When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

  The blue Cadillac’s lights went off.

  Blue Cadillac.

  It probably wasn’t the same car. And if it was, it wasn’t following me. It was a coincidence.

  I rode farther off the road as I approached. The passenger window was rolled down, a bundle of folders and papers resting in the seat, but I couldn’t see the driver.

  I held my breath as I rode past, and a moment later, the car pulled onto the road again and sped away.

  See? I thought. Nothing.

  I flinched, nearly crashing into an old oak, as my phone vibrated in my sweatshirt pocket. I regained my balance and fished it out with my gloved hand just as I was clearing the copse of trees.

  My eyes darted between where my house had come into view ahead and my phone screen.

  I tapped the call on and lifted the phone to my ear. “Levi?”

  “Finally,” he gasped on the other end. “Why isn’t anyone answering their phones?”

  “They’re at work,” I said. “Or at least Arthur is, and Nick’s just ignoring us, I’m pretty sure. No idea about Remy or Sof.”

  “Where are you?” Levi interrupted.

  “Almost home.”

  “Don’t,” Levi said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t go home,” Levi said. “They’re at my house, Franny.”

  “The others are? What’s going on—”

  “No,” Levi hissed. “The freaking FBI. They’re at my house. They’re taking like—they’re taking everything. They have a search warrant.”

  I almost dropped the phone as I looked back toward my driveway. Two black Suburbans were parked in it, right behind Dad’s truck.

  “Hello?” Levi said. “Franny?”

  My voice came out shaky. “Everything?”

  “They’re loading up boxes of my stuff. My cameras, my computer, all of it.”

  “Where’s the video?” I asked. “From that night?”

  “I’ve got the memory card,” he said, “but there’s a copy saved on my computer. Look, the sheriff’s here too. He told me not to say anything just yet. They’re taking me in for questioning—”

  “Questioning?” I bit out. “What could they possibly pretend to question you about? You didn’t do anything!”

  “I know,” Levi said. “The sheriff’s pretty mad. I guess they already picked up Remy early this morning when the sheriff wasn’t home, and they still haven’t released him.”

  Remy.

  They’d had him all morning. That was why he hadn’t replied.

  “I’m sure he’s okay,” Levi said, anticipating my fears. “They can only hold him so long, and I doubt he’s said a single word. He knows his rights. Anyway, I’m trying to get ahold of my parents, but they’re, like, in a dead zone, and—” Levi dropped off. I caught the faint murmur of Remy’s dad talking in the background.

  “Levi?” I said, then more urgently, “Levi!”

  “I have to go,” he said. “I’ll call you as soon as I can. Don’t go home, Franny.”

  The line clicked dead.

  I was even with my driveway now. I thought I saw the drapes move in the front window. My whole body was shaking.

  I kept pedaling. I didn’t know where I was going. Not Levi’s house or Remy’s. I couldn’t risk going to Sofía’s or Nick’s either. I could head to Walmart, but that was five miles in the opposite direction, and they were probably under observation now too.

  The panic was building, and as it did the headlights of passing cars were flickering in and out.

  Shit. I focused all my energy on pedaling, on getting as far from my house as I could, typing out a message into our group chat as I went: DON’T GO HOME.

  What were they doing at my house?

  What were they telling Dad they were doing at my house?

  What excuse had they given Sheriff Nakamura for digging through his nephew’s stuff?

  For taking his son?

  I lurched back onto the asphalt in time to pass under the stone bridge that held up the train tracks, and the car passing through in the opposite direction slammed on its horn at the sight of me.

  I turned my handlebars so hard I nearly fell off my bike as I shot out of the tunnel and onto the cross street beyond. I jerked the bike right again as the left handlebar clipped the rearview mirror of a car waiting at the stop sign there. Fog slipped down my throat as I swore and lost control, careening furiously into the marshy bank off the road.

  The gray world cycloned around me as I flew clear of the bike and tumbled through the soggy end-of-summer grass.

