“No.”
“It’s true. You’ve just got to look closer. One side is kind of pretty. You’re not supposed to say that about yourself, but I’ll say it. Okay? I’ll say it. I’m pretty. But not the other side! The other side, if you look at it on its own, is ugly.” She slaps a hand to her face in order to shade the one side of it. Maybe he can see it now. The drooping cheek. A broader ridge of forehead. The slight bulge of the eye, a little more lid around it. “I’m like two different people.”
The wind gusts and carries bits of ice in it. She wobbles on her perch before catching her balance, spilling some of her drink.
“You should come down from there.”
“Didn’t I say to worry about yourself?”
She looks at him with her red-rimmed eyes. In these long wordless seconds, during which time they stare painfully at each other, he wants to tell her how sorry he is about her brother. He doesn’t usually say things like that—sorry or thank you or please or any common pleasantry; it just doesn’t occur to him—but he knows he ought to. Sorry might be the medicine she needs. He wants to tell her how much he admires her fearlessness and impulsiveness, how he has learned from her, grown into a better man by her example. He wants to tell her he not only worried about her last night—he missed her, too, as if he were a lizard dragged from the sun, so that he felt enervated without her around, sour and cold-blooded. He wants to tell her he needs her. They all do. He gathers his breath, but before he can blow out the words, she says, “I’m a killer.”
“You—”
“I killed that woman outside. I killed my own brother. I killed Reed. I killed them all. I might kill you next, who knows? This was my idea, coming here. It was a stupid, deadly idea. And we’re all worse off for it.”
“Stop it. Don’t be so self-pitying. It doesn’t become you.”
“Do you know what I feel like right now?” Her voice comes sliding out of her like sharpened steel. “I feel like eating you.”
“Clark—”
“I feel like eating the whole world. Shoving all the metal and concrete and wood and bone and meat into my mouth until there is nothing left.”
“You need to rest. You’ll feel better once you rest.”
“I killed her, Lewis.”
“You did what you had to do. She was going to kill Colter.”
“I don’t mean her.”
It takes him a moment to process this. “Then who?”
“Her.”
“Her who?”
“Your mother, Lewis. I killed her. So that you would come with us.”
The world seems to dim. The sky seems to sag. The wind rises and slaps his face. He waits for the anger to come—he knows it is there, inside him, waiting to catch flame—but for the moment there is only a sick feeling, a green-tinged sadness. He opens his mouth, but no words will come.
“Go away, Lewis. Before I hurt you more than I already have.”
When he makes no move to leave, she says, “Go!” in what sounds like a half howl.
*
Now Lewis is running, pounding along as fast as he can, sliding, occasionally falling, but always scrambling to his feet, always moving, away from the world he thought he knew and into the world he does not. Snow kicks up beneath his heels. Though the air is cold, his throat burns with exertion. The mall is behind him, like a great tomb, and he races away from it. He can feel the rage growing, growing, so that his inside feels bigger than his outside. And he is so hot, not just his breathing now, but his head, his skin, the core of him furnaced. He could tear off his clothes, eat snow.
With this comes that familiar feeling—of the sky opening up to watch him. He can sense it homing in on his dodging figure, and he knows he cannot escape it. Above him the clouds begin to twirl, as if spun with a spoon, and he hears the kind of crackling sound that comes from thick wool socks sliding across a rug.
The parking lot reaches on endlessly. No matter how furiously he pumps his legs, the edge of it seems to grow no closer. He sees the vapor of his breath. He sees the ground, thickly floored with ice. He sees the flicker of light gathering in the sky, where the clouds darken and churn and foment, as the anger spills out of him and takes hold of the world.
The air around him seems to sparkle. He listens for thunder but hears only the panicked gusting of his breath. He tries to run faster, but the lightning stops him midstride. It shoots from the sky and spears him, jags through his body like a second spine. Several more bolts join the first, like so many whips lashing at him, their barbs caught in his skin, filling him with painful light.
He wakes naked. His clothes are ashes curled away by the wind. His hair has scorched and brittled, and when he runs his hand across his belly, his eyebrow, his head, it crisps away. He is purely skin, his body as white and rigid as alabaster.
He lies on his back, staring up at a night sky that looks like holes punched through black cloth, the biggest of them the moon. The moon! How he has missed it, as shadowed and pale as a favorite grandfather’s face. For a long time this is all he sees, his vision absorbed by the sky, so that he might as well be floating through space.
There is no sound except a distant ring, like the single undying chime of a silver bell. He sits upright and takes in a world he recognizes, but not quite. Here is the parking lot, but it is crowded with cars. Here is the mall, but it is glowing with light. A woman in a red coat approaches, carrying shopping bags weighted with clothes. A man carries a girl on his shoulders. A couple walk arm in arm, laughing at a joke he cannot hear. The woman pauses to cough, and the cough overwhelms her, bending her over and spasming her body, and the man rubs her back to comfort her.