From Sky to Sky

by Amanda G. Stevens

  But she was answering him. “When Doc died, I inherited his research. And the product of it.”

  He drew a long breath. The strain pulled tight across his shoulders.

  “I thought you would want it,” Rachel said. “Like Anna did: on any terms.”

  He was mostly keeping up, but she kept throwing monkey wrenches. “You thought I want to die.”

  “Isn’t that why you fell?”

  “I fell because the wind changed. I fell because my foot didn’t land where I wanted it to.”

  “You don’t want mortality? An out?”

  “I’ll take another few centuries, if I can get them.”

  “But I was so sure.” She covered her face and spoke into her hands, seeming to shrink into herself while she stood there. “Someone I could really help. Someone with the question to match my answer.”

  The geyser showered him in cold despair. He had to steady himself, steady her.

  “There’s no matching question though, is there? So I’ve got nothing to offer to anyone.”

  “Hey. Rachel. Look at me.”

  She lifted her head, and the emptiness in her eyes was a punch to his chest. “I’m so sorry, Zac. Please tell them I’m sorry.”

  She bolted for the employee exit onto the back parking lot, threw her entire body weight into the crash bar, and dashed outside.

  “Rachel!” He barreled after her just as Connie appeared in the doorway between the front area and the kitchen.

  “Zac?”

  He didn’t slow his pace, ducking through the doorway before the door could shut on him. Rachel was already halfway to a gray SUV.

  “Rachel!”

  She flung the driver’s door open and threw herself inside. Seconds later, while Zac still hurtled across the lot toward her, she swung the car out into the street with a squeal of rubber and a revving of the engine. The driver behind her honked but braked in time to avoid her. Zac ran to his car. He couldn’t lose her.

  Connie’s voice chased him from the back of the bakery. “Zac, what’s going on? Do you want me to call the police?”

  The possibility spiked his pulse. He swiveled to face her across the lot and shook his head. “No. Please. This is personal.”

  The concern in her eyes made him want to holler at her: she was mortal and useless to every one of his predicaments. A flicker of anger joined her sincerity, which he deserved. He was about to leave mid-shift after less than a week on the job. And he didn’t care, and she could probably tell.

  Nothing else to say and no time to say it. He reached his car and started driving. Rachel couldn’t be far ahead of him, not the way the traffic lights turned in this town. But the SUV was nowhere to be seen.

  Five minutes later, he spotted it. He followed it another five minutes and frowned when it pulled into a gas station.

  The woman who got out was the right height, but her hair was blond.

  He had lost Rachel.

  His fist beat the steering wheel, and something in him cracked, as it had when he hurled a punch at David yesterday. He punched the wheel a few more times, shouted a few curses, and none of it lessened the pressure in his chest or the knowledge he was failing. Again. Wrong in everything he knew. Powerless in all he did. He had been since the night he learned Colm was murdering mortals.

  No. He had been wrong, powerless … lost … since the sunny, windy afternoon he had fallen to his death. And then woke up alive.

  Cold terror gripped him, the ceaseless cold of the grave he should be occupying right now. He curled his hands around the wheel. He had to find Rachel. A woman ageless like him, lost like him, terrified. Like him.

  Go. Find her.

  His thoughts came together. Okay, a gray SUV. Not helpful. A gray-haired young woman. Slightly more helpful. If only he could know where she would go, a hotel or …

  The barn. Old like them. Susceptible to entropy, unlike them. She felt the same kinship to it that he did. Would the feeling drive her there, to say farewell to a place that had mattered the way the subjects Moira painted mattered to her? It was a ridiculous long shot, yet it was where she would go. He didn’t know where the certainty came from, but he couldn’t ignore it.

  Or maybe he should. One more opportunity to be wrong and no reason to believe he was about to break his streak.

  No other ideas, though. Nothing else to try. He straightened behind the wheel, drew a long breath, and began to drive. The winding two lanes of blacktop calmed him. Twenty minutes later he turned onto the gravel path that had mostly eroded away. He parked near the road. If she heard his car, she’d try to run again. But he didn’t see hers. He got out and walked around the building.