  I was vaguely aware of the car turning around, to check on me, maybe, or more likely to scream at me for hitting their mirror. I staggered to my feet, left ankle stinging where it had caught most of my weight, the same one I’d rolled the other night, and swung my legs back over the bike, kicking off hard.

  There was no time to look back.

  I needed to get somewhere safe. Somewhere isolated, where no one would think to look for me.

  The cord of energy running through me shivered, like a metal coil charged to the brim.

  I hadn’t realized I was already heading there.

  To the mill.

  I chanced a look over my shoulder, to see if the car I’d clipped was still following me. It was, but the driver was taking it easy, cruising along the rain-slicked road at the approximate pace of an eighty-year-old who’d given himself forty minutes to make it to bingo night at Ray’s Sports Bar & Grill.

  He was crawling along like he had no intention of catching up, leaving plenty of space between us.

  Between me and his powder-blue Cadillac.

  But when I looked back at him, he sped up.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE CADILLAC’S OLD ENGINE whined, and the windshield wipers made rubbery squeaks in time with my racing heart.

  Pedaling through the marshy grass was slow going, but moving up onto the road wasn’t an option.

  One swift jerk of the wheel and he could be in front of me, cut me off.

  My lungs burned. Condensation slipped into them with every anxious breath. There was no one else around. No foot traffic on these country roads. No other cars.

  Ahead on the left, another road dead-ended into this one. I’d have to ride in front of the Cadillac to turn onto it, but if I managed it, I could cut into the wooded gap on the road’s far side and lose him.

  I concentrated on my stinging thigh muscles rather than the crunchy pain shooting through my ankle. Overhead, something popped and shattered—a streetlight, raining glass down on the Cadillac’s hood.

  The driver hit the brakes, the wheels skidding sideways along the slick road then whipping back in the other direction as he corrected his mistake.

  It was enough. I shot clear of the hood of the Cadillac for a second, two seconds, three seconds, and ramped back up onto the road, straight toward the tilted sign for Galbraith Road and the pine trees beyond it.

  The Cadillac’s tires shrieked as the driver hit the gas again. I stood, giving full weight to my pedals as I forced the bike forward in furious pumps. I hit the edge of the road, thunking into the mud beyond with another painful spurt up my leg.

  The headlights flashed across the trees ahead of me, and the car’s brakes squealed as the driver made a sudden turn, and then the engine’s hum rose to a roar as it sped off.

  I didn’t look back. I didn’t stop to catch my breath or check my phone.

  The trees thinned out until I was smack in the middle of the dead mill yard, the rust-edged towers and ragged block buildings stabbing the gray sky.

  I’d be safe here. No one would find me. I could call the others, and—

  And what then?

  My mind slogged through murky thoughts and half plans. All I could do here was hide and wait.

  I
slid off my bike and stumbled toward the nearest supply warehouse, foisting most of my weight onto my handlebars as I stumbled over the train tracks that had once brought raw materials from West Virginia and Kentucky and taken the steel made here to just about everywhere else.

  Mom had drawn a diagram of the mill in crayon on a paper place mat at the Macaroni Grill once, her eyes lighting up like she was telling a particularly juicy fairy tale.

  It’s extraordinary, really, she’d said. People have been using iron to make tools for practically all of human history, since long before we knew how much of it there was in the Earth’s core.

  It had fallen from the sky, she’d explained, eyes going wide and glossy. Meteorites. Rock from space that changed all of human history. Isn’t that extraordinary, how a rock from space could change the course of the world?

  Her eyes had flicked to Dad, who’d given a little smirk and a nod. It’s extraordinary, he’d agreed. I was probably no older than seven, but even then I’d seen through his words: You’re extraordinary.

  The tracks were hardly overgrown, devoid of rubble and trash—trains probably passed through here still, though without any reason to stop.

