She rolls away and scoots to the edge of the tunnel and vomits. Then she hugs her legs to her chest and shivers her way through the next few minutes. Her whole body seems to pulse along with her overworked heart. She spits away the stringency lingering in her mouth. She hears a seething, like sand run through fingers, and when she reaches out, discovers the hound gone, only ashes in its place.
Her relief doesn’t last. Slowly she turns her head to the left. More footsteps sound. The clomping of shoes, hurrying in this direction. Not a hound, but a man. She feels like she can’t endure any more, not one more thing. “I can’t even,” she says, but she can. She does. She stands, wobbling in place. She considers searching for the dagger but decides against it. “I can’t do that again. Don’t make me do that again.” Hide. That’s what she needs to do. Hide right now or she’s going to die. Hannah crumples her face as though to cry, but a scuffing sound startles her back to reality and she swallows down the feeling. She edges away, hurrying along the wall until her hand fumbles into something, the metal lip of one of the giant pipes. Inside it there is room enough to crawl, huddle in a ball.
A long minute passes. The footsteps draw near. She can see the air outside barely brightening, like the breath before dawn. What must be a flashlight.
Finally she sees the source—bobbing into view—the hand and then the body and then the face of a man. The man in the black torn clothes. The man with the cauliflower skin. He peers into the pipe. A crow roosts on his shoulders. It squawks a greeting. “There you are,” he says. “Let’s get you out of this terrible dark place.” He holds out a lumped hand. “And into the light.”
She only hesitates a second. Then takes his hand and lets him help her scoot from the pipe. He smiles at her and she smiles back. “You’re safe,” he says, “for the moment.” And she feels it. She stands a little straighter than before. She has run and she has fought and she has hidden, every test survived. She is used to feeling weak, and that’s fading. Maybe strong isn’t the right word, but she feels different. Resilient, ready for the next affliction.
“Sarin?” she says.
The man shakes his head no. “But there’s you. You’re here.”
She’s alive, he means, but more than that. She’s like Sarin. That means she has a role in the story still unscrolling. Not as a victim. No longer blind and maybe no longer a child. There’s something she can do. Fight back. Fight the dark. “What now?” she asks.
He smiles in response. He likes the question. She does too. The agency of it. He puts a hand to her shoulder and leads her down the tunnel, and it isn’t long before she hears a distant car horn, and they follow the sound and soon feel a puff of wind and the air lightens. A ladder reaches up to a vent. “This way,” he says, as her fingers curl around the rungs and she begins to climb.
Chapter 24
IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT when Lela and Hannah sit in the dining room of The Weary Traveler. Below the table, curled in a horseshoe shape, lies Hemingway. The coffee doesn’t taste good but Lela drinks it anyway. Hannah picks at a package of M&M’s. Outside, sirens cry, car alarms blare, voices shout. But they hardly notice. They might be done crying—for Cheryl, for now anyway—but their minds remain deaf with grief.
Maybe fifteen minutes have gone by without either of them saying a word, when Lela speaks. “We’re going to have to take care of each other.”
It’s a startling thing to admit, but it feels right. Lela often claimed that she never truly understood something until she wrote about it. Saying out loud that she will watch over Hannah feels similarly clarifying. It is true that Lela can barely get her clothes folded and her dishes put away. She might not take good care of herself, but she will take care of this girl. She will. She has to.
She isn’t sure if the threat has passed, just as she isn’t sure if this place is safer than any other. Earlier, from his bed, Juniper told her to lock every door and window and to collect every tablet and computer and phone and smash it to the floor and crunch the plastic guts beneath her heel. “Don’t check your email. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t answer the door,” he said. “Paranoia is a requirement if you want to survive this.”
Not just this, she thought, but the world they live in. Despite legal and medical advances that make this seem like the safest time in history, there are so many more ways to get hurt, so many of them online. She did as she was told. Almost. She couldn’t bring herself to destroy her own laptop. She held it over her head. But then her arms trembled. It belonged to The Oregonian and she hadn’t backed up her work in what felt like a century, and damaging the device was a little like sledgehammering her skull. It was her, an extension of her. That was the sad truth. So she let her arms drop. And slipped the computer back into the oversize purse that rests beside her now.
At this Cheryl would have shaken her head. Typical Lela. Chronically unable to sever herself from work, to think of others first. Her sister is gone and yet still here, in Lela’s head and across the table, as Hannah looks like a tinier version of her. The same brown hair. The pursed mouth. The doofy homemade sweater and secondhand jeans. But there’s always been something different about the girl. She’s stronger and more poised than her mother ever could be. Even now, despite everything that has happened, Hannah does not come across as afraid or broken. Just the opposite. Possessed by a straight-backed, firm-jawed resolve.
Hannah has always acted older than her years, but now she seems older even than Lela. The Mirage is scratched across one lens. Her hair is matted and tangled. Her clothes are smeared with dirt and blood. She’s a survivor. A fighter. Lela remembers what Juniper said—the girl was special—and what Sarin said—the girl was like her. She knows they’re right without fully understanding what they mean.
“We need a plan,” Hannah says. “We can’t just sit here like a couple of morons, wait and see what happens.”
That sounds like something Lela would say. Hannah’s right. She’s absolutely right. But this is one of the few times in her life Lela doesn’t know what to say or do. She folds a napkin in half and in half again. Wipes away some crumbs. Then reaches across the table. “Hold still a sec. You’ve got something.” Lela uses her fingers as a comb, picking some dead flies and dirt clumps from Hannah’s hair. “That’s better.” Then picks up her coffee but doesn’t drink from it. “You’re sure he’s dead?” Lela says. “The red priest? Tusk?”
Hannah plucks two M&M’s from the package and crunches them down to a wet rainbow. “That wasn’t his name.”
“Cheston.”
“That wasn’t his name either,” Hannah says. “Lump said he called himself Alastor.”
“Whoever he is, he’s dead? That means we stopped them? It’s over?”
“I guess before Alastor died, he said it was too late. He said it had already begun.”
“What’s it? What’s already begun?”