“Good. Because it will be sweet mercy when it’s gone and we can starve to death in peace.”
“I was hoping to avoid that,” Harper said, and began to speak to Nick again with her hands. “The Fireman said you can find him and show him where we are.”
“If I have to.”
“You have to.”
“I’d need to throw fire. I don’t like to.”
“I know you don’t.”
He gave her a wary, haunted look. “Did John tell you why?”
Harper nodded.
Allie looked slowly back and forth between Harper and Nick.
Harper was going to try and speak to him with her hands, but this time sign language wouldn’t do. She got up and hunted in the drawers and came back with a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen.
What happened was not your fault. It takes a minimum of six weeks for the spore to reach the part of the brain that makes controlling it possible. Maybe longer. Your mother wanted to animate fire, the way John does with his Phoenix or you did last night with your little birds. But her brain wasn’t ready. What she did was like inducing labor before a baby is prepared to survive outside the womb. Instead of a child, you get a miscarriage. But she didn’t know. Neither of you did. THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT. Or hers. It was a shitty accident. That’s all.
But he shook his head, folded the note once, twice, and pushed it down into his pocket. His face—swollen from crying, pink where he had burned himself, filthy and still bloodstained—had nothing like ease or acceptance in it.
“You don’t know,” he said with his hands. “You don’t have any idea.”
Before she could reply, he pushed off the couch with both fists and went to the door out into the garage. He looked back.
“You coming or not?” he asked with his hands.
He led them behind the building. A pulsating harmonic filled the night, seemed to make the air itself vibrate: the shared song of a thousand crickets. Nick moved away from them, into the high grass. He paced in a circle, tramping the grass flat. Wet weeds squealed under his sneakers. He went around and around, going faster and faster, his head swinging back and forth. His fingers danced and played and Harper thought he was singing without a song, listening to a melody that had no sound. Asking for what he wanted without words. It was a little frightening, watching him go about like a figurine in a silent music box lurching along its track. His eyes were closed. Then they weren’t. They snapped open, peepholes into a furnace. His fingers trailed orange sparks.
He lifted his left hand and flame trailed off it. Little flames sheared from his fingers, fluttering into the air, but instead of shrinking and vanishing, they took shape, became dainty birds of fire. A burning flock of them fell streaming from his blazing hand and shot this way and that, spinning like rockets into the night. A dozen. Two dozen. A hundred.
“My God,” said Renée, who had come to the back door to watch. “How come they don’t just burn up and vanish? What are they using for fuel?”
“Him,” Allie said and nodded at her brother. “He’s the kindling and the firewood both. The lighter fluid and the match.”
“No, that isn’t right,” Harper said. “That doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t been able to figure this part of it out yet, no matter how much John has tried to—”
But Nick had stopped going about in a circle. He rapidly flailed his hands back and forth and put them under his armpits and the bluish-yellow streamers of flame went out in a whimsical pink gush of smoke. He bent over to blow on his palms, and while he was leaning forward, something gave, and he toppled headlong into the grass.
Allie got to him first, scooping him up in both arms. His head lolled on a neck that didn’t seem to have any bones in it. Allie glared.
“He wasn’t ready to do that,” Allie said. “He’s been through too much. We should’ve waited another night. You should’ve waited.”
“But John—”
“John Rookwood can take care of himself,” Allie said. “Nick can’t.”
And she marched past Harper into the garage.
It was what Allie needed, Harper supposed: a chance to stand up for her brother, to reclaim the role of Nick’s protector from Harper—or at least reclaim a share of it.
“I really don’t understand,” Harper said to Renée. “What Allie said just now about Nick being the kindling and the kerosene—that has poetry in it, but it doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“That’s what poetic speech is for—for the things that are true but don’t make sense. For the rough beast and the widening gyre,” Renée said, and she lifted her gaze to stare into the night, where a hundred flaming birds turned in a widening gyre of their own before scattering into the stars.
5
Harper found fishing line and a hook in a tackle box under the worktable, and used them to put two stitches in Allie’s upper lip. Allie sat rigidly while she sewed, gaze pointed toward the ceiling, eyes welling with angry tears. She made not a sound the whole time. Harper wasn’t sure if that was the silent treatment or stoicism.
When she was done, Harper worked on Nick. He was deeply asleep and only frowned while Harper put four stitches into his torn forehead. She used the same needle, but she sterilized it by holding it between thumb and forefinger until the steel glowed hot and white.
After, Harper went outside to sit on the stoop and watch the clear night sky. Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.
At last, in the gray light of dawn, a small sparrow of fire zigged out of the trees behind the graveyard and exhausted itself in a whiff of smoke. A moment later the Fireman followed it, staggering from the forest and into Harper’s arms.
The sight of him appalled her. The long gash on his left cheekbone was a ragged line of black gum. The side of his neck was baked red with what looked like an agonizing sunburn. He stank as if he had rolled in the ruin of a campfire.
In his left hand swung a steel bucket full of coals.
“I saved her,” he gasped. “We need to put her someplace safe and get her some fresh wood.” He gave Harper a frantic look. “She’s starving.”
He only reluctantly allowed Harper to pull the bucket out of his hand. The tin handle was hot—maybe searing—but Harper’s palm lit softly and she felt no pain.
Harper set the pail on the stoop and guided him inside.
He passed out almost as soon as she was done sewing up his slashed cheek. She left him on the couch, where he slept with his own turnout coat as a blanket.
She went outside again, feeling very tired and very pregnant. The small of her back was a continuous shriek and she was experiencing sharp pains of a gynecological nature.
The bucket of glowing coals sat on the rear step, next to the tape deck. Mick Jagger promised he was going home, over a strutting bass line. Those coals swelled with brightness, faded and swelled again, matching the rhythms of the song.
Harper had an urge to kick the bucket over into the grass.
Instead she carried the pail to a big steel drum, standing in the weeds behind the garage, one in a cluster of garbage cans. She poured the coals in on top of old rubbish: splintered boards, rusting beer cans, oily rags. Flames guttered and jumped, the garbage igniting with a soft, hungry whump. Harper found some sticks and a rotten log crawling with bugs, fed them to the blaze.
“What’s that?” Renée asked. “Cook fire?”
“More like one of these fires you light to remember someone by.”
“An eternal flame?”
Harper said, “I hope not.”
6