  Ahead, fog clustered around the towering, twenty-story blast furnace like the ghost of the ashy carbon dioxide that used to spit out from it. Drizzle bounced off the metal incline ramp that led up to its mouth. One of the skip cars still sat a third of the way up the metal-webbed tunnel, permanently paused, probably still holding its fuel or ore, while the other cars were visible at the bottom.

  It was hard not to imagine that rusty little box holding its breath, waiting to see the outcome of the chaos that had left it stranded, suspended six stories over the ground.

  It looked sad, the way the toys you didn’t really like did.

  At least it wasn’t the kind of thing kids lined up to shoot with BB guns, like the Jenkins House.

  Even after five years, the mill still felt like a kind of holy ground, a gravestone over something you felt in your bones you shouldn’t disturb.

  What little graffiti had been dashed across the rusty metal and gray brick was limited to prayers and bittersweet platitudes. Across the doors of the building was written in bright violet, RIP NICK. I’LL MISS YOUR BIG BALD HEAD, BROTHER.

  My gut twisted like a wrung-out rag. There could’ve been any number of Nicks working at the mill that day, but Nick Colasanti Sr. was the first to come to mind. Was he bald? In the few pictures I’d seen, he was always wearing a mesh-backed hat. When I tried to picture him, I just saw Nick in the hat.

  If the accident had happened a few years later, it could’ve been him—Nick Jr. or any of us. Not Remy—he’d been college bound since first grade, even if all he really wanted was to skateboard, and not Sofía, who’d been planning to be a lawyer ever since the pre-accident summer she’d spent binge-watching Law and Order: SVU with her grandma on a visit to Splendor.

  But Arthur, Nick, Levi, me. It could’ve just as easily been any of us.

  There was a padlock on the door, but it had been clipped. Apparently not everyone avoided this place.

  My skin crawled. Wayne Hastings hadn’t.

  Any other time, that would’ve scared me off, but any other time, I wouldn’t have come here in the first place.

  As I stumbled inside, the ground beneath my feet was soft, with the give of moss or thick carpet, and yet clouds of soot and dust kicked up around me. Another tremor dropped through me, a sounding line that couldn’t find the bottom of my stomach.

  I’d been in here exactly once. Mom had asked Arthur and me to drop off Mark’s lunch when he’d forgotten it. The place was blurry in my memory, a messy amalgam of what the place that nearly killed my brother would have looked like, not what it did look like.

  What it did look like was somehow worse.

  I had expected the black: the ash coating everything, the rubble where the explosion had begun; the metal oxidized and flaking from where the roof had been blown clear, leaving millions of dollars of equipment exposed, just like the skip car.

  The white was what surprised me. The gallons or tons of foam or powder that had been sprayed over everything.

  If someone had led you, blindfolded, to this room, you might for a moment think you were looking at mounds of snow. Or heaps of chewed-up newspaper, piled for the ultimate papier-mâché project. The softness of the ground made sense now.

  I was walking on that last moment, when firemen wandered through this place, eyes stinging, hearts pounding, hoping—against all evidence—there were more survivors, people trapped under rubble near the fringes of the room, with no more than minor burns.

  I doubled over, gagging. My eyes stung from smoke that wasn’t there, from chemical-laced smells I couldn’t place.

  I didn’t know how praying worked, or if it did, but I prayed right then for something that had already happened.

  I prayed Mark had had his back turned. I prayed he hadn’t seen the rush of hot metal coming toward him. Maybe he’d even been staring out the window at the field beyond, tracing Fibonacci curves in wildflowers, counting spirals in a dandelion, doing any of the things I pictured my brother doing, when I could conjure up anything but that steadily beeping hospital room.

  Purpose. Meaning, connection. That was what he’d found in those things, in drawing them. I hoped that had been what he’d seen in those moments, even if it was a mirage, rippling through the heat waves sent across the room.

  It was possible: He’d been almost to the door, heading out for a lunch break, when it happened. They’d found him caught under a metal pipe that had been thrown by the blast, but the burns on his feet and legs and hands weren’t so bad they wouldn’t be usable if he woke up.

