by Melissa Marr
The kiss’s end was like the snuffing of a candle—a little less light and heat in the world.
When I opened my eyes, Giovanni was beaming at me, his face whole and perfect once more, and slightly transparent now. “Thank you,” he said.
“Is that enough?” I still couldn’t believe that he wanted nothing more than one kiss.
Giovanni shook his head as he faded even further. “Nothing is enough. Nothing makes up for it. But . . . is something. Something beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful,” I said, and he must have known that I meant it, because the last of him I could see was his smile.
I caught up to the French tour group, and Cairo and I managed to get a taxi to the hotel more than an hour before the others were due back from the Castel Sant’ Angelo. We ordered a couple of coffees from the café downstairs and drank them in his hotel room, which had a view of the street below—crowded with little cars and motor scooters, both more tourists and just Roman people trying to get on with their day.
“We have to tell Mom and Dad about this, don’t we?” I said.
Cairo sipped his cappuccino. “I think they already know.”
“How could they know?”
“Ever since this started happening to me—I know we tried to hide it from Mom and Dad, but I always suspected they knew. Almost like they were waiting to see what would happen, you know? To see what I’d make of it.”
“How would they guess you were hearing people’s thoughts?”
He gave me a look. “They got married three weeks after they met, Ravenna. I always wondered about that, and now I believe we see the reason. You don’t think they recognized something special in each other? Something unique? Just consider it. Everything they’ve discovered—stuff they found where nobody else even knew to look—and the way Dad’s books all seem to be written like he was really there?”
Cairo was making some wild leaps—but I wasn’t sure he was wrong about our parents. If they possessed these powers, did that mean Cairo and I had inherited them?
My mind was full of so many things, too many for me to discuss them with my brother before our friends returned and we were once again surrounded by other voices, other thoughts. So I said the most important thing first: “I shouldn’t have turned on you like that last night, Cairo. I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks for saying that. But I mean it, Ravenna. I get why you didn’t believe me. Why you were angry. You thought I was leaving you, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“No such luck.” My brother grinned at me over the rim of his paper coffee cup. “No matter how weird it gets from now on . . . we’re in it together.”
SCENIC ROUTE
by Carrie Ryan
“Where should we go next?” Margie sets the large atlas on the table, smoothing her hand over the worn cover. Her younger sister, Sally, shifts to her knees on the bench to get a better view.
“Mississippi?” Sally asks, tucking dirty-blond hair behind her ears.
Margie shrugs and fiddles with pages, swollen after getting wet in the rain. “Too hot right now. Besides, we’ll be coming from the west here, under Canada. That’s where we left off planning yesterday.”
“Page fifty-seven, then,” Sally says, leaning her elbows on the table.
Margie rolls her eyes as she flips through, letting the atlas open almost on its own volition. “You know, I really don’t get your fascination with West Virginia.”
“It looks pretty,” Sally says, tracing her small fingers around the counties.
Neither girl has been there. Neither knows anything about it other than the contours on the map and the teaser entries from the guidebooks stacked along the front wall under the window.
Margie pulls the light closer and checks over her shoulder outside. It’s full dusk, the summer days stretching late and dying slow. Greasy smoke chokes up from the lantern—almost all their oil is dirty, and dark patches stain the ceiling over the kitchen table from their evenings cramped over the atlas.
“So maybe we come in on the interstate here,” Sally says, “but I think it would be more fun if we did the smaller roads after that. More scenic and probably less crowded.”
Margie pushes a notebook across the table, sifting through the pages until she finds where they’d left off the night before. “You start writing it all down, Sal. I’m just going to check outside real quick.”
Sally looks up at her sister then. It’s almost silent in the cabin, just the sputter of the flame and the two girls breathing. “Why?”
“One last sweep before bed.” Margie tries to keep her voice from fluttering.
“You already did the last sweep,” Sally points out. A sliver of hair hangs limp and heavy across the side of her face, throwing her eyes into shadow.
Margie doesn’t want to tell her that something outside keeps making her look up. It’s the feeling on the back of her neck, like the tension before a thunderstorm—that quality of light spreading a sense of dread somewhere in your body left over from before humanity knew such things as language and science.
“Here.” Margie squats by the small stack of books against the wall and flips through for the right one. “You figure out where you want to stop for dinner and if there’s any sightseeing you want to do. Plan it all out, and I’ll be right back.” Margie sets the Visitor’s Guide to West Virginia on the table and picks up the shotgun before stepping outside.
When she looks back, her little sister still kneels on the bench by the table. Her finger’s stuck on that map, pointing at something too far away, which probably doesn’t exist anymore anyway.
Margie never mentions to Sally that sometimes she just has to get away from the tightness of it all. In the beginning, just after the change time, she’d hated the outside, hated to leave the comfort of four walls and a roof, but now it makes her feel trapped. She’s always judging the escape routes, figuring distance and the time it would take to cover it.
Their newest cabin sits on top of a mountain that’s steep enough to keep the monsters away. There’s a deep well, a gun cabinet stashed with crates of ammunition, a cistern of fuel oil, and a pantry brimming with canned food—enough to make Margie think that perhaps they have a shot at surviving all of this so long as it’s just the two of them. They’ve lived here for most of the summer, so that now the fear’s just a low humming noise in the background, like the sound of bees around a blackberry patch.
