by Lydia Millet
“I can’t believe this,” said Hayley.
“It’s crazy,” said Jaye, shaking her head.
“I’m sorry,” said Cara, staring at her trembling hands. “I’m so, so sorry I got you into this.”
“Those look bad,” said Hayley.
“You need cold water—right away,” said Jaye. “Is there water in here?”
They were being practical, Cara realized, in order to stop thinking of the Burners. She felt grateful.
Hayley got up and started scanning the long shelves, already shivering in the cold.
“There’s drinking water,” she said, and reached for a bottle.
“If we don’t have running water, we need a towel,” said Jaye. “To make a cold compress. That’s second best.”
“The only sink’s out there,” said Cara, gritting her teeth at the pain. “We can’t risk going out yet.”
“Are they just waiting?” asked Hayley.
“Look,” said Jaye, “here.”
There was a blue-and-white dishtowel hanging from a hook; Jaye grabbed it and poured water onto it from the bottle Hayley handed her.
“I hope it’s clean,” she said, and then gently laid the wet cloth over Cara’s hands. “You have to keep it there a while.”
The coolness felt good at first, but the towel was also scratchy and the textured loops of thread started to feel like they were stabbing the sensitive skin if she moved her hands even a little. Cara bit her lip and sat looking down at her trembling arms. Her heart was still beating too fast.
“You’re gonna be OK,” said Jaye gently, kneeling down beside her. “It’s only first degree. I’m almost sure. There aren’t any blisters yet, at least.”
“Cara. What the hell were those things?” said Hayley.
She unscrewed a second bottle of water and glugged from it.
“They’re called elementals,” said Cara. She was trying to keep from crying, the burns hurt so much; talking slowly and deliberately seemed to help. It kept her focused on something other than her hands. “They’re not human.”
“Hmm, really,” said Hayley, and swallowed a big gulp. “No kidding. Those things were like CGI. They were walking special effects.”
“Too bad they don’t keep aspirin in here,” said Jaye.
Looking up from her hands, Cara saw Hayley’s eyebrows were singed, the top hairs black and curling, and some stray hairs on her head, too. It must have been burning hair she smelled.
Hayley put her hand up, seeing Cara’s gaze rest there, and touched her eyebrows; the burnt ends came off on her fingers. She stared at them. For a long moment Cara had the distinct sensation that all three of them were in an unreality; they would wake up, like people did in a bad movie, and all of this would turn out to be a dream.
“I don’t know what the elementals are, exactly,” she went on, shaking it off and wincing as one of her hands shifted and the tender skin scraped painfully on the towel. “But they work for this guy called the Cold One, or just the Cold. There are four kinds. The Pouring Man was a water elemental, which meant he needed water to move around in. There had to be some form of water for him to show up in a place. These guys are fire, obviously. They need fire or at least heat. It’s the four elements, the ancient elements—remember that Classics unit we had in History? So there must be others, too. Earth and air, I guess.”
“Huh,” said Hayley. “Earth, that seems kind of lame. Like what are they going to do, scare us with potted plants?”
Cara tried to laugh at that, but she could barely crack a smile.
“How about air,” said Jaye. “I mean, if some move through water, and some through fire, they have some major limits, right? But air is everywhere. We breathe it. I wouldn’t want to meet up with those guys.”
They sat in silence for a minute. Cara looked up at her friends; they looked small and…well, unsure of themselves. Anyone would be, she thought, and this was just them, three girls in junior high and those blackened things outside the door.
“Listen,” she said. “What we need to do is get out of the building, right? I’m pretty sure it’s too cold for them in the night air.”
“But they could be out there,” said Jaye. “Right outside the fridge door. That window is too small, even if it weren’t all fogged up. How could we even tell if they left?”
“I’m going to try to find out,” said Cara.
She could use the nazar, at least.
She looked down at the towel, a field of nubbly blue and white over her trembling hands.
“Jaye,” she said, “can you take the towel off? I mean, really slowly?”
Jaye shook her head. “We shouldn’t lift it. Not yet. Give it five more minutes.”
“OK. But then we have to make a move.”
“Eee-yeah. And what move would that be?” asked Hayley.
Cara shook her head. She was going to figure this out; they weren’t going to be stuck in here. Her mother was imprisoned; her baby brother was imprisoned, because that wasn’t him behind those eyes. She refused to be trapped, too.
“What did they want from us?” asked Jaye.
Cara remembered the book. She’d almost forgotten it, preoccupied with the pain shooting across her palms. She turned her head carefully and looked down.
Jaye and Hayley had to pick it up, since Cara couldn’t use her hands yet. They lifted the big, empty book and placed it on a box in front of her; they opened it together, one on each side of her.
Beneath the wet towel, Cara raised one shaking hand over the other, palms still up, and very gently touched her ring. Just with a fingernail.
She closed her eyes and pictured her mother, thinking the question: Where is she? She thought of nothing else, just her mother. It was hard at first because trying to think of her mother made her think of herself missing her mother… which she knew was wrong. She had to think more clearly than that. So one by one she pulled up memories of her mother. There she was when Cara was very young, smiling down with a paper mobile of seagulls behind her head; there she was at school when Cara was in first grade, putting Cara’s lunchbox in a cubby, smiling at another mother over Cara’s head. She always seemed to have been smiling then.
