“You said no one would believe me,” I interrupted his pleading. “But Connor does. Connor knows. Everything.”
Mr. Barrett’s eyes went wider than I’d ever seen them. His face tightened, then crumpled. I could see the struggle in his face over how to respond—to trivialize, to threaten, to humiliate, to beg. I saw him realize it would do no good. Connor believed.
His walls fell down. His armor melted away. All the metaphors failed him. Confidence, arrogance, toxic masculinity—none of it could shield him from the pain of having his son understand exactly what a monster he was.
Connor didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. His eyes did all the talking, and what smoldered there was raw hate. Contempt. Revulsion. Mr. Barrett took a step back, as if physically feeling the force of his son’s disgust.
Connor saw him for what he really was—and for the first time, so did Mr. Barrett. The mirror his son held up to him, the pure power of his loathing, showed Mr. Barrett the monster he’d spent so long pretending he wasn’t. I could see it hit home. Saw his eyes fill up with tears.
“Who else?” Connor asked.
Mr. Barrett didn’t budge, or speak. So much passed between their eyes in that instant. How the balance of power between father and son had been forever shifted. How Mr. Barrett’s monstrous actions had cost him the most important thing in his life.
“Who else did you hurt like that?” Connor was shouting now.
“Sheffield?” I asked. “What you did to Solomon, did you do it to him too?”
Mr. Barrett stammered, “Connor, I—I—” But he was all out of words.
“You’re a fucking monster,” Connor said. He shouldered his duffel bag, and headed for the steps.
“Ash,” Mr. Barrett said, his mouth slack, his face shattered.
It was what I’d prayed for. The unbreakable monster, broken. But whatever pride or victory or happiness I had hoped to feel was dwarfed by Connor’s pain.
I followed him down the stairs, and out into the cool dark.
“Are you okay?” I asked, once we were a block away.
“Ash, I will never be okay.” Connor waved to where Solomon sat on the hood of my car. “Let’s go talk to Sheffield. See if we can stop some arson.”
Sixty-Six
Solomon
Standing before the movie screen, the Shield continued to work the crowd. “Why do you think Queen Carmen refuses to help us?”
Shouts; inarticulate rage.
“Why does she sit back and hide, while othersiders abuse and exploit us? While they destroy our society, and harm our loved ones? Why does she refuse to stop them?”
People shouted back answers. Most of them were ugly.
“That is the truth I have come to reveal,” he said.
Cheers. Pleas.
“I know you’re here, Ash,” the Shield said.
Ash and I exchanged glances, mask to mask. Frightened eye to frightened eye.
“You can’t,” I told her.
“I have to,” she said.
I turned back to the stage. Watched the crowd. They were so worked up, so angry—they’d have torn us to shreds at the slightest word from the Shield.
“Come out, Princess. For too long, you have hidden your face from your people.”
At a wave from the Shield, his people brought out two figures in chains.
“Niv,” I whispered, recognizing him first, and then, “Connor.”
He was so little. And so scared. His clothes were filthy.
“Come out, Ash, or I will break these two in front of everyone.”
“You’ll come with me,” Ash said, grabbing my hand again. “Okay? We’ll try your idea—I’ll trigger something in you, something that will incapacitate them, and we’ll get Niv and Connor and get the hell out of here.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling extremely not okay. There would be no getting the hell out of there. Not alive. Not with so many angry people all around us.
I felt her hands grow sweaty. So did mine. We started walking toward the front of the big hall.
The crowd slowed us down, and by the time we got halfway there it had become impenetrable.
Ash took off her mask, carried it under her arm.
Someone gasped. No one else seemed to notice.
“Make way for your princess,” I said loudly.
The gasps spread. People turned, stared, cried out. Some shook fists. Some dropped to their knees.
I heard the rumor ripple through the crowd, watched a path open up for us. I heard the click of camera shutters, and wondered where mine was. When had I lost it, in the whole wild ride of the past couple of days?
