by Shannon Hale
“Is the residence occupied?” Luther called out. He froze mid-step, seeing us standing in the dark. “Um, inconvenient time?”
My mom took his face in her hands and kissed both his cheeks. “Mi hijo,” she said. My son. She often called him that, but this time she said it with such affection, my eyes watered. Dad and Mom left the room, and I knew they were going to pack.
Luther looked at the hole in the floor. “Whoa, what happened there?”
“Groundhogs.”
He squinted at me. “What’s going on?”
I’d never talked to him about GT, Ruth’s death, or told him much of anything about Wilder, Mi-sun, and Jacques. If questioned, he could be genuinely ignorant.
“Dad’s taking a sabbatical,” I said. “We’re going to be traveling, doing research. For the semester. And maybe the entire year.”
“Where?”
“All over,” I said, my expression hard. “And I’m coming too?”
“Luther …”
He looked at me with a pleading expression. I shook my head.
He sighed and sat on the couch. “Happy birthday,” he said, pulling a T-shirt out of his backpack and tossing it at me.
He’d printed his own design: BLUEBERRY BONANZA: Now with superpowers in every box!
“Thanks,” I said.
“Should I go?”
I wanted Luther away from here and safe with his oblivious parents in their tidy house. The Earth was spinning at a crazy angle and way too fast, and I needed to pack or think or run, do something to force it back in control again. But I also knew that this might be the last I’d see Luther for a long time. Or ever.
“Can we try this again?” I held my arms out.
“What have I done to deserve such a fate,” he said, though he came closer. He was taller than me, and as his arms went around my back, his chin touched my temple. He didn’t hold me close at first, but I squeezed him tighter. And I thought the words, I love you, Luther. His arms relaxed after a couple of seconds as if signaling an end, but I didn’t let go. So he sighed and hugged me for real. One of his hands opened on my back, pressing me closer, his head leaning against mine. I turned my head so my face fit into his neck and squeezed my eyes tight to keep from crying.
I love you, Luther, I thought again, more fiercely this time.
When he let go, his arms fell as if they were really heavy. He turned and then stopped at the door.
“I could—”
“No,” I said. “Don’t do anything.”
“But—”
“No.”
“Who?” he asked.
I shook my head.
His shoulders slumped, and he walked out the door. Into the night. Into our neighborhood that suddenly felt as safe as a coal mine on fire.
“Wait!” I wanted to walk him home, but I wouldn’t leave my parents. Laelaps trotted along at my ankle. “Wait … I want you to have Laelaps.”
Luther’s eyes got wide, and he looked six years old. “You lie.”
“He barks whenever strangers come to our house, but he didn’t bark at you. And he’s way cooler than your freaky shivering rabbit.”
“My parents will have a conniption,” Luther said, but he was already kneeling on the lawn, scratching the dog’s neck.
I watched from the front porch until I couldn’t see Luther and Laelaps anymore. My heart pinched in on itself. At least Luther would have some kind of guard.
My parents were in their room. They’d packed a bag for me too.
“It’s late,” said Mom. “Let’s get some sleep.”
If the house wasn’t bugged, it’d be better to leave in the morning when it wouldn’t look suspicious and get far away before anyone realized we were gone for good. Besides, we might need the rest.
Mom invited me to sleep in their bed, between them like I used to when I was little. No way I would risk waking up flailing from a bad dream. I sat on the floor, listening to their breathing and folding a gum wrapper into squares.
A couple of hours into my watch my eyelids felt weighted. I was about to give up and sleep when I noticed that the tips of my fingers were tingling. Little black dots danced in my periphery. My parents’ breathing had slowed.
Maisie Brown, I asked myself, if Ruthless were asleep in a house, what would be the safest way to catch her?
Why, flooding the house with odorless gas. The kind that knocks you out. Permanently.
