“Cate—” I said, my voice broken. “It’s hopeless.”
She didn’t answer. I could see in her face that she was hurting, sweat beading her forehead too thickly, lips gone bluish. She’d end up killing herself too if she kept this up.
Movement behind me. I realized that Fiona had approached. She stood over Cate, face blank, watching. Watching. I wanted to shout at her to get away, but I didn’t have the energy. Fiona reached out a hand. Delicately, she touched Cate’s shoulder. I saw Cate twitch slightly, like she’d been brushed by a cold breeze. Her face loosened for a second, then she drew a deep breath. Her hand stilled. She pressed her palm hard against my mother’s forehead. They stood arranged like that: Cate connected to my mother, Fiona connected to Cate.
All three of their faces were glowing in the firelight, but it seemed to come from inside their skin, a buried source of radiance.
I looked back at Bellanger. I wanted to see him seeing them. Watching them undo what he’d done to my mother. His eyes were wide with awe.
My mother opened her eyes. She gasped. Cate fell backward as if she’d been pushed, but she was half laughing, catching herself on her elbows. I said my mother’s name and she turned her head immediately, seeking out my voice. She looked perfect. The gunshot wound had been absorbed back into her skin, and she was glowing, the fatigue scrubbed away from beneath her eyes, her cheeks flushed and eyes alert. As if she’d had the past few weeks erased from her body’s memory. “What happened?” she whispered.
“Magic,” Cate said, her whole face alive. “It was magic.”
My mother repeated the word silently, tasting it in her mouth. Fiona looked from one of them to the other, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. It seemed impossible that she wasn’t responding on a bone-deep level to the sheer power of this: a Mother lost, a Mother brought back.
But I couldn’t forget where we were, the fire pulling closer, danger still lapping at our heels. I turned to Bellanger, crouching on the floor. He’d escaped a fire before. He’d walked out of the flames, remaking himself, starting over, and he’d do it again. Rising, I walked to Bellanger until we were only inches away. I knelt and took his face in my hands, his beard scratching at my palms, his skin beneath it feverishly hot. He flinched, began pulling back, and then he relaxed into my grasp. My palms were wet with my mother’s blood.
I remembered looking up at him as a child. Watching him work. His intensity and concentration. His wisdom, his willingness to change everything we knew about the world, whatever it took. I had wanted that wisdom for myself. I had spent a lifetime steeping myself inside it. It was wound through me now, impossible to escape.
The lives he’d taken: Lily-Anne, dying alone; the tenth Girl, gone before she even started; Angela and Gina, dead and unnoticed, their bones standing in for more consequential deaths. Fiona and the thwarted, half-formed life he’d given her in exchange for her mother and her sister.
My mother.
He spoke so quietly that only I could hear him. “You can have the world, Josephine. You can take it. Everything else is yours. Just let me have her.”
There was a renewed blaze of heat against my back. Fiona had let go of the flames, and they roared to life now, unrestrained, eating away at the ceilings and the walls. The fire was out of her control. It was the same as the fire outside, just as hungry and just as wild. This place would burn too quickly, surrounded by miles of dry, merciless wilderness.
I looked deep into Bellanger’s eyes. Milky brown, swollen irises. The very first eyes to look at me when I emerged into the world. His face changed. He was reverent, like he was seeing me for the first time. “Girl One,” he whispered.
I said, “Get up. Walk into the flames. Stay there.”
My hands fell from his face. He rose; I rose. Mirrors of each other. I turned and went back to the three of them, pulling Fiona tight against me, feeling her fine bones. Her skin was sheened in damp sweat. Cate had her arm looped around my mother’s shoulders, steadying her. We turned in the heat, and we began walking toward the door. I held on to Fiona. I didn’t let her go. Behind us, the sizzling crash of the roof collapsing. We walked, Fiona’s steps matching mine.
At the doorway, I couldn’t help it. I turned once. Dr. Joseph Bellanger walked in the opposite direction, deeper into the flames, only the white of his coat shining for a second before he was lost to us.
* * *
The world was fire-streaked and smoke-darkened. We followed the people running, running, everyone fixated on their own private escape, ghostly silhouettes darting through the haze. Seventeen years of Bellanger’s life vanishing. Fiona leaned against me, half stumbling. The shed was the bright center of the blaze, the heart of the destruction, with sparks hopping to the surrounding buildings and carrying the fire along the arteries of the compound.