Cara remembered that smile and focused on it. Where is she? Where is my mother?
And when she opened her eyes again, the white of the pages was moving like snow drifting across an Arctic landscape, or clouds passing each other with faint shadings of gray in the white. It was beautiful. All three of them stared; Jaye gasped.
Dark colors flared onto the page. They washed across it, unfurling into a moving scene as detailed and vivid as a high-def screen. It was night and there was a huge gray-black building with a few small lights in windows and multiple smokestacks sticking into the night sky like pillars. There were also massive white towers that reminded Cara of old pictures of nuclear disasters, wide at the bottom and curving in and then out again as they rose.
“Oh my God,” breathed Hayley.
“A factory?” asked Cara.
“Actually, I think it’s a power plant,” said Jaye.
So they could see it, too. It wasn’t one of her visions. Or at least, it wasn’t only that.
“But it’s—is it animation?” said Hayley. “What is it?”
Then Cara noticed the edges of the book were also changing. They didn’t look like book pages anymore; the paper and binding faded.
What they looked like was a window frame.
“Um. It seems to be turning into a window,” said Jaye.
And there was something about the picture: it wasn’t a picture. It wasn’t 2D at all.
“Touch it,” whispered Cara to Jaye.
Jaye tentatively reached out her hand.
There was space there. Her hand didn’t knock up against anything. She jerked it back.
“Just—space,” she said, awed.
“That’s how we get away,” said Cara. “We go there.”
“Go there?” asked Hayley.
&n
bsp; “It’s where my mother’s being held,” said Cara. “That was the question that I asked.”
“This is scary,” said Hayley, and sat heavily down on a box. “It’s way too weird.”
“We have to go,” said Cara. “Even if I brought up a different place, the only way for us to get away from these guys is through”—she pointed down at the window that had once been a book—”this right here.”
“You want us to step into some kind of window that—that isn’t really there?”
“We don’t know where that place even is,” said Jaye. “It could be Afghanistan. It could be anywhere.”
“We have to,” said Cara. “It’s what we’re supposed to do.”
“That’s all you got?” asked Hayley. “We’re supposed to? That’s messed up. It makes me feel queasy.”
“Look,” said Jaye, in a grim tone.
She was pointing at the refrigerator door.
At the small window in the door, glass white with steam. It seemed to be melting—melting and trailing in grayish lumps down the metal.
Cara watched a stream of it race down the door’s inside. It hissed and sizzled like drops of water hitting a hot stove.
“Hold my arms,” she said, and stood.
She was above the open book that had turned into a window. She still had the wet cloth on her hands.
“Grab my arms!’ she urged, when her friends didn’t move. “Now.”
She felt them clutching her upper arms (even that hurt her hands as they moved against the rough cloth of the towel), but she squeezed her eyes shut and raised one foot and stepped forward into nothingness.
It was like falling. No: it was falling. Her stomach flipped, and she wanted to yell in terror: she was stepping off a ledge into thin air—down, down, with no idea how it would end.
Then it did. Her feet made contact with a solid, flat surface: she was hitting the ground. She held her hands up reflexively, held them out and fell onto her elbows instead; that hurt, too. But not anything like as badly as the burns.
They were on an expanse of dried-out, brown grass. Strewn through the grass were the white smudges of cigarette butts, dirty Styrofoam cups, and crushed soda cans in the tangle of weeds. In front of them was a high, chain-link fence with razor wire curling on top; behind it was the massive power plant.
Wherever they were, it wasn’t Narnia.
But they were safe from the Burners, anyway. At least for now.
She sat up. Hayley groaned beside her, and Jaye kicked at Cara’s shin by mistake, struggling to get upright.
Off to their left there were what looked like low, black hills—piles of powdered coal, Cara realized—along with a big A-frame building made of metal. There were long chutes going up and down between buildings farther off, and a row of freight cars sitting on a railroad track. Off to the right was a row of tall lights, which shone brightly over water that glittered in large, square ponds with banks of cement.
“That was amazing!” squeaked Jaye, breathless. “I can’t believe that—that happened to me! Is it—Cara, seriously—is it magic? Is that what it is?”
“I don’t know,” said Cara honestly. “I don’t know how it works.”
“What matters is we’re in the middle of nowhere,” said Hayley, brushing dirt off her clothes as she stood up.
“Or at least, at a coal-fired power plant,” amended Jaye. “In the middle of nowhere.”
Cara looked up at the fence with its sharp wire.
“Would have been nice,” she admitted, “if the book had put us inside that.”
The book, she thought, and looked around in a panic.
And there it was, on the ground behind them. Looking like nothing special—just a big, flat book with a dark cover.
Hopefully they could use it again, thought Cara. To get back.
“This place is huge,” said Hayley. “How are we supposed to find your mom in there? It’s the size of, like, a small city.”
“One step at a time. We just have to trust the flow,” said Cara.
“Rad,” said Hayley. “Next you’ll be telling me what color my aura is.”