  She had parked behind it. His heart pounded. He’d found her. Now to talk to her, though he didn’t know what he would say. He stepped through the big sliding door in the back, which she had left gaping. The floor was dust, small puffs forming around his shoes with each step, though the ground beneath was hard. No wind inside but still cold. He hunched his shoulders, thrust his hands into his coat pockets, and looked around. Three stalls on one side, swept out and empty. In a corner, a rusted pitchfork and rake had been left behind, old wood handles rotting away for at least a few decades. The rest of the barn was open space to the far wall. No Rachel.

  Zac tipped his head up to the ceiling. No cutaway to see into the hayloft, only a small square opening at the front of the barn, to one side of the center where the loft doors would be. Dangling through the square opening, a rope swayed. He walked the length of the barn, studying. No one should be walking up there. Over one of the stalls, he could see up into the loft through several holes. The floor was rotting away.

  Steps sounded overhead, booted feet but a light tread. She must know where to step.

  He walked over to the rope and nudged it with one finger. Brand-new, smooth and bright white, nylon fibers. He tugged it then shimmied up.

  As his head cleared the floor, Rachel screamed.

  “Hey.” He pulled himself into the loft. “It’s just me.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  He stood and looked around. She had spread a red-and-orange beach towel over the old boards dusty with hay and dry with age. Beside a professional camera case, a white plastic bag appeared to hold trash from fast food meals.

  She was still staring at him. Her breaths heaved through her jacket.

  Maybe a trivial question would calm her. “How’d you get the rope up here?”

  “I climbed on the roof of my car.”

  He gestured to the things she’d brought up. “You’re not living up here, are you?”

  “No, no. I just like the environment. I came up here a few times with lunch.”

  “And you came back to say goodbye.”

  A faint blush. “On my way out of town.”

  “You live nearby?”

  She pointed out the loft window at her car. “Home. I roll with the highways. I stop and take pictures. You know, to remind myself I was there.”

  Or to prove it to herself. To the people who never saw her and never had seen. Right now her emotions were spurting over the whole place, the terror and loss as she’d run from the bakery, but not only that. Zac’s chest grew tight with the abandonment he’d picked up the day they met.

  “We need to talk, Rachel.”

  “I’ll pay my debt. I promise you, I’m prepared to do so.”

  As she said the words, he was hit by a spray of something new and cold and dark. His stomach knotted.

  “Now please go,” she said, “so I can return to solitary confinement minus the confinement. It’s not a bad way to live really.”

  The tone was a poor attempt at casual. She had lived as David had, a century alone. It had left David … well, old, in a way that Zac and Simon weren’t. Longevite humor wasn’t only lost on him; it seemed to wound him in a way Zac could not understand. He tried to remember not to joke about death, or imperviousness to it, around David.

  Behind Rachel’s eyes lay a
hollowness that was different from David’s quiet hurt, but it occupied the same place.

  “You thought you were helping the others.”

  “I was healing them,” she said quietly. “I was curing our cancer.”

  He blinked and saw an image of Lucas, the last scare they’d had, a year ago. Eleven-year-old child hooked to wires and machines, burning with a fever the doctors couldn’t combat, tests for tumors in his lungs that mercifully came back negative.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t anything like cancer.”

  “It is a disease.” She held out her hands, fingers spread, as if showing him a deformation. Her hands were whole, the fingers straight and young, the skin blemish free. “A disease that keeps us stuck here. I would give my right arm to find a true gray hair on my head.”

  “And Anna would have too?”

  She lowered her hands to her sides. “I told her I needed more time to rework, or the odds were at least fifty percent she would die like Sean and Holly. I needed a year, maybe two. Anna came back eleven days later.”

  “To die?” Zac’s voice rasped.

  She dropped to her knees and curled her hands into her thighs.

  Zac started across the loft to go to her. “Hey.”

