by Amy Faye
There were new trees down, and new saplings that had taken the place of trees that had fallen when she was a girl. Everything around her was changing, everything becoming different. Everything but this little cave, with its stone and soil walls and the strung-up electric lights. That, and the cabin.
The cabin hadn't changed enough, she thought sourly. It should have been different, somehow. There should have been dishes in the sink, because to the best of her knowledge, Dad had never done them. There should have been a pile of dirty laundry, where Dad hadn't bothered to put it away.
There should have been beer bottles laid out, where he'd spent a night reading and drinking them and thinking about things. There should have been a computer, where he'd been using it to interface with the world, at least a little bit. But there was nothing. It was as if, the moment that she'd left, he'd stopped doing anything there at all. As if she'd left him in stasis until she'd come back, and the house had experienced the years as only a few moments.
Her gut twisted up and she knocked a fist against the wall as hard as the cramped position and her bad angle would allow. It was a disappointing sensation, but she accepted it, because she had no real choice in the matter. She swung again, trying harder. It bounced off the wall ineffectually again and she growled out her anger.
She slipped herself out of the hole with some difficulty, wriggling around in the dirt and clawing her way out. There was a rug, one that she used as often as a blanket as she used it as a floor covering, and it was warm and plush compared to the cool, mushy earth. She appreciated the feeling on her face, and she lay on it in the dark.
Eventually, she would have to leave. Eventually, there was going to be something to pull her out, whether it was food or an intruder that she couldn't keep away on her own. But until then, this was where she wanted to be. Classes be damned. Work be damned. She didn't need money; she just needed this place, and her memories. There was food enough on the mountain, there was water enough on the mountain.
There was a hand generator, in one of these rooms, attached to a bicycle. She could cycle for her own power, no need to pay an electric bill. She could do anything she wanted, she didn't need the outside world. Dad hadn't needed it.
Diana closed her eyes and started taking slow, even breaths and realized exactly how exhausted she really was. The day had taken more out of her than she'd realized, more than she'd thought was possible, and the rug was so soft, so comfortable. So warm.
The room was dark, and with the door closed there was only a thin sliver of light that came through the bottom. That thin sliver went black again as her eyes drifted shut and stayed that way, and she let the dreams come to her.
Everything else could wait just a little longer. After all, there was someone right outside. Someone who had promised that she could be alone, even if it was just for now.
23
There was someone waiting outside for her, Diana knew, and as she finally stirred from her rest she realized that there wasn't going to be any way to escape him forever, even if he might let her. Eventually, there would be a moment where she had to make a decision, and the only two choices were:
First, she could go outside, where she'd inevitably run into Alex, or worse, she wouldn't; or,
Second, she could stay in here, and starve to death.
There really wasn't another option, and even the option of starving to death was such an obviously bad choice that there may as well have not been another option. She pushed herself up from the rug. The room was almost impossibly dark; there were no windows in her hidey-hole, and though there were electric lights, she hadn't bothered to turn them on, not in this room.
There had been maybe ten minutes of a tour around, ten minutes in which she'd looked around and seen what sort of state the place was in, and spent at least a couple of those minutes lamenting how much she'd missed the place, and how badly it had fallen apart.
Then she'd crawled in here, left the lights off and the door closed, and crawled into the nook in the wall. The only light now came from the sliver of a gap between the door and the floor of the cave, which made an ill fit to the heavy, rectangular door. That they'd managed to get it as close as they had was a testament to the work that she and Dad had done. Mostly Dad, of course.
Diana's role in building the place had been largely supervisory, since she was barely seven when the excavation began, but it felt as if she'd had the place as long as she could remember, even if those memories were partly the first expansions of the natural caverns.
Her eyes had adjusted at some point in her sleep to the darkness, and when she rose, that thin shard of light was enough to illuminate the whole chamber, at least enough to make out shapes and locations. She stood up. She'd tried painting once, like Dad. It hung on the far wall, covered in a heavy cloth. There was no reason that anyone would want to see it. She wasn't going to be Kramer the Younger. Her best hope was to carry on the legacy by having other people's things.
There was a bed, too, though she'd never bothered to sleep on it. The ground was hard and soft in all the right ways, when she wanted to stay down here. Another shelf, as if the library didn't have enough space. She thought of it as the 'currently reading' shelf, though there were dozens of books that still sat on that shelf years after the last time she'd been in this part of the complex.
There was the door, a basin that was supposed to be filled with water from the nearby spring, but was currently empty, there was the door. Beside it, she knew, was a light switch that would flip on the lights in the room, but it was too dark, the light not quite managing to reach up from the ground to the switch. She ignored it and headed for the door.
The place was as familiar as the cabin had been, and she recounted the rooms as she walked. There was the library to her left, the deepest room of the cave structure. The hall twisted on itself, though there was a gap in the rock wall where she could just about spy the door to the front part of the cave. It had a heavy door, one that had a heavy bolt on it to match the ones in the cabin.
