How could she have done it? How could she have been such a fool to think he would let them go once he had what he wanted? She gave up Connor for nothing. It didn’t save the kids in the basement. It saved no one.
The flames climb to the curtains, and the stack of newspapers in the corner ignites as if it had been doused with gasoline. Sonia struggles against her chains but succeeds only in upending the chair. Her hip complains bitterly as she and the chair fall backward to the floor, just inches from the building inferno.
Sonia Rheinschild knows she will die. In truth, she’s amazed she has survived this long, what with so many other ADR operatives killed in “random” clapper attacks. But to lose the kids in her basement is too much to bear. Poor Jack, lying there beside her, had it easy compared to what the others will now have to endure.
Then, as the heat builds around her, as the air grows inky black with smoke, she hears the most wonderful sound she’s ever been blessed to hear. A sound that changes everything.
In that moment, her fears and regrets leave her. She smiles and begins to breathe deep, over and over again, resisting the urge to cough, willing her body to succumb to smoke inhalation so that she never has to feel the flames.
She will go to her husband now. She will join Janson in whatever place, or nonplace, all the living eventually go—and she will go there in peace . . .
. . . because the wonderful sound she heard from the basement below was the breaking of a window.
38 • Grace
Cold, confused, and covered with scratches, Grace crawls out of the prickly hedge. Her head spins, and she’s terrified because for the first few moments, she can’t fathom how she got there. Maybe she was hit by a car and thrown into the bushes. Maybe she was mugged.
When her memory begins to return, she resists it, because even before it oozes to the surface, she senses it’s going to be bad. And she’s right.
She saw Argent, but it wasn’t Argent, but it was. She screamed and passed out—perhaps from her shock, perhaps from something else. The sky is a bit darker now than when she lost consciousness. It’s still late twilight, though. How long was she out? Ten minutes? Twenty?
Her attention is drawn to orange light ebbing and flowing in random surges. Something around the corner is on fire.
Fighting the weakness in her knees, she holds on to a streetlamp for balance, then turns the corner to find Sonia’s shop on fire. Grace can feel the heat of the flames all the way across the street. She runs toward the burning building in a panic, but the shop’s plate glass window explodes before she can even reach the curb. She’s thrown back onto a manhole cover, its hard steel skinning her elbows.
People have come out into the street to watch—perhaps they want to help, but there’s nothing to be done. All they can do is stand there with phones to their ears. A dozen simultaneous calls to 911.
“Sonia!” she calls as she gets to her feet, then turns to the onlookers. “Has anyone seen Sonia?”
They answer with helpless expressions.
“You’re useless! All of ya!”
She tries to peer into the flames, but all she can see are antiques burning. Then out of the corner of her eye, she sees kids slipping out of the alley behind the shop. She hurries to the alley, to find it’s the AWOLs from Sonia’s basement, as she had hoped it would be.
“What happened? What happened?” she asks them.
“We don’t know! We don’t know!”
Farther down the alley, Beau pulls himself out of the broken basement window—he’s the last one out. As Grace scans the gathering of kids, she can’t find Connor, which means he hasn’t returned from whatever secret mission Sonia had sent him on. But Risa isn’t here either.
“Grace, you’re alive!” says Beau, pleased by the fact. “We’ve gotta get out of here before the fire trucks arrive.”
“Where’s Risa? Where’s Sonia?”
Beau shakes his head. “Dead,” he tells her. “Some maniac. We tried to stop him, but we couldn’t, and then he set the whole place on fire.”
“A guy with a messed-up face?”
“You know him?”
“No, but I know his face. Or part of it.”
Now the hollow wail of sirens comes to them over the treetops, distant but drawing closer—and as bad as this whole thing is, something occurs to Grace that makes it even worse.
“Where’s the printer?”
Beau looks at her as blankly as the fire watchers had. “What? Why the hell do you care about that stupid thing now?”
He doesn’t know! They never told anyone else how crucial it was, and so, without Risa or Connor there, there was no one to save it. Connor had said that the gears and mechanics and stuff were broken, but the important part—the printing part—was still okay. Maybe. But if it burns, there isn’t even “maybe” anymore.
Beau grabs her arm. “Come with us, Grace. I’ll find us a place to hide. We’ll be okay, I swear it.”
She gently pulls out of his grip. “You be smart with them, Beau. Run north, and maybe east, ’cause most people runnin’ away run south or west. Be smart, and keep them whole, you hear?”
Beau nods, and Grace turns and, without looking back, runs down the alley toward the back of the burning building.
The heat is so intense, Grace can’t even get near the back door. A few feet over, low to the ground, is that solitary window into the basement. Rather than spewing smoke, it’s drawing in air, breathing in oxygen to feed the flames above.
She gets down on her knees and peers in, but can’t see a thing—which means that there’s no fire down there!
Not yet, anyway. It may be too late to save Sonia and Risa, and for all she knows, Connor is dead too. She may be the only one left who knows of the printer’s existence.
Something heavy crashes in the shop. The flames crackle with nasty, vicious greed.