  She put a hand up. “Please stay back. The floor’s dangerous.” She looked like painted glass kneeling there, her hair stark and colorless, her shoulders quivering. “She said a whole year was out of the question. She said, ‘I can’t stand one more barren day.’”

  “Rachel, listen. I can’t let you go explore some more highways while I pretend I don’t know you.” He couldn’t drag her before the others, either. If she refused …

  “I never should have left that letter for Cady.” Tears broke her voice. “They could have gone on thinking Anna and the others finally got old.”

  He knelt where he was. He braced his hands on his legs, mirroring her pose, and said as gently as he could, “No.”

  She looked up. Tears stood in her eyes.

  “Anna left a letter, Rachel. Before she died.”

  Her lips parted for a harsh, panicked breath.

  “She didn’t identify you. That’s why I thought—they still think—your father was the one who administered the cure. But we’ve all known it wasn’t natural.”

  “It was supposed to be. A natural life span, that’s what I was trying to give them.”

  “Cady believes they were murdered.”

  She groaned and covered her face. “Then you have to tell them. It’s only— I didn’t want to be hated at the end.”

  A sob shook her whole body, and he couldn’t sit here watching her break down. He stood and stepped toward her, his strides loose and easy, trying not to look threatening. He would stay an arm’s length away and—

  A crack echoed through the barn as the floor fell away beneath him and he fell along with it into darkness.

  TWENTY-TWO

  He opened his eyes to an unknown roof, barely glimpsed through a jagged hole in the ceiling. What on earth …?

  The barn.

  He had fallen. Becoming a habit. Crap.

  “Rachel?” His voice was hoarse, his throat dry. Hay dust had drifted into his mouth while he lay there. He coughed. “Rachel. Are you okay?”

  The only sound was the wind passing through the building, under the eaves that didn’t need to be airtight and wouldn’t be by now, in a building this run-down. She might be unconscious. He tried to get up.

  The attempt at motion brought sudden awareness of his body. His legs and torso didn’t rise when he told them to, but he wasn’t paralyzed; he felt the muscles gather and execute the commands of his brain, but they weighed too much. He blinked a few times, dust on his eyelashes too, and then cast his gaze down the length of himself.

  Buried.

  His chest began to squeeze. No, not now. No time for that. He had to push this wreckage off himself and get up. He shoved at the slabs and beams pinning his torso and left arm. His legs were trapped too. Only his head and right arm were free. He strained against the wreckage for long minutes while the behemoth prowled around him, closing in. He yelled wordlessly as if he could scare the beast into leaving him alone. But with the sound of his cry, it pounced and landed squarely on his chest, weighing more than the debris piled on him.

  “No. No, no, no.”

  He couldn’t walk it off. He couldn’t get outside. He couldn’t find the sky.

  His voice continued in his ears, screams he could not stop. He was buried again. He was suffocating in blood and mud and corpses. He was crushed under the barn’s collapsed floor. They were both happening to him at the same time. Words filtered into his mind, words his mouth was making.

  “Get me out. Don’t leave me here. Please.”

  His throat was raw. He couldn’t speak anymore, but he couldn’t breathe either. His back arched in the tiny space he occupied between hard ground and debris. He tried to buck the weight off him. He tore at the unmovable beams until his right fingers bled.

  When he had exhausted himself into stillness, the afternoon had come on. His lungs eased open, adrenaline so far spent the behemoth had to get up and go away.

  He tried, for the first time since waking, to think. At first his mind glitched on panic the moment he directed his thoughts to his situation. He lay still and numb, drawing shallow breaths, and in time the pins and needles in his hands and arms withdrew. He tried to find any injuries. Bruises seemed to be everywhere. His left side twinged every time he drew breath, something he should have noticed before. Likely a fractured rib. A surface lick of pain crossed the outside of his left hip, sharp but probably a flesh wound. Nothing mortal as far as he could tell, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered if he couldn’t get out. Panic flickered and popped in his system like faulty wires; his heart skipped beats, and his breath caught.

