When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

  “Are there more of these?” he said huskily.

  Remy’s mouth juddered, but no sound came out. He’d gone as pale as Arthur, who pushed him aside and started flipping through the stack of papers on the table.

  “What is it?” I asked, stumbling forward.

  Schematics?

  A journal about his time with the alien, or a confession that he’d loosened the hook block at the steel mill?

  A Why I Did It letter?

  Arthur tried to block my way as I came forward, and that was when I knew it must be something worse. Something horrifying, something I’d never unsee.

  My phone buzzed, and I heard Arthur’s chirp—Remy’s had probably gone off too—but neither of them reacted. They were quickly sifting through the papers, spreading them out across the tabletop in a mania, all while Arthur kept his back to me, all while he tried to block me out.

  I pushed past him. This time, I knew, I couldn’t afford to look away.

  At first I was so stunned by the light, careful lead sketch that a bubble of relief rose through my chest. It was just a drawing. A portrait.

  Then I pieced together the thick wavy hair, the unruly eyebrows and speckled cheeks and bony shoulders.

  It was me.

  The phones chirped, buzzed, soundlessly vibrated, and we ignored them.

  My throat felt like it had collapsed. I couldn’t speak. Blood rushed past my eardrums, and a forceful buzz went through me. The lights overhead stuttered, but I was too dazed to reel back the energy pouring off me.

  Art and Remy were both flipping furiously through the papers, the images in them blinking in and out of view beneath the flashing light.

  Me.

  Me.

  Me.

  Droog.

  My parents, I realized. Mom twice more, then Dad, then Droog and me. A drawing of Arthur, before his tattoos, before he’d cut the bowl-like mop of blond hair off. Another of me. There were dozens, easily. Drawings of me perched on the propane tank, minus the mustachioed penis. Sketches of Mom looking through the telescope she used to keep on the balcony outside her and Dad’s room. Dad lying on his back on a blanket in the grass, and Droog jumping over him.

  Our phones went off again, ignored.

  “Oh my God,” I gasped as my eyes fell onto a blur of lead I hadn’t noticed in the corner of the drawing in my hand. I checked the one beneath it and beneath that. Two letters scrawled on every page. Initials.

  M.S.

  Mark Schmidt.

  My skin erupted in goose bumps. “He took these from our house,” I whispered, and then, the much worse realization: “He’s been in our house.”

  Why?

  What did he want? To figure out what the thing in the disc had told us? To hurt us?

  Remy’s phone started ringing. “Shit,” he choked. “All these texts—we have to go. He’s on his way back!” He answered the call, and on the other end, I heard Nick spring into rapid-fire talking.

  I spread the drawings across the table with shaking hands.

  “Take pictures,” I told Arthur. “We need to get proof.”

  He was staring at the table in a daze, fear torquing his features. The buzz in me was worsening, the lights still strobing, and reaching for my own phone would be useless.

  “Art, now! We have to go!”

  He shook his head. “We can’t leave these here. He can’t have them, Franny! They’re Mark’s, and they’re—they’re our family!”

  “Arthur, unless the sheriff finds them here, we have nothing!”

  “He’ll think we planted them anyway!” Arthur cried. “He’s more suspicious of us than he is of this asshole!”

  “Then we’ll find some other way to lead him down here,” I promised. “Just take the freaking photos, Arthur!”

  Remy hung up the call midword and held up his phone, snapping a few pictures. Then he pulled the chain to turn the light off, but it did nothing. My emotions were out of control, and so were my surges of power. In the flashing light, I thrust the pages back into the folder, all except the lone drawing of Arthur, which he grabbed from my hand.

  There was no time to argue, and even if there had been, I was momentarily distracted by the sight of my own arm.

  The scars had shrunk again; I was almost sure.

  Whatever. It didn’t matter right now.

  I stuffed the folder back on the shelf under the table, and we fled.

