“What do we do with these two?” Cate asked.
I considered the two remaining men, who watched me back, darting eyes letting me know they still were trapped in there. I could kill them off. Have them shoot each other. Tell them to walk one by one into the river and stay there until the water filled their lungs. Isabelle had called them here because she knew they would just keep on hunting us down, stalking us, killing us off. Using the proof of Fiona’s abilities to rip away our last shreds of privacy and thrust us into the spotlight. Killing them now would end that, at least.
But I exhaled. “Take their weapons.”
The three of us let go of each other’s hands. Brisk and quick, not speaking, we patted the men down, disarming them. They’d brought rope, duct tape. Guns. A knife that glinted with cruel jagged teeth, in the evening sun. A book of matches—I remembered that scorched clearing, all the life bleached out of it.
I found the cartridge. A square not much longer than a deck of playing cards. So small to hold so much history inside it. I’d once thought this was the only remaining proof of who Fiona was, but now I thought of her—out there, somewhere—still growing, still changing, very much alive.
When we were done, I pulled back. “Turn yourselves in.” I raised my voice. “Confess. Tell the world what you did to Delilah, and to Vera, and to Patricia.”
The two surviving men hovered there for a second, as if letting the instructions penetrate the surfaces of their brains. Then they began moving out of the clearing, quiet and obedient. The only sound was the light crunch of their footsteps. I watched their forms retreat into the distance until I couldn’t see them anymore. The three of us stood alone. Orange Shirt’s head was haloed by a creeping pool of blood.
“God, Morrow, I can’t believe you did that,” said Cate.
“I can’t believe it either.” My voice betrayed the slightest tremor.
“Where do we even go from here?” Cate asked.
“We’re going to rescue my mother,” I said. “We’re going to find Bellanger.”
46
We’d been driving endlessly. The sun through the windshield was so hot and unrelenting that it nearly blurred away my vision, a wash of surreal white. Outside, the landscape was as jagged and unforgiving as an alien planet. All rust-colored rock, serrated cliff edges, ground that was heat-cracked into wide-ranging geometric patterns.
“This should be it,” I said.
I slowed. The three of us gazed around, feeling our optimism evaporate in the endless, noiseless glare of the heat. The air-conditioning rattled ineffectually, puffing out a lukewarm breath. I knew I should be sweating, but my skin was sticky rather than damp, the sweat evaporating too quickly. We had our plastic thermos of drinking water, stale and hot, nearly empty. My tongue was heavy in my mouth. I glanced at the Volvo’s fuel gauge, the arrow hovering right above E. We were miles from any gas station, and if this wasn’t the right spot, we’d need to retreat back to the closest semblance of civilization. Try again tomorrow. Or the next day.
“There’s nothing here,” Isabelle said softly.
Not quite nothing. Strange rock formations, bubbled archways and sharp wedges, rose from the ground in the distance. It’d been a long time since we’d encountered any paved roads. I double-checked the road map where I’d carefully marked the coordinates Junior had given me over the phone. “This should be the edge of Bellanger’s land,” I said. “We’re going to have to search.”
But I didn’t move, not wanting to waste a drop of precious fuel. The desert was so empty: a broad scoop of a sky, cloudless. High above us, a bird suspended inside a current, a dark blot. I was surprised to see any sign of life. It seemed like we three were the only ones reckless and desperate enough to be out here, cut loose from the world’s natural laws.
“Are you sure we can trust Junior?” Cate said beside me, fanning herself with the notebook.
“He did get the Grassis’ address right. Just seventeen years too late.”
Cate shook her head. “I mean, can we trust him?”
“I don’t think he’d lie about this.” But a spike of uncertainty ran along my spine. After all this, I’d ended up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by blanched sky, looking for a dead man who refused to appear—
“Look,” Isabelle said.
It took me only a second to realize what she was pointing to. In the pale sky, a bright, plummeting arc. The bird. No longer suspended, it dropped from the sky, a blaze like a shooting star. I recognized why: it had caught fire, a flame that began at its tip and then rapidly ate away its whole body. Before the little doomed comet even touched the ground, it was nothing, dissolving into the heat of the day.