Chapter 23
I flung Mom and Dad over my shoulders, and they didn’t stir. I grabbed the bags as I passed, hoping one of them had the car keys, and ran for the garage, kicking a door off its hinges on my way. I could feel their hearts beating against my shoulder blades and their diaphragms slowly contracting as they inhaled. Alive still. I needed to get them into clean air.
I placed them in the backseat, got in the driver’s seat, locked the doors, and clicked the button to open the garage door. It groaned and creaked. Slow. Painfully loud and slow. But at least it gave me time to ruffle through my mom’s purse and find her keys. Success. I hadn’t taken my driver’s license test yet, but I was pretty sure my parents would approve this infraction.
I’d just started the motor when a car zoomed into our driveway, blocking us in, the headlights blinding. This was definitely not the friendly neighborhood watch.
I jumped out, grabbed the car’s chassis under the front bumper, and flipped it upside down into the street. I hoped the occupants were wearing seat belts. Kind of.
“You trying to kill my parents?” I shouted at the night. “Kill me first!”
I backed out Mom’s Camry and screeched down the street. At the last moment, I remembered to hit the remote button, shutting the garage door. As if we were just going to run an errand and would be back soon. As if that house was still our home.
“¿Qué pasa?” Mom asked, what’s happening?
“Someone gassed us in our sleep,” I said, the car stuttering as I braked around corners. I was not a great driver.
Dad was groaning, and I guessed they’d woken to headaches. At least they’d woken.
There were car headlights behind us. I sped up. The car sped up. I made a fast left. So did they. I wasn’t sure if I was scared or mad, but my chest felt like red-hot metal and my mouth wanted to scream.
“Who wants to drive?” I asked.
“I can,” Dad said.
I screeched to a stop, jumped out, and ran toward the oncoming car. The tires squealed as the driver braked and turned at the same time, its side slamming into my side. I rolled, Fido tucked to my chest, got back to my feet, and ran forward again.
A couple of bullets stung my shoulder. Not cool. My parents were close by.
I punched the hood of the car. Not quite enough. I jumped up and came down on it with my elbow, like those brightly Spandexed wrestlers. Now the engine was a bowl of spaghetti.
“Holy crap!” I yelled, because suddenly there was a really big gun pointing out the window—the kind that shoots rockets. I yanked it out of the guy’s hands and bent it into a circle, tossing it back into the car with them.
“Who are you?” I asked, sticking my head through the window. They stared back, wide eyes in unfamiliar faces. Not the Howell or GT guys I’d seen. “Who?”
I pulled the closest one out of the window and held him over my head. I felt a rush of energy, as if every cell in my body was awake, and I could do anything.
Ruthless believed she could do anything, I thought.
Another car sped around the corner, the yellow headlights burning straight for our Camry. I dropped the guy on the roof of his car and ran.
“Drive!” I told Dad. He hit the gas and took off. I veered straight for the new car. It sped up as it approached me. I stomped, planting my feet in dents I’d made in the asphalt, and I leaned my shoulder into the oncoming car. The tires screeched, the metal groaned, and half the car went accordion before I fell into a backward somersault. I didn’t pause to interrogate this time. I ran after the Camry, reaching it
in a dozen huge strides. Dad slowed as I opened the front passenger door and hopped in, and then we sped off.
Dad took back streets, eventually merging onto the interstate a hundred miles to the south. The highway was only two lanes here, the landscape brush and low hills.
Mom had been keeping boxes of protein bars in the back of her car since I’d Hulked out. I lay in the backseat, eating and watching for cars and helicopters. I was sleepy, but I couldn’t sleep.
In Phoenix, Mom found a chop shop and sold the Camry for parts. We walked to the bus station.
It was early afternoon, the streets were crowded, the buildings too shiny, nearly melting in the sun. Everything felt sharp and fast, like a dream of falling.
In the back of the bus, I made phone calls on Fido. It was the only safe phone to use, but only I could use it. I called both my parents’ work managers and told them we had to leave town for an unexpected emergency. I asked the post office to hold our mail, canceled our utilities, and called the bank to arrange ongoing automatic transfers from my parents’ savings for the mortgage.