  At the top of the steps, I grabbed the broken padlock as Remy and Arthur pushed the doors closed—it was extremely unlikely a man with something to hide wouldn’t notice the missing lock, or that his stuff had been disturbed, but there was nothing else we could do.

  The rain had stopped, but everything was drenched and muddy as we sprinted through the woods, away from the gravel driveway and the sounds of tires crackling up it. We ran down through the valley, then curved back toward our house, and when we reached our property, the others were just pulling up.

  We ran up, and they jumped out and met us partway, and everyone started talking at once.

  “Wait!” I half shouted over the din as I latched on to something Sofía had said. “The steel mill?”

  “What about it?” Arthur said.

  “That’s where he went,” Nick explained. “First to a cemetery, then to the steel mill.”

  “Is he building the weapon out there?” Remy asked.

  “We don’t think so,” Levi said.

  “We couldn’t follow him into the cemetery without making it too obvious, and we couldn’t get all that close at the mill either,” Sofía said, “but it looked like he was loading more metal into his truck. Like stripping the wire and pipes from the building.”

  “I don’t understand,” Arthur said.

  “It was bound to happen to you eventually,” Nick said.

  “There was no sign of the materials in his cellar,” Arthur said. “If he’s not building it at the mill either, where do you think he’s doing it?”

  “In his house?” Sofía said. “Somewhere in the woods?”

  “Did you find anything we can use?” Nick asked. “A jar of human teeth or something?”

  Remy flashed me a dark look. “You could say that.”

  Arthur held out the picture on his phone, and the others stared at it.

  “Dozens of those,” I clarified. “Well, not that, exactly. But drawings of our family.”

  “He’s been drawing you?” Levi said, wide-eyed.

  “Not quite,” I said.

  “They’re Mark’s,” Arthur explained. “He stole them.”

  My gut twisted as I thought back to what the sheriff had said when he’d questioned us about the substation. “It might be some kind of trophy. Maybe he’s got stuff from everyone who was hurt in the accident.”

  “If this dude’s got serial killer trophies in his basement, it’s officially time to stop calling it an accident and call the police,” Nick said. “Again.”

  “We need to get them out here before he moves anything,” Arthur agreed.

  Remy looked to me, and I nodded. He took out his phone and paced the length of the car as he dialed. “He’s not picking up.”

  “We’ll have to go back to the station,” I said.

  “By the time we get there and the sheriff gets back here, the stuff could be gone!” Arthur cried.

  Remy thrust his phone toward Levi as he climbed back into the car. “Put that on speaker, and don’t stop dialing until he answers.”

  For what felt like the millionth time that night, we squeezed back into the Metro and took off, but we’d barely reached the haunted bridge when the incessant ringing over Remy’s loudspeaker cut out, replaced by a clamor of voices. “Hello?” Sheriff Nakamura said over the wash of sound.

  “Where are you?” Remy asked. “What’s all that noise?”<
br />
  “I’m at the station.” There was a harried edge to his voice. “I know we need to talk, Rem, but right now’s not a good time. Things have suddenly . . . picked up here.”

  Remy’s jaw worked anxiously. “Is it about Wayne Hastings?”

  “What? No, it’s . . .” A few seconds passed, and then the drone of the busy station went silent as a door clicked closed. “Are you injured? Are you safe?”

  “Injured? No,” Remy said.

  A knocking sound came over the line. “Hold on a second.”

  The murmuring voices crept back in and the sheriff said, “Tell Agent Rothstadt I’ll be right out.” As soon as the background noise vanished again, the sheriff sighed. “Sorry about that, bud. We got a late-night visit from the FBI.”

  “The FBI?” Remy said.

  My heart thudded. Remy’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, it turns out those burns in the field were caused by a piece of a satellite,” the sheriff said.

  Piece of satellite, Arthur mouthed, clearly offended by the very notion. I tried to smile at him, to communicate Yeah, ridiculous, but I’d just gone so dizzy the car was capsizing before my eyes.

