When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

  But I couldn’t.

  We got in the car and drove to Levi’s house in silence. When we arrived, no one climbed the lattice; we filed through the door and went straight to his bedroom.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lindquist were still out of town, and the house had fallen into disarray, the lowest point it reached between their bimonthly housekeeper visits. Usually, we would’ve teased Levi about the paisley socks left on the floor, the mustard-yellow trousers discarded over the sofa arm, and the novelty soda bottles resting on the bathroom sink.

  Tonight we were silent.

  It only took a minute to get the video pulled up. The process of dragging the cursor back and forth in search of any significant movement took longer.

  “Slower!” Arthur commanded whenever he thought Levi might’ve zipped over something, whereas Nick impatiently growled, “Faster!” every few seconds.

  “Wait!” Sofía finally cried. “What was that? Go back.”

  Levi dragged the cursor back a centimeter.

  “Farther.”

  He pulled it back until a dark blur swam onto the screen.

  “It’s too dark,” Arthur said.

  “It looks like this was taken underwater during a lunar eclipse,” I agreed.

  Nick prodded the screen. “That’s obviously Levi. Look at those huge shoulders!”

  “That person’s wearing a shirt,” Sofía said. “When we found Levi, he was a square inch of neon fabric away from butt naked.”

  “He might’ve stripped afterward,” Nick said.

  “That’s what I went to bed in,” Levi said. “You were there, dude!”

  “You might’ve gotten sleep-dressed beforehand, then stripped afterward.”

  Levi screenshotted the figure across several frames, then opened some photo-editing software and began playing with the brightness and contrast.

  “Look.” He pointed to something on the figure’s shoulder. “Long hair. I think it’s a woman.”

  Nick and Arthur leaned in, scrutinizing the blur that might or might not have been long, glinting hair.

  “I don’t know . . .” Nick began.

  “What’s that?” I pointed at a little dark rectangle on the figure’s chest a couple of inches below the clavicle. There was a hint of the same shadowy shape on the other side.

  “Weird metal nipples?” Levi asked.

  “I think they’re hooks,” Sofía said. “She’s wearing a jumpsuit.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s overalls.”

  Nick made a face. “Who wears overalls? St. James? The farmer who owns all the land that got burnt?”

  Not in his interview he hadn’t, but I could think of someone who did.

  I watched the realization dawning across Arthur’s freckled brow just as it was hitting me.

  The person who’d witnessed the incident, the person who’d stolen the material and left the creepy I KNOW note, who was at the center of this, just like he was at the center of everything that happened five years ago.

  I squeezed the nautilus shell necklace in my pocket to keep the sudden dizziness from tipping me over.

  His name tasted like poison. “Wayne Hastings.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  IT WAS A DANGEROUS job. Everyone knew that. But the accident shouldn’t have happened. The crane that broke had been scheduled for maintenance the day before.

  That was what all the papers would say, all the talking heads in the weeks following the accident endlessly pulling at the same strings, trying to find more-concrete answers in the knotted center.

  The employee responsible for the maintenance had called off work that morning, for the rest of the week. The team had been short-staffed, so they’d put off the repairs.

  For one day. Sixteen hours. Like fate’s evil twin had been doing the scheduling that week.

  It shouldn’t have been enough time for anything to go wrong. It was like those expiration dates they put on milk: a lie for the sake of caution.

  Deadlines for maintenance came long before maintenance was necessary.

  But then someone—not the man originally scheduled to do the maintenance, but someone who’d had to take his place—had climbed onto the forklift to work on the crane.

  The crane’s hook block had fallen off midservice.

  Hook block.

  There was a phrase I hadn’t known five years ago but now would never forget. I’d googled it. I could picture a hook block easier than I could picture Mark’s conscious face.

  The investigation was a series of guesses; everything was too burnt, too melted to say for sure.

  But they guessed that the hook block had come loose. They guessed it had hit the pot full of hot metal sitting beneath the crane. They guessed the sudden force had tipped the pot, and when the liquid iron hit the damp sand surrounding, it had triggered the explosion.

  Journalists wondered whether it was possible someone could have loosened the hook block beforehand.

  Some even speculated about the employee who’d called off suddenly. How could you know you were going to be sick for a week? they wondered. They shared vague quotes from private sources implying the employee might have been disgruntled, that he rarely spoke or interacted with co-workers, that he was strange and jumpy.

  There were petitions, hashtags, online groups, all demanding answers, demanding further investigation.

  But there was no evidence, and the news anchors were careful to never say his name.

  It didn’t matter.

  Wayne Hastings was in the air, thicker than the ash that fell on Splendor for days after the explosion.

  The name was whispered and screamed, repeated a thousand times in the school hallways and the aisles of Kroger and the hospital waiting room.

  Wayne Hastings.

  * * *

  * * *

  Oh my God.

  Wayne Hastings dropped the bullets. He left the note. He took the debris. He knew about the disc.

  Was he going to turn us in, or was he one of us?

  “What if he has something?” I gasped. “What if the alien gave him something, like it did to all of us?”

