a second before I could see the message preview onscreen.

  Another e-mail from Bill: FRIEND! You REALLY MUST CONTACT . . .

  “The others?” Remy whispered. “About Wayne?”

  His name sent an icy drip down my spine. I shook my head and slipped my phone back into my pocket. We were almost there.

  We’d come a roundabout way, up through the valley behind the house to his back door.

  The windows were dark, a good sign.

  We crept to the house and split up: Arthur edged around the left side, and Remy and I hurried, bent, around the right, glancing up the side of the house for signs of life in the dark windows.

  We came around front, and from the far corner, Arthur nodded the all clear on his side. Remy touched my arm, then pointed toward the truck parked on the gravel driveway.

  He’s here? he seemed to ask.

  Arthur propped the bolt cutters on his shoulder like Wayne Hastings’s gun and marched in place, then drew a circle in the air with his finger.

  What the hell is he doing? Remy’s expression seemed to ask now.

  Walking. The. Grounds, I tried to mouth back, but by then, he was distracted, staring with a repulsed expression toward the roof. In my peripheral sight, Arthur’s gaze juddered up too.

  I was startled anew by the eerily still birds gathered on the green roof, all angled in the same direction, their focus fixed off the back right corner of the house, the same as they’d been the other night.

  Only this time, I wasn’t standing there.

  The birds hadn’t been pointed toward me at all.

  I thought about the weird behavior of the cows in the field behind the substation. What had Nick said? That usually, they grazed north to south, along the Earth’s electromagnetic field, but the blast must’ve disrupted that.

  Birds used that same field to navigate, didn’t they?

  Could they have been confused, like the cows and the compasses had been?

  I hurried back the way we’d come, and Remy ran alongside me. Arthur met us behind the house and tried to silently ask us what we were thinking, but I was on a mission. We trekked past the cellar doors to the edge of the valley.

  The branches overhead were even thicker with birds here.

  In a panel of moonlight, I stopped suddenly, grabbing for Remy’s hand before he could go any further.

  The soft pfft pfft pfft of the falling rain seemed to fade away, leaving only the rush of my own pulse in my eardrums as I studied the dirt and brush under my feet.

  Dead. Blackened. Charred.

  A thin burnt streak snaking out through the mud in an intricate, vein-like pattern.

  “The burns couldn’t have reached all the way from Jenkins,” Remy whispered. “That’s miles away, and we would have seen them in your yard.”

  He was right, but that didn’t change that there were burn marks here. We followed them down the hill, through a tunnel of black: feathers in branches all around us, and the charred dirt underfoot.

  Arthur produced his compass from his jacket and angled it under the moonlight so we could see the needle spinning. We took off down the hillside along the trail.

  My phone buzzed.

  Another e-mail from Bill.

  It had only been fifteen minutes since the last one.

  I glanced at the preview: THE U.S. GOVT WILL TAKE YOU. IT WILL BE ALL TOO EASY IF . . .<
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  I jammed the phone back into my pocket and ignored the crawling of my skin. I couldn’t deal with him right now. One thing at a time.

  Mossy branches lay scattered across the ground, splintered at the ends like snapped bones where the energy must have hit them. We stepped over them and followed the streak toward a small clearing, where four other jagged burn marks met it, like points of a star.

  My skin heated and itched as I stepped into the center and slowly turned, staring at the thousands of watchful black eyes, heads that cocked and twisted curiously at the sight of us.

  And worse, at the birds I now realized lay along the burn marks in lifeless lumps, just as they had back at the substation. There were feathers scattered across the forest floor, black and brown and gray and red, like a plague.

  Remy swallowed. “I wonder if the blast confused their sense of direction so much that they dove.”

  “I knew it,” Arthur hissed. “He’s not one of us. There’s a second alien! An evil alien, that we have to stop!”

