Page 61 of Bent Heavens

Room to room she ran, shouting until her voice broke. Most men remained in place. But a few, steeled criminals not fully bent into subservient beings, took heed. Liv felt the motion of warm bodies like circulating blood. She flapped her arms, herding them, and heard the scrunch of their bodies colliding near the kitchen, the moans from their gnarled palates, the uncertain thuds of legs no longer built to scale the rungs of a ladder.

“Olivia?”

Liv turned, and in the backlight of the operating room saw Faddon, his smiley face askew, coming down the hall, trailing blood. Liv, her nerves on fire, suffered seconds of struggle. Should she help him? No, he was a surgeon, Dr. Frankenstein, and would sew himself back together. A more critical thought: Should she go back and help Dr. Nance the only way she knew how, by finding Mist and driving its blade into the boneless lard of her body, over and over, until she was finally dead? The decision was made for her: After what Faddon said next, she ran and didn’t look back.

“Bring back your father?” he begged. “I miss him so much. And you can join us, too, Olivia. You can be one of us, too!”

31.

The sky was molten metal that dusk was cooling to embers. Still, it was real light from a real sun, and Liv found herself blinded upon passing through the silo’s hatch. Her knee rammed the metal lip, and she fell to the dirt, her broken toe shooting pain up her calf, her palms skidding across gravel. She rolled onto her back and held her hands above her. They bled, but they were hands, human hands, with smooth skin and five fingers, and she wanted to kiss them and taste the clean, untainted blood.

She gripped a rung on the outside of the silo and hauled herself up. She thought she heard a buzzing from below, and her heart punched. What if Faddon had hit a fail-safe button that would rouse the military to belatedly mop up the mess of the Biatalik Program? Hurry, she told herself. She took a step. Her foot flared in agony. She gasped and sobbed. She thought of the cross-country meets, the long jogs up to the Dawkins place, the endless miles she’d run for no good reason when now, right now, was the only run that ever mattered. Run, she ordered herself. Run!

She did. The pain came in rapid, hot blasts, like the bang-snaps Doug tossed in for free with firework orders. She pushed herself across the lawn and into the front yard, where she collapsed against the car’s still-warm hood. From there, gasping, she saw lonely, lumbering forms, just three of them, visible against the vast cavity of Black Glade. These were the only three brave enough to escape Biatalik, beings who’d known flat floors for so long they pitched and heaved on outdoor surfaces. One moved in a sideways skitter. Was he the one with multiple legs? One pulled himself along, branch to branch, with gibbon arms. Did he have any legs at all? Still another crawled on his belly, his serpentine spine cresting from and diving into dead grasses.

She felt nauseated, grappled at the station wagon door, and dropped down inside. What if Faddon had been right? The Biatalik prisoners seemed to have deduced their only real option, the same one taken by Frankenstein’s monster: dissolve into the woods and become Black Glade myth that would plague generations of children to come.

Carbajal’s jeer crackled from the dead car radio.

You think you know what’s best, do you?

Carbajal was correct, and with the subtlety of a swinging scythe. She hadn’t risked everything to save A when A was just some creature from a distant place. She was no better than any other torturer who followed Doug’s Army Field Manual 2-22.3, people who chose, with self-serving brutality, who deserved to be treated with humanity and who didn’t.

Liv cranked the ignition to cover the journalist’s cackle and shifted to reverse. She might have had trouble getting here, but she knew just how to get to Doug’s house; the whole world tipped that way—you only had to let the decline pull you. Dragons of dust spread their wings behind her. Fifteen minutes later, she was seeing the landmarks that hadn’t changed over the three years since she’d been there. The empty, baleful piggery building. The abandoned church over which graduating classes spray-painted their years. The dirt strip that led to Doug’s home.

Trees here were a dying species, weeds their conquerors. Even in the early twilight she could see the oily black half acre into which Doug had said he’d shot a flare before having to call the fire department. The damage was worse than he’d suggested. His damage usually was. She pulled into his driveway and stood there in the stillness.

The fireworks garage had fallen prey to an explosives malfunction Doug had never mentioned. The roof was an improvised patchwork of plywood. Doug’s car was gone, which meant there was no point in going inside. There would be no Doug, no A, nothing. The only proof he’d been here over the previous months was half of a Ping-Pong table that he’d set up against the wall to play by himself. Rain had softened and scrunched the table into an arachnid fist of metal.

