As I walked back to my tent I expected the world to come crashing back over me—my worries about the Guard leaving and the Marvins taking their place, my confusion over seeing Mom again. But some remnant of that moment with Hannah clung to my skin and kept it all at bay. I stopped at the bluff that overlooked the kids’ cabins. They were silver and black in the moonlight. I could feel Greer and the others inside them, asleep on their cots, breathing as one.
Before I went into my tent, I looked down the path that led to Hannah’s. There was another light out there in the trees. She’d gone inside with her flashlight, making the skin of the tent glow a greenish yellow. I watched the dance of shadows inside as she got ready for bed. And then the light winked out and everything was dark.
I lay down on my sleeping bag and closed my eyes. I could feel the in-and-out pulse of the camp’s breath. Hannah’s too. I fell into rhythm with it, imagining the air in their lungs flowing into mine and mine into theirs. We’d built an entire world out of ourselves and all the cast-off things around us. Right then it felt as if it would go on forever.
It felt unbreakable.
13
THE NEXT THING I knew, I was standing in my bedroom back home. It was late. I was still wearing the shorts and Captain America T-shirt I’d gone to sleep in. I thought I must have been dreaming, but I looked down at my feet and saw that they were caked in mud from my walk down the mountain. My hand went to my face and I felt a little thrill of fear when I realized I’d walked all the way through town without my mask or gloves.
The room was dark, but the little bit of moonlight coming in through the window revealed that it was just how I’d left it the night of the sixteenth. A pile of comic books lay at the foot of my unmade bed. The laundry Mom had done earlier that afternoon sat in the basket beside my desk—pants and shirts folded into neat squares, socks rolled into balls the size of fists. The air tasted like dust.
Downstairs, the front door opened and closed. Heavy footsteps moved from the entryway to the living room. I left my bedroom and started down to see who it was. When I came to the landing and made the turn for the final run of steps, I saw that it was Cardinal. He was standing at the end of the couch, perfectly still. This was Dad’s Cardinal, not Gonzalez’s. He was a winged tank, nine feet tall, his armor the color of blood that had become glossy as it hardened into steel.
The living room windows filled with an orange light that sent shadows writhing across the walls and the floor. I smelled smoke and heard the ring of wind chimes. Cardinal turned and walked toward the front door. I followed him out onto the porch, but the porch wasn’t the porch anymore. It was a shelf of rock at the peak of Lucy’s Promise.
Cardinal sat down at the edge of the cliff and motioned for me to join him. When I did, he broke the seal on his helmet and set it in his lap. It wasn’t Cameron Conner. It was Dad. He swept his hand across the landscape.
“Behold, the Gardens of Null.”
As the words left his mouth, the sun rose over our backs and spread across a world that had been consumed by an immense fire. From where we sat, all the way to the horizon, there was only silence and great dunes of oily gray ash. No buildings. No streets. The Black River had boiled away and the forests had become groves of limbless pillars, charred to cinder. Lucy’s Promise sat at the center of it all. The flames had burned it down to bedrock, leaving its slopes a glossy black. Here and there, fissures showed the deep orange flames that seethed in the heart of the mountain.
I turned back to Cardinal, but instead of Dad’s face he had yours. I asked how the fire had started, and you leaned in close and whispered to me the great secret of the world.
“It wants to burn,” you said.
The sun passed over our heads. The sky became a deep black nothing.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
A knife appeared in your hand. It was black-handled with a chrome blade. A kitchen knife. You placed it in my palm and closed my fingers around it.
“Forget.”
You took my hand and gently guided it until the tip of the blade hovered just over my right eye. The next second you were gone and I was alone. A hot wind moaned around the top of the mountain. I turned to my right. Even though the sun was gone, I could see tendrils of shadow falling down the face of the rocks beside me. I thought about the great secret of the world, and then I gripped the knife in both hands and drove it through.
14
AND THEN I was standing in the middle of the woods. It was morning. I was barefoot. My T-shirt?and shorts were damp with sweat. I looked for a landmark to get my bearings, but all I saw was that I was on a trail. I thought maybe if I kept going, everything would become clear.