I don’t have to go far before it gets quiet. We must be the only ones here right now. I got lucky, I guess—I still haven’t decided how much I want to tell Christie Jones about last night. Maybe she already knows. She’s got a prophet under her roof.
Finally, I settle into a shadowed corner opposite a row of cubicles. I still do want that coffee. But first I think I should try this again.
I go still and I listen. Nothing answers—just the high-pitched whine of silence. But distantly, unless I’m imagining it, there’s this hollow sound, like the air at the edge of a sheer drop.
This is why we stayed, I remind the unease settling into my stomach. There’s no point to my being here if I don’t keep talking to them.
“Are you here?” I whisper. But the air barely shifts.
Until a voice behind me asks, “How’s that working for you?”
Someday soon, Cassie Cyrene is going to catch my elbow with her face. I’m not saying I’ll like it, or that she’ll deserve it. But it’s going to happen nonetheless.
I spin around with a laugh that’s mostly a wheeze. Cassie sits calmly against the wall, her legs folded to the side, her gingham skirt flat.
“You remember the part where I have post-traumatic stress disorder, right?” I say. It still feels unearned in my mouth. But there’s a thrill to it, too. They don’t know me. I can say it as many times as I want, and nothing will change.
“Sorry,” she says. “I forget that not everyone can see where they’re going.”
I can’t be entirely sure, but I think I was just on the receiving end of a prophet burn.
“So . . .” I smile, shrug. “Guess we’ll be working together after all.”
The grim line of her mouth spills into a real smile. “No kidding.”
“You could have told me,” I say.
“I’ve been told not to rob people of the journey,” Cassie says airily. At my raised eyebrows, she concedes, “It wouldn’t do you any good if you were here just because I told you it was meant to be. Also, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
I snort. Fair enough. “Ms. Jones, um, went to the interview?”
Cassie eyes me impassively. I don’t get around to asking before she answers. “We’re not family. Not in any kind of official sense. They let me live in their house—she and her wife, Sandy. They let me eat their food and read their books. Sandy takes me thrifting once in a while. But on paper? As far as my school knows, I ‘grew up early.’”
She shrugs. “I’m the one who wanted it that way, so I shouldn’t be surprised when I don’t get special treatment. But I know what I’m talking about, even if I didn’t foresee it. She should get that by now.”
I let out a slow breath. “So you didn’t foresee it.” When she narrows her eyes, I add quickly, “You just seem really sure.”
She eyes me for a long moment, as if to make sure I’m not doubting her. “No one can be a hundred percent sure of everything. Not even me,” she says. “I see a lot, you know. Maybe even more than Maggie Williams did, in her prime. But I see moments. Fine details. Not context. And it means I jump to the wrong conclusions, sometimes.
“So when I told my parents what was coming, I don’t know what they decided to do with that information,” she says. “And I’ll admit, there’s something they’d give almost anything to relive. But they have a better reason not to. At least, I like to think so.”
I wait for her to keep going. And when she catches me looking, her cheeks flush. “I’d prefer not to say why.”
I don’t know how to react. But I know what Gaby would have said. “Want to talk about literally anything else?”
She uncrosses her arms with a sigh. “I’m not sure how anymore.”
“Then let’s make it a game,” I say. That’s what Gaby did whenever we had a transfer student, or a new kid sitting with us at lunch. “You ask anything you want, and I ask anything I want. Only rule is, nothing heavy. No big life stuff. The more insignificant, the better.”
I think I catch a smile as she sweeps past me. “My favorite color is green.”
“Okay, new rule,” I call after her. “You can’t foresee the questions.”
As we round the corner at the end of the hall, I hear the churn of the printer again, and I’ve barely taken a step toward their cubicles when Alex slides a stack of warm sheets of paper into my hands, exuding pure, wired triumph.
Cassie slides around me and peers over at the packet. “Oh, this looks good. We’ll be making a few unexpected stops, though.”
Alex looks unfazed. “You can pencil those in, if you want.”
“Oh, I didn’t see who they’d be,” Cassie chirps. “Just that they’d be unexpected.”
“Have you been back there this entire time?” Felix hisses as Cassie brushes past me to pick up her own packet.
“Don’t worry.” Cassie smiles over her shoulder. “Your singing voice is very nice.”
Masking a snort, I finally look down at the result of Alex’s hours of work. Names and addresses: John Jonas. Jessica Graham. Loreen Murphy. The last on the list is just an address: Lotus Valley Central Caverns.
There’s a sheet below it, a printed, clearly standard survey: how long have you lived here, are you married or single, please rate this list of priorities from most important to least. Handwritten at the bottom, however, are two very different questions:
What is your happiest memory?
What would you give to live it one more time?
I pick it up to take a closer look and catch one more sheet underneath. This one is just locations. Hospital, attic stairs. Lotus Valley Public Library, southwest corner. The corner of Morningside and Jacobs (midafternoon only! adds a scribbled parenthetical). There’s a question on here, too. But only one.
Are you familiar with the entity that was born here?
But I’ve barely finished reading that sheet when Alex plucks it out of my hand. Carefully, like he’s trying not to draw attention. And when I catch his eye, he shakes his head.
