by Jeff Sweat
“What else you know about the Old Guys?” Jemma says.
“They real old. They smart. But they gone.” Pico needs to know about them, Lady thinks. The Ice Cream Man still wants to talk about ice cream, and somehow so does she, about the sweet and milk and cold and the everything gone from the world.
“The Parents hads magic to keep it cold on the hot hot days. They mades it and carried it in these carts, and it’s never gonna get mades until the Parents comes again.”
“Until the Parents comes again,” Alfie says wonderingly.
“Then it’s lost forever,” Jemma says.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE BETTERMENT
By the time the sun climbs high enough to break over the bank, Jemma’s sure she can see it, as if there are two buckets attached to a yoke. Every drop of life that goes into Pico seems to siphon from Apple. Pico’s breath eases, Apple’s struggles; Pico cools and Apple burns. How long before one bucket is completely empty?
As much as she wants Pico to be full and living, she can’t help but hate him for emptying Apple. But Pico opens his eyes and sees her. He doesn’t speak or move, and she’s not sure he could, but his eyes are warm and liquid and, she thinks, grateful.
They agree to stay where they are near the river. The Ice Cream Man scouts out a Long Gone old gasplace a block from the water and helps them move the boys by draping them across the box of his ice cream cart. A huge awning shields the glass front, where three of the four panes somehow still hold. A palm tree splits the platform where the gas pumps rest, and one of the pumps has tipped over. Another palm grows up from the floor through a hole in the roof. They set up camp between the empty shelves.
As they haul Pico’s stuff into the gasplace, the pack falls to the floor and the Half Holy’s book drops out of it. Jemma doesn’t think to hide it, because who else but Pico would know what it means?
“Where you gets that book?” the Ice Cream Man says. Jemma sees that it’s opened to the gruesome pictures of the End.
“In the Holy Wood,” Lady says. “Why?”
“Ice Cream Men finds em all over the Wilds. In big shiny places like the bookhouses, bookskins you gots to touch.” Libraries, Jemma thinks. “Insides are End pics, always pics, on newy paper. They don’t fits.”
“Someone left it?” she says.
“They just waits on you to touch. People try to trades to me, but what I gonna do with books?”
And Jemma nods. What, before now, would they have done with books?
Then the two are gone, although she can hear the tinkling for minutes after the cart disappears.
“How am I still alive?” Pico says, sitting up. “Am I getting better?”
“We got you medsen,” Jemma says.
“You Gathered?”
“We traded,” she says. For everything.
* * *
Pico’s not sure he’ll ever move again. It isn’t the sharpness of the pain, although it still burns fierce in his leg. It’s the way the pain seems to be everywhere at once, even in the parts of his body that shouldn’t hurt, as if the rest of his body were just feeling sorry for the leg.
The case rests under his hand, hard and cold and smooth. Did the girl bring it to him?
Jemma. Jemma is the girl, the sad one. There’s a curly-haired girl here somewhere.
The boy next to him, wrapped up in blankets and sweating—that was him a day or a week ago. “Is the boy dying?” he says.
“His name’s Apple,” Jemma says.
Apple. And then he remembers it all. If Pico’s awake, Apple should be, too. They were sick together. He motions to Apple, as if he could communicate all that with his fingers.
“There was only medsen for one of you,” Jemma says.
Then he understands why Jemma is sad, why maybe she will never be not sad again. He’s sad, too. Apple was the first one to trust a useless Exile. He saved them from the bear. He believed they could find the answers to the End.
In the confusion, in the grief, Pico pulls back to the silver box. At first he can only rest with the case, dozing between breaths. He dreams it’s being carried away, and he pulls it under his arm like a doll. No one will take it away now.
The mystery of the case breathes life into his mind. Those tendrils of wonder creep into his head, unlocking doors that had been shutting down, and consciousness throws those doors wide. He doesn’t know when it happens, but his eyes are fixed on the case, watching his thumb as it flicks at the latch.