“I mean the flow of events—like we have to take it one step at a time,” said Cara. “First we need to find an opening in the fence. Because even if we could make it over the razors, I can’t climb with my hands like this. Can one of you guys carry the book again?”
Jaye leaned down to pick it up.
Left or right? Cara didn’t know. She touched the nazar again, her hands still shaky though the pain was starting to ebb a little, and tried to ask it for a picture, but all she got was a faint urge to go left instead of right. In fact, she couldn’t tell if the urge was something she was making up or something that was real. But nothing more definite occurred to her, so she decided she might as well go with it.
“This way,” she said, trying to sound confident.
They skirted the chain-link fence in the dark. Hayley was right: it was uncomfortable not to know where they were. They could be anywhere—anywhere it was fall right now, anyway, anywhere that had power plants—and that gave Cara an unmoored feeling, as though the place was only half-there. The night world was huge, and somewhere in that darkness, cut loose from everything they knew and everyone who knew them, she and her two best friends crept over the surface as tiny as ants.
If Jax were with them, she thought, he’d use his GPS in a way she could never use hers. (Jax could do things with his phone she didn’t hope to understand.) He’d tell her right away how far it was to the nearest bus stop, the nearest gas station or all-night diner. Probably even the nearest bathroom.
And if Max were here, he’d make a joke or two and she wouldn’t have to feel like success or failure was all on her. Her friends were here, and they were great, but she’d brought them into this and it would be her fault if anything happened to them.
She realized she was truly relieved it was her hands that had got burned, not anyone else’s.
“Look!” said Jaye. “There!”
Sure enough, the fence was ripped; part of it had been pried away from one of the metal posts that connected its sections, and there was a long, thin triangular opening.
“So much for Homeland Security,” said Hayley, whose mother was almost as interested in terrorists as she was in kidnappers and perverts. “Someone could just walk in and plant a bomb or whatever. We could be Al Qaeda. The nation is, like, completely lucky it’s just us.”
They bent down, Jaye holding the book sideways, and one by one they ducked through.
“Are there guards?” asked Jaye, and answered her own question. “There have to be guards. And cameras and all that. If they catch us, they’ll definitely not let us in.”
They saw the long, bright stripe of a searchlight slowly sweeping the ground around the outside of the main building, originating from somewhere up on the roof. It disappeared at the far end of the complex, to their right, and then rotated around and started up again at the left.
“I don’t know if we can stay hidden,” said Cara. “I think that light moves faster than we can.”
“We’ll have to try to outrun it,” said Jaye. “What else can we do?”
“Just don’t drop that book thing, Jaye,” warned Hayley. “I really don’t want to get stuck here.”
Cara watched the beam scope across the lake of cement stretching before them.
“We wait till the leading end of the light passes us, then make a dash for it,” she decided. “And cross our fingers we get to the building before it starts up again. Let’s aim for that double door, OK?”
She raised an aching hand and pointed.
As they waited for the searchlight to finish its circuit and begin again, she closed her eyes and touched the ring. Where is she? she thought. Where in the power plant? Where? Where?
And then she saw something: pipes stretching across a floor, with a grid of wooden slats beneath them. Something clouding the air. But Hayley’s voice interrupted.
“G
o! Now!”
Her friends were already running, and the beam was moving off to her right. The vision had only seemed to last a second, but she must have been standing there for longer without being aware of time passing…. She sprinted after them, arms rigid at her side to keep her hands from flopping around more than they had to. She could feel the blood throbbing in her fingers, making her more conscious of the soreness. Just get to the doors, she told herself, just make it to the doors, and then we’ll be out of the searchlight’s scope….
She was catching up to Jaye, she realized, who was running a little slower than Hayley since she had the book under one arm; over the hard ground, first on dried grass, then on concrete. She was dimly aware of some machinery off to the left, more chutes or silos or something, silent and angular in one corner of the lot; then the doors loomed.
“It’s coming around again!” yelled Jaye, and they picked up their pace and then jerked to a stop to avoid slamming against the wall of the building. A bright white light glared over their heads, then left them in the dark again. Or not quite dark—there were other lights on the building itself—but Cara didn’t see anyone around who might notice them.
They stood panting, Cara’s hands trembling again and tears standing on the rims of her eyes, whether from the force of the air as she ran or from the pain in her hands she couldn’t quite figure out.
“Made it,” breathed Hayley.
“So far so good,” said Jaye, and Cara contented herself with a brief nod as she tried to still the shaking.
They listened, expecting the sound of an alarm to pierce the night, but none came. Cara focused again on what she’d seen: an empty room. Pipes. Water spraying from them onto a wooden lattice below.
“Jaye,” she said when she caught her breath. “Do you know anything about the inside of places like this?”
Jaye shook her head.
“My dad took me to a plant once,” she said. “That old one in Sandwich, right before the bridge. But I was really little. Why?”
“I think my mother’s in a room with water,” said Cara.
“There’s lots of water in power plants,” said Jaye. “That could be anywhere.”
“Water is spraying down,” said Cara. “All these little nozzles are coming out of pipes, and water is spraying down from them. Then, beneath that, there was a kind of wooden grid….”