Now, after the fire feels around this side of the lake, ravages through Camp Blood on its way to taking Proofrock down, now the next generation’s dioramas are going to be of Pleasant Valley, before it burned to cinders.
It’s a foregone conclusion: that’s the way the wind’s blowing, and the skies are clear, no clouds building to release nature’s fire extinguisher down.
Jade can try to climb the cliff when the flames get close, but… does she really want to? Better to just sit in her cabin hugging her knees and rocking. Maybe imagine that the flickering on the windows is from a bonfire burning into the night. Maybe the ghosts of the kids killed here will feel that heat, even, and raise their voices in some campfire song, the rhyme-y one about the dam bursting, and— Jade stops rocking back and forth on shore.
She looks to the chalky bluff again.
Hardy didn’t just tell her about that mooning stunt, did he?
He also made that big deal about… how long ago was this?
Sophomore year, was that when Jade had to do her interview project a second time? Shit.
But: yeah. That story about that other old sheriff, the one who saved Pleasant Valley from the last fire by shooting out the windows of the dam’s control booth and raising the level of the lake, dousing the flames.
Jade looks up the bluff again.
Could she?
If the wind’s blowing the fire towards the lake, and the lake’s rising, then… it should work, shouldn’t it?
Hardy’s not around to drive up to the dam and shoot the windows of the control booth out, though. And everybody in Proofrock’s probably still got shriek-faces on about their dead friends and family, and everybody else is packing their cars and trucks, because this is the big one, this is the end of Pleasant Valley, the end of what Henderson and Golding started so long ago.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Jade lowers her hands, trying to shake blood back into her fingertips, and for the fiftieth time she wishes hard for her coveralls. It was a good and necessary gesture last night, but dealing with that gesture in the morning is seriously sucking.
But this tracks, too, doesn’t it? All of her armor’s been stripped away, is part of the lake already, but there’s still one fight to fight. Jade hates Proofrock through and through, doesn’t have enough fingers or toes or math to even count all the ways she hates it, but that doesn’t mean she can watch it burn, either.
She limps back to cabin 6, the one that was supposed to have been her own private Mausoleum, her high-altitude Mortuary, her American Burial Ground, and pries the loose floorboard up, stands with the shiny-new double-bit axe she stole once upon a childhood, to deal with anyone who ever followed her out here to her safe place.
Instead of dragging it behind like would look cool, she carries it low in front of her hips, runs for the bluff.
The lower ten feet are dotted with old rusted rebar hammered into the rock for a climbing patch. Jade tests that rebar, gives it her weight, her shoulder screaming for mercy, her fingers just screaming, and earns her climbing patch in her underwear, in a twenty-mile-per-hour wind.
From here on up, though, it’s all fingertips and toes, it’s all crumbling rock and untrustworthy roots, the axe hooked over her right shoulder from the front, its lower tip gouging into her back each time she has to reach farther than she can reach.
Letha Mondragon would make short work of a task like this, Jade knows, but Letha Mondragon is receiving medical attention in a tent right now, the reporters already carving her hero’s journey in stone.
It makes Jade jam her bloodied fingertips deeper into the crevices. It makes her scrape her knees harder against the face of the rock.
Finally she births over the top of the bluff, lies there on her back panting, the axe clutched tight to her chest.
It’s not over yet.
She rolls over, comes up to a knee, then three points, and then, because she doesn’t trust herself to stand all at once without wavering back off into the open space behind her, she’s running ahead as best she can, still holding the axe with both hands.
Ten, twelve minutes later, there’s the dam like a big toy dropped down from orbit, its top lip of concrete probably twenty feet tall. Meaning: that’s how high Jade can bring the water up, if she can just convince Jensen Banks, the dam keeper, to crank his controls that much.
Will he remember her from all the presentations he gave to the elementary classes? Presentations Jade groaned and squirmed through, not caring about the volume, the rate, any of that stupid stuff.
It matters now, though.
She runs harder, the smoke engulfing her for feet at a time, leaving her bent over and coughing from the absolute bottom of her lungs—it’s like inhaling a whole pack of cigarettes at once, and then, before you’ve got your breath, inhaling another pack.