  The FBI.

  The FBI was here. Were they the ones who’d taken the video down? Did they know it was us in it? Did they care?

  “We don’t know much else yet, but there are concerns about radiation,” the sheriff was saying. “They’ve got military here setting up a temporary facility and everything, so I don’t want you kids going anywhere near Jenkins Lane, got it?”

  Remy stared hard into my eyes via the rearview mirror.

  “Rem?” the sheriff prompted.

  He pulled over onto the shoulder abruptly and put the car in park. “Got it.”

  “What did you need?” the sheriff asked. “Everything okay?”

  Remy’s mouth opened and closed. Bits of Bill’s frantic e-mails were carouseling through my mind, and the others must have been able to hear my heart racing guiltily, fearfully.

  I should have told them.

  I might be the one hosting the alien, but we were all in that video. If I’d told them what Remy knew, one of them would have talked sense into me. I would’ve turned myself in before it came to this.

  Before it came to them.

  “Remy?” the sheriff pressed.

  Nick’s eyes bulged as if to say, Dude! Go on! and Arthur spun his finger, like Get to the point, and Levi and Sofía both leaned in, urging Remy onward.

  Just then, headlights hit the rearview mirror, and a black SUV appeared on the curved bridge behind us. The long black car slid past, sleek and inky, followed immediately by another, and then another. A fourth, a fifth.

  Remy was watching them with a tensed jaw. My mouth had gone dry as sandpaper; the buzz revved through me, jostling, eager, as fear coiled through my body, but I released my grip on those non-muscles, and it dispersed in my body again.

  The ground shivered as the sixth and final Suburban skimmed past, and in its wake, a solid-white semitruck appeared, brakes spitting and hissing as it jerked through the corkscrew of the road.

  “Are you there?” the sheriff asked.

  Remy cleared his throat. “Shoot. I just blanked.”

  “What?” Nick demanded from the far side of the back seat.

  “I’ll call you back, Dad,” Remy said, and hung up.

  “Dude,” Levi said gently. “What’s the deal?”

  The semitruck rumbled past, and another one sloughed out of the blue-green foliage, followed by a third.

  There was something nightmarish and impossible about it, like I was watching the woods lay eggs, long and shining in the moonlight.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” Sofía demanded.

  “The FBI is here,” Remy said.

  “So what? They’re busy with the satellite crash! We need to get Wayne behind bars, Remy.”

  “Not a satellite,” Arthur growled.

  “Not the point!” Nick said. “The man who ruined our lives and stockpiled your brother’s stolen drawings is building a weapon for aliens, and Remy’s having visions about the world ending! I personally am thrilled the FBI’s here!”

  The shadowy fold of the woods delivered a fourth and final semitruck.

  So many trucks.

  So many voices at the police station.

  So many people here, all searching for us.

  For the thing in me.

  The power trapped under my skin was too much. The memory of light searing across my mind was too much. Their arguing was too much.

  “It was supposed to be our discovery,” Arthur was saying. “Now they’re going to take over the whole thing.”

  “So what?” Sofía said. “The world will still be saved!”

  “Those trucks were in my vision,” Remy said, spinning in his seat to face us. “This doesn’t change anything! The FBI isn’t here to save the world.”

  My own body felt claustrophobic, and I couldn’t get a good breath.

  “Then what are they here for?” Nick demanded.

  I threw open the back door and tumbled out onto the shoulder, gasping for oxygen. I bent over and pressed my hands against my knees as I struggled to inhale.

  Two more SUVS were roaring past behind the trucks, bumping up behind them like security guards.

  “Franny?” Sofía said, jumping out of the car and trailing me to the evergreen trees. “Franny, are you okay?”

  I turned back to her, staring through the heady clumps of mist drifting through the headlights.

  I tried to speak, but no sound came out. I shook my head. Remy opened his door and stood, his silhouette peering over the car at me as Sofía took two slow steps, murmuring, “It’s making you sick, isn’t it?”

