Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  The spring of power inside Marion uncoiled.

  Heat blasted through her body. At her pulse points—temples, wrists, throat—her skin pinched and puckered. Beneath her, the world opened—not just the ground, but the entire fabric of where she stood. Layers of earth and energy and stardust peeled back to reveal the yawning chasm beneath.

  She looked down, once, and thought she saw the familiar glimmer of moonlight on black waves, and a swirling dark miasma that called to mind lessons from last year’s physics class—dark matter, black holes, event horizons.

  Then she reached up, grabbed the Collector’s scaly, wet hide. A claw sliced her arm open from wrist to elbow, but she held fast.

  Then the Far Place sucked her away from the world she knew, and she dragged the monster down with her.

  THE FIRST TIME MARION TRAVELED to one of the hidden, hollow places of her world, it had been brief, and a surprise. A peek down a secret pocket. A glimpse of an alien burrow and a glittering golden sea.

  The second time she traveled, it was gentle. A slide through a river and a slip behind a veil.

  The third time, when she dared to reach beyond the places known to both man and beast, it was far from gentle.

  It was an eruption.

  It was a breaking.

  It left her unmade.

  Val

  The Dawn

  Val landed flat on her back. The cool ground beneath her was riddled with rocks.

  She blinked, feeling frozen between here and elsewhere. Above her rambled a familiar treescape. Then her breathing returned in an abrupt, choking gasp.

  She rolled over, pressed her hands into the mud, and looked up to search the woods. They weren’t as dark as they had been when she’d left them; the sky beyond the stern black branches had lightened to a newborn gray.

  “Marion?” Her voice came out in shambles. When she tried to stand, she fell back to the ground.

  She suspected that final tesser had been a difficult one for Marion to accomplish—what with the monster latching around her body and all, and the fact that the place she’d been going had been . . . Except Val didn’t know or understand or want to understand the place Marion had been going.

  But somehow, Marion had managed it—Marion, Marion—and now Val was home.

  Zoey sat hunched beside Val on her hands and knees in the dirt. She coughed, wiped her mouth across the back of one shaking hand.

  The other hand still tightly held Grayson Tighe’s baseball bat. The sight of it tore Val in half and sent her spinning away atop the sea winds.

  She must have made a sound; Zoey turned, her face crumpling with grief and pity.

  “Val, come here.” She reached for her, half crawling.

  Val slapped her hand away. She didn’t deserve comfort. She could repent for the rest of her life and it would hardly make a dent. “Don’t touch me!” she sobbed.

  She decided, staggering away from Zoey, that she didn’t have the capacity to fathom what had happened—to her, to Marion, to all of them. The men who had hunted them, the corpse of her mother, the wide, flat space of the hidden realm where the Collector had revealed his true form. An infestation of monsters, old and inimitable, that prowled the world hunting girls.

  Words circled her brain: miracle, phenomenon, abomination, plague.

  Faintly, she heard Zoey speaking to her: Val, you’re shaking. Val, you’re gonna pass out.

  But Val’s mind wouldn’t stop racing.

  Maybe the Hand of Light wasn’t once made of men who wouldn’t listen to reason, who would lead girls to slaughter if it meant their rituals were validated and their truth absolute.

  Maybe, Val thought, somewhere in the world was a Hand of Light chapter composed of women, or kindhearted men. Maybe there were other ways to slay these beasts—many other ways—and none of them would require the world to give up its bravest girls in sacrifice.

  But none of that mattered at the moment. Nothing mattered but the loss of too many lives at Val’s hands, and the loss of one in particular.

  “Val,” Zoey whispered, “please say something.”

  Val collected herself as her mother had taught her. She raised her chin, squared her jaw, and proceeded west through the woods.

  “Where are you going?” Zoey called after her. Val heard her footsteps, slight and hurried. “Val!”

  “I’m going to wait for her.”

  “Wait for who?”

  “For Marion.”

  Zoey was beside her now, tearful. “Val, stop.”

  But if Val stopped, she’d collapse. If she stopped, she might never start again.

  “Val,” Zoey whispered. “Marion’s gone.”