The first thing she did after Sally and she moved in, other than tossing the bodies over the cliff, was cut down all the rhododendron and laurel. She piled it in a circle partway down the mountain and in the gaps she strung old cans and bottles on twine to rattle if anyone—living or dead—came near.
That’s why it doesn’t make sense that something could be moving around outside. That’s why she’s jittery and pre-lightning-strike aware. If someone’s on their mountain, it’s not one of the monsters, and too often it’s the living that end up being worse than the dead. She’s seen it before when the bandits have come claiming supplies and people and shelter as their own. There’s not enough safety in this new world, and too many people are willing to take what little they can find at any cost.
“I know you’re out there,” she calls, her fingers curled around the gun, holding it tight to her shoulder. She’s lying—she doesn’t know that anyone’s really out there at all. She figures that if it’s somehow a monster, he’s already smelled her, so shouting won’t give her away, and if it isn’t a monster then she may as well have been shouting at the stars.
No one answers, which doesn’t surprise her.
“I’ve got the place trapped,” she calls out again. “You try coming inside and you might as well go blow your own head off.”
Another lie—but nothing whoever or whatever is out there needs to know.
“Find anything?” Sally asks when Margie gets back inside.
“Skunk,” Margie mutters. “Don’t go out there stumbling around until I find him,” Margie w
arns. “We don’t need to smell things up again.”
Sally crinkles her nose. Dirt mingles indistinguishably with freckles along the bridge. She yawns, long and loud.
“Bedtime,” Margie says, pushing Sally toward the rope ladder up to the loft.
Once they’re both curled up on the wide bed with just a sheet pulled over them, Margie says, “Tell me about this trip we’re taking through West Virginia.”
“There’s this place there called the Paw Paw Tunnel—it took them more than a decade to dig,” Sally starts to tell her. “First we’ll have to stop by the town and eat at this place on a hill called Panorama at the Peak. It’ll be a long walk from there to the tunnel, but the travel book says it’s a must if you’re visiting the area.”
Margie closes her eyes. Her little sister smells like sweat and unwashed hair, but it’s a sweet smell, familiar and steadying. Margie tries to sleep—she wants to sleep—but instead she just counts heartbeats. Outside it begins to rain, thunder tripping through the valleys around them. Sally’s breathing falls into a steady rhythm, and in between lightning strikes all Margie can think about is someone being outside. Right now. Watching their little cabin.
She sneaks back down the ladder and crouches by the window, looking out at the clearing surrounding the house. Rain courses from the sky—a curtain of water blocking the outside world.
The storm rolls closer, lightning and thunder wrapping around each other and pummeling the mountain. In the bare seconds of light, Margie scours the clearing around the cabin, terrified of seeing something out there that doesn’t belong.
Eventually, when her legs fall numb, she moves to the table, where the flashes of lightning illuminate the atlas and tattered notebook. The change time came when Sally was in third grade and Margie in tenth. Her sister’s handwriting is stiff and careful, the letters showing the unsteadiness of her little hand as if she’s still stuck in the before time that happened years ago.
Margie flips through the book: page after page of adventures and plans. Details of a path across the entire continent, as far as their maps can take them. It’s to be the grandest road trip ever, according to Sally.
Margie wonders when Sally will figure it all out. Figure out the truth of their life.
Because it’s the end of summer, another big thunderstorm rolls into the valley the next afternoon. The sky glows a sickening green, and nothing feels right to Margie. Heat settles thick and humid, the wind holding its breath before the storm pushes in hard. Sally seems oblivious, sorting through the guidebooks, flipping through the pages with an almost manic intensity.
“Whatcha looking for?” Margie asks. She crouches next to her sister but keeps glancing out the window. The air’s so saturated it’s hard to see much farther than the porch.
“West Virginia.” Her voice comes out almost breathless, that kind of sound you get on the edge of panic. “I can’t find West Virginia. We haven’t finished the route through, and I need to find someplace where we can stay the second night or we’ll be trapped outside.”
She looks up at her older sister with eyes wide and wet. “We can’t be outside, Margie,” she whispers harshly. “We have to be inside where it’s safe, and I can’t find the book of inns and hotels.”
“It’s okay.” Margie lays a hand on her sister’s shoulder, but she shrugs it away. “We had it last night. It’s here.”
“It’s not here!” Sally cries, shaking her head. “It’s not here,” she says again.
“We’ll keep looking,” Margie reassures her. Beyond the window the storm finally hits, wind hissing and rain bending trees to the ground.
Margie convinces Sally to skip West Virginia for now and figure out where they should stop in Maryland. “I’ve always heard they have great crab cakes there,” Margie says. She finds the Maryland guidebook and sets it on the table.
The picture on the cover shows a faded blue bay and white sails, with a red crab bursting from the text. It makes Margie ache for something she’s tried to give up. It makes her feel lonely in a way she hasn’t before—an intense desire to share something as simple as a chair by the water with someone who understands.