“This is the survey?” Felix asks, oblivious.
“Ms. Jones’s suggestion,” Alex says. And though he sounds calm and even enough, he hunches a little as he tucks the last sheet of paper nonchalantly into his back pocket. “We’re going to act like we’re conducting a survey on the Flood’s presence in Lotus Valley, see if anyone tips their hand. Though I don’t know if everyone will talk to us. Maggie’s supporters especially.”
There’s a damp, heavy chill curling into the base of my lungs. That buzzing click of the adrenaline valves switching on. But for all the anxiety I’m feeling right now, uncertainty doesn’t follow. Because I still hear it in the back of my head. What gives you the right?
I think whether they support me, want me gone, or believe that I’ve brought them a gift, one thing will be true. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting Lotus Valley to tell us what they think of me.
JULY 3, FIVE MONTHS AGO
NOTE TO SELF: Like anything, this is a skill that can be learned. And if nothing else, you’re good at homework. Maurice made you a photocopy of the diagnostic criteria. He wants you to look at these words and know that you’re allowed to feel them. Those pages are heavy with ink now, with underlines and asterisks and notes. You know what’s yours. You know what isn’t.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking you know everything.
Let’s back up now to this crisp, hot afternoon at the thrift store, down the street from your North Park apartment. You’re not looking for anything. You don’t need anything. But there’s nothing like buying a jacket for the price of a sandwich. And it’s reliably still, in a way home rarely is—no clatter of dishes or footsteps, no cartoons blaring. No one comes here.
Usually. Tomorrow is a holiday. You might have remembered that otherwise. But in the whirling mass of adrenaline and summer haze, your sense of time was the f
irst thing to go.
You don’t see if they come in together, but it’s unlikely that a group of nine strangers formed a flash mob to ruin your fucking day. By the time you look, they are thoroughly and overwhelmingly everywhere. A pair of boys by the entrance. A man rifles through the hangers, metal against metal, plastic against plastic. A cluster of women decide, consciously or not, that whatever rack they want is the one behind you. You slip from aisle to aisle. They trail you, their laughter high and sharp.
Hypervigilance. You know that it makes sounds louder, it makes proximity nearer, and that when your world narrows, the exit is all there is. But when a woman parks her stroller by the next rack, hems you into that stretch of aisle, you forget every bit of diagnostic criteria you’ve ever learned.
This is what it would be like to have your thoughts blasted apart by dynamite. You have the actions, even the order—move around the women, move around the boys, move out the door. You can’t string them together. They’re too much. It’s pounding, through your chest and to your fingers, you’re trapped, you’re trapped, you’re trapped.
To them, what happens next looks like nothing. If it looks like nothing to the people who love you, it most certainly looks like nothing to these strangers. It flickers through your mind almost too quick to register, a thought with definition and color in a sea of whirling white.
Push her.
Then the stroller shifts, leaves an opening, and you jump for it. Once you have momentum, the rest snaps into place: a quick and rigid smile to the cashier, a polite mumble to the boys at the door, and a slow breath out as you tumble into the summer heat. In, out. In, out. Like you’re supposed to do.
It’s a little funny now. You imagine Gaby wrinkling her nose at you—You tried to push a baby? You should savor these moments while you have them, these days. Those moments before you overthink.
Because note to self: It will hit you. It always does. It will settle on you in hour three of the long night to come: those words burnt into your brain, the itch of potential energy in your hands. There’s a word for that feeling. Something you’ve never felt for people who’ve earned it, let alone nine loud and harmless strangers.
Rage.
Thirteen
THE BRINGER OF CALAMITY
I ALWAYS THOUGHT I knew the desert. The nights were my time out here—with the Astronomy Club, with my family, with Gaby, looking for faint stars and little forgotten civilizations.
I’m squinting in my sunglasses as we cross the terrace from the station to the parking lot, the light bouncing off the pavement and right back into my face. “Where did we park?”
“Right down that way.” Felix is smirking at me. Which I’m not sure I appreciate.
I’m still half-turned to him as I reach the bottom of the steps. So I completely miss the person I’m about to bowl over.
“Oh!” I stumble back, laughing to cover the quick punch of adrenaline. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
But in a way I’m beginning to recognize now, the scene has changed.
I blink. The person two inches from my face blinks back at me. It’s a woman with a short black bob and thin penciled eyebrows, a stranger. It’s what’s around her that I recognize. The racks, the ’80s wallpaper, the warm dusty smell of the Second Time’s the Charm thrift shop. And the stroller resting under her light grip.
In real life, though, she was looking at a sweater. She wasn’t looking at me with blank, unblinking eyes.
She wasn’t soaking wet, either.
I flinch. But the shop twists away like a curtain, up and out of existence. I’m back at the steps of the terrace, but one thing stays the same: someone’s standing in front of me, staring.
Not for long, though. His hands go slack, the flyer he’s holding drifting to the ground like a paper airplane, and he straight-up bolts across the parking lot without a single glance back.
I can hear Cassie calling out to me, but the others are still a few steps behind. It gives me a second to catch my breath.
“Rose?” Cassie says again. I hear the sound of footsteps quickening behind me, the others catching up. “What was that?”