  How usable, though? Would he ever draw again?

  I backed up to the door as a desperate, helpless scream worked its way out of my chest.

  Anger, anger, so much anger. And here I was, as alone as I’d felt for five years. Finally safe to let it out.

  Spit flew from my mouth, mixed with the piles of everything around me. I doubled over and screamed again, until I felt that jittery energy flowing out of me in every direction. Until a—probably the last surviving—light bulb surged bright and snapped apart, raining glass into the desert of ash. Until the red-painted fire bells on the wall began to scream with me.

  The flame winked out as quickly as it had come on, leaving me empty, achy, gasping for breath. I swiped the back of my hand up my mouth, drying it, wiped at my tear-streaked face with my fingertips.

  The damp hair on the back of my neck began to prickle then, just a second of warning.

  “Quite the show,” said a man’s voice behind me. “That must make you Frances.”

  I spun toward him. He was standing in front of the door, dressed in a bucket hat and iron-crisp Members Only jacket three shades lighter than his mocha-khaki pants. The man was easily seventy years old, white-haired and starting to stoop. He shuffled toward me, his hands raised in appeasement. “No need to be alarmed.”

  I took a step back, and fear as big and hard as a jawbreaker caught in my throat.

  “In fact, it’s essential you remain calm.” He was a heavy breather, the kind who gave a damp exhale between every couple of words, his lips smacking audibly as they parted to let in new oxygen. “Our bodies aren’t meant to channel the energy in that way. If you keep up like that, it’s going to make you very sick, young lady.”

  I glanced between him and the door. His thin lips twisted into a smile, and he touched his chest. His hand was so papery his veins were visible as blue rivers beneath his skin, except where the sun had left dark spots. “It’s me.”

  I recognized him, but not because I knew him: because he’d been following me in the blue Cadillac.

  He patted his chest once more, and the movement revealed a shiny, black rectangle tucked under the jacket at his hip.
r />   Gun, my mind registered, and it was like I could taste the bullets in the back corners of my mouth, between my molars, even down in my stomach. Cold and tart metal all through my body. My heart rate skyrocketed, and I took another step back, trying not to react to the sharp pain in my ankle.

  He took another step forward, and his white eyebrows, thin and widely spread, lifted in surprise. “Bill. Black Mailbox Bill, Frances. I’m here to help.”

  My throat loosened, just a little. Black Mailbox Bill wasn’t much more comforting than me. Either way, a stranger had tracked me down, flown across the country, and cornered me in an abandoned steel mill.

  “What are you doing here?” My voice came out hoarse, and I fought to control it. “How do you know my name?”

  “Now calm down,” he said. “You can trust old Bill.”

  I disagreed. You couldn’t trust anyone who referred to himself as old Bill. My eyes flicked to the outline of the gun inside his jacket.

  “Ah, this?” he said lightly. “This isn’t for you. This is in case—” He reached for it, and all at once the machinery hummed to life, the fire bells roaring against the wall. Bill jerked his hand away and held both hands up again, like I was the one with the gun and I had it pointed at him.

  The current running through me dropped off, and the room fell silent in response. Bill gave a tense smile and dropped his hands to his sides. “I was just going to say, this is for protection.”

  “Protection,” I repeated.

  Bill gave a somehow smug nod. “From anyone who tries to get his hands on either one of us, Frances. I’m sure you understand what a risk it is, my coming up here.”

  “How did you find me?” I demanded.

  “I’ve got a lot of help with the MUFON community, and once we’d placed the location from your video, it just took a little digging. You kids really should be more careful how you use your social media.”

  “Lesson learned,” I said.

  Bill chuckled. “Now, how about this, Frances? I’ll set my gun down, and you can take a load off that bruised ankle for a minute while we chat. But only for a minute. If I could figure out to look for you here, others won’t be far behind. We’ve got to get you somewhere safe.”