Sally keeps her head bowed low over the map, stringy tips of her hair brushing the crinkled pages. “After that we’ll go to Maine. It’ll be safer up north in the winter,” she says without looking up. “They don’t move as much in the cold.”
Margie presses her lips together tight. She remembers planning vacations that didn’t revolve around monsters. When snow meant sledding and snowmobiles and fun. The aching part inside her wells deep, spreading fast and hard through her—pounding in her blood.
“Right,” she finally says. “That’s right.”
She leaves Sally sitting at the table and steps out onto the porch, where the rain beats against the ground as if to punish it. In two steps Margie’s deluged, letting the heavy drops sting her skin and mix with her tears. She feels helpless under this weight of water. The world’s too big for her to survive in, much less for her to keep another being safe.
She knows a day will come when it’s too much. When she’ll trip up and miss a sign or signal, and that will be the end of that. She feels like a windup clock—and now she’s winding down and doesn’t know what to do next, how to twist herself back up again to keep on going.
The storm shifts and the wind howls like the dead. They’re out there, she knows, climbing the mountain, pushing at the circle of laurel, tripping over strings of tins cans that beat and rattle in the storm.
Eventually this tiny fortress will no longer keep them safe. She’ll have to tell Sally to plan the next trip, and they’ll move on, and the clock will keep ticking until the gears wind down to nothing.
Margie climbs back onto the porch, every bit of her body soaked and cold with rain. Just as she reaches for the door, the glint of light off water makes her pause.
There’s a puddle at the end of the porch with two ovals of mud dissolving in the middle, the edges blurring and washing away. A strip of damp leads up the wall, as if someone in dirty shoes recently stood there, leaning against the cabin.
Margie’s throat closes. Her body jerks rigid. Behind her the storm menaces—howling and beating and breaking. It’s as if the entire world’s turning inside out, the cacophony of the mountain splitting apart.
She turns around. The sky’s dark, everything that color of deep dusk, when shapes bleed into each other and your eyes play tricks. Movement hums around her but always out of sight. Her teeth chatter as she forces air into her lungs, willing everything to just shut up a moment so she can figure out what’s going on.
She waits for someone to burst out of the rain. To throw her against the wall and attack her in the way of men or monsters or both. A thin thread of light from inside cuts across the porch, dissolving into the storm. Through it she watches individual drops of rain plummet and splatter, running together over and around the cabin.
Every muscle in her body tight and trembling, she slips into the cabin and wraps her hands around the shotgun, its weight a comfort. She carries the lantern from room to room, listening for a sound out of place under the beating of the storm. Everywhere’s empty just the way it should be, but she leaves the lantern burning on the table because she can’t bear the dark.
Tucking the gun under her arm, she climbs up to the loft and pulls the rope ladder after her. Sally’s gone to bed long enough before that she already sleeps deep and even, her breathing a syncopated hiss mixing with the storm. Margie spends the night pressed against the wall, staring out the windows to the clearing around the cabin. Tiny squares of light spill from downstairs, flickering like fire against the darkness.
The storm clears before dawn and, exhausted, Margie sneaks back onto the porch. She’s almost convinced herself she dreamed the puddles—of course no one had been there, of course it was just the rain collecting under the eaves. The cabin’s old, the gutters unrepaired.
There are a million explanations for what she saw the nig
ht before. Margie’s just about convinced herself of all of them as birds wake up around her and start calling to the day.
But then she sees the book. It lies on its spine, flipped open to the middle, pages fluttering in the remnant wind. When she picks it up, the cover curls a bit and wet fingerprints smudge some of the corners.
It’s the Visitor’s Guide to West Virginia.
“Found your book.” Margie tosses it onto the table, causing one of the chipped plates to rattle. “You should be more careful with it—if it hadn’t been tucked behind one of the planters on the porch, it would have gotten soaked,” Margie adds.
Sally looks up at her, lips stained dark with juice. “I didn’t take it outside, duh.”
Margie stands at the sink and looks out the window. She loves her sister, knows she’s probably right. But she has to believe Sally’s lying because otherwise someone came into the cabin and took the book. Someone stood leaning against the wall, flipping through pages while Sally and Margie sat inside, oblivious.
Her fingernails scratch against the old dingy grout of the tiled kitchen counter. This cabin’s the safest they’ve found since the change time. They’ve built a quasi-life here perched on the tip of a steep mountain. Margie’s garden is coming in, she has supplies enough to can and pickle, and the well has a hand pump so they don’t have to worry about water.
Though she lets Sally plan road trips in the evenings, Margie’s indulged herself with the idea of staying for a while. Settling in further. Spending the winter beside the fire quilting. Simple things you don’t dare dream about while the dead rumble around you.
Margie’s shoulders sag. Whoever’s out there hasn’t hurt them. Not yet. But if there’s anything Margie’s learned about the world since it changed, it’s that it’s only a matter of time.
She’s learned that lesson well.
“I’m going to check on the laurel walls.” Margie shoves a water bottle into a ragged backpack with extra shells and a plastic yellow flashlight. “It might take me a while. You going to be okay without me here?”