“You want some help with that?” Lady says. He’s not sure when she came back.
“No,” he says, still weak. “By the time I’m strong enough to open it, I’ll be strong enough to look at it.”
“You sure?”
“I’m not sure I’m even here right now.”
She lies down by him, and he’s grateful for the warmth against his side. He hasn’t felt warm for days. “Still cold,” he says.
“You feel hot. Wonder when your fever’s gonna break?”
His fingers don’t seem to be any better at the latch, as if they just can’t get the feel for the metal. But he doesn’t want to wait longer. “I was wrong,” he says.
“What?”
“I want you to open it.”
She opens the case and drops the ancient paper into his grateful hands. He’s too tired to thank her, but he knows she knows he means it.
Pico can’t focus on the words yet—all those scrawls require too much concentration—but having the smooth roughness under his fingers brings the words he’s already seen back.
It attacks the brain. If the brain changes when you become a Parent, what if it doesn’t change? Is that how Leong survived the End by getting hit in the head? Do the Touched die first because their brains are more like a Parent’s?
The papers fall into the case again, his cheek against the floor.
It’s noon and the sun through Long Gone streaked glass finally soaks through his skin. “Time for Zithmax,” Lady says, her eyes studying his face, looking for breaks in his illness. She looks relieved.
“How you think Apple is?” Pico says.
“Bout the same.”
That’s what it looks like to Pico. If anything, Apple seems a little stronger.
Lady tilts a litro and helps him drink. “You turning into quite the Mama,” he says, and is just alert enough to know he’s used the wrong words. There’s a flash of something across her eyes and forehead, and then it’s gone.
“It’s just that you a giant baby,” she says. She leaves. Jemma left minutes ago, and it’s just him and Apple.
Apple hasn’t moved all day. By the way Jemma acts around him, she doesn’t expect him to move again. He’s sorry for it, but he’s never been so glad to breathe in his life. This is why the End matters. Because not Ending just feels too good.
He flips through the papers, maybe too fast, because they blur dizzily together. He looks up to see Apple, tired and sickly but definitely alive, sitting up and trying to make sense of the room. He shouldn’t be sitting. He should be dying.
“Hey, Piquito,” Apple says. “You figure the case out, or what?”
The girls are closer than he thinks. One shout from Pico and they come running.
* * *
Apple is tired. He’s been swimming in rivers of brea, fighting the current and the pull of the earth. It wants him under. The Last Lifer in the tarpit is there, small, smaller than Pico. She clings on to his shoulder like a snail, inching up toward his neck as he sinks into the brea.
“I got you,” he says.
“You don’t got nothin,” she says.
The fight leaves him, and the moment he stops kicking is the moment he realizes he doesn’t have to. The brea is thicker than water. It bears his weight and the Last Lifer’s. He revels in the way it cushions his limbs. You don’t have to swim, he thinks. You wait for the current to carry you to shore.
Then the brea is rift by fire, by streams of light. Whatever held it together separates as if
he’s tugging on a cobweb. It’s not black and dank. It’s honey, it’s gold. He’s Apple, and he will live.
Apple is awake.
He opens his eyes and speaks without quite knowing what he says, sees Pico staring back at him. Then Pico is shouting and Jemma and Lady are staring at him, too. No one expected him to wake. It makes him wonder if he’s already dead.
Lady tackles him in a hug that almost knocks him back to his blankets. Her chin tucks in behind his neck, her curls covering most of his face. She feels real. He must still be here. “Jesucristo, Apple,” she says.
“Was I gone a long time?” he says.
“Long gone,” she says.
Lady steps back and for the first time since he woke he really sees Jemma. She’s rooted to the tiles just inside the door. Her arms are rigid, her hatchet halfway up as if she forgot she was lifting it. Her face is rigid, too, like a cast she’s made of herself. Nothing moves on the outside, but the inside Jemma threatens to burst.