A big guy stepped into our path. Tears in his eyes.
“No. I can’t let you do it, Princess,” he said.
“Step aside, brother,” she said, and touched his arm. And then she winked, and smiled. And he nodded. Stepped aside.
I watched it happen, how effortlessly she won over the crowd. Her fearlessness impressed even these people who a moment before had been perfectly okay with tearing down her mother’s government.
Courage does that. It transforms people. With a shiver, I realized: It takes a very special kind of crazy to change the world.
The Shield saw the change happen too. I could see him growing more furious, the closer we got to the front of the park.
“Seize her,” he said.
Connor saw me. He called out my name. Niv looked barely conscious.
A pair of Destroyers took hold of Ash, and I tried to fight, but three of them were on me and they wrestled me to the ground. My face was pressed into the filthy scuffed carpet, and I could barely see the scene as it unfolded. As they forced Ash to her knees. Turned her around so her back was to the Shield, her face out to the crowd.
“No!” I cried.
She was going to be broken. Maybe murdered. They all were.
I had to do something. I shut my eyes, reached out for the Shield. Took hold of my anger, my fear. Tried to magnify it. I fumbled with the rush of my emotions, sprayed hatred in his general direction, felt a few drops of it land, a stream, a trickle, strengthening, connecting . . . I saw his twisted smile widen—
But no. Hate was what had gotten us into this problem. Hate had only made him stronger, meaner, more dangerous.
“Now I will reveal the truth,” the Shield said, and took a gun from his nearest soldier’s hand. I looked around the inside of my mind for a weapon, and found it.
Of course.
I had to dig deep. Burrow down into myself, as far as I could.
Fear was obvious.
Rage was easy.
But love . . . love was hard.
What did I love? I loved Ash. I loved Radha, and Connor. I loved Maraud. I loved Cass, and the Clarion. I loved my city, and the way the sunset lit the riversea up, and the taste of roasted chestnuts from the street vendors in Raptor Heights. I loved Niv, in a very weird and conflicted kind of way.
Fear and anger felt so strong, I’d come to rely on them. So I’d never noticed before how full of love I was. How it filled up my spine with a shivering so strong it made my whole body shake.
It was him, I knew it. The Solomon on the other side. The one who had been hurt so badly but was still so full of love. I felt it leaking into me. I let it fill me up.
“The Refugee Princess is a monster,” the Shield shouted, and took the safety off his gun. Pressed it to the back of her head. Screams resounded through the crowd. So did cheers. Ash’s face was fearless, defiant.
Love. I focused on that, and not the horror before me. Love filled me up, and overflowed. My spine was electric, alive, a conduit for lightning. It had always been there; I’d just been too blind to see it. Too focused on my anger, and my fear. My teeth chattered with the surging energy in my backbone. It poured through my bones, down my arms, out my fingertips. I felt the feeling leak into the soldiers who held me; felt their grips weaken. And I saw it reach the Shield. Saw his smile tighten, vanish. His mouth opened in a si
lent cry. Tears began to flow down his face. He shut his eyes, and accepted it. Embraced it. For just a split second.
He smiled. Had he felt love at all, in the years since the Night of Red Diamonds took his mother away from him? But he felt it now. And he let himself feel it.
Time slowed down, for me and him. That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Because I watched everything unfold with crystal, perfect clarity, even though so many things were happening at once that there’s no way a normal human mind could have observed them all.
Beyond the reach of my aura of projected love, the Shield’s soldiers had raised their guns. They saw how he and I were locked in a trance together; they thought—correctly—that I was enchanting him; they were ready to kill me to save their leader. Ash’s eyes were on me, wide with terror. Convinced she was about to watch me die.
All hell had broken loose in the crowd, and people had run screaming from the spray of gunfire they believed to be imminent.
But the men with guns had stopped. Frozen. Their fingers hovered in midair, millimeters from the triggers.