  Val did not reply. She walked. She walked across Sawkill, from the eastern Kingshead Woods to the western Spinney. Zoey, beside her, said not another word. They stayed clear of the roads and kept instead to whatever trees they could find, because in the trees’ whispers sat half-formed words that reminded them of Marion, of the Rock, of the obscura. They passed by the Von Neumanns’ farm, and the Hawthornes’. At every fence stood a horse with pricked ears and curious bright eyes, watching them pass.

  Val was grateful. The sight of the still, silent horses reminded her, oddly, of the frigid glacial plain of the obscura, the icy trees swollen with blight and monsters. She allowed herself to imagine that she would soon pass a shrub, turn a fence corner, look past the flanks of a curious yearling, and see Marion walking toward her through the misting jade fields.

  It was the sort of cruelly intoxicating vision that Val should not have allowed herself, the sort of imagining she did not deserve.

  And yet she couldn’t resist, didn’t want to resist.

  Don’t ever hope, Valerie, her grandmother had told her once. Don’t hope for things to get better. Don’t hope for a different world.

  Hope, Sylvia Mortimer had said, is a lie that only weak-minded people believe.

  Val settled on a flat jutting rock beneath the lighthouse and turned her face to the sea. A moment later, Zoey sat down beside her—not near enough to touch, but near enough that Val felt comforted.

  She decided her grandmother had been wrong.

  Hope, she thought, breathing with the tide, was a choice that only those with resolute hearts dared to make.

  Zoey

  The Reformer

  When they retreated to the Tighe house, a group of people waited for them—Mr. and Mrs. Tighe. Zoey’s father. Grayson, leg bandaged and some of the color returned to his face. Both his hair and his glasses sat endearingly askew.

  And then there was Mrs. Althouse. She rose from the armchair draped with Zoey’s favorite afghan and turned to face them.

  Though the twin prospects of her father’s embrace and Grayson’s kiss in her hair were so comforting that Zoey nearly ran to them, she instead inhaled long and slow, and focused her attention on Pamela Althouse alone.

  She didn’t really know the woman, had hardly spent any time with her except for a few fleeting moments. But her pale, drawn face held so much of Marion in it—dark hair, sad gray eyes, a gentle expressiveness to her mouth—that Zoey’s gut twisted painfully.

  Val squeezed her hand. Zoey had volunteered to begin the tale, but she knew Val’s signal for what it was: Do you need me to go first?

  Zoey drew a breath and steeled herself for a task she’d never thought she’d have to undertake: Ma’am, I’m sorry, but your daughter is dead.

  Honestly, she wasn’t sure if this woman would survive it.

  But Mrs. Althouse spoke first. “It’s okay,” she said, her voice firm at its center and shivering at the edges. “I know you tried.”

  Astonished, Zoey’s mouth dropped open. Beside her, Val jerked as if struck.

  Then Zoey glanced past Mrs. Althouse to Grayson. He sat on the couch with his leg propped up on the tufted leather ottoman. Her father stood behind him, his hand on Grayson’s shoulder, and gave her one slow nod, his dark eyes bright with love.

  And Zoey knew that the gra
titude she felt toward them in that moment could not ever be properly described.

  “It’s okay,” Mrs. Althouse said once more, her mouth trembling, and opened her arms to them. It was a gesture of welcome and an offer of solace—but also, Zoey thought, a plea for help.

  Zoey hesitated approximately .47 seconds before running awkwardly into Mrs. Althouse’s arms. She shared some qualities of Marion’s—her soothing solidness, the scent of vanilla lotion, fine black hair lumpy with tangles.

  Zoey felt Val hesitate beside them, and Zoey wondered just how much her father and Grayson had revealed.

  She also wondered, a reluctant ache in her chest, how many genuine hugs a girl like Valerie Mortimer had received in her strange, solitary life of servitude and lies.

  She set her jaw and glanced back at Val. “Come on,” she whispered. “Come here.”

  Val shook her head. “I don’t— I can’t—” She stepped back, sank unsteadily onto a nearby chair. The look on her face reminded Zoey of a lost child. “Not yet.”