Her eyes flare. She is sharp and terrible and beautiful—as the version of Jemma in his head has always been. And he’s so glad he could wake up to her again.
“You came back,” she says, and then she collapses into his arms, soft again. Without my help is the part she doesn’t say.
* * *
“Is it possible to get better without Zithmax?” Jemma says that night after they light the fire. It scorches the tile floor. The smoke winds its way up to the hole torn by the palm tree.
“Clearly,” Lady says. Apple already looks as if he’s taken most of the Zithmax bubbles.
“Apple’s a lot stronger than most kids. Maybe strong enough to fight fections on his own,” Pico says.
“True,” Jemma says.
“Could be,” Apple says, but he wonders.
“I got some new stuff to talk about from the case,” Pico says.
“Maybe not tonight, Pico. Tonight I wanna hang with Jemma,” he says. With his girl? There isn’t a word for them in the Holy Wood. There’s nothing to describe what it is when you have each other.
Jemma’s face floods with light and something else. She helps him outside, but he can walk pretty well already without her help. His leg feels better.
They sit on the hood of a car, a car built for speed like a falcon but now grounded. Ivy grows through the tires. The gasplace windows are lit up from the fire like a lantern. Any fighter in a mile could see the glow, a sign saying to come attack. “We need to move the fire back, make it smaller,” he says, needing her to think more like a Muscle now.
Jemma nods. “That ain’t why you wanted to come out here.”
“Nah? Why then?”
“Cuz I didn’t pick you. When you knew I was gonna pick you. You talked me out of it, and I let you.”
“What you want, Jemma?” he says. Not offering her condemnation or especially forgiveness, because that she could never forgive. Just letting her say what she couldn’t say the night she let him die.
“I wanted you,” she says. “Even when I picked Pico.”
“I wanted you, too,” he says.
He remembers the feeling in the Stacks that he was floating away like a kite and the tug of Jemma pulling him back to the ground. She’s the reason he’s still here at all.
But now he feels planted, and when they kiss, this time, it’s as if he’s towing her in by a rope wrapped around his hand while her feet fly up in the air in a giant wind. She’s the one who needs mooring.
“I wanna roll with you,” she says.
“I wanna roll with you. I always have.” But still—
If they don’t roll together tonight, she will regret it. If they do, she will regret it even more, because she will never separate the rolling from everything else about to follow. Because, he believes, it soon will follow.
“Maybe tomorrow, when I feel better,” he says.
“Not agreeing to anything like that,” she says. “Gonna take advantage of your miracle cure.” He understands. He’s waited for tomorrow too often for this. No one in the Holy Wood waits. Nothing in him wants to wait.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
She looks stung, but just a little. She kisses him so close, clings to him so hard, that he almost changes his mind.
“I been thinking about your visions,” he says.
She sits back, puzzled. This isn’t what she expected, but there are things he needs to say, words he needs to leave as a gift.
“They don’t mean nothing,” she says. “You know now they don’t.”
“They mean something. Mean the gods picked the right person to talk to.”
“Why would they pick me?” she says. “I ain’t that strong. I ain’t that good.”
“You strong and good enough,” Apple says. “But maybe it’s how you imagine the world to be. You see what it was before. You believe it can be more. No one believes like that. Maybe the gods come to you cuz you needed it. Cuz you opened up a crack to let em in.”
Jemma’s ribs move under his hand. He’s aware that she’s speaking in response but feels it as a vibration under his fingertips and not a voice in his ears. He smiles at her and his face seems to split. His body lurches—no, his insides lurch, falling through him toward his feet.
He’s shivering when a second ago there was no cold. “Can you get me a blanket?” he says. Jemma slips into the gasplace, and the moment she closes the door, Apple staggers away, each step rooted in the ground while his shoulders wobble through the air. Like no earthly thing he’s felt. This has to be it.
Wild images flash before him, outlined in golden haze. The gasplace right now, a cannibal shivering in a pipe, a boy on a strange kind of bike, a man from the Long Gone, with a beard and wrinkles. None of it from right now except the gasplace. He wills himself to find something real, and then Jemma’s eyes are there. Squinting, brown, skeptical. Smiling.
