Ember Burning

by Jennifer Alsever

  “I need to go home now,” I say. The words tumble out of my mouth and I launch myself toward the front door.

  “That time is gone. Everyone stays as long as necessary,” Zoe says from the wall.

  Necessary?

  She waves her arm around at the expansive house. “There could be worse places to be,” she says brightly, with unsmiling eyes.

  My hands go numb, limp—and without thinking, I drop my backpack on the floor. The sound of her red velvet voice and the gray murmur of the TV obscure my vision. The antiseptic smell of the stone floors and fresh-cut flowers fill my head as I yank the door handle and run as fast as I can down the path away from this house. I can’t breathe, I can’t think in that beautiful palace.

  Running outside, colors fly by quickly—a jumbled kaleidoscope of green and brown and blue sky. I glide over the tall, soft grass while my body heaves with gasping sobs. As I race down the hill, my shoes slide over dirt, rocks, leaves, sticks, and tufts of grass. A whirl of green passes me—juniper, ivy, pine. The smell of sage and wet grass whips into my face. My toes stab the boulders, which form an obstacle course.

  The air outside is thin and unnaturally still. No chirping birds. The only sound is of my own breath and my footsteps, whap, whap, whap, down the hill. Get to the gate. Get away from these people. “Get home,” I whisper to myself. “Get home. Get home.”

  At one point the ravine is so steep that I slip backwards, slamming my back onto the ground and initiating a long slide down the hill. I strain to recover, pulling myself up to keep running. The tall grass marks my destination: the meadow. I breathe a sigh of relief, scanning the open terrain.

  The cobalt blue sky is huge, a sea above me. The mountains and cliffs loom like a prison wall—the stone painted yellow, red and gray. I spin. I scan. I search. But there is no gate. Is it gone? My breath turns ragged.

  With two hands, I grasp my cell phone like it’s a tiny life preserver in the rolling black ocean. I jam the numbers 9-1-1 into the dial pad over and over. I need help. I need Jared. Maddie. Anyone. But there’s no signal. It shouldn’t surprise me. I haven’t had reception since I drove down the highway out of town.

  “Ember! Ember! Wait up.” I look up from the phone.

  Tre jogs after me and reaches his arm out to touch me, like we’re playing tag. “Damn, you’re fast.”

  “Cross-country team,” I say, as if that explains my complete and utter panic about getting out of this place. “Get away from me.”

  “It’s okay, really. I’m on your side.” He looks sincere.

  “Then why are you following me?”

  “Because you’re wasting your time,” he says.

  “What do you mean? I’m getting the hell away from you people. This place is crazy.”

  “I mean, it’s no use. We’re lost.” His blue eyes plead with mine. They’re soft. Sane. “We can’t get out. The gate’s gone.”

  The gate’s gone. There’s no way the gate could be gone. I continue to scan the meadow, looking for it.

  “I need to get home. I have to make sure everyone is okay.” My mind races with worried thoughts. Gram, alone in her crooked little house, never wanting to ask for help. If she got sick, she would totally be alone. They likely won’t let Jared into Leadville to help her. Maybe Jared is already there, maybe he is sick, or even dead. Maddie, her little brother Hunter, her parents, who would invite me over for Sunday pasta and always took me camping. I think about everyone in town: Jules, the tattooed hippy who owned the consignment shop. My teachers. Even the Sydney Clones. It’s my town. My people. All that I know.

  “You can’t,” Tre says. “We’re lost.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? We are not freaking lost. We eat gourmet food here. We have TV and a mansion. I went home last time. There’s no reason I can’t go now—”

  “And look what happened when you did go home,” he says.

  His words hit me like rocks, pummeling me. Zoe’s words replay in my head. “Physics. Why did Zoe say every action causes a reaction? What did she mean by that?”

  Tre scrunches his mouth for a moment and then his voice becomes tight. “She means whatever you do here that is not welcomed by Trinity gets punished. But the punishment is not to you. It’s to people on the outside. The virus is what she means.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say, quickly shaking my head. Lilly’s voice echoes in my head: “Don’t go. It’s a bad idea.” This place is getting scarier by the minute.

