I kick my leg out of her grasp. “You should get out of here. Call your people and leave.”
Baine attempts one of her urbane laughs, but it comes out off-key, far too high. “What, now? When we’re so close?” For an uncomfortable second she reminds me of Mom: a woman whose wants outweighed everything else, an endless appetite. “I made it past the gates. Past those fucking birds”—I picture a dozen sharp yellow beaks driving into her flesh, again and again—“and you think I’ll stop now?”
“If you go in that House, I guarantee you’ll have a bad time.” It sounds like a bluff, but it’s nothing but the truth. I can feel the House at my back like a living thing, a guard dog with its hackles high. The explosion seems to have pushed it off some secret edge, sent the entire structure a little farther out of reality. It’s less a house now than the idea of one, and a house is meant to shelter some people and keep out the rest. If Baine forces her way through the door she will meet nothing but misery.
She isn’t listening to me. She’s scanning the ground with her mismatched gaze, blinking too often. Her eyes catch the iron shine of a ring of keys and she dives for it, clutching it to her chest as if she thinks I might try to take it away, as if she still imagines she has anything I want.
A tortured, resentful pity moves through me. I’m suddenly tired of standing here talking to this vicious, hollow creature. “You go ahead and hold on to those,” I tell her, not ungently. “I don’t need them.”
By the time she opens her mouth to reply with some other offer or threat or bribe, I’m already gone, running for the front gates.
It hurts, leaving Starling land. Stepping across the property line is like tearing myself free from a briar patch, leaving blood and skin behind. The gates swing wide for me, and I step through them, ignoring the twitching, whimpering figures tangled in metal. The iron animals frolic in my peripheral vision, their sides slick and red in the moonlight.
I feel smaller on the other side, less than I was.
Arthur’s truck is waiting right where I left it, except now it’s obscured by a pair of black vans and half a dozen people. I’m braced for questions and accusations, scrambling for a lie that will explain why I’m barefoot and bloody-handed—but I receive nothing but glazed stares. One of them is making violent gestures to her companion, saying, “Fire me, fucking do it. I’m not going back in.” One of them is slumped on the back bumper, crying quietly into his hands.
I slide into the driver’s seat and try the key twice, three times before the engine turns over. I try not to think about where I’m going, or how high the river is, or whether I can find the old mines with the mist up.
The bridge looms out of the fog like a black rib cage, the struts silhouetted by the glow of the power plant across the river. My knuckles are sharp and bloodless on the wheel. I hear the road change under the tires, going hollow and rattly, and I keep my eyes firmly on the other end of the bridge.
But the end is blocked. There are vehicles parked at bad angles across the road, shards of glass tossed like glitter over everything. A light is flashing, infusing the mist with red and blue. Through the strobe I can make out the boxy shape of an old Pontiac, and the silhouette of a cowboy hat. It looks like Constable Mayhew got his stupid lights back from the real cops, somehow.
I hit the brakes hard enough to make the rubber squeal. The cowboy hat lifts, tilting in my direction, and I know with sudden certainty that I won’t make it past him. Mayhew’s never needed much of an excuse to handcuff me, and now I’m covered in blood at the scene of a bad wreck, having somehow slithered off the hook for the motel fire a few hours earlier. Even someone without a personal grudge would probably have a few questions for me.
But the mines are on Mayhew’s side of the river, on Gravely land. I can picture the rotten boards, the endless green hearts of the kudzu vines. Just around the bend, a short scramble down from the road.
Or up from the river.
The door handle is slick under my sweating palms. The old railroad ties are rough under my feet. A flashlight shines in my direction, blunted by the fog, followed by a shout. “Who’s there? Is that you, girl?”
My legs feel very far away from my torso, and poorly connected, like the trailing limbs of a neglected puppet. They carry me to the very edge of the bridge. The mist is so thick and viscous tonight I can’t even see the river, just the curl of my toes over the edge and then nothing at all. I can hear it, though: the same sweet siren’s song I’ve heard in my head since the crash, the endless rush of the river calling me back down.