Liv got back into the station wagon and sat there, engine idling, watching new dragons grow in the taillight crimson. She thought of the Biatalik runaways. If they were found, they’d be shoved into cells, the same kind that Doug had wanted to create for Subject A, Subject B, and so on, sketched alongside Lee’s Resurrection Update margin notes. When Liv recalled those sketches now, she connected them to stickler eraser burns and revision lines of Doug’s corn maze designs. She might have even thought of it herself, the secret of where Doug was hiding, if her phone hadn’t vibrated right then.

It was Doug.

Ready for you at the Monk Block.

Liv stomped the gas and shouted to the pain of her broken toe.

Many years had passed since she’d been to the Monk Block. Prior to Mr. Monk’s renting the fifteen acres to farmers, he’d occasionally truck the two kids there to play amid the expanse of cool, green, uninterrupted grass. The memories were crackling live wires, severed like their friendship but popping and hot. Liv followed the soot smell, the station wagon’s steering wheel nudging her into every correct turn, the headlights switching on by themselves as darkness fell. These supernaturalities had to be real; she had no more control of her body.

She turned onto a measly dirt path. Corn encroached from fields on either side, long, dry leaf tongues lapping the car windows. Thirty yards down, a padlocked gate bolted to two posts impeded further progress. The gate hadn’t been there when Liv and Doug were kids. Had gates even existed back then, before so many of the world’s dangers had thickened? Liv’s throbbing foot held the brake to the floor. She could hit the gas, try to bust through. She could put the station wagon into reverse, creep out of there, get on with her life.

Instead, she turned off the engine, turned on the red hazard lights, and took out her phone. There were so many people she could call for help: Mom, the police, Principal Gamble, anyone. What she saw, however, was a message from Bruno from earlier, a patient red dot waiting to be noticed. Yes, it was Bruno she wanted to speak to, no one else. She didn’t listen to his message; she tapped his number. His voice mail picked up.

“It’s me.” Her voice was brittle in the quiet car. “I … I wanted to tell someone … to tell you that I’m … I’ve gone to find Doug. There’s this farm, this land his dad owns, and I think he’s … I have to leave the car. I don’t want to do it alone, but … Bruno, I don’t know what’s going to happen. After this, I mean. Maybe nothing. Maybe I’ll be there tomorrow. If I am, I want to talk to you. I want to kiss you. But if I’m not … I just want … The time I had with you … I’ll miss you. I guess that’s what I want to say. If things go … if you don’t get to talk to me again … I’ll miss you.”

She gasped, the sound startling her, and stabbed at the phone until the call ended and she could snuff the screen’s hopeful light inside her coat pocket. Bruno, her mom, her own future—none of it could be allowed to matter right now. Her father’s suffering was all she could allow herself to think about.

Getting out of the car was like slipping into cold water. With the headlights killed, velvet blackness met the blinking red lights, and she had to stand with her hands on the gate until her night eyes awoke. Liv peered over the gate, listening for the pulse of her own heart like her father listened for the pulse of an electric fence.

“Doug?” she called. “It’s Dad! It’s Lee! A is Lee! Doug?”

Nothing. She limped along the path for a minute before seeing, rising through the mud of night, a long-held vision turned real: the Monk Block Corn Maze. Whereas the corn glowed with a coat of moonlight, the maze entry dove to black. Liv squinted and made out the first left turn. Her stomach cooked in its acids. The opening left turn had always been a part of Doug’s Trick. To kick off the labyrinth with compulsory turns was to make clear to walkers that they were being led, and had, in fact, little choice in how their journey would end.

Liv stood on her toes, the injured one flaring, and stretched her neck. There was no telling how far Doug had gone. He’d had four whole days, enough time to do all the things he’d long talked about doing, provided he could scrounge up the money: scan his best design into a web program, acquire a GPS device, rent a zero-turn mower. Liv felt a wave of awe, followed by a shiver of doubt about everything she believed. Lee Fleming had encouraged Doug’s creativity, lauded his designs when everyone else had scoffed. Doug had finally paid back that confidence. Was it one life saved for one lost?

“Doug?” Her throat was a clogged rasp. She cleared it. “Doug.”

She stepped close enough to the maze entrance that a corn leaf lazed outward and traced her throat, sharp as a knife. She didn’t want to enter. She looked about, hoping for a reason to delay, and found one. Twenty yards to her left stood a modest aluminum outbuilding, probably erected by a farmer to house gear he didn’t want pinched. Call it whatever the farmer liked; it was a shed, and Liv wondered if it might be that simple, that Doug had transferred her father from one shed to another.