  I blinked at her.

  “I know it is,” she said shakily. “All night you’ve seemed like you were about to collapse. . . . Using that power is hurting you.”

  It should’ve been obvious, but it honestly hadn’t occurred to me before then.

  Every time a burst of the power receded from my body, pain and nausea raced in to take its place.

  Every time I tapped into the energy, the pain got a little worse.

  “Whatever’s going on,” she said, voice wet and rattling, “please just tell me. For once, just tell me.”

  Tears flooded my eyes. I felt suddenly small, helpless. The others had gotten out of the car too and were watching, waiting for an explanation for my outburst.

  The last thing I wanted to do was tell them, but it was time.

  I could end this for all of us, if I was just honest.

  “Remy’s right,” I rasped. “The FBI isn’t here to save the world.”

  “We don’t really know what they’re here for,” he cut in. “But whatever it is—”

  “They’re here for me,” I said. “For the thing inside me.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “IT WENT INTO ME,” I said. “I didn’t remember at first either, but . . .”

  Remy turned away, shaking his head angrily, but it was never his job to protect me, and I shouldn’t have let him try.

  My heart pounded as I went on. “But at the end, right before we came to . . . the thing walked into me. That’s how it disappeared, when it all stopped. It entered me.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  Levi’s mouth dipped open. “What. The.”

  Nick’s eyes bulged. “I swear to Gah.”

  Arthur went white-faced, and Sofía stepped back, like she’d been pushed.

  “That’s what you’ve been keeping from us?” she said.

  I glanced at Remy. He’d walked into the middle of the road, his hands folded behind his head like he was stretching his neck.

  I took a deep breath. “There’s more.” I held
my phone out to Arthur, but he made no move to take it. He was stunned into uncommon silence and stillness. “I e-mailed that guy. Black Mailbox Bill, who said he’d seen one of the discs? Look what he said.”

  Arthur stared at the phone like it was a living rabbit I’d just pulled from Levi’s fedora. Sofía took the phone instead, and Nick and Levi crowded around her, reading over her shoulder.

  “Okay, now we really need to tell someone,” Levi said. “We’ve got to blow this thing wide open.”

  Remy spun back. “And this is why we didn’t tell you.”

  Levi looked gobsmacked. “You knew too?” he asked, right as Arthur sprung back to life, saying to me, “You told him and not me?”

  “I was handling it,” I explained.

  “Obviously not,” Arthur argued.

  “I was trying to,” I said. “I thought if Bill could tell me what had happened to him, then—”

  “Then you could just leave me in the dark?” Arthur demanded. “You trusted a total stranger over me, Franny!”

  “Oh, come on, Arthur,” Remy said, stalking back toward us. “You might not have known the thing was in her, but you knew it had done something to her, and all you cared about was getting enough groundbreaking footage to land your own Wikipedia page.”

  “That’s not fair,” Levi said. “We were all affected—we didn’t know she was any different!”

  “She’s shooting lightning out of her fingertips!” Nick said. “Not that it matters, because as soon as you realized that thing had affected any of us, you should have given a rat’s ass what that might have meant! But you weren’t affected, Art, so of course it was all fun and games! Of course it was all just trying to find the next thing that could fucking turn you into someone, so you can finally outshine your brother, no matter what or who it’s costing!”

  “Thank you!” Remy said, caught up in the moment, but I was staring at Arthur, watching the expression melt off his face like he’d been slapped.

  “Stop it,” Sofía said quietly, but Nick was rounding on me and Remy now.

  “And as for you two, I don’t know why, but I expected better! You knew what kind of danger you were putting us all in, and you said nothing! Didn’t even warn us that every second we stayed in this shit-show, we were risking being—being disappeared by the gah-damn U.S. government! I’m so freaking tired of all your lies and secrets, and that goes for all of you!”