“How much money do you have saved?” I asked.
“Enough to pay the mortgage for four months,” said Dad.
“And if we’re gone longer than that?”
Mom closed her eyes. The bank would take our house. And everything in it. My mom loved that house. My dad loved his job. I pressed my knees to my chest, imagining that I could get smaller and smaller until I disappeared.
And we just kept going. Sleeping on buses, eating in truck stops, washing our faces and underarms in gas station bathrooms. We didn’t stop till we’d reached the Atlantic Ocean. Florida. Mom and Dad had withdrawn the maximum cash from ATMs in Arizona, and we used all that for a deposit and first month’s rent on a one-bedroom furnished apartment.
Traffic screeched outside our window. There was no air-conditioning. We ate street tacos by the open window, listening to Cuban and Puerto Rican–accented Spanish, the hard slap of basketballs from the weedy court.
The whole world was orange-hot and loud as a train. I looked at the scalding sky and wished for something. That my parents wouldn’t die. That we could go back to our small house and small life. I was invulnerable. And I was scared.
Chapter 24
Wake up. Breakfast. Shower and dress. It was still gray every morning when Dad and I took a bus to the golf course. We’d discovered a wild area behind the manicured links, perhaps reserved for a future expansion. No one was ever around. I scouted out lightning-struck palm trees—headless and dead-standing—and pulled them up by their roots. I cracked the trunks into sections and left them in piles.
And sometimes I just ran.
In moments my skin was as hot and sticky as the air. Dirt I kicked up stuck to my skin, the shower undone. It was the only hour of the day I actually felt alive.
When we got back, Mom was already gone to work at the convenience store. We’d learned that people would hire a Latina woman without an ID but not a white guy.
Dad did the shopping and cooking. I did the cleaning. In the afternoon, he went to the library. I had to avoid public spaces. With or without Fido, I was too recognizable.
One month. Two months. Three.
When the fourth-month anniversary struck us, I curled up on my sofa and cried quieter than the sounds of night traffic. Back home, the savings account was empty. Foreclosure imminent. Very soon, our house would no longer be our house.
It was Christmastime when we started getting careless. I couldn’t sit in that apartment one more day, reading library books to the tune of electric piano music that marched through the walls. Dad didn’t argue when I followed him to the local library. I started in the poetry stacks. Hungry for the kind of winter Robert Frost knew, I added him to my internal anthology:
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less
I glanced at the computer bank and back at Dad. He was lost in the history stacks. It felt like a crime, but I eased into a computer chair and got online.
The news sites read like incredible fiction. Parliament in India was shut down, rioting in Beijing, an entire town of people disappeared in Australia, some new scary flu in South America. Maybe the world was always this crazy. Maybe it felt more dangerous because I felt dangerous, cut off and raw, untethered.
I didn’t dare e-mail Luther. I wouldn’t paint a target on his back by letting any big bads know I cared about him. But like my brute body constantly craved food, my whole self craved Luther. Somebody. A friend.
I checked the Japanese teeth-whitening site for the most recent post from user LEX. It was a month after I’d fled Utah, and all it said was: “I’ll save the Poo Project for you.” Nothing since.
But there was a recent post in English from a user named Talos—the same name as Europa’s guard, a gift from Jupiter. My adrenaline spiked like needles in my heart and wrists. I read the post.
Poe would come in handy right now because I can’t use my own words.
My whole body shivered as if Wilder were there beside me, breathing against my ear. How had he found out about that site?
If I responded, Wilder would know that I was alive and on a computer. What if he was loyal to GT or Howell or whoever gassed our house?
Blame the faulty adolescent brain. I logged in as new user “DG” and replied.
Poe said, “I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.” I wish I could do a lot of things.
