The Children(106)

“No.” He bent to prod at her feet clumsily, one-armed. The other arm he held to his chest, bloody hand wrapped. As he rose his eyes bored into her, irises bled of color by the night.

A single thought—an image, really—punctured the clamor in her head. Edith staring with that same empty intensity. Standing in the great room, her own left hand curled to her chest. I’ve lost my finger.

Guinevere screamed. It rang through the cold air like a caroler’s high note.

Ennis pressed his good hand to her mouth. It tasted awful and smelled of ash. “No time.” He gave her a warning look before pulling his hand away. “Go to our house.”

“En—”

“Run.”

And she did.

Not far. She was crashing through the orchard when she changed her mind, a tiny spike of resistance poking up like saw grass. At the edge of the woods was a sycamore she’d climbed enough times that when she got there she began scaling it mechanically, up and up, until she could see over the tops of the peaches. All the windows of the kitchen glowed orange.

“Guin!” He’d followed close behind, was at the base of the tree. “What are you doing?”

Her teeth were chattering. “Where are they? Where’s everyone else?”

“I don’t know!” His eyes so wide and white. “I yelled for them, I—maybe they went out the front.”

Ennis had set the fire. He had. The knowledge howled around her like a whiteout. She’d be living inside it for the rest of her life. “Go look.” She sobbed it. “Go find Dad.”

He looked over his shoulder, hesitating. It could still be okay. The flames hadn’t spread yet, they didn’t have a single sting. “Yeah. Okay. Stay right there.”

Before he could move, the fire in the kitchen turned blue.

A smokeless planetary blue. It was so beautiful her fear drained away.

Guinevere perched in the branches. Her brother stood below, good hand pressed to the bark. The world breathed long and slow as the blueness stole from window to window, like a deity extending one blinding arm. When the entire first floor had flooded with cobalt light it no longer even seemed like fire. Maybe—Guinevere told herself, with a child’s desperation—it would just turn off.

The children leaned in. To see what would happen next, to hear the unnatural silence.

The windows blew out. A coordinated explosion of glass and smoke. The moment broke and the flames rose until they were orange and ordinary, the sounds of house fire swallowing everything.

Time ran wrong for a while. It melted like metal in a crucible. There was a noise that might have been screaming, but maybe fire could sound like that, as it devours wood, glass, flesh, air.

Guinevere was in the tree, then she was on the ground, the bottoms of her feet singing and her back cold where her nightgown ripped open on the trunk. Her skin was scraped all along her spine; hours later they’d have to soak the fabric to remove it.

Dryad’s road rash. She heard the words in her father’s voice, which she would never hear again. By the time Guinevere hit the ground, she and Ennis were the only living people for miles.



* * *




That night would return to her often. Sometimes its lures were obvious. If she’d wanted to catch it, she would bait her trap with the odors of inland October—wood fire, cold trees, the winey rot of fallen fruit. Certain sounds could do it: the hiss tick of a record bobbing against its end, the huff of a gas stove catching. It came at unlikely moments, too. The trigger could be anything.

These flashbacks had the taste of nightmare. When she was actually living it, their flight through the trees was too familiar to be frightening. She was in the one well-loved place that was left to her. Lungs aching, feet numb, she ran through all the seasons she’d spent in these woods.

Spring, when the air was so soft it ripped open like paper, revealing another, greener land below. Autumn a synesthete’s paradise, leaves Crayola bright and the last of the berries dried to jam on the briar. Summers slow and still, winters slower, stiller. Every branch and twig encased in shining ice. These were her woods. What harm could come to her here?

Only once had she been lost inside them. It had all been so dreamlike—the red dog, the black bear. A prelude, surely, to a fairy tale. Life since then had swept the glitter from her eyes. But now she was back in that timeless place, wishing for the clockwork of some other narrative to catch and carry her away from this one.

If she could find the Architect’s tree, chiming with keys of every color. In its branches a tower, in its roots a stair. If this unkempt wilderness could give way to the eerie order of the milk-white wood that grew in the caverns below the Ninth City. Please. Please. She begged for it with every strike of her feet on dirt.

Guinevere tripped and caught herself against a trunk, arm yanked back like a wing. It dropped her back to Earth, where she was forced to remember. The fire came up and the house went down and all the stories were gone. Her mother’s typewriter, her stacks of pages. And her mother. And—

Hello, my fairy. My blue-eyed girl.

Ennis was crying and he kept saying something, god knew what. I didn’t mean to, probably, or I’m sorry. She wouldn’t let his remorse reach her. She felt no pain, though she’d wake with scrapes and bruises that followed her well into her second life, far from this one. Tomorrow they would wash her brother’s blood off her skin and the smell of warm iron would make her thrash and scream. Tonight she barely responded when he cupped her face and said, “A little farther.”