  He shut his eyes so he didn’t have to look at the ceiling and the walls, then opened them again and studied the view above him. The perimeter of the floor was intact. Rachel could have kept to the edges, lowered herself down the rope, and escaped. He lifted his head off the ground and angled his eyes as far as he could in every direction, but she wasn’t lying trapped beside him. She was gone.

  He lay for hours. Shoving at the beams and big flat sections of floor, shifting a few things but never moving enough weight to leverage himself up. He wasn’t going to get himself out of this. The thought came to him as dusk was seeping into the barn through the door she’d left open.

  “Someone will come,” he whispered into the air that was growing colder every hour. He shivered. His breath was visible now, and he was wearing only a fall jacket, and the wood keeping him trapped ate his body heat.

  His shift had ended hours ago. David and Tiana had closed the bookstore by now. Someone had texted him, called him, wondered why he wasn’t responding or picking up. He’d left his phone in his car. The fact chafed, but he had to wait here for them to come. No choice.

  In the meantime he worked to keep his breathing steady, his mind clear. His adrenaline would burn out eventually and send him crashing, but it hadn’t happened yet. Instead his system kept rocketing deeper into fight-or-flight whenever his brain registered the confined space as if it were news. Shoot, maybe this would cure him altogether.

  He was okay. Coping. Dealing. Take that, Life Buoy.

  He was suffocating. Mud filled his mouth and the weight of the bodies reminded him where he was, how deep the grave was turning out to be, and he had to keep digging. But the mud was solid now. Rough. With splinters. He gasped and writhed, and a board clattered somewhere over him. The barn. Not the grave. Deep night, moonlight filtering in from somewhere, temperature near freezing, trapped.

  Trapped.

  “No.”

  Sparking, fizzing panic. Heart rate out of control. His muscles trembled with cold and fatigue, and the cracked ribs had progressed from an ache to a stabbing pain. But he was okay. He was dealing. He lay there an hour or more, shivering and straining his e
yes to focus on the one beam of moonlight through a small hole at the peak of the roof. Okay. Dealing.

  Someone would come.

  Another hour. And another. No tracking them to the minute, but the sense of them creeping by was a skill he’d retained from the years when a pocket watch was used by railroad men, not teenage freighters. Time was instinctive to him then and now. It was past midnight, perhaps two in the morning. Clouds rolled over the moon, and the little silver light above him went out, and a cry escaped him.

  “Someone.”

  Long, dry sobs heaved from his gut. Alone and in the dark. Alone and unable to move. Maybe they would never find him.

  He should be able to dig himself out. He’d done it once before. But he couldn’t move the beams, and his right hand was too raw now to keep trying. He was as powerless in this as he was in everything else: couldn’t figure out Colm was killing people, couldn’t maintain the mask of the affable celebrity for the fans who now mocked and mistrusted him, couldn’t save Lucas’s family from a loss very much like a death. Couldn’t keep Cady and Finn’s family from being accidentally slaughtered by a desolate woman who sought death for herself too. It all gushed out of him like so many mortal wounds.

  When he thought he might be able to catch his breath, the last of the wounds tore open. Couldn’t place his foot on the tightrope, couldn’t keep his balance against the wind, couldn’t stop the plummet to earth and the explosion of pain and death and the waking up from both in his undamaged body that he knew had not been undamaged, had not been alive, had not been a body anymore except that here he was inside flesh and bone that had not perished, had not even broken.

  “What did You do to me?” The words were hoarse, raw. “What are You doing to me now? I know You’re here.”

  He bucked in the trap.

  “You don’t make any sense. Why won’t You let go? Why won’t You let me go?”

  Be still.

  He thrashed again. “In the grave I tried to find You. I begged You—don’t You remember I begged You to get me out?”

  Be still.

  “No!”

  Zac fought the rubble for an hour, teeth locked against more words. When at last he stopped, his breaths were ragged gulps of cold air that left him coughing. He tried to keep wrestling, but he had no strength. He closed his eyes.