By the next week, Dad had agreed to weekly library visits if I wore a long-sleeved shirt and one of those surgeon-type masks many had started wearing to guard against the mystery flu. I sat at the computer, forcing myself to check the news sites first. The flu from South America had a name: the Jumper Virus, so called because of how it seemed to jump around the world. Entire towns on four continents were known to have contracted it and were placed in complete quarantine.
The news was all depressing. I went to the Japanese site. There was a post from Talos. My skin felt cold as if I’d just dived into the unexpected waters of the ocean.
It’s snowing outside, and the day is dark. I want to slow down and contemplate those lovely and dark and deep woods, like the Robert Frost poem. But I have this token. And I can’t rest. Not for winter, not for anything.
But I take a breath. And I feel how much I miss you.
How do I respond to those last words? Apparently with a heart that slammed against my ribs and a face that burned. So what’s it going to be, Maisie—flight or fight? I read his message over and over, letting each word take as much power as a shout, as a touch.
I decided to ignore his last line and respond to the weather chitchat. A library window was open, the breeze warm as bathwater, the sky dazzling. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what those Utah Decembers were like.
I love nestling into the dark days of snow. I love how the afternoon feels days long, the prolonged feeling of Cozy, that wistful slowness, how the energy of doing is buried under the heavy, soft layers of watching.
The exchanges with Wilder were hot bright spots in a long wash of gray. Mom, Dad, and I ate oranges and oatmeal, sat by open windows and read books, all the time watching for black cars and tensing for the sound of helicopter blades. Crying at night, smiling by day. It was a time of clenched jaws and fists and feeling muggy and tired and adrift. Little to distinguish one day from another, besides a weekly message from Wilder. His words gave me something to hope for, an outcome other than fear and absence.
I am thinking about you, though I know it makes things harder. I am thinking about you, your hair in a ponytail. You’re wearing blue. And you don’t smile at me.
His messages often left me wordless, but I had to keep the conversation going or I was afraid I’d disappear.
Today I’m imagining you wearing an orange sweater vest, because it’s so wrong and it makes me laugh.
His responses would come within the hour, though I wouldn’t see them until the following week.
<
br /> I happen to have a closet full of sweater vests. I wear them at every opportunity—to dress up or dress down, over collared shirts or nothing at all (I dare you to imagine that). I wear them while swimming, while bathing, while sleeping. I rock sweater vests like a rock star.
Each week I expected to see Luther’s LEX join the conversation, but he must have given up on looking there. Maybe he’d given up altogether. Wilder seemed to be the only being out in the world who remembered me. And all I could do was wait for something to change.
Waiting felt like holding my breath longer than twenty minutes. Waiting felt like being buried alive. Each day that I sat and did nothing, my body throbbed harder. My dad staring at a wall, his mouth turned down. My mom lying on the bed after a night shift, her body a sigh.
At night when I tried to sleep, I would fidget and thrash against the real, physical pain of inactivity. Morning runs and felled tree trunks weren’t distracting my brute body anymore. I was made to do something. I could almost feel the nanites nipping at me, as if I’d swallowed a nest of fire ants.
“We can’t live like this forever,” I whispered into my pillow, and I knew at last that it was true.
Chapter 25
The next trip to the library gave me the excuse I’d been craving.
I was reading news online. Schools in Florida and other states with quarantined towns were shut down until scientists could figure out how the Jumper Virus was spreading and contain it. Universities and churches too, and even Congress. Craziness.
An unrelated article from three months before caught my attention: BILLIONAIRE SHOT WITHOUT A GUN.
Businessman Alexander Islinger was killed on Wednesday while he delivered the keynote address at a Chicago charity banquet. He was shot twice in the chest and died instantly. No bullets were found.
“We had metal detectors, X-ray machines, so I don’t know how anyone got a gun in,” reported the head of security.
The building was locked down. Police searched every guest and employee and then combed the premises. Witnesses say whatever weapon was used was completely silent.