There’s a long, quiet void where only the radio’s hiss and the sound of tires on the road can be heard. The number of dead flops around like a fish in the bottom of a boat. Three thousand one hundred and eighty-eight people were killed in one week.
I flip off the radio. I can’t think about those people. They’re on their own.
I spot a sign for a rest stop, and since I haven’t seen a cop in hours, I decide to pull off and take a break. The sun is setting out on the horizon, the end of a long, hot day, and the reward is a canvas of reds and purples and oranges.
Bex wakes and gives me a sleepy and confused look.
“I need a break,” I whisper, leaning over her to get my phone.
“We all do,” she grunts, and immediately drops back off to sleep.
I step out into the cool night and zip up my hoodie. I stretch, then walk over to the bathroom, where I wash my face and hands. I long to brush my teeth, but I’d have to wake the others up again to get into the pack. Instead, I wander over to a picnic table and lie down on my back. I take out my phone. I’ve got a decent signal, so I type the words CHIHUAHUAN DESERT into the browser, and a map appears. The area is huge, and it spreads into Mexico, New Mexico, and Arizona. It looks like a whole lot of nothing. There are county roads snaking through it and a handful of tiny towns. A big swath of it is a national park. I try to find the ideal place to put a camp. It would have to be in a remote spot, I assume, so that no one would find it. It’s not going to be on a major road or near one of the towns. The problem is the entire region is barren. It could take us days to search it all. I hope Doyle sends me another message with more details.
I flip through my pictures to remind me of why I’m going to Tempest in the first place. One is of my mother, Summer Walker, in her ever-present flips-flops and cutoff shorts. She’s on the beach doing yoga, strong in the warrior pose with the Atlantic Ocean behind her. She’s so beautiful and strong, her black hair fluttering in the breeze. I hope they haven’t hurt her. She is a Sirena, and I’ve heard what they do to Alphas at Tempest.
My father is in the next picture, the man Bex calls the Big Guy. He’s giving me a tired expression as he eats a bowl of cereal in his cop uniform. He loved to ham up his exasperated looks whenever I took his picture, but he’s probably the most patient man I know. He’s solid and honest and brave, but the last time I saw him, he was seriously hurt. I worry about the broken ribs he probably got when we wrecked the car. He begged us to go on without him. I will always regret that we did.
I flip through more pictures, feeling tears leaking down my face. Here they are, the two of them trying to decipher the instructions for it; the Big Guy’s annoyed expression after he broke the IKEA coffee table; my mother standing off to the side, stifling a laugh. Here they are walking hand in hand along the sand, not knowing their daughter was capturing the moment on her phone. Here’s Mom glowing in the sunshine. Here’s Dad burning breakfast.
“I’m coming. Just hold on,” I whisper, hoping the words drift out into the night and find their way to my parents’ ears.
I skip forward to a photo of Bex and me, lying on my bed with our heads pressed close together so we can take a picture together. Our eyes are smiling and our mouths are puckered into duck lips. I don’t remember when it was taken. It could have happened on a thousand different afternoons. We were inseparable then—so close, we didn’t need other girlfriends. Here she is bumming cigarettes from the bouncer at Rudy’s, and here is the time we tried to learn to skateboard, and here she is trying on a fur coat we found at the Salvation Army. I told her she looked like a polar bear. We laughed about it for weeks. I miss the girls in these pictures.
The camera roll ends with one of the last shots I snapped, and it steals my breath. Fathom and I are pressed close to each other in the bright Coney Island light. All six-foot-plus of him looks awkward and confused. I’m holding the camera and looking mischievous. I snapped it without warning, and when I showed him the result, his hard, suspicious features fell and a boyish version I never knew existed took their place. Was it magic? he wondered. Did I know how lucky I was to have a machine that recreated the faces of the people I love?
I do now.
What is it about you? Most of our days you were grouchy, or pensive, or just mean, but then you could be so kind. When you stepped close to me and locked your eyes with mine, I felt like I could melt onto the floor. Even now, this picture of you is enough to make me dizzy.