I can still see the man’s retreating back, shimmering in the desert haze. “I’m not sure.”
“And what is that,” Felix says, nodding to the flyer. I stoop to the pavement, pick it up, and unfurl it.
TO ALL LOTUS VALLEY CITIZENS:
The mayor’s office requests your presence and participation at an emergency town hall meeting this evening, eight p.m., to vote on the best course of action regarding the dangerous interloper and bringer of calamity, Ms. Rose Colter. Further information on the imminent threat will be available on channel three.
GO ARMADILLOS!
The flyer concludes with a loopy, feminine signature—one I recognize from the note on my door this morning.
“A vote,” I mutter. “She’s gonna vote me out?”
“Well,” Alex says, his voice a little queasy. “Not you, exactly.”
Right. Of course. It’s not just me they want gone, is it?
Felix tilts the poster to the side, as if that’ll help. “She knows the Armadillos’ season ended in November, right?”
“It’s not funny,” Cassie says quietly. I turn to her, halfway to saying that I get to decide if it’s funny—until I catch the look on her face and clamp my mouth shut. It’s my flood, but it’s her home.
Felix falls into step alongside me as we cross the parking lot, and there’s a beat after he leans in. “Do you wanna drive?”
My head snaps toward him. He looks a little embarrassed, maybe. But dead serious. “What?”
He shrugs, his blush creeping down his neck. “It seemed to help, before.”
“I . . .” For a long moment, all I can do is gape. “We’re on a schedule. It’s just gonna slow us down if you have to direct me, right?”
“Okay, but . . .” His brow furrows. “You’re sure?”
Not long after I started with Maurice, I told him how every week, no matter how diligently I expected it, it would startle me, every time, when he opened the door. I said it to laugh at myself, to joke about how jumpy I was. And then I noticed, a few weeks later, just how lightly he eased the door off the jamb. It slipped into our routine so matter-of-factly, I didn’t see it at first.
It felt a little like this feels, right now.
“Thank you.” I smile and jerk my head away. “I’m sure.”
* * *
—
“ARE YOU SURPRISED?” Christie Jones’s voice filters in through a dull crackle.
I lean closer to the center console, where the phone rests in Alex’s outstretched palm. “More surprised that it’s so civil.”
“Civil is the only way they’re going to do it,” Christie says. “Thanks to the charter, Maggie either needs Rose’s consent, my consent to use Rudy, or to prove that we’ve exhausted all peaceful avenues. So without any of that? All she can do is try to suspend the charter. She’s always wanted me to use Rudy to keep the neighbors in line. And if the town votes to let him loose on the Flood, that’s precedent she can use next time she’d like to drive a ‘danger’ out of town.”
“And then there might not be any town to protect.” Alex’s outburst is vehement enough that he nearly drops the phone.
“Yes, Alex,” Christie says. “We agree on that.”
He flushes. Felix absently pats at his arm.
“In any case,” Christie says. “I’m listening to that ‘further information on channel three’ now . . .”
There’s a swish through the speaker as Christie holds the phone up to Maggie Williams’s tinny voice on the TV. “. . . and what of the evacuation?” she’s saying. “Sheriff Christie Jones would like you to believe that her creature can assist. Now, we are all, of course, grateful for his assistance in the Harper incident. But do we fe
el confident, Lotus Valley, that he will not turn that same violence on us? Because I, your mayor—I’m not sure I do.”
Harper incident. I glance at Alex up front, but he’s studiously watching the road.
Another swish as Christie comes back on the line. “. . . so it’s safe to say the campaign has already begun.”
“So she trusts Rudy to take on the Flood,” I say, “but not to help with the evacuation?”
“It’s not trust, exactly.” Christie’s voice goes dark. “She doesn’t think Rudy’s capable of anything but violence. But she doesn’t see an issue with using that violence for her own ends, either.” There’s a beat. “You’re talking to the pawn shop customers today?”
Alex makes a noise of assent. I think, for a second, of that other other list in his pocket.
“And you’re . . .” She clears her throat. “Sure about the Mockingbird? Jay said he could go later.”
Alex draws his shoulders a little straighter. “She’s more likely to talk to me.”
“All right.” She doesn’t sound happy, but she doesn’t argue, either. “Well. I know you’re thinking about who stole that tape deck. But it’s just as important that you charm the living hell out of these people. Listen to their hopes, their worries, their wildest show business dreams, whatever makes them think twice before voting tonight. Be courteous, be quick, be vague. Felix, I swear to God, if you criticize anyone’s baking—”
Felix sighs all the way around the tight corner. “Once!”
Christie ignores him. “And remember that Maggie has a lot of friends,” she says. “Whatever you do today, assume it’s going to get back to her.”
“If she hasn’t already foreseen it,” Felix says.
Next to me, Cassie shifts, but she doesn’t say a word, or turn away from the window. She’s been trying her best, these last five minutes, to pretend this conversation isn’t happening.
“Don’t get hung up on that,” Christie says. “I’ll be back this afternoon, but until then, Jay’s nearby.” There’s a pause. “Is Cassie there?”
The Valley and the Flood Page 13