  “Yeah, everything about this place is ridiculous,” he says.

  “I don’t get it. How can the virus be connected to me?” I can’t really fathom how something I do here can affect the outside world or how I would be that important anyway.

  “Well, the day after I got back from trying to find my way out of this stupid place, there was a bombing at an aerospace company in Oakland. Where my dad just happens to work. Are they connected? You decide.”

  His face twists and his nostrils flare. Maybe he’s got the same volcano of emotions surging through him as I do. Tears begin to silently stream down my face. Blood thumps in my ears.

  Tre rakes a hand through his hair and paces next to me. He’s clearly upset, too. “Look,” he says, “I never wanted you stuck in this cage, too… I didn’t. This is a messed-up place.”

  A beautiful prison. The world around me morphs into a carnival mirror. The weight of my mistake, of not recognizing how ridiculous everything was here, not even thinking through anything. Lodima’s warnings, my four-week gap… knowing I caused the virus at home… It all collapses onto me.

  I sink onto my knees. The gray ringing in my ears returns once again. Tears drip off my chin. I want my life back. Not this... this… place.

  “I still don’t see why I can’t go home, even if there’s no gate,” I say quietly. I wipe my face and nose with the back of my hand. “Screw the gate. I’ll hike out a different way.”

  He sits down next to me. “Yeah, I tried that already.”

  “You did? Alone?”

  “Yeah, just me,” he says.

  “What about Zoe? She seems to know what’s going on here. Maybe she can—”

  “I can what?” I turn and see Zoe standing right above me, her black crepe dress blowing in the breeze. Her hands on her hips. She’s smiling, but the smile doesn’t feel quite right, and for some reason I don’t fully understand, a flicker of fear pulses through my veins.

  “Help us get out?” My voice is small.

  Tre stands quickly, brushing dirt off his hands and jeans. He reaches his hand out to help me stand, too.

  Zoe shakes her head. “Emby, Emby,” she says. “That’s pointless. Let’s just go have some fun now, right?” She reaches out and wraps her willowy arm around me.

  The gesture gives me that odd sort of feeling inside my body, glowing, content, like I just want to be near her. To smell her floral perfume. To soak in the warmth of her soft brown skin.

  24

  Sitting alone in my room, where Zoe ushered me, I realize something important: we’re not only lost—we’re trapped. And I have a weird nagging feeling Zoe is at the heart of why.

  For a half hour, I lie on my bed silently crying, then the knocking begins. At first, it’s a little rap, light and cute and friendly. “Ember, come on, open up. Emmmmmmmber.” It’s Pete.

  I don’t want him in here. I don’t trust him—or any of them. I throw a silky bronze pillow over my head. “Go away,” I yell, my voice muffled under the pillow.

  “Ember!” he yells. Then the knocking returns. Relentless. “I’m not going to stop,” he sings.

  It’s seriously starting to annoy me, like an alarm clock that you can’t turn off. One minute. Two minutes. Oh. My. God. So much knocking. He needs to go away. “Eeeember,” he says.

  He’s not going away.

  I come to the door; my hand hovers over the doorknob. “Why are you here? Go away, Pete.” My voice is thick.

  “Open the door, Ember,” he says aga
in, softly. “Just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “No.” I speak to the thick dark wood door. My voice quivers. “I’m fine.”

  “Ember. Let’s just talk,” he says. “I want to make sure you’re not covered in that nasty pus-filled rash everyone gets here.”

  “What?” I swing the door open and examine my body. “What rash?”

  “Kidding,” he says, striding past me and flopping back onto the disheveled bed with the shimmery comforter and fur throw blanket. He brings with him the skunky scent of pot. “I knew it’d get you to open the door. Oooh, fur! Awwwesome.”

  I stand there by the door, with my hand on the smooth knob, irritated. “What do you want?” My words come out like bricks.

  “We’re going to the Nest in a few minutes. Come with us,” he says.

  “The Nest?”

  “You know, the hammock in the tree. We name everything. The Nest. The Log. The Beach is that big rock to the west of the house where you can just soak up some rays—”

  I roll my eyes and cross my arms. “No, I don’t want to go to the Nest.”

