Page 24 of Bent Heavens

“There’s so many,” he whispered. “I forgot. I forgot how many.”

“Skinners?” Doug asked.

“How could I have forgotten?” Lee’s voice splintered.

“Dad.” Liv’s voice, too, broke into pieces.

Lee whipped around and gripped Liv’s shoulders.

“I forgot. I forgot this place. I shouldn’t have brought you. I have to do this alone. You need to leave. Both of you. See that field? There’s a road on the other side. Go through the field. Flag down a car.”

“No way,” Doug said. “We’re coming with.”

Lee’s arm lashed out, snagged Doug’s shirt, and pulled their heads close together. He hissed furiously, spittle popping along his pale lips.

“You are not! You do exactly what I say and get away!”

It was the most aggressive Lee Fleming had ever behaved, and it nailed Doug and Liv to the trees. Lee released Doug and frowned at his own hands, perhaps at the person he’d become. Dusk light shone against his battered fingernails, and that was prodding enough. Quickly he retied his boots and pulled on his gloves. He worked his fingers around Lizardpoint’s crocodile-skin grip.

Lee’s lips trembled over clenched teeth as he took a shuddering breath, stood the tallest he could, and fired off a military salute to Doug, the same kind with which Major Dawkins had honored Lee at birthday barbecues. Doug, still stung by Lee’s shouting, blinked in surprise. But what had Lee been teaching him if not to be a proper soldier? Doug’s cowered back straightened, and he returned the salute.

Lee turned to Liv. He grimaced as if his legs were locked inside one of his steel-toothed traps. He opened his mouth to speak, but that, too, looked painful. What he did, then, was nothing, except look sorry, and out of time.

He whirled away, charged the fence, and lowered his ear within inches of the top wire. Liv felt eviscerated, barely able to stand, yet still understood. Her dad believed the fence to be electric, and some scrap of rural insight told her that electric fences ran in pulses, and her dad was listening for them. Liv thought she could feel them, each sizzling beat the mirror of her bruised, burned heart. Lee’s hands hovered over the wire, preparing to make his move.

Liv ran, leaving Doug behind and colliding with her father so hard he had to roll to the side to avoid the electric fence. Lizardpoint’s metal pick clacked against Mist’s sharpened blade. Somehow both father and daughter had turned lethal, too sharp to be held safely, but they held each other all the same.

“Don’t go,” she cried. “Please don’t go, please don’t go.”

He held her cheeks in his hands, but all she could feel were his gloves’ silicone grips.

“You have to let me go,” he whispered. “I have unfinished business.”

She tried to press her face into his chest, but he held her firm.

“I know you don’t believe in any of this, Liv.”

She was exposed, shamed, but also desperate to tell him that he was wrong, she did believe that he believed, and wasn’t that enough?

“Dad, I—”

He shook his head, out of time.

“It’s all right. Doug … he wants to believe. He needs to believe. He doesn’t have the choices we’ve always had. You’re a doubter like your mother. That’s good. That means you’re smart. Just listen to me, sweetie. Listen to me and then let me go. I want to say I’m sorry. For everything. How I ruined everything our life used to be. What I’ve done to your poor mother. I just … forgot things. And now it’s all coming back.”

None of it made any sense to Liv. She had a gutful of protests, enough to last all night, all day, all her life, but the stiff surfaces of his gloves slid down her face and took hold of her shoulders. He managed a pained smile and flicked his eyes up to the shadowing skies. His last words were not his, but James Galvin’s, his favorite verse, one he told seniors on the final day of class, inspiration for their future.

“‘Perhaps you didn’t realize,’” he quoted. “‘Anything can happen under a sky like this.’”

Gently, like Mr. Fleming the husband, the father, the English teacher, he held her away from his body. He unzipped his pack and withdrew his copy of Resurrection Update, wrinkled from study, bloated by rain, stained by coffee, studded with sawdust. He held it out to her. She stared at it. He prodded her in the sternum with the book until she felt her hands wrap around it. She stroked the cover. It was lightweight, she thought, for a soul.

When she next looked up, Mr. Fleming, the pariah, the lunatic, the survivalist, had one hand on a fence post, and having found the gap in pulses he was after, he climbed over the wires. To Liv it was a leap of unimaginable distance, the crossing from one world to another. He landed in a sloppy stumble, but righted himself and walked, then jogged, then ran in the direction of the silos, Lizardpoint at the ready.

By the time Doug joined her at the fence, Lee Fleming was a pale firefly. Doug must have known as well as Liv that they’d never see him again. He hoisted Maquahuitl over his head and brought it down on the fence, staving the wires downward, snapping some, bending the nearest poles inward. It was a mourning rage, violent as a cloudburst, and it would be minutes before it was through, fence posts dented to hell, wires pounded into the dirt, and Doug crying out, perhaps from electrocution, perhaps not, finishing by hammering the ground with his club until his red, grimacing face was lost in plumes of dust.

Liv felt the dry wind from Maquahuitl toss her hair, but she did not flinch. She could feel, extending from the muck of her sorrow, a different emotion, one that, like skinners, she didn’t want to believe existed. The thing was called relief. Life would be difficult without her father. But wasn’t it also true that, in some ways, life would be easier?

The book felt undeserved in her hands. Either her dad was a traitor or she was. She thought of “Sapphic Suicide Note,” and wondered if the book itself, placed into her hands, was the suicide note of her father.