The ground trembled. Trembled again. In that moment a roar split the air. Like an elephant’s trumpet and a tiger’s snarl, tapering off into a wolf’s howl. A shriek not of anger but of power, of confidence. An animal who was not afraid of anything on Earth.
People screamed. Pointed. The Shield stood motionless, his head turned in the direction of the roar. All his anger and rage and violence held back for a few slim seconds by the love that bound me to him.
The Earth shook. Like distant thunderclaps, one after another—boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! It shook the teeth in my gums. There was a sound of ripping.
Time sped back up.
A white blur tore through the old movie screen with one clawed foot. Something massive. Something with eyes like storms and teeth like nightmares. Something most citizens of Darkside spent their whole lives praying to get a glimpse of. It stomped through the rip and roared again.
Queen Carmen’s white Tyrannosaurus rex.
I thought, It worked, Ash. You did it. You reached her.
Soldiers and peasants and prosperous merchants all fell to their knees and pressed their foreheads to the ground. Like thousands of dominoes falling in quick succession. The tyrannosaur stood fifty feet from me, and I realized—she wasn’t albino at all. She did have pigment: a marbling of purple along her spine, fractal spirals tapering down her sides. Queen Carmen looked unstoppable in the saddle.
Inches from where my hands were pressed against the ground, a foot as wide as a tree trunk smashed into the floor. The tyrannosaur came to a stop, tail whipping around for balance. All the men and women with guns ran away screaming.
Only the Shield and Ash and Connor and Niv and I remained, frozen in place, and only for an instant more. Fear and awe overwhelmed me, at the presence of this magnificent monster. Fear and awe crowded out every other emotion, including love. Released from my crippling bond, the Shield turned to flee.
Of course he did not get far. Effortlessly, without even moving her body, the tyrannosaur lowered her muscular neck and opened wide her terrible mouth and picked him up with her terrible teeth. She tossed him up into the air, a cat playing with a mouse, and caught him in her jaws. And bit down once, hard, snuffing him out.
With a lightning-fast whipcrack motion, she jerked her head around and flung the body into the bonfire. And roared. A long and earsplitting sound every citizen who was there that day will hear in dreams for the rest of their lives. Will tell their grandchildren about. The sound of power, of ferocity. Of a mother protecting her baby. Of order and balance restored.
Sixty-Seven
Ash
We were late.
I broke laws, getting there. Driving through yellow lights that were really already red. Speeding. Praying Sheffield would still be waiting. That he hadn’t gone to strike a match and set the school, the woods—and likely half the town—ablaze.
“Calm down,” Connor said, uncomfortable with my very minor transgressions.
“You texted him?”
“He hasn’t responded.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Solomon said. “Whether he’s there or not. He’ll have someone else start the fire for him.”
Neither Connor nor I had anything to say to that, because it was probably true.
He was still there, when we got to the empty movie theater parking lot. Sitting in his car with the door open, listening to music.
“What can I do for you three fine upstanding citizens?” he asked, when we got out and walked up to him, and I could tell by the hostility in his face that he knew. What we were up to. The conversations we’d had with his teammates. The photos we’d showed them.
“Call it off,” Connor said. “The fire.”
“Whatever do you mean?” he said.
Solomon muttered something under his breath, and wandered away.
“You know what we mean,” I said.
Sheffield’s smug smile started the shivering up in my spine. It triggered rage, but something else.
Vision.
I could see things. The pain under Sheffield’s bravado. Big and jagged, like a spider made of black broken glass.
It was her, I knew. The Ash on the other side. Her magic. Leaking into me.
I could see the future. Sheffield’s future. He’d go to an Ivy League school; enter the corporate world and keep on manipulating people into doing terrible things for him. He’d become one of the wicked men who run the world.
Like Mr. Barrett.
But I could see another future. A different one. Where he broke the cycle, confronted it, and grew from it, and moved on. Where he made the world better, instead of worse. Where he acted out of love instead of hurt and manipulation.