  Zoey turned back into Mrs. Althouse’s arms, hiding her face in that Marion-esque hair. If Val wasn’t ready, that was fine. That was, maybe, as it should be.

  In the meantime, Zoey would relish any and all hugs she could get for herself.

  “It’s all right,” breathed Mrs. Althouse, with such tenderness that, suddenly, Zoey could hardly stand to exist inside her own skin. “It’s all right now. I think we’ll be all right.”

  Zoey squeezed her eyes shut and wished fiercely that this would turn out to be true.

  No one particularly wanted to go home, so they didn’t.

  Mr. Tighe made up the guest room for Mrs. Althouse, and then, on the couch in Mrs. Tighe’s study, set up a pallet of what looked like every blanket in the house for Val. But after five minutes of being in there alone, Val came to find Zoey, dragging her quilt behind her.

  Zoey was in Grayson’s bed, waiting for him to come upstairs. He had insisted on cleaning up the kitchen before turning in, otherwise the crusty layers of casserole on their late-night dinner plates would fester and haunt him, snickering in the kitchen while he lay awake staring at the ceiling.

  The adorable little freak.

  “Come here,” Zoey told Val, patting the mattress and scooting over to make room. “Don’t worry about cooties. Grayson washes his sheets like twice a week.”

  Val slipped under the covers and lay there, unmoving, like the human-size lightning rod that she was. “Seems wasteful.”

  “But also extremely sanitary.” Zoey propped her head up on her elbow to watch Val. “You can unclench and lie in the bed like a normal person, you know.”

  Val’s mouth worked, like she was either trying to decide what to say or attempting to hold back tears. “Do you think he’ll come back? Do you think he’ll get us?”

  The questions didn’t surprise Zoey. She’d been wondering the same things, too frightened to say them aloud.

  She inspected Val’s stoic face—the perfect straight line of her nose, the sharp curve of her jaw. Mrs. Althouse had convinced her to bathe, to wash her hair and scrub the black stains off her skin, and then she’d helped Val bandage the handprint scars on her belly and gathered her damp golden hair into a loose braid.

  The expression on Val’s face as Mrs. Althouse so gently cared for her, like an abused pet that could hardly believe its luck, had lodged in Zoey’s ribs like a thorn.

  Finally, Mrs. Althouse had instructed Chief Harlow to take Val’s ruined nightgown and, on his way to the police station to check on the apprehended Hand of Light survivors, please burn the damn thing so Val never had to look at it again.

  Zoey had also bathed, also at Mrs. Althouse’s insistence, and at Grayson’s tender behest.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he’d told her, gathering a stack of clean towels from the linen closet, “you look completely badass. Total warrior queen. But even warriors take care of themselves when they have the time.” Then he’d handed her the towels and kissed her nose.

  So Zoey had obeyed, scrubbing herself raw under scalding hot water. She’d picked obsessively at the grime beneath her nails until the water had run cold, and then she’d sat on the side of the tub and sobbed, only coming out when Mrs. Althouse knocked on the door and announced quietly that Grayson had just pulled a casserole out of the oven.

  As she’d dressed in a set of Grayson’s old pinstriped pajamas, it had occurred to Zoey that Mrs. Althouse was hovering over them, making sure they ate and bathed, because she had no one left to mother. After that she’d had to sit on the toilet and hug herself for a good five minutes before finding the strength to head downstairs.

  “Maybe he’ll come back,” she told Val, not sure what to think or for how long bad dreams would vex her sleep. “Maybe he won’t. Maybe it’ll be years, or decades. But I don’t think so. At least not here, not near us.”

  Val still stared at the ceiling. “Why don’t you think so?”

  Zoey felt suddenly so tired that the only option left to her was the familiar slip into humor. “Because I think we probably scared the ever-living shit out of him.”

  She was rewarded with a soft laugh from Val, and a slight relaxing of her own shoulders.

  Then Val said, after a moment, “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  Taking a shaky breath, Val turned to face her. “I need to be close to someone. I need to be held.” She paused, blinking rapidly. “But I don’t think I deserve it. I’m not sure that I—” She closed her eyes, her hands clutching the hem of her quilt. “I feel like I’m going to float away if I don’t touch someone. But I can’t stand the thought of asking you.”