Could you really be gone? Arcade thinks so. She’s packed you up and put you in storage like a stack of old sweaters she no longer needs. As cold as she is, maybe she’s living in reality.
“I’m not ready to let you go,” I whisper.
“We should train.”
Arcade has materialized behind me, and I let out a little yelp of surprise.
“You scared the crap out of me,” I cry. I fumble with the phone, not wanting her to see my photograph. I stuff it into my pocket and spring to my feet.
Arcade looks around at the deserted parking lot and the tree line behind the bathrooms. I take the opportunity to wipe the tearstains off my face.
“We do not have much time left,” she says. “How long before we find the camp?”
“We’ve got about a half a tank of gas left, but it’ll run out and we’ll need another car. If we get lucky and all goes perfect, we could be at Tempest in three days.”
She nods, then walks across the field toward the woods.
“Come,” she calls to me over her shoulder.
“Can we cut the prayer down to fifteen minutes tonight?” I cry after her, but she says nothing.
I give the zipper on my hoodie another tug. It’s going to be a long, cold night.
Chapter Five
ON MOST NIGHTS I AM EAGER TO GO TO SLEEP, even if it is in the back seat of a stolen car. In my dreams, Fathom and I are together. He is healthy and alive. We are wildly in love. It is like the worst YA novel of all time, and it is absolutely delicious.
Tonight, we’re lying on a beach, not the gross Coney Island beach littered with cigarette butts and hypodermic needles, but a tropical island. It’s warm and bright, and the tide massages our toes. My cheek rides the rise and fall of his chest, and he clings to me like a drowning man holds a life preserver. Together we bake in the afterglow.
Or, at least what I think the afterglow must be like. I am still technically beforeglow, at least in the waking world. In my dreams, Fathom and I have been glowing almost every night—it’s all hands and fingers and lips and arms and legs and then the fade to black. The nocturne gives me what the real world will not.
Fathom watches me with his hurricane eyes. His fingers rake through my hair, and I lean into his hand, craving the tickles it conjures. He says something, but it’s gibberish, as if this dream has spent all its creative energy and is slowly unraveling. I feel a pang of anxiety. I’m happy. I don’t want to go. I like it here.
“Listen,” he says, his voice suddenly clear.
“Listen to what?”
He sits up abruptly and scans the milky tide with narrowing eyes.
“I don’t hear anything,” I say, holding his arm like he might suddenly be pulled away into another dream.
“They’re coming, Lyric Walker.”
“Who?”
Fathom leaps to his feet, takes my hands, and pulls me to my own.
“The monsters!” he shouts at me, his voice barely audible over a rising shriek that is all at once everywhere and growing with intensity. I turn to the ocean, only to see it rise, higher and higher like a black titan, a looming giant of wrath standing hundreds of feet over my head. It’s boiling and indignant, but I stand my ground, staring it down, daring it to come any farther. I plant my feet in the sand. My fists clench until they are red. My chin juts forward defiantly. In the water, I see forms emerge: arms, legs, claws, teeth.
I raise my fist, and it burns like a star, turning me into a lighthouse and illuminating the wave, which is suddenly no lon
ger made of water. Now it is a living mass of Rusalka bodies stampeding toward the shore.
“Run!” Fathom shouts, but when I turn to him, he morphs into Bex. She grabs my free hand and tries to pull me away.
“We can’t escape this,” I say to her, but again she’s changing, morphing into Arcade.
“Kill them! They’re not worthy of your mercy!”
When I look back at the wave, it has changed too. It’s no longer made of Rusalka. It’s made of men and women in lab coats. They hold horrible saws and hooks and cattle prods in their hands, and at their center are my parents, thrashing for freedom.
“Let them go!” I scream.
A scientist leaps out of the murky soup and lands right in front of me. He’s followed by another, and another, until I am completely surrounded on all sides. The scientists are no longer just people. They are hybrids of Rusalka and men, walking death with bloody gums; black, soulless eyes; and golden, glowing lights that dangle like bait in front of their terrible, ripping fangs.