Beyond it, there was a front room, lightly furnished with a table and some chairs, and a sofa with a broken spring that had to be replaced, so it was moved down to the cave. It was comfortable; she could have lived down here all by herself, without the cabin at all, if she were careful. In the side of the front room was the exercise bike, hooked up to a generator that was tucked away behind a wooden barrier that she could move, if she had to, but she had no special intention of doing so.
She stepped out into the main room, which looked the same as it always had. Alex wasn't there, which she supposed was what she'd expected, though she didn't quite know precisely what it was that she did expect. Was he going to be contrite and apologetic after she'd run off? Was he going to be angry with her? Was he going to pretend none of it had ever happened?
She stopped dead still and rested a hand on one of her chairs, feeling the wood under her fingers. It was comforting to have something like this, something to remind her that at least so far, she wasn't quite insane just yet. There was history here, and as strange as that history might have been compared to some other people, it was her history. She was the one who had to decide how to feel about it, not someone else. Nobody got to decide what they were going to permit her to think.
Diana missed it, but it was a relic, in a way. It was part of a past that she should have let go a long time ago. If she wasn't prepared to be done with it, then she shouldn't have left the mountain. She should have stayed, even if it meant that she was there when Dad's number got punched. Even if it meant that she was the second victim.
She closed her mouth, forced herself to calm down as much as she could, and walked out the front; the bar was set aside, still, but she made no move to reset it into place, as if it mattered. Nobody would break in here. Nobody but her even knew it existed. At least, nobody outside of Alex, now, it seemed.
He looked up when she opened the door from a perch on top of a fallen log, laid halfway back with his jacket folded u
nder his head.
"Hey," he said. "Still alive, huh?"
"Sorry," she said, not really feeling particularly sorry at all, except perhaps for herself.
"It's, uh, a nice place," he offered. There was some uncertainty in his voice. "Good library. Lots of books."
"Whatever," she said, unsure of what he was trying to do except that she knew he was trying to do something. "It doesn't matter any more."
"Sure it does. You probably put a lot of work into collecting all that stuff."
She had, in a certain sense. It would have been easy to amass a collection like that, if they were in the city. They'd have a used book store maybe ten miles away, tops, and she could just sift through it and grab whatever she wanted.
Living out in the sticks like they did, though, it was a rare thing to have a specimen come along, and it was rarer still that there was anything worth actually keeping. When she was younger, it was practically all she thought about, for months or years. Every new find was a big deal, even if she managed to get four or five a week most weeks.
She shrugged and he rose to his feet.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"No," she told him. She wanted to be firm. This was a piece of her history, but it wasn't something that she was ready to share. Not with him, and not with anyone. But her voice sounded anything but firm. She felt weak and afraid.
"Alright, then. Come on. We need to find Cyanora. I can't imagine that she's not worrying at this point. We've been gone for hours."
"I'm sorry," she said again. "I didn't mean to cause trouble, I just..."
"Hey, come on. I get it. You needed to go back to roost, right? Most normal thing in the world."
"Is it?"
"Well, I mean, sure."
"Thanks, I guess," she said. She didn't really feel thankful, but then again she didn't feel much of anything really. Just empty, unhappy, and alone. She leaned into him with her head and he wrapped an arm around her shoulder unconsciously, pressed his lips into her forehead and pulled tight with his arm.
"We've got to think about our next move before trouble hits," he said softly.
But there was something wrong. A smell. It hit her right away, and must have only hit him a moment later. She looked up into the sky at the black, billowing cloud and knew that whatever it was, it was bad, and it was coming from right around the area where the cabin should be.
Diana cursed and started moving, but not half as fast or as soon as Alex.
24
Whenever she'd heard anything about fire safety, Diana had been told never to go inside for anything after you were out of a burning building; all of that went out the window so fast that she never once considered what it meant that the woman-dragon was standing outside, watching it burn. She also didn't stop to consider what it might have meant that Alex was way ahead of her, and he wasn't outside.
He grabbed her arm as she rose up the steps, moving the other way, a bundle under his arms. A large bundle, she thought. His eyes were wild and barely managed to stay on her face long enough to spit out the words 'the painting,' as if it were supposed to mean something.
She pulled free and took the stairs up two at a time, around the corner and up, then took the first door on the right, throwing her weight back and yanking the heavy, hardwood door open. The heat all around her blazed, as hot as anything she could imagine, but it was almost familiar, now. She'd experienced the hottest that flames could be without boiling your skin right off your bones, and she'd lived through it. There wasn't much else she had to worry about, she thought.
The doll that sat on the bed hadn't been singed, yet. She grabbed it and made for the opposite side of the hall, grabbed Dad's notebook and his glasses from the bedside table, and started back out. The problem came when she hit the stairs. The flames had spread, already heavy enough to consume more than it had left untouched, and the heat was like she was stuck inside of an oven. Smoke filled the air, leaving a greasy feeling on her skin and tickling her throat in an attempt to get her to start a coughing fit that she wouldn't stop again.