  My stomach roiled. It wasn’t just the birds or the prospect of a second alien, though those weren’t helping. I took a few dizzy steps before I caught a tree and retched into the mud. Remy was beside me in a second. “You’re sick,” he said. “We should get you home.”

  I shook my head and righted myself. “I feel better now.”

  Remy shook his head angrily. “We should be closer to figuring this out by now. Can’t Bill do anything?”

  I glanced at Arthur to see if he’d heard, but he was snapping pictures of the burns with his phone. As the flash went off, another painful spasm went through my esophagus, and I hunched over, vomiting.

  Remy swept my hair back with one hand and drew light circles on my back with the other until the sickness had passed. I spat into the mud to get the taste out of my mouth, then straightened.

  “We need to take you to a doctor,” Remy whispered. “We won’t tell them about . . . We’ll just see what they can do.”

  I shook my head

  “Something’s wrong, Franny.”

  “I’m handling it,” I lied.

  I clutched at the tree trunk, waiting for the next jolt of pain twisting through my gut to let up.

  Cold wind. Light falling all around me, being pulled into the center by an insurmountable force and the sound moving through me, everything, all at once, happening again and again—

  Focus on the tree, I told myself, but it wasn’t working. I was lost in that dark place.

  Something pressed against my hand. Hold on to me, came a voice through the darkness.

  “Hold on to me, Franny,” Remy said again, and I opened my eyes and stared at my hand, still on the trunk but knotted tightly into his.

  The creases of my raw pink knuckles, the light blue chips left on my nails from when Sofía brought polish to work for us last week digging into his hand, the red scars twining all the way from the tips of my fingers down my wrist and up to my—

  The scars. They started halfway up my hand. There weren’t any on my fingers at all. I stepped back from Remy, pushing my sleeve up, and found the jagged ridges faded a half inch below my elbow, where they used to end.

  “My scars,” I said. “Look. My scars. They shrank.” I thrust my arm out in front of Remy, and Arthur shone his phone toward us as he trudged over.

  Remy’s mouth screwed up. “Are you sure?” He lifted his T-shirt around his stomach. “Mine too,” he said. “It’s like a third of the size it used to be.” In fact, it was little more than a wine-colored V-shape under the right side of his ribs.

  Arthur turned his arm over under the light, illuminating the intricate pattern of purply-red. “Mine’s the exact same.”

  “What do you think this all means?” Remy asked.

  Arthur looked back to the burnt mud. “Like I said, we’ve definitely got two aliens in Splendor.”

  “Not that,” I said. “The shrinking scars.”

  His brow furrowed. “No idea. I’m more concerned with saving the world.”

  His phone chirped just then and mine buzzed in my pocket and Remy’s must have too, because he took his out as well.

  It was from Nick: Creep on the move! Following!

  Another e-mail popped up from Bill, blocking out Nick’s text.

  Frances, it read, Only I can help you. DO NOT TRUST THE . . .

  My heart gave one sharp pulse.

  Frances.

  Frances?

  When had I told him my name was Frances?

  I wouldn’t have done that.

  I couldn’t.

  I didn’t.

  My blood went cold.

  “Earth to Franny!” Arthur was saying, waving the back of his hand in front of my face so I could see the stick-and-poke letters spelling out BUTT on his knuckles. “We don’t have much time—come on!”

  He was right. Now was our chance. Probably our only one. We bounded up the hill and beelined toward the cellar.

  Remy and I tore the brush aside, and Arthur stepped in with the bolt cutters at the ready. He crouched and fitted them onto the loop of the padlock.

  “Wait,” Remy said, and we both froze and looked at him. “After this, we’re officially criminals. I mean, not fence-hopping delinquents. We’re talking felony-ing our way into someone’s cellar.”

  “Yeah?” Arthur said.

  “That’s all,” Remy said. “I just wanted to commemorate the loss of our innocence. As you were.”

  Arthur cracked a smile, and an exhausted, fairly sick laugh rocked through me. “Farewell, indeed.”