“Make an example out of us,” they taunt, and one last time they change. The monsters are gone, and in their place are hundreds and hundreds of identical copies of myself.
I wake with a jerk, all floppy limbs and foggy brain, and then WHAM! The crown of my head crunches against something hard and unmovable. My skull is a cracked egg with searing yolk dribbling down my neck, shoulders, and spine. Fireflies swoop in and out of my vision and the coppery taste of blood fills my mouth. I’ve bitten my tongue so hard, I’m worried I might have lost some of it.
“Calm down! You’re okay. You’re safe,” a voice says from above me. Its owner is sitting on my chest.
I push off the dream, telling myself I am not a monster. This is not Coney Island. I’m in a lime-green Ford somewhere in the middle of Texas with a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound girl sitting on my chest.
“Bex,” I gasp.
Bex gives me a long, suspicious look as if she’s weighing whether or not I’ve gone crazy.
“I can’t breathe,” I squeak.
She rolls off me and into her seat. She’s sweaty, and it looks like someone poured a glass of water down the back of her T-shirt.
“You’ve been having a lot of crazy dreams lately,” she says, pointing to my hand. The glove is awake and pulsating. It’s never powered itself on before without my asking.
“It was so real,” I explain as I turn it off. “I can still hear them.”
Bex points to my driver’s-side window. I crane my neck in that direction and spot a gang of burly guys sitting on motorcycles in the parking space beside our car. They laugh and shout at one another, gunning their motors so that a loud thrum rattles our windows, my teeth, the air, and probably God in heaven. One of them spots me and howls with laughter. He’s amused that he scared the crap out of me. I give him the finger and he laughs even harder.
“Where’s Arcade?”
“She’s praying,” she says, the words riding on a wave of irritation. “Were you two out training last night?”
I nod. There’s a big purple bruise on my shoulder and on the right side of my rib cage. Bex gives them a quick once-over and shakes her head.
“Do the two of you have a plan when we get there?”
“Sort of,” I say, but suddenly realize we don’t at all, unless you consider “Attack the camp, free everyone, make people regret doing evil crap” a plan.
“Sort of?” she says. “And do you have a plan for me?”
“You’re going to drive the getaway car.”
“No, for when you die.”
It’s not like I haven’t considered the possibility, but I also know I have actively avoided giving it a lot of thought. I don’t know what is going to happen or how it’s going to end. I also haven’t thought about what Bex will do if I’m killed. Who the heck plans that kind of thing? This is a unique situation. I don’t have a plan B, and she knows it.
“What do you want me to say? There isn’t an instruction book for what we’re going to do. I’m doing the best I can here.”
“For just one second, can you stop fighting me and hear what I’m saying to you?” she says. “What should I do if you die?”
I fumble with words I don’t have. I’ve been so caught up in preparing for this fight that I have forgotten about the consequences if it fails.
“Find somewhere to be happy,” I whisper.
I watch a tear tumble out of her left eye and down her cheek; then she nods as if I just answered a question for her.
“Typical,” she says.
Arcade opens the car door and crawls into the back seat.
“You have had enough rest,” Arcade says. “Make this machine go.”
I give Bex my best reassuring smile, but it misses by a mile. She turns her head away to the window again.
I start the car and pull out onto the freeway.
I’ve seen movies set in the desert, so I thought I knew what to expect: endless miles of golden sand, vultures, and some poor fool raving from thirst and hallucinations. The West Texas desert is nothing like the movies. Amazing colors are baked into everything: reds and rusts, mustards, browns and grays, and deep maroons, speckled by shocking blues and purples. It’s a glorious painting, and the artist used every hue. It’s also overflowing with life. Unfortunately, said life is freaking me out. I grew up in a place where the wildest beasts were the seven cats owned by the crazy lady on the tenth floor of my apartment building. Here, there are lizards as big as those cats. They sit in trees and lurk in the scraggly brush, spitting their lavender tongues at everything. Snakes whip their bodies into the road in defiance of my two-ton machine. Furry creatures with long tails skitter in the tall grasses that line the highway. I feel like I’m driving through a zoo.