Hold them in the center, he thinks. Hold them. They float above him, and he pulls them to his chest. Then he floats with them. The feeling changes.
The haze around the gas pumps floats like sparks from a hundred fires, falling on him with no heat and no terror. The sparks are gold. They look like something he’s seen before. They cling to the hairs of his arms.
When he breathes, his lungs double. His heart stops pounding, stops pulsating in the night. The feeling—as if he’s lit a fire in his chest, but it’s warm and good and threatens to eat up all the evil in the world. The feeling that he’s stronger than he ever has been. As if he can’t be broken.
Tingling, too small to see, moves through his chest. He inhales and something sharp enters his nose, a scent come to life. His vision is sharper. He can see the sparks flowing through the sky. They stretch out into the night, until the sky is a web of glowing gold haze.
Then he knows where he’s seen the sparks and the images before, or at least who has seen them. He has to get back to Jemma.
The gods didn’t mean for us to feel this much. He never wants to stop feeling it.
* * *
When Jemma emerges from the gasplace, Apple is standing well clear from the car, slowly spinning under the stars. He shouldn’t be able to move. He was all but dead this morning. For the first time, she’s afraid of the healing.
“Apple, you okay?”
“Never better,” he says, as if he’s struggling over his own tongue. She draws closer and he points to his waistband above his left hip. He motions to her to pull it down.
She does. There, below the arc of his hip bone, is the ugly mess of the bear wound. But it seems to have disappeared in the firelight. She looks closer, and it’s there, but getting smaller and smaller before her eyes. She looks at his shoulder where the lump of his broken collarbone jutted out yesterday. He’s better. He’s not supposed to be better.
When she looks up, she sees a mix of fear and awe in Apple’s eyes. Hers would only show fear. She’s never seen this happen before, but she knows how it works.
“The Betterment,” she says. The moment before the End when
your body becomes right, when it starts to fix itself. That’s what brought Apple back from the dead.
“Jemma,” he says, trying to hold her in the center of his vision. Every word seems to take everything. “The End. It’s like your haze. But I see gold instead of blue.”
“What?”
“The haze is like…” His voice trails off, distracted by whatever else is struggling in his head.
“Apple, I don’t care about the haze, I—”
“Jemma,” Apple says again, but something is wrong with his voice; it’s tight and raw, then something’s wrong with his face. Blood is trickling down his nose, down his ears. She can’t mark all the changes in his body because soon she knows it will be much, much worse. He collapses.
His eyes are confused, but he can still speak. “I didn’t—I thought I knew how—”
“Apple, don’t,” she says, sobbing and squeezing his hand. He gives her a strange smile. A holy smile. His eyes are kind and nothing. She knows what will happen, what always happens, but still she has to act it out. She will run into the gasplace, screaming, and Lady will pull out her bag, and they will try to stop the bleeding. They will chant and moan and finally close his eyes and light the body fire.
She knows all this, and maybe she just can’t find the will because it’s her Apple and he’s fading. So when Jemma steps into the gasplace after kissing his lips again, she says it so quietly that at first the other two can’t hear: “It’s Apple. He’s at the End.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE FLAMES AND THE FLOOD
Pico lights a torch and drops it into the pile of smashed furniture under Apple’s body. All his scars are gone, even the ones Apple carried from the lion. His body is straight and smooth and new as the flames ignite around him. Pico thinks: Before the End kills you, it tries to fix you first.
Why does the End try to heal you? And why don’t you stay healed?
He’s not sure why his head is still trying to solve the puzzle even when he’s mourning the first person who truly grasped what he was. But that’s how he’s always dealt with harshness: by setting his brain to work. The body fire climbs. Emotion, so rare for him, creeps into his face. Your friend fell to the End, just like everyone. This is the perfect time to ask questions about it.