“I know what he did to you,” I said.
“What who—”
“Mr. Barrett,” I said.
Sheffield’s eyes went wide. He looked from me to Connor and back again. Took a step back.
“No,” he whispered. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“We know, Sheffield.”
But I hadn’t known. Not really. I’d taken a shot in the dark, praying I was wrong. If Connor was as surprised as me, he hid it way better.
“How—?” he whispered. Even in the dim light we could see his face redden. Darken.
Connor and I stood there, not saying anything. There was nothing we could have said.
Tears came, fast and copious. He tried to say something, but what came out weren’t words.
“Please,” he said eventually. “He told me no one could know. Please don’t tell anyone.”
I said, “That’s not what this is about.”
Confusion filled his eyes, along with all that pain.
Mr. Barrett was what he was. A monster, past saving. Sheffield was still becoming.
“You’re better than him,” I said. “You can still choose. You can decide not to hurt people.”
“I—” But then Sheffield gasped. As if startled by the sight of something. Connor and I turned around, to look in the direction he was facing.
All Connor saw was an empty parking lot, with Solomon strolling through it. But what I saw was Solomon leading his big mauve allosaurus along, throwing sticks for her to go fetch.
I saw Maraud, and Sheffield saw her too. I know he did.
His hand flew to his mouth.
“Oh god!” he cried. Between sobs, he choked out, “What the fuck is that? What did you do to me?”
“Nothing,” Connor said, but that wasn’t true.
We’d snapped something. Broken through the barriers he hadn’t finished building.
As we grow up, we forge armor for ourselves. Defenses, against the reality of monsters and fantasy. In his shame, Sheffield’s had given way. He could see all the horror and wonder that the world truly held.
The allosaurus turned in his direction. Their eyes locked. Then she looked away, utterly uninterested in him or his fear.
&n
bsp; Connor walked toward him, and Sheffield staggered backward.
“Shhh,” Connor said, and opened his arms. He folded Sheffield into an awkward embrace.
They stood that way a long time. Stiff limbs settling, relaxing. Talking in low voices. I couldn’t hear what they said, and didn’t want to. I imagined a whole secret language guys use, when they’re alone together and in pain.
Finally Sheffield nodded, at something Connor said, and took out his phone. Sent a quick text. There was a big wet smear on his sleeve, where he’d been wiping his face.
And just like that, it was over.
“I gotta go,” he said, and we let him. He walked backward, all the way to his car. Never taking his eyes off the dinosaur. After he was gone we stood around, barely talking. Solomon sauntered over, allosaurus and all.
“Let me drive you to Poughkeepsie,” I said to Connor. “I’m way cooler than the train.”
He nodded. “I kind of want to go to the dance. Just to stick my head in. Is that crazy?”
I was about to conjure up an excuse, for Solomon’s sake—Mr. Barrett would probably be there—when my best friend shocked me by putting his hand on his little brother’s shoulder.
“Of course,” Solomon said to Connor.
A vast night sky stretched above the high school parking lot. Stars shivered, feeling so far away that they might as well have not been real. The scene outside was alive, electric. I took photos. No monsters, no darkness. I could control what I saw through my lens now.
Outside the lens was a different story. A unicorn sharpened her horn against a wall. A gaggle of six-inch-tall goblin boys catcalled a very fit eight-foot-tall golem boy, whose cheeks blushed red clay.
Inside, the sound of the crowd sucked me and Connor up. It made him smile, to be among the people he loved, and that made me smile. Mr. Barrett never showed.
I looked from football player to football player, compared their faces to the photographs I’d taken of them. And how they’d looked when I confronted them. The goofy or sullen or happy or sad human beings that they were.
At the end of the day, a photo says very little. Even the most brilliant images in photographic history could only say, This happened. This person existed. This incident occurred. This thing was once real.
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