  “Listen, I know right now this is a giant mind fuck,” he says, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. “But you’ll see that really in the end, it’s not that bad.”

  “Not that bad?” I practically spit the words at him. “We’re stuck here and the world is spinning on out there. Where I’m supposed to be. What does she want with us here anyway?”

  “Who?”

  “Zoe, I guess,” I say. “Is she somehow the witch in this Hansel and Gretel situation?”

  He rolls over onto his stomach and props his face up with his hands. “Dude, I wish this house had real candy on it,” he says. “That would be so cool… Love those Red Hots candies. But would it be made out of glue? Or like, frosting?”

  “How can you be joking about this? Seriously?” I’m screaming. I’m so fully screaming at him. My hands clench into fists at my sides. “Get. Out. Pete.”

  “Ember, come on,” he says. “Don’t get so mad. Sorry.”

  My eyes narrow. He’s part of the reason I am here. Still. “Why didn’t you tell me what I was getting into? Why did you welcome me here? Tell me I needed to be in your little club?”

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference. You were stuck here the moment you came back,” he says. He pulls a red yo-yo out of his pocket and reaches out to the edge of the bed and drops it up and down. “Or at least I was.”

  “Why?” I ask. “Why are we stuck here?” Frustration builds inside me. No one will answer that question. People are dying of this crazy virus out there, and I’m told I cannot go home, that I’m in a time warp. Yet here he is, playing with a yo-yo like it’s no big deal.

  The plastic yo-yo slaps his hand with each catch. He focuses on running it up the string and then glances up at me briefly. “Who knows why we’re stuck here. But I know how you feel. When I first found out we couldn’t leave, I felt a little stuck, but then I realized it wasn’t so bad here. And so you just go with it.”

  “Wasn’t so bad?” I repeat his words with an irritated sigh-laugh. “What the hell, Pete?”

  “Like for me,” he says, “it’s pretty awesome. I mean, the first day, I couldn’t believe it. I wake up in the morning when I want. I don’t have to cook breakfast. I don’t do laundry. My mom’s not at me to get a job. I sink into one of those chairs and smoke some weed. I’m talking expensive, powerful shit. Sweet taste, good to the last gram, peace and love.”

  I clench my jaw. I want him out. But he keeps talking. “It’s an endless supply, right? Then, we go off and just live, man. I mean, Zoe showed us a zip line and we climbed trees with all these ropes and spiked shoes. Then we put up this hammock in the tree. I’m talking a hundred feet in the air. Laying there, floating in the sky, high as a kite. And sure, Zoe does this stuff to get you to like it here, to stay long enough so the force or whatever will keep you here. But it works for me.”

  “The force to keep us here?” I gasp. My hands clench and my eyes bug out.

  He shrugs. “I don’t know really what the force is. But my point is that it’s as close to heaven as I can get. My dad’s not screaming at me, hitting me, pushing me down the stairs.”

  Wow. I am not the only one who came to Trinity to hide out from real life. I ran from emptiness. He ran from abuse. I see a little bit more beneath Pete’s chill facade for the first time since I met him.

  “We come back to the house and there’s like a shitload of fried chicken for dinner. My favorite, right? I’m with two of the hottest chicks ever, and they think I’m funny. They think I’m cool. Lilly even starts to dig me. We start a thing. It’s intense.”

  I sigh deeply.

  “Seriously, intense… So see, Ember? It’s cool here.” He looks over at me, his eyebrows raised, trying to get me to agree.

  “But it’s not real life,” I say. “And it’s creepy. You’re stuck in this one place. There’s a whole world out there.”

  “I do miss the surf and, I guess, slam-dancing. But the Bath House is cool, and so is the whole thing about getting to do life over. You gotta admit.”

  I repeat his completely senseless words in a flat tone. “The Bath House. Getting to do life over.” My mind is screaming.

  “Yeah, the Bath House is like this big dark room, where you get into this water that smells like, I don’t know, maybe some kind of flowers but also a little metallic? You float in total, complete darkness and silence. Zoe walks around putting these rocks around the pool. It’s pretty cool, actually. It’s like you have no body. You’re like, disconnected.” His voice becomes slow and spacey as if he’s there right now.

