“I guess we’re at the right place,” I said.
* * *
After we’d pushed the bodies into the river, we’d gathered our things and left Freshwater. We drove, following the directions Junior had given us. The three of us were bruised and tattered from the fight; Cate did her best to mend our wounds, but she had trouble using her abilities on herself. “It’s always been like this,” she’d said straightforwardly. Her own eye stayed mottled and swollen, an ugly reminder of what a close escape we’d had. Inside the car, though, we felt alive and vicious with purpose, driving into the future and into the past at the same time.
Lonely farms and abandoned corrals, distant power plants, crumbling barns or mobile homes so dwarfed by the landscape around them that it was impossible to tell whether they were occupied or not. Huge, ominous industrial-looking outposts with no clear function. The towns we passed through fit the definition of “town” less and less easily. Sometimes they were just a grouping of five or six houses, half-finished, tarps fluttering over bare frames. In a way, the very weirdness of the landscape was a cloak of anonymity. I saw why Bellanger chose this place.
I lost track of time, caught inside a strange limbo. I was sure we’d been driving for at least a day, maybe a week, a month. Forever.
The radio stations grew farther and farther apart. We went from having options to getting excited whenever we found a human voice emerging from the static like a drowning person lifting an arm from the waves. Then that stopped too.
The whole time we drove, I thought of finding my mother. I thought of meeting Fiona—Girl Nine, alive again. But there was one person I couldn’t focus on too closely because it was like staring directly into the sun. He was just a feeling under my skin. A slowly building rage, burning hotter with each mile.
* * *
“Holy shit,” Cate said. A laugh came out of her, a bright exhalation of amazement. “For some reason—I didn’t think—this is—”
Even though I’d been the one to bring us here, there was something powerful about standing here and actually seeing it. We’d finally arrived at the place that I’d needed to find, unknowingly, ever since I first saw my mother’s burned-down house on the news.
The compound stood inside the low dip of a valley, ringed by cliffs. There was a sturdy fence ringing the perimeters. Beyond the shadowed mesh of the chain-link, I could make out pale buildings, beige and stucco, as if they’d evolved to match the stark desert landscape. A few mobile homes were perched, rectangular, next to simple one-or two-story structures. Angular structures, like building blocks scattered through a sandbox.
Wordlessly, the three of us walked down the rocky dip of the valley toward the gate. There was more vegetation here, scrubby and dry, grasping branches and parched clumps of stiff greenery. Eggplant-colored cacti, squat and spiny.
I kept thinking of that bird. Its trajectory arrested, sent to its beautiful and fiery death. I couldn’t tell whether it’d been a warning or a welcome. Even as a tiny child, Fiona had been a flame-hot force. Cracking light bulbs, lighting candles. Smashing objects. And now I knew that her abilities had been developing, years and years ahead of the rest of ours. I didn’t know what we’d find here. All I knew for certain was that I needed to get to my mother, and I clung to that.
We stood at the gate, stymied for a moment. Prickling loops of razor wire ribboned the top. The place felt even more abandoned than the rest of the desert, the silence highlighted by all those buildings. The wrongness of it struck me deep in my bones. There were none of the noises that usually textured the air—no dogs barking, no birdsong, no human voices.
“What do we do?” Cate asked. “Ring the doorbell?” She spoke wryly, but there was a trace of tension, a wire plucked too hard.
I glanced at the top of the gate, noticing a security camera perched there, its hooded eye trained on us. Before I could fully react to this, Isabelle inhaled. “Do you hear that?”
I noticed it too: a noise at last, a low rattle, growing steadily closer. Every little sound stood out in this empty place. It wasn’t coming from inside the gates; we turned, scanning the landscape in the direction we’d just come from. The rattling grew louder, the unmistakable sound of tires against gravel. The growl of the engine. Out beyond the closest formation, a plume of yellowed dust, rising into the air—leaving a suspended trail that slowly, slowly, faded at the edges. The car was coming right for us. There was nowhere else to go.
We waited. The driver must’ve spotted the anomaly of the Volvo, parked behind a distinctive outcropping of rocks. Whoever it was already knew we were here.