The stairs were engulfed, and worse, she could see that what had previously been overbuilt, heavy steps were already beginning to lose their structural integrity, flames licking through from the bottom of the stairs. She'd left the painting in the front room, propped up against the back of the couch; it wasn't there now. But there was no way out that way, anyways, not unless something very big changed. The door stood open, wreathed in flame, and she had to make a decision, and had to make it now.
Diana turned and looked over at the studio door. That door was engulfed almost entirely, and starting to fall apart, the way that the rest of the house was soon going to be. She knew without needing to wonder that if she put her body through it, then no amount of bolting the door would keep her from going right through it. It also happened, she knew, that the house's slope was the highest there.
With her options caught between 'die here' and 'die on the other side of the house,' and even then, the doors starting to close around her, she took a deep breath, dropped her shoulder, and ran hard through the door. It crashed and smacked hard against the wall behind, blown back by the force of her charge, and leaving her with thankfully few burns. Once her clothes caught, it would be the end.
The painting was there again, back where they'd first found it. Originally, it had been on the floor, propped against the legs of the easel; now it was up, on the stand, and placed, as if Dad were going to start working on it again any minute.
That was, of course, assuming that he didn't have to come through a burning building to get it. Diana grabbed it and shifted it into her overloaded left arm, grabbed the easel with her right, and heaved it with as much strength as her small body would allow. The window shattered in a noise almost entirely swallowed up by the sound of the roaring flames all around her, and she followed it out a moment later.
The feeling of falling was familiar, now. The feeling of landing, on the other hand, was something that she would have rather continued not knowing as she landed hard on her right arm, trying and ultimately failing to roll out of the landing. She stared back up at the house behind her, engulfed in flames. A mighty crack came from inside, and the gable sunk in on itself as the house started to lose whatever structure it still had, and the weight started to pull on the rest unevenly.
Her breath came hard and every movement of her lungs served as a stark reminder of the shape her arm was in, which was as worrying as the cough that suddenly overtook her as she started to breathe normally again. She tried to move her arm, and it did what she asked, with a great deal of hemming and hawing and an even greater deal of pain.
She forced her left hand to pick up all of the various things that had slipped out of her arms when she'd landed, carried them a hundred yards or so away, and then started examining each in turn.
A plush doll, a pair of glasses, a notebook, and a painting. It was a sorry haul for something that had almost cost her life and had almost certainly dislocated her shoulder at the very least. The glasses had cracked but she'd managed to avoid shattering them in the fall, for which she was grateful.
The notebook was singed badly, but as she flipped through, none of it was quite destroyed. She held it to her chest with her good arm a minute, felt the hot leather against her face and set it aside.
The last of the things that she'd been able to grab, the first that she'd searched for, was a gift. It was from her mother, one of the few reminders that Diana had of the woman, and it was hand-made. The stitching had come apart in places, over the years, and Diana had done her best to repair it from the diagrams and explanations in her books, which resulted in repairs of varying quality from 'not great' to 'very alright.'
The last thing was the painting, and she had no idea why she'd grabbed it at all. It was easy to imagine that if she were someone else, looking at her actions from outside, it would have been because Alex had made her responsible for the painting, but it wasn't.
It ha
d been important to Dad, even if he wouldn't have admitted it. It was the last thing he'd done before he died, and it had been left in his studio. Everything else about the house seemed wrong. The lack of clutter. The cleanliness all around. It didn't look lived-in at all.
But the painting? The painting was all Dad. It had his unhurried brush-strokes, his use of color. It had his ill-defined details, before he went back over it and finished it. The painting was still in early stages, probably a week out of being finished. Even by this point, there would have been hours of work put into it to get it this far.
All of that meant something. It meant something to him, even if it was just a paycheck. It meant something to the people who bought his paintings. Which meant that it meant something to Alex, too. And more than any of those people, it meant something to Diana.
She'd watched him complete a hundred paintings like these, sitting in the room with him while he painted, as much from his imagination and his memory as from any reference photo that might have been tacked up on the wall.
There had been no such photo tacked up on the wall of the studio this time. No reference at all, really, which was a little bit of an oddity. Even his most bizarre landscapes always started as someplace real. Even places that he had seen, landscapes visible from the mountain, he had photographs. But not this time.
She wondered if that meant that it was someplace that was very important to him, someplace completely unimportant, or if it wasn't a real place at all. But the early stages of this one looked as real as anything he'd ever painted. It looked like, if she could just undo the rough blocked-out shapes into their real life selves, she might just be able to see where it was, step right into the painting. It wasn't bizarre, wasn't surreal, wasn't even hard to believe.
The one hard thing to understand, out of all of it, was a little brown smudge in the corner of the verdant field. It wasn't the central image. Hell, most people would barely even look at it. It was just a detail, and in this stage, it was barely even that. A single stroke of brown in a sea of green, topped off by the ocean of pinks and reds and oranges that made up the evening sky, reflected off the clouds.