Forever

chapter SIXTY

• SAM •

It was oddly distressing to lose a night of sleep with Grace like this — out of the blue, with me far away from where she’d shifted. After dropping off Rachel, I wanted to go look for her, but Cole convinced me that it was useless; she wouldn’t come to me, and if she shifted back near her parents’ house, at least she’d know where she was. I didn’t think that I would fall asleep without her, but after Cole talked me out of driving back to where Rachel had left her, I lay in my bed and stared up at my paper birds and Christmas lights and pretended I was just waiting for Grace to come to bed. The long day stretched out behind me, and when I couldn’t hold all of the things that had happened in my mind at once, sleep found me.

I dreamed I was walking around the house, going from room to room. Each room was empty, but it was a full, breathing emptiness, like I might turn and see someone behind me at any moment. The house itself felt inhabited — not recently, but currently — as if the residents had merely gone outside to investigate the weather and would shortly return. The bedrooms, certainly, bore signs of life: On each bed was a suitcase or a backpack filled with clothing, shoes placed carefully beside it, personal effects laid out, waiting to go. Ulrik’s bed had his laptop and his electric razor. Paul’s had a pile of guitar picks and some burnt DVDs I had never heard of. Even the room with the bunk beds had supplies on their beds: Derek’s earbuds tangled on top of his camera, and Melissa’s sketchbook beside her shoes. Beck’s bed was empty.

I went from room to room, turning off lights in each room as I did. Good-bye to Beck’s room, never occupied. Good-bye to Ulrik’s room, where we’d watched horror movies on his laptop. I went downstairs without going to my room. Good-bye to the living room, where I had once sat with Grace on the sofa, nearly a wolf, where Isabel had helped stop Cole’s seizure. I turned the light off. Good-bye to the yellow room that Cole lived in and Jack died in. Lights off in the bathroom I had avoided for a decade. Good-bye to the kitchen, with its photographs of us pinned and taped to every cabinet, one thousand smiles, every one of them genuine. I turned off the light and headed to the basement.

And here, in Beck’s library, surrounded by books, were Beck’s things that had been absent from his room, his suitcase and his shoes, sitting on the ottoman of his reading chair. His tie was folded neatly by them and beside them both was a CD with tangled branches on the cover. The title was scrawled in the only available white space: Still Waking Up.

All around me was Beck, living inside all of these books that he had read. He inhabited every page. He was every hero, every villain, every victim and every aggressor. He was the beginning and end of everything.

Die letzte aller Türen

Doch nie hat man

an alle schon geklopft

(The last of all doors

But one has never

knocked on all the others)

This was the last good-bye. I turned off the light.

There was only one place left. I slowly climbed the stairs to the ground floor and then to the second floor. Walked down the hall to my room. Inside, my paper birds trembled on their strings, caught in the premonition of an earthquake. I could see each memory that the birds contained, images playing across their wings like a television screen, all of them singing bright songs that I had sung before. They were beautiful and terrified, jerking to be free.

“Bad news, Ringo,” said Cole. “We’re all going to die.”

I woke up to the sound of the telephone.

Adrenaline shot through my half-asleep body at the sudden noise, and the first clear thought I had, inexplicably, was Oh, no, not here. Half a moment later I realized the noise was just the telephone, and I couldn’t think why I had thought that. I picked up the receiver.

“Sam?” said Koenig.

He sounded very, very awake.

“I should have called earlier, but I was on midnights and I — it doesn’t matter.” Koenig took an audible breath. “The hunt’s been moved up.”

“It — what?” I thought perhaps I was still asleep, but my cranes hung perfectly still.

Koenig said, a little louder, “It’s tomorrow. Dawn. Five forty-seven A.M. The helicopter got freed up suddenly and they’ve moved it. Get up.”

He didn’t have to tell me. I felt like I would never sleep again.





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