  “Well, not all of us,” Arthur bit out. “I still have no sign of a gift, whatsoever!” A little dent divided his unibrow. “I’m the one who poked it,” he growled, “and you all get the powers!”

  “Want to trade places?” I snapped. “You can have them.”

  Arthur’s eyes darkened. “You think that’s possible?”

  “Franny,” Sofía said. “What are you saying?”

  “What if he’s building it?” I said. “The thing from Remy’s vision—the machine, or weapon or . . . whatever.”

  “Oh my God.” She pulled her phone out and started typing.

  Arthur shook his head. “We’re missing something. Something important. The E.T. isn’t here to hurt us. It chose us!”

  “What are you doing?” Levi asked Sofía.

  “What do you think? I’m calling the police!”

  “No!” Remy snatched her phone.

  “We have to tell someone!” she said. “For all we know, he’s building some kind of superbomb!”

  My stomach tightened. I felt the hum quickening in me, the pressure building, the energy jittering under my skin. “She’s right,” I said. “This is all getting too dangerous. People could get hurt.”

  “And if we announce what happened to you—to all of us,” Remy said, “we will get hurt. We’ll end up in test tubes.” He picked up his car keys off Levi’s desk and turned, appealing to the others. “We don’t have to tell anyone about the disc. All we need to do is take Wayne out of the picture.”

  “And how do we do that?” Arthur asked, apparently enlivened by the thought that his self-imposed destiny could remain intact.

  “We go to the station,” Remy said. “We show my da
d the video of Wayne at the cave, and we lie through our teeth about everything else.”

  Sofía grimaced. “We can’t lie to the police!”

  “Remy says the world’s ending, and that’s your concern?” Nick said.

  “It’s a start,” I said. There was no part of me that believed it would be enough. But it was a start. “We get Wayne taken out, and he can’t finish whatever he’s building. Or maybe the police will find it—disarm it.”

  “I’m in,” Levi said.

  Nick rolled his eyes. “Fine. But if this doesn’t work, we turn ourselves in.”

  “Seconded,” Sofía said.

  “Fine,” Arthur said bitterly, for once outvoted. “Maybe that is what it wants. To stop him. I guess it doesn’t matter how we do that.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The Splendor Sheriff’s Department was a squat brown building at the edge of town and looked more suited to be the gift shop at a shoddy state park than the headquarters of a police force.

  The sign was vaguely and inexplicably western, like a prop from a cowboy movie, but once we got inside, it was as quiet and sleepy as any small office. Wood laminate lined one wall, and the blinds were slatted open, the elongated ceiling fluorescents casting glares across the deep blue panes and washing out the already washed-out blue-gray industrial carpet.

  When we came in, dripping, the officer at the front desk took her feet off the desk one at a time and rolled forward in her chair. “Remy?” she said, squinting at him, like she couldn’t be sure in this very, very offensive lighting. “You look like you’ve been swimming in that storm out there!”

  At the sound of his son’s name, Sheriff Nakamura’s head popped out of the glass-walled office at the back of the station. He quickly tried to hide his own concern. “Is everything all right?”

  Remy nodded. “Can we talk to you for a second?”

  The Nakamura men studied each other for a moment. The corners of the sheriff’s mouth creased. He looked like he was bracing himself to discover we’d dumped several bodies in a nearby river.

  “Come on back,” he said finally, lifting his coffee mug.

  We filed past the three other officers. One was laughing on his desk phone, and another had a game of solitaire up. “Slow night?” Remy asked.

  “You could say that.” The sheriff closed the office door behind us. “There was another surge down at the substation, but they called to let us know they didn’t need assistance.”

  “Did you go anyway?” Remy guessed.

  The sheriff arched an eyebrow. “I drove past. Didn’t see anything suspect.” He leaned against his desk and folded his arms. “Now why don’t you all tell me why you’re here?”

  Arthur crossed his arms, a grumpy mirror of the sheriff.

  “Wayne Hastings took the debris,” Remy blurted. “We have video evidence.”

  The sheriff’s eyebrows lifted. He set his mug on the desk. “You have video of Wayne Hastings stealing debris?”

  Remy shifted. “Well, no. We found the debris in this cave . . . behind the Jenkins House. So we set up a camera, and we caught him taking the debris out of it.”

  The sheriff dropped his chin. “And you didn’t think to tell me when you found the debris?”

  Remy frowned. “No?”

  His father sighed. “But you see the debris on this video?”

  “Not exactly,” Levi answered, handing over the flash drive he’d put the copy onto. “It’s really bad quality, and it cuts him off right here.” He poked the center of his chest. “But you can see his creepy overalls and that he’s carrying something. Probably. And the stuff was gone after that!”

  “Well, the problem here is we’ve got no proof that the materials ever were there.”

  “I’ll testify,” Sofía said.

  “Look, you all,” he said. “Even if we had solid proof Wayne took that stuff out of some cave, that doesn’t mean he stole it.”

  “Search his house,” I said. “It’s there. It’s got to be.”