  Zoey watched Val struggle in silence, waiting for her pocket-Thora to protest: You feel sorry for my killer? Really, Zo?!

  But instead, her pocket-Thora whispered, sad and ghostly: She’s suffered enough, and she will continue to.

  So Zoey nestled close to Val, slipping her arms around her. “We fought a monster together,” she said quietly. “I haven’t forgiven you yet, and I don’t know that I will. But I can hold you for a while. You deserve that much. And so do I, frankly.” She inhaled, exhaled. “I deserve to move on.”

  At first Val lay stiff and startled, hardly breathing.

  Then, with a soft, wounded sound, she melted into Zoey’s embrace. She touched their foreheads together—a salute. A promise.

  A thank-you.

  Zoey awoke again, later, when Grayson tiptoed inside the room.

  She opened her eyes and saw him holding a finger to his lips. “Pillow,” he mouthed, gingerly selecting one from the bed.

  Zoey slid out from Val’s arms and followed him downstairs. They didn’t speak until they’d curled up on the sofa, beneath the afghan that had christened their first and only lovemaking.

  “I don’t want to leave her alone for too long,” Zoey announced, once she’d had just about enough of the grandfather clock’s incessant ticking. Her fingers itched for her bat, which lay beside Grayson’s bed upstairs.

  Just in case.

  “You could have stayed up there,” Grayson said reasonably.

  “Yes, but I needed a cuddle.”

  “Val was cuddling you.”

  “A boy cuddle.”

  Grayson nodded. “I am an excellent cuddler.”

  Tucking her legs beneath her, Zoey snuggled against his lanky frame. “Did you bake more cookies?”

  “Not yet.” He shifted to look at her, his expression eager. “Do you want me to?”

  “Oh my God. No. I mean, yes, but later.”

  He subsided, reluctantly, and then blew out a slow breath.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Grayson’s breathing came slow and even.

  Then Zoey thumped her fist lightly against her thigh, making him jump.

  “I want to figure out better ways to hunt monsters,” she declared. “There has to be a way that doesn’t kill off more girls like Marion.”

  “You’d be an excellent te
acher.”

  Zoey glanced at him. “If I opened a school would you be the housekeeper to my headmaster?”

  “What kind of school, exactly?”

  “One that teaches extraordinary girls how to use power like we did, and root out evil, and destroy the shit out of it.”

  “That sounds incredible,” Grayson said.

  “Wonderful. You’re hired.”

  “But wait. As housekeeper, could I wear an apron of my choosing?”

  “No,” said Zoey, grinning. “One of mine. On occasion I might let Val choose.”

  He let out a beleaguered sigh. “So will you open this school here, or far away?”

  “Kingshead, maybe.”

  “Ah.”

  “Val’s going to stay there, look after the farm. It’s way too big a house for one girl to live in. Or even, like, fifty girls.”

  Grayson appeared to be deep in thought. “Would your students be required to wear uniforms?”

  Zoey answered at once: “Yes. Wizard robes.”

  She thought that would elicit a laugh, but instead Grayson smiled wistfully at her. “We would be working pretty closely together, as housekeeper and headmaster. I’m not sure I could . . .” He looked away, his eyes suddenly bright, and laughed ruefully. “I’m sorry, Zo. I swore I wouldn’t . . . Jesus.”

  Zoey’s heartbeat thundered in her ears. She eyed the Tighe family’s movie collection and spotted a familiar cover. “I’m sorry to tell you,” she began, reaching desperately for a subject change, “that I don’t think I’ll be able to watch Alien again for a really, really long time.”

  “Zoey—”

  “Much to my dismay, my love for Ellen Ripley has its limits. No more xenomorphs for me. I declare a xenomorph moratorium. A xenotorium.”

  “Zo.” Grayson gathered her hands in his own, kissed them tenderly. “I don’t know if my heart could take being near you like that and not being with you.”

  Zoey looked at him—his clean, square jaw, the fall of dark hair over his forehead. She tried to think of something to say, but all her words seemed inadequate.