“Mr. Mazzucchelli is not our only witness!” Carol cried. “There is another! Ask the nurse herself! Ask her! Is it not true? Did she not watch as the Fireman injected my father with an air bubble and ended his life? Did she herself not drug my nephew, Nick, so they could commit their homicide in peace? Ask her! Is it true, Nurse Willowes? Yes or no?”
Harper lifted her head and looked around. A hundred and seventy faces watched, lit an infernal shade of orange by the torches. They watched in fear and rage. Emily Waterman looked stricken. Tears had cut through the lines of dirt on her cheeks. Jamie, on the other hand, seemed almost to quiver with purpose, still gripping Allie by the jaw. At last Harper found Michael, who stood behind the two convicts, just to the right of Ben Patchett. He had recovered his rifle and he held it at waist level, the barrel pointing in the general direction of Allie. He nodded, imperceptibly: Do it.
Harper moved her chin up and down. Yes. It was true.
A scream—a bellow of anguished rage—rose all around her, and the darkness itself seemed to quake. Harper had never heard such a sustained howl of noise. It was a chorus of a different sort, and for the first time, Harper saw some of them beginning to shine. Jamie’s eyes shone like gold dollars flashing in the direct light of the noonday sun. Norma Heald’s exposed arms crawled with Dragonscale, and the Dragonscale crawled with a livid red brightness.
“Unh,” the Fireman said through the burlap sack. “What is that? What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
His heel sliding over the ground, trying to find purchase.
“He’s waking up!” Emily Waterman shrieked, in a high, shrill voice. “He’ll kill us! He’ll burn us all!”
Once again, Norma Heald was the first to break from the crowd. She reared back and threw a rock, a small white pebble not much bigger than a golf ball. There was a sudden instant of silence, as if everyone drew a breath in the same moment. The rock hit the Fireman on the shoulder with a bony thwock!
A great and savage roar of satisfaction rose from the crowd.
Not one of them saw the door to the infirmary, three hundred feet away, open and slap shut, as Nick came staggering through it, half awake and half drugged.
Neither did the Lookout in the steeple spy the headlights of the bus, less than a mile away, flashing a frantic warning at the gates of Camp Wyndham. He was looking directly below, watching the action. Watching as the stones began to fly.
4
A rock banged off the granite above the Fireman’s head. He flinched from the sound. A rock struck his knee with a bony pop.
His left hand erupted into blue flame, melting duct tape, snapping the shovel handle.
A white stone the size of a paperweight struck the burlap bag over his head and his left hand abruptly went out in a poisonous cloud of black smoke. The Fireman’s chin dropped against his chest. Rocks thudded off his shoulder, his stomach, the meat of one thigh, banged off the sheer face of the stone behind him.
No, Harper thought, no no no . . .
She shut her eyes and turned her mind inward and began to chant without words, sing without melody.
5
The Zapruder film, the silent color reel that captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, lasts less than twenty-seven seconds, and yet entire books have been written in an attempt to adequately explore everything that can be seen happening in the frame. Time must be slowed to a crawl to make sense of any scene of true chaos—to show the flurry of human action and reaction going off like multiple strings of firecrackers, all at once. Every rewatching of the film reveals a new layer of nuance, a fresh set of impressions. Every review of the evidence uncovers a new set of overlapping narratives, suggesting not a single story—the shooting of a great man—but dozens of stories, all caught in frantic medias res.
Harper Willowes didn’t have the convenience—not to mention the distance, or safety—of seeing what happened over the next eleven minutes on film. Nor could she rewatch that scene of slaughter later, to see what she might’ve missed. If such a thing had even been possible, she would’ve refused, couldn’t have stood facing it again, facing all that was lost.
Yet she saw much, much more than anyone else, perhaps, because she didn’t panic. It was a curious quirk of Harper’s nature that she grew calmer in the moments when others were most inclined to sink into hysterics; that she was habitually at her most observant and clear-eyed in the very times when others could not bear to see what was happening at all. She would’ve made a fine battlefield nurse.
She opened her eyes as flame leapt from her hands and the duct tape about her wrists shriveled and melted with a filthy stink. Then her arms were free . . . free and crawling with yel low fire almost to her shoulders. There was no pain. Her arms felt blessedly cool, as if she had dipped them in the sea.
There was no need for torches anymore. The camp was all lit up. Harper faced a surging crowd of men and women with eyes that were bright and blind and shining. All of them were scrawled with glowing lines of Dragonscale, the spore casting a crimson light that shone right through sweaters and dresses. Some were outside barefoot and they walked in slippers of bronze.
Norma Heald, her eyes glowing like drops of cherry-colored neon, bent to grab another rock off the ground. Harper lunged and threw her right hand and a crescent of flame the size of a boomerang leapt through the darkness and struck the back of Norma’s arm in a liquid spatter of fire. Norma shrieked, stumbled backward, and fell, taking down at least two people who stood behind her.
Harper heard screaming. She was conscious of motion at the edges of her vision, people running, shoving each other down. A rock whickered past her left ear and clattered off the standing stone to which she had been tied.
She turned toward the Fireman and found Gillian Neighbors standing in her way. Harper lifted her left hand and opened her palm, as if to give a high five. Instead she threw a plate of fire, like a pie in the face. Gillian screamed and grabbed at her eyes and fell back and was gone.
A rock struck the small of Harper’s back, a sharp momentary pain that quickly faded.
Harper reached up with one hand, found the duct tape around her head, and yanked. It did not tear free so much as slide away in a melted slurry. She opened her mouth and the rock in it fell into her left palm. She squeezed it in her fist and it began to heat, the surface cracking and fissuring and turning white.
Remember the stone in her fist.
Michael reached up to grasp Carol’s wrist like Romeo reach ing over the side of the balcony to take Juliet’s hand, you and me, babe, how ’bout it?
Gilbert Cline was off the ground, turning and sinking his fist into Ben Patchett’s stomach. Ben doubled over and seemed to shrink, and Harper thought of a baker pounding risen dough to make it collapse.
Another rock struck Harper in the hip and she staggered. Allie fell in beside her, restoring Harper’s balance with a touch of her shoulder. Allie wore a muzzle of blood. She grinned through her split lips. Her wrists, bound in hairy twine, were trapped behind her back. Harper touched them with a hand sheathed in a white glove of fire. The twine fell away in twisting orange worms.
Harper and Allie were at the Fireman’s side in three more steps. Harper grabbed him beneath the armpits, buried her hands into the flame-retardant material of his coat. Her gloves of flame went out with a gush of black smoke, to reveal the lace of Dragonscale wound around her forearms. The spore was still lit a feverish reddish-gold. No sooner had the flames gone out than her whole body went thick and strange with gooseflesh and she felt so light-headed she almost toppled over, and Allie had to steady her with a hand on her shoulder.
Blood soaked through the burlap sack over John’s head, staining it in two places, one at his mouth, the other on the left side of his head. Allie yanked it off to reveal the face beneath. His cheekbone was split open, and his upper lip was swollen, drawn up in a bloody sneer, but Harper had been braced for worse. His eyes rolled this way and that—and then his gaze found her. Her and Allie.