  Arthur put pressure on the bolt cutters, and the padlock snapped, dropping with a clatter against the wooden doors.

  Remy reached forward to open it, but I brushed his hand aside. “Let me,” I said. “That way, if we get arrested for this, we can tell your dad we coerced you.”

  He smiled faintly. “Who would buy that?”

  “You won’t be the one who opened the door.”

  “So?”

  I shook my head, trying to explain. “You’re the one who has stuff to lose here. College and a career, and all that. When this is all over, you need to be able to get out of here, Remy. You have to leave before this town sucks out your soul, which means maintaining some level of plausible deniability. You’re the one with the future.”

  “Stop it, okay?” Remy said sharply. “You have a future. And wherever it is, I’m in it. I’m not leaving you.”

  Arthur squinted between us. “What the hell are you two even talking about? Just open the door!”

  So Remy reached out and opened that last door, the one we couldn’t close again.

  Maybe we couldn’t close any of them, right from the very beginning.

  When Mark was painting the Milky Way on my ceiling for my birthday, he told me something: Black holes were like punctures in the fabric of space-time. If you dove into one, you’d cross its horizon at the same moment as everything else its gravity had ever pulled there.

  You’d see it all, every single bit of time and energy and material the black hole had ever experienced, its entire life flattened. No order, no causality, just a bunch of shit.

  Everything, all at once.

  That was what the accident had done to Splendor. As soon as we’d crossed that event horizon, we’d been doomed to everything our shit-town’s gravity could pull into itself.

  Remy opened the door, and Arthur led the way down the rickety stairs, and I followed.

  It had always been like this. Every time we’d opened a door, it had been this door. Every time we’d followed him down, it had been this set of stairs.

  Now we would finally see where we’d been going.

  TWENTY-THREE

  EVEN OUR FOOTSTEPS SEEMED to whisper as we descended, making no more noise than the faintest scuff of rubber on concrete.
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  We felt our way down the stairs. Remy’s flashlight clicked on, swinging back and forth like a light saber until it caught on the metal racks that lined the right and back walls of the room. On the left, rusted metal hooks held tools aloft: axes, snow shovels—guns. Lots of them.

  An immense, wood- and foam-dusted worktable occupied the center of the room.

  Something metallic clinked and rattled as Remy’s flashlight caught on it: a single bulb and chain mounted in the ceiling beside the worktable. Arthur tugged it, and sallow light unfurled like a blanket across the table. There was an industrial-strength lamp clamped to the edge, and some kind of saw mounted on the other side. The surface was sprinkled with both wood and metal shavings.

  “He’s building something, all right,” Arthur said.

  My spine crawled. “Or he already built it.”

  Remy picked up a twisted piece of steel, six inches long. “Maybe there are blueprints.”

  There was a leather-bound folder on a shelf beneath the tabletop, and he stooped to grab it. Arthur set the bolt cutters down and walked along the racks, examining the mix of extension cords and dusty soup cans, oversized water bottles and small generators, fans, lanterns, blankets.

  “Maybe he thinks he can survive whatever that thing does, down here,” Arthur said. “Maybe he thinks if he builds this thing, they’ll let him live.”

  He stopped and ran his fingers over a toolbox. “If we could just find our alien, this would be so much simpler.” He turned back to us. “Where could it have gone?”

  Another cramp went through my center. I stepped back and gripped the edge of the metal rack on either side of my legs.

  “No idea.” Remy’s eyes darted to mine then back to the leather folder in his hands.

  I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth, fighting the white trying to overcome me.

  “Fran?” Cast in stark light and shadow, Remy looked like a woodcut of himself. He lifted an oversized sheaf of paper and held it toward me.

  Arthur perked up with interest. He grabbed it before I could, and his expression transformed.

  As far as I knew, my brother wasn’t afraid of anything, except maybe dying in a particularly boring way. But his body had gone rigid, and the tan leached out from under his freckles.