When we hit a town called Goldthwaite, we lose the sixteen- lane superhighways that run through Texas, along with the eighty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. This is where the poor carve out their lives. Gone are the monstrous SUVs and pickup-truck mutations designed to speed up climate change. These roads belong to the beekeepers and the day workers and the fruit pickers, to the Mexicans who work the oil wells, and to the people who live on “the res.” The folks I pass have faces baked by hard work and years in the sun. They send me friendly waves when we pass one another. At least, I think they’re waving at me. It might be the Ford they’re waving at. It fits in nicely in this part of the country.
Unfortunately it’s running on fumes, and when the engine finally ceases, we barely have enough to make it off the freeway and into a dusty gas station in the middle of nowhere. When we come to a stop, the motor pings and pops, then wheezes its final, dying breath.
The three of us are stuck. There is nothing out here for miles. Even this gas station is abandoned. By the look of the pumps, it filled its last car long before I was born.
“What now?” Bex asks.
“We walk,” Arcade says.
“It’s hundreds of miles!” I cry.
Arcade doesn’t respond. She opens the car door and steps out. I watch her walk along the road’s edge. Bex snatches her hoodie and does the same.
“Guys, this is insane,” I plead, but they are almost out of earshot. Exasperated, I grab the pack and step out of the car into the broiling heat. A hateful blister of a sun hangs in a jaundiced sky, melting everything into a Shrinky Dink. Thirsty trees lean forward, the crumbling sidewalk glows with angry sunburns, and everything is flat. We’re definitely going to die out here.
As they walk on without me, I write a quick apology to the owner of the Ford, but it comes out more like a fan letter. I rave about how it handles, how the engine feels like something that belongs in a rocket. I apologize for stealing the phone charger but promise that it couldn’t be helped.
I run a caressing hand on the Ford’s hood when I’m finished.
“I’m going to miss you, beast,” I whisper, because it’s true. If I live through this, I’m going to buy a car just like this one. It’s going to be ginormous. I
might even mount a tusk where the hood ornament should be.
I do my best to catch up with Bex and Arcade. The heat and the running wind me, so I can hardly talk when I close the gap. I’m sure they don’t mind. I’m not feeling particularly welcome. Bex’s disappointment in me is palpable, and Arcade isn’t exactly chatty. I hang back and walk at my own pace on the pebbly ground. After a few hours in the heat, I am really feeling the pack. It’s bulky and awkward, and every step seems to add another pound. I’m regretting the bacon and the half gallon of milk and all the other stuff that is too impractical to carry on my back. Without asking the others, I slip it off and toss things onto the side of the road, where they are quickly attacked by a murder of crows. I probably should have talked to Bex and Arcade, but neither of them offered to help me with it. Unfortunately, when I hoist it onto my back, I can’t feel much of a difference in the weight. I debate sitting down in the dust for a big cry, but I need to keep going. My parents don’t care if the pack is heavy or if the sun is mean. I’m their only hope.
The sky is orange and purple, signaling the end of another day, when we come across a deserted ice cream shop. I kick through the overgrown grass and litter to a rusty metal picnic table and toss the pack on top. At some point the table was painted bright red with a big smiling clown logo in its center. Now the clown looks as if he’s been sleeping beneath an underpass. Maybe we’re related.
Bex digs into the pack greedily, pulling out everything. Neither she nor Arcade mentions the stuff I tossed out for the birds. Either they don’t care, or this game of “don’t talk to Lyric” is more important.
I snatch two protein bars and an apple and make myself a bologna sandwich, vacuuming them so fast, it’s startling. Bex and Arcade do much the same. It’s a silent affair. I look across the table at my besty, my partner-in-crime, my sister from another mister, and feel as if the tabletop is a million miles wide. I can’t take it anymore.