I lifted my eyebrows. “Oh, are you worried he’s out there now?” I said. “Because I was under the impression…”
He pushed back into his seat. “I’m worried period, okay. It’s easy for you. The Hunter seems to prefer boy legs, but Adam and I, we happen to like our appendages where they are—attached.” I tilted my head but tried to mask a smile. Owen was at least trying. He was trying to believe Adam wasn’t the Hunter. He was trying to be on my side. “Okay, fine.” He tossed his hands up. “What’s this plan?”
I unbuckled my seat belt and twisted to look back at him. “I’ve told you about my dad’s death, right?”
“Oh sure, that was after we made friendship bracelets but before we held hands and sang ‘Kumbaya.’ I can hardly get you to shut up about it.”
“Point taken.” I turned back and, across the steering wheel, unfurled the map. A red triangle with a circle around it marked the three matching points. I peered over the map’s curling edges into the forest. “My dad left something in there. He was brilliant, you know. My grandparents, they were just regular people who worked at the plant, but not my dad. He could have never been happy doing just that. He wanted to know things. Bigger than Hollow Pines.”
I felt Owen inching closer behind me. I could feel the hot tickle of his breath on my arm. “What did he leave?” Owen asked.
“Was it treasure?” Adam said, and I remembered he’d been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in English class.
“Not exactly.” I closed my eyes. I was trying to picture the generators, but time had worn away the edges of the memory, and now they only loomed like a legend in my mind. “My dad had figured out a way to harness atmospheric voltage.”
“What is that?” Adam asked.
“Electricity that’s in the sky,” Owen said.
“Lightning,” I nearly whispered. “The theory goes that if someone could control the atmospheric voltage, then there would be enough energy to disintegrate the atom.”
Owen’s intake of breath was sharp.
Adam’s eyes widened. “You’re going to disintegrate Adam?” He touched his finger to his chest and frowned.
I put my fist over my mouth to keep from laughing. “No! The at-om. Tiny little microscopic particles. Don’t worry. No one is disintegrating you.”
“But if you could disintegrate the atom, you would have not just energy, but a supersource of energy. Enough to charge a whole city. Enough to charge—”
We both stopped and stared at Adam. On the outside, my creation appeared so normal, beyond recognition for what he really was. But hidden underneath was the tapestry of scars and organs sustained by a steady hum of current destined to fade like the passing tide.
“Yep,” I said. “That’s pretty much the idea.”
The ink scratches of my dad’s handwriting on the satellite picture were like whispers from the dead. Coiling the map, I retrieved the clunky GPS device from the glove compartment, then opened the door with a tinny pop.
From the trunk I pulled Owen’s bag of tools, which I’d ordered him to bring. Metal clanked around in the canvas bag. I plopped it in the grass behind the trails of the car’s exhaust.
“So I guess that means you’re done being mad at me,” he said as he bent down for the handle. “Now that you need me.”
I slammed the trunk. The sound rang through the open air like a gunshot. I dusted my hands. “Yep. That’s pretty much the idea.”
I doled out three flashlights, and we each snapped them on. The yellow beams trickled through the dying sunlight. We crossed the tree line just as the day took its final breath.
The ground was a soft bed of pine needles. A few steps into the forest and we found a world emptied of sound. No birds chirped or squirrels chattered. I hadn’t set foot in the Hollows since my dad’s death, and I felt like I might see him pass through the spaces between the trees at any moment.
Adam held up a low-hanging limb for me, and I ducked underneath and shuffled through the leaves scattered half decomposed over the mud. Soil clumped onto the soles of my shoes, making them heavier. I passed a snapped trunk. Shards of charred wood poked out from either side like a broken arm, and I smelled the remnants of smoke.
We trudged in silence. I noticed Owen snapping his head left and right, searching. It was easy to create the story in our heads of the Hunter lurking and for it to begin to feel true. But there was no reason the Hunter would be here in this spot with us right now, so I ignored the distant snaps of branches and rustling of leaves.
With the tip of my finger, I brushed the bark. My skin came away with a black smudge from where lightning must have split the tree some time ago. After a short distance, I handed my flashlight off to Owen and cradled the GPS in both hands. The numbers on the screen glowed green, changing as we tracked east and north in the direction of the Arkansas state line.