The window is so small, and she’s such a big-boned girl, she’s convinced there’s no way she can fit through the window—but she has to try. How terrible it would be if everything were to be lost because the window is too small and she’s too big. The odds are even money she’ll fit, and even money she’ll get to the printer before the floor above her collapses. That’s a 25 percent chance. Lousy odds, but they get worse the longer she hesitates.
Shutting down her survival instinct, she dives headfirst into the little rectangular hole.
As she suspected, she gets only partway through. Her hips are caught by the rigid wood, so she wriggles and squirms. The heat around her head is unbearable. And now there’s light. The angry fire spies her through the slats of wood up above, like sunlight sneaking through a closed blind.
She grabs a support beam and with all her might pulls on it, until she falls into the basement, cutting herself on broken window glass on the floor.
The air is almost entirely clear down here, because smoke only knows up—but the heat! She can feel the skin on her scalp blistering. She keeps as low as she can, rounding a corner, and there, in the place Connor left it, is the box filled with all the broken parts of the organ printer, waiting patiently for their chance to burn. Ain’t gonna happen. She grabs the box, then opens the stasis container, which is too large to take, and digs into the thick green gel to pull out the slimy ear, shoving it into the pocket of her blouse. Then she heads with the ear and the box of printer parts, back to the small window.
Behind her, a support beam gives way and the remains of the shop up above drop to the basement. The flames, fed by the oxygen-rich air, leap forward, flooding the basement like water. Grace reaches the window, shoves the printer through, then begins the monumental task of getting out the way she came in.
There’s no leverage outside. Nothing to grab on to. She’s stuck halfway in, halfway out, and she can feel the flames on her feet, melting her shoes.
“No!” she screams in furious defiance. “I won’t die this way! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”
And suddenly her deliverance arrives in the form
of a stranger grabbing her arms, and pulling. “I’ve got you!” he says. He tugs once, twice, three times. It’s the fourth tug that dislodges her.
The second she’s out, she kicks off her burning shoes, and the man helps to stamp out the fire at the cuffs of her jeans. She has no idea who he is—just a neighbor man—but she can’t help herself from throwing her arms around him. “Thank you!”
The sound of sirens now fills the air, coming from many different directions.
“An ambulance will be here in a second,” says the man. “Let me help you.”
But Grace is already on her feet and gone with the box of printer parts clasped to her breast like a baby.
39 • Connor
“There are places you could go,” Ariana told him, “and a guy as smart as you has a decent chance of surviving to eighteen.”
He’s back at the freeway overpass, on the ledge behind the exit sign. It was once his favorite escape spot/make-out spot/danger spot. This time, it feels like none of those things. And this time he’s alone.
He has been to many of the “places” Ariana had referred to. None of them were as safe as he wished they’d be. He did survive to eighteen, though. That should be enough, but it’s not. Twilight gives way to night as he nests there, on the overpass, gathering fortitude.
Ariana, a girl he thought he loved before he actually knew what love was, had promised to go with him when he kicked AWOL, but when he showed up at her door in the middle of the night, she wouldn’t even step over the threshold. It was as if there was an invisible barrier between them that could not be breached. She was remorseful, but more than that, she seemed relieved to be on the other side of that door, still welcome in her own home. It made it painfully clear how truly alone he was.
Connor was angry at her that night, and he held on to that anger for a long time. Now, however, he’s more angry at himself. Wanting her to join him in this seedy fugitive life was pure selfishness. If he truly cared for her, he would have protected her from it, rather than pull her into it.
So much has changed since then. Connor remembers hearing somewhere that it takes seven years for one’s body to purge itself of all its biological matter and replace it. Every seven years, everyone is literally a new person. For Connor, he couldn’t be more different after two years. It’s as if he’s been unwound and put back together again.
Will his parents recognize the change? Will they care? Perhaps they’ll see a stranger at their door. Or maybe they’ll be strangers to him. And then there’s his brother, Lucas. Connor can’t help but imagine him as the same thirteen-year-old he was. He won’t be. What must it be like to be the younger brother of the notorious Akron AWOL. Lucas must despise him.
The journey here began well enough. Sonia didn’t offer him her car, of course. They both knew he had to leave no ties to the antique shop, in case he got caught. Instead he stole a car that had small dunes of runoff mud wedged beneath the tires, a clear indication that it hadn’t been moved for a while, and wouldn’t be immediately missed. He could probably bring it back, park it in the same place and the owners wouldn’t even know it was gone.
The drive from Akron to Columbus took less than two hours. That was the easy part. But actually going to his old front door—that was a different story.
The reconnaissance ride through his neighborhood earlier that afternoon was the first indication of how difficult this would be. Memories of his pre-AWOL life kept leaping out so vividly, he sometimes swerved the car as if they were actual obstacles in his path—just as he did when he retrieved the stem cells with Risa and Beau. What a waste that whole excursion will have been if they can’t fix the printer. He can tell himself his reason for going home is to enlist his father’s help in repairing it, but Risa was right, it’s just an excuse. Still, if they’ve had the change of heart he dreams they’ve had, it wouldn’t be out of the question.