  “I can’t do that without grounds,” he said. “And even if Wayne Hastings did steal a bunch of twisted metal crap from them—which, as I said, I have a hard time believing—I doubt Crane Energy wants to press charges at this point. They’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  My heart started to race as the possibility of resolving this shrank before my eyes. “He’s dangerous,” I said. “You don’t know what he’s using the parts for—you don’t know what he’s capable of.”

  The sheriff’s expression softened. “I know you kids have every reason in the world to hate Wayne Hastings,” he said gently. “But I want you to leave him alone. He gets enough harassment. The man’s harmless.”

  “You don’t know that!” I screamed, smacking his desk and surprising myself as much as anyone else.

  The sheriff’s stunned expression held for a beat before it resolved into something stern. “Frances, I know—”

  “You’re not even going to listen to us?” Remy cut across him.

  “Remy, of course I’m listening. I’ll always listen, but—”

  “But you won’t actually do anything,” Remy said. “You’ll run into a burning building for Joe Ass Shmo from two streets over, but when I need something from you, I’m just on my own.”

  “Remy.” The sheriff reached for Remy’s arm, but he shook him off, and Sheriff Nakamura’s face twisted. “You’re not on your own. You’ll never be on your own.”

  Remy laughed. “Really? Because my mom’s dead, and you’re a police officer who’s not following up on a dangerous person.”

  Right then, he was the secret Remy who’d whispered his fears to me and then pretended they vanished on the breeze, and the way his father was staring at him made me think the sheriff had never seen this Remy at all.

  Didn’t he know what his son’s nightmares were about?

  Didn’t he know his son hated that he was a cop?

  “I’ll go to Wayne’s house tomorrow,” the sheriff said. He gave a tiny shake of his head. “I’ll ask him if knows anything about the wreckage or the power surges, but I can’t barge into his house without a warrant, and I can’t get one of those without evidence.”

  For a prolonged moment, Remy and his dad faced off. “Do you understand?” the sheriff finally asked, quiet, gentle.

  “Yeah,” Remy said, and jerked the office door open. “Got it loud and clear.”

  He was already out the door when his father’s face crumpled.

  After a few seconds, the rest of us awkwardly shuffled toward the door, and Levi cleared his throat. “Good to see you, Uncle Reo.”

  The sheriff’s dark eyes shifted over each of us. “You kids be careful, okay?”

  By the time we made it to the parking lot, Remy was in the Metro, idling at the curb.

  “What now?” Nick asked as we piled in. “We try the FBI? Do they have an alien hotline?”

  “We get better evidence,” Remy said. “We find whatever Wayne is building and get pictures.”

  “Exactly,” Arthur said, confident and optimistic once more. “The alien wants us to destroy what Wayne’s building, to prevent global catastrophe. That’s why Levi sleepwalked to his house. That’s what our purpose is—to save the world!”

  I wanted to scream at him to stop. I didn’t know how, after everything, he could believe in purpose, in great commissions that fell from the sky.

  If people had purposes, then why was Mark comatose in a hospital bed? Who decided to cut Nick’s dad down in the prime of his life, to give Nick’s mom a grief so big and terrifying she couldn’t get herself to leave the house ever since? To put her in a situation where she could no longer work, and her nineteen-year-old son was responsible for keeping a roof over their heads and fancy-ass stolen sneakers on their feet?

  Who or what took Remy’s mom from him, robbed
his dad of his health and comfort? Stole Sofía’s aunt and grandfather, and with them, Sofía’s perfect future?

  Maybe there were people who had purposes, but we weren’t them.

  Not people in Splendor. At least not the Ordinary.

  It wasn’t our purpose to save the world, but I wanted to anyway. Or at least to save the five people smashed into the car with me, who’d already lost too much.

  My destiny. Whether that meant burning Wayne Hastings’s house to the ground or turning myself in, somehow I’d save them.

  “He has a cellar,” I said. “He keeps it padlocked and covered with branches. If he’s hiding something, it’s there.”

  “Oh God,” Sofía said, rubbing her head. “We’re going to break into it, aren’t we?”

  “I am,” I said. “It’s up to you what you do.”

  “Good thinking, Fran,” Arthur said. “The cellar. I should’ve thought of it.”

  Sofía took a deep breath. “If we don’t find what we need, we have to call in the big guns.”

  “Like tomorrow,” Nick said.

  “Agreed,” Levi said.

  Remy’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. I nodded, despite the anxiety piercing through me. “Tomorrow.”

  This was our last chance.

  TWENTY-TWO

  WE DECIDED WE COULDN’T all go.

  Most nights Wayne Hastings drove off in his old Ford truck in the dead of night for an hour or so, and if he was gone when we got there, we’d have free rein to search, so long as we had a lookout who could warn us when he was returning.

  “And if we get there and he’s home,” Sofía added, “we’ll want to be ready to follow him if he takes off. Wherever he’s going, there could be more evidence.”

  “You can take my car,” Remy said. “I’m going to the cellar.” I was surprised Sofía seemed poised to argue that she also wanted to be a part of our crime spree, but Remy said quickly, “You’re the only person I trust to drive my car. Please.”