The wail of a baby rises above the growl of the fire—a terrifying sound. And above us, sparks wheel up through the trees, embers disappearing into the dark. A loud crack shudders through the air, and I jerk my gaze back to the hut.
Theo rams his shoulder into the door, but it doesn’t open. He breathes, chest expanding, then throws his body against the door once more, and this time it breaks free and he tumbles inside.
The wind changes direction, turning the air thick and ashy, and I think: This fire didn’t happen by accident. Someone set it ablaze. Someone who wanted a problem to go away.
Theo disappears into the birthing hut, and I stop breathing, stop blinking.
The baby has gone quiet.
Gray smoke spills out through the doorway; embers sail among the treetops, greedy for more tinder, anything that will satisfy its hunger, while Bee fidgets a few paces back from the door, hands twitching at her sides.
Too much time passes. Too many minutes.
I look behind me, and think of running back through the trees to Pastoral, yelling for someone to help. Wake the others. My bandaged arm throbs, my panicked heart pumping blood too quickly through my body.
But just as I start to turn toward Pastoral, Faye appears in the doorway, the gray of her hair the same color of her skin, coated in smoke and ash. She coughs then buckles over, dropping to her knees in the grass. Bee is at her side, touching her, telling her to breathe. Colette appears next, but her eyes are wide and watery, like she doesn’t know where she is, or how she got here. Like she’s lost track of the days.
She stumbles, then spins around, looking back at the door just as Theo emerges from the wall of smoke. He’s holding the baby to his chest, and Colette nearly falls trying to get to him, reaching out for the tiny infant wrapped in a blanket. Theo relinquishes the bundle into Colette’s arms, and the baby makes a small sound, a whimper—she’s still alive.
But behind them, the birthing hut continues to burn. “We need to get them out of here,” Theo says.
I nod. Chin wobbling up and down, no words coming out—in shock.
Theo turns to Bee, who has placed her hands on the small baby, feeling for the sputter of her heartbeat beneath the rib cage. “We need to go,” Theo says to Bee. “Now.”
She responds with a quick, assured nod—more lucid than I am. Her eyes sway to me and her mouth tugs into a tight line of concern, like she can see the lost look in my eyes.
And I know now, with her gaze on me, that she can see.
Her eyes blink, the gray not so gray, but a deep tragic blue. Perhaps it’s always been that color, the same hue as the sky. Maybe I only imagined it was a sad, milky bluish-gray.
She turns away from me, a hand on Colette, and starts leading her toward the path that will take us back to the farmhouse and then out to the road.
But before I can fall into step after them, a voice breaks through the air behind us. “What the hell happened?”
I spin around and see Parker standing in the trees, head craned upward, a hand over his eyes as he follows the pinwheeling trail of smoke and flames up into the night sky.
No one answers him.
Eyelids blink.
We need to get out of here, but not with Parker standing a few feet away, watching us.
“Someone started a fire,” Bee answers finally, her tone accusing, staring Parker down, like she thinks he might have done it: set the structure ablaze.
“I see that,” Parker replies, his voice thin and soft, still a kid really—and he lowers his hand, looking far too bewildered to have started the fire. He’s the only one awake at this hour, and he must have seen the smoke or the flames from his post at the guard hut and come to investigate. Everyone else in Pastoral is sound asleep. “Y’all okay?” he asks, taking a step closer, nodding at Colette with the baby in her arms.
“We’re fine,” Theo says, giving Parker a blunt nod, as if it’s a gesture Parker will take to mean that he needn’t concern himself with any of this. We have it under control. You can go back to your post.
“Well shit,” Parker says, scraping a hand down his neck, like he’s trying to sort out how he might extinguish the flames, or explain it to Levi—as if this were his problem now. But then his eyes jerk back to us, the young features of his face hollowing out, eyebrows stuffed together. “Why are you all heading into the trees instead of toward Pastoral?”
Theo steps forward, closer to Parker. “Just figured we’d go back to our place, let everyone rest, and wait for morning when we can see how bad the damage is.”
But Parker’s expression doesn’t soften. Maybe he knows Theo well enough to know when he’s lying, or maybe something in his gut tells him this isn’t right, that we wouldn’t just flee back to the farmhouse without telling someone there was a fire, or trying to put it out to keep it from catching on the surrounding trees and spreading to other structures. Parker knows we’re full of shit.
“You’re trying to take that baby out of here, aren’t ya?” he says. “You’re planning to go past the border.”
For the briefest moment, his mouth goes slack, like maybe he understands our intentions and won’t try to stop us.
“You don’t have to tell anyone you saw us,” Theo says calmly, cool as winter air. “When you discovered the fire, there was no one here. We had already left.” Theo has given him an out, a way to explain away our disappearance. He nods as he says it, meeting Parker’s gaze, hoping Parker will see that it’s the right thing to do, and help us.
Parker chews on the side of his lip, as if testing out this story, seeing how it sounds in his head—if he thinks the others will believe him. He and Theo have been friends a long time. But in truth, it’s only been two years since Theo arrived in Pastoral. A man with a different name.