When he drove through his neighborhood today, it looked remarkably the same. Somehow in his mind’s eye, Connor imagined it would look vaguely postapocalyptic: overgrown, underwatered, and indefinably forlorn, as if somehow the entire suburb suffered without him. But no. The lawns and hedges were all trimmed to good-neighbor standards. He considered driving down Ariana’s street, but decided against it. Some parts of the past need to stay exactly where they are.
When he finally turned onto his street, he had to keep both hands firmly on the wheel to keep them from shaking.
Home sweet home.
It looked perfectly inviting on the outside, even if the invitation was false. For a moment, it crossed his mind that his family might have moved—until he saw the LASITR1 license plate on a shiny new Nissan coupe in the driveway. His brother’s? No, Lucas would be fifteen now, still too young to have a license. Perhaps one of his parents downsized from a sedan, having one less son to take up space.
A window was open upstairs, and Connor could hear the riffs of an electric guitar. Only then did he remember that his brother was begging for one around the time their parents signed Connor’s unwind order. The music bears none of the acoustic skills of Cam Comprix. It’s raucously dissonant—just the kind of thing that would irritate their father. Good for Lucas.
Connor had driven by twice, scouring the street for hidden officers in unmarked cars, and found none. No one would still be on the lookout for him here, now that the Juvenile Authority is convinced that the Hopi are giving Connor political asylum halfway across the country.
He could easily have made his appearance then—there was no good reason to delay it—but he made this detour anyway as a stalling tactic.
He needed to weigh Risa’s dire warnings about going home.
He needed to search his own heart to know if he really needs to risk this.
So he went to the ledge, like he had done so many times in the past when he needed to think.
The ledge is cramped and crisscrossed with the webs of oblivious spiders who have no concept of a world larger than this overpass. Funny, but all the time he spent here brooding over how unfair his life was—in the days before it actually became unfair—Connor never knew what the sign actually read on the other side. He found out that day he drove past it with Risa and Beau.
THIS LANE MUST EXIT.
Thinking about it makes him laugh, although he can’t say exactly why.
It’s dark out now. It’s been dark for a while. If he’s going to do this, he can’t wait much longer. He wonders if they’ll invite him in, and if they do, will he accept? He knows he has to keep the visit short, just in case they secretly call the police. He’ll have to watch them. Keep them both in sight the whole time he’s there. That is, if he goes in at all. He’s still not beyond aborting the whole thing at the last minute.
Finally he pulls himself over the railing, leaving the ledge behind, and returns to the car, which he parked nearby. He takes his time starting it. He takes his time driving to his street. It’s so unlike him to do anything slowly, but this act of return—it has such inertia, it’s like pushing a boulder uphill. He can only hope it doesn’t roll back to crush him.
Some lights are on in the house: the living room lights downstairs and in Lucas’s room upstairs. The light is off in the room that had been his. He wonders what it is now. A sewing room? No that’s stupid, his mother didn’t sew. Maybe just storage for all the junk that always accumulates in the house. Or maybe they left it like it was. Is there actually a part of him that hopes that? He knows that’s even less likely than a sewing room.
He passes the house, parks down the street, and pulls the four pages of his letter out of his pocket. He read it several times while on the ledge to prepare himself for this moment. It didn’t.
He walks past the driveway and turns down the little flagstone path to the front door. Anticipation speeds his heart and makes it feel as if it’s rising in his chest, trying to escape.
Maybe he’ll just hand them the letter and leave. Or maybe he’ll talk to them. He doesn’t yet know. It’s the not knowing that
makes it so hard—not knowing what they will do, but even worse, having no clue what he’s going to do either.
But whatever happens, good or bad, it will bring closure. He knows it will.
He’s halfway to the front door when a figure steps out of the shadows of the porch and stands directly in his path. Then suddenly, there’s a sharp stinging in Connor’s chest. He’s down on the ground before he even realizes he’s been shot with a tranq, and his vision goes blurry, so he can’t even tell who his attacker is as he draws near. For a moment something about his face makes him think of Argent Skinner—but it’s not Argent. Not by a long shot.
“How unceremonious,” the man says. “This moment should be grander.”
And Roland’s fist, which holds the pages of the letter so tightly, relaxes, letting the pages fall free as Connor plunges into the chemical void.
40 • Mom
Claire Lassiter takes a moment from her exhausting task of maintaining appearances. She thought she heard something out front and it’s giving her an odd sense of prescient anticipation, although she doesn’t know why. It’s nothing new. She jumps every time a pinecone falls on the roof, or a squirrel scuttles over the rain gutters. She’s been so edgy for so long, she can’t remember the last time she felt calm.
She definitely needs a vacation. They all do. But they won’t take one. There are tickets for a vacation they never took in a drawer upstairs somewhere. They ought to just throw them away, but they don’t. Funny how their lives have become all about inactivity.
A sound outside. Yes, there is definitely something happening on their front lawn. She strides to the door and opens it, expecting to see perhaps some of Lucas’s friends. Or a dog that got off its leash. Or maybe . . . or maybe . . .
Or maybe nothing at all. There’s no one there and nothing to see but some litter blowing across the lawn. She lingers for a moment daring the night to offer her something better, and when it doesn’t, she gets anxious, as if standing there is somehow tempting fate. So she closes the door once more.
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