  Dread makes its way through my core again, like sticky tar coating my insides. “Why do you do it? Why does she want you to do it?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I don’t care. Really. I mean, there are no other obligations. No growing up. It’s awesome. You gotta admit. Right?”

  I swallow, and that heaviness inside me is followed by true bafflement. I’m completely infuriated that he could be so stupid, so foolish to just accept this situation. “At what cost? What the hell does Zoe mean ‘you’ll stay as long as necessary’? That scares the crap out of me,” I say, shaking my head in exasperation.

  He stands, gingerly swinging the yo-yo down to the floor and out in front of him, pulling it along the ground for a few seconds before snapping it back to his hand. “Walk the dog,” he says, looking up at me. He grins with pride like a kid who just learned a card trick. “Learned it last week. You should see Lil do the crazy eight. She’s awesome.”

  I ignore his trick and his distraction. His childishness is infuriating. “Whatever, Pete. Is that even important?” A couple beats of silence pass while he continues to throw the yo-yo up and down. “You know, I heard Lilly talking to Zoe. They had a plan to keep me here.”

  “Yeah, probably,” he says, shrugging. He saunters toward me and slides down the wall and sits on the floor. His thick hand pats the gray carpet next to him. I hesitate, then join him, my back sliding down the wall to sit, too.

  “Lilly tricked me,” I say, pinching the velvety pieces of carpet between my fingers. “She’s that yappy coyote who plays with the neighbor’s dog in the woods as a way to lead him back to its den to be killed. I’m the dog in that scenario. You’re a coyote, too, though. You wanted me to jump in the lake.”

  He laughs. “I didn’t know coyotes did that. Tricky…” he says, hanging on to the last syllable in a whisper.

  “So what’s her prize? What’s Zoe giving her?” I ask, not wanting to know what I’m worth, why they did it, but needing to know just the same.

  “Prize? I didn’t know they were giving out prizes.” He slaps his forehead. “I wish I would have known because I really need some more plastic trophies in my room. Or maybe they give out free bags of Cheetos. Or some Ghost Haze Train—legendary weed. Ever tried it?”

  I don’t smile. I take a deep breath and will myself to be patient to get a
nswers.

  “She didn’t trick you,” Pete says finally. “Lilly was dying for a girl to be friends with here. Zoe is cool, you know, but she’s like super serious and feels more like a parent or something. She’s not on the same plane as us, if you get my drift. She is off doing her own thing half the time. Lil has me and Tre, but she’s never had a good friend who was a girl. And really, you’re someone from the future, in a way. I mean, we see stuff on TV, but really we want to know what it’s like out there.”

  “The future,” I repeat. “I’m not from the future.”

  “Hell yeah, you are. You’re the real deal. I have all these questions, you know. Like the World Wide Spider Web,” he says. “Tell me about that. I gotta dig it.”

  He and the others don’t understand what the Internet is. They don’t understand what is happening in the real world. I digest this for a second.

  “It’s the World Wide Web. And no one says that. It’s called the Internet, or the web, or online, and it’s everywhere, connecting everyone—movies, people, email, shopping, news, money, it’s like just part of life. I don’t know. How can I even explain that?”

  “And you’ve got cool new cell phones, right? That’s awesome. Show me yours.”

  I do not want to play show-and-tell. “What, so I’m here and giving up my freedom and my life so you can see a cell phone? So Lilly can have a goddamn friend? You’ve got to be kidding me.” Questions tumble out of my mouth all at once. “Why did she want me to sled so badly yesterday? What’s the deal with you two anyway? And what about her and Tre?”

  He shrugs. “Eh. Complicated.”

  It kills me that he’s so casual and that all their secrets stay out of reach. “Then what did Zoe promise Lilly?”

  Zoe must be the person behind Trinity, pulling the strings, somehow.

  “Apparently… she promised her a new life—one with more power—if she made you like it here. You know… all the rebirth stuff. She told me she figured it was okay because you were stuck here anyway, and she liked you and you might as well have fun here.” He winds up the yo-yo and rubs the red plastic with the bottom edge of his T-shirt.