Page 37 of Ash Fall

He's right. God, I hate that he's right. The word that tears out of me is "Fuck," again, loud enough to echo off Father's precious first editions, and then I turn back to my sister.

"Fine. You have ten minutes to pack a bag and be ready to go."

"As if." Her arms stay crossed, and the sneer she produces belongs on our mother's face at a charity gala. "I have never taken ten minutes to pack for anything, ever, in my entire life. It takes my assistant longer than that just to bring the luggage up."

"Then you're about to set a personal record." Closing the distance, I plant myself in front of her and give her the hard realities of what’s about to happen. Sugar coating this would be the cruelest thing I could do. "Listen to me carefully, because I'm only laying this out once. A super volcano erupted yesterday. Ash is going to fill the sky over this entire continent, and then it's going to start falling, and it won't stop for months or years. The sun goes away, Briar. Crops die, stores empty, engines clog, and everything out there stops working, including the trucks that bring food to people like us who never learned where food comes from."

She stares at me, and then a disbelieving laugh huffs out of her. "You're being dramatic. Volcanoes are a Hawaii problem. We're in Canada."

"He's not being dramatic." Gage steps up beside me, and his steady, level voice does what mine can't. "I had the radio on this morning while we loaded. It was Yellowstone that blew yesterday, the caldera in Wyoming, and that one alone is a global event. A few hours ago, Taupō let go too, that's a super volcano in New Zealand. They said the Pacific Rim, the ring of fire - the warning signs are off the charts and it’s only a matter of time for it too. All of them at once going off means ash and cooling will be across the whole planet, not just here." He lets that settle before he finishes, gently. "If you stay in this house alone, you will run out of food, and then you will starve. That's not a threat, it's just what’s going to happen."

Watching my little sister absorb that hits harder than I expect. The bratty front doesn't drop, but it does pale considerably. Underneath it there's a fifteen-year-old girl alone in a forty-room house, with no staff answering and parents who chose their reputations over her.

"Decide fast, Briar." I tell her quietly. "We don't have a lot of time."

"This is ridiculous." She rallies with impressive speed, the entitlement snapping straight back into place. "Where are you even going?"

Absolutely not. That conversation involves an hour of arguing that we don't have, and I am not doing negotiations in Father's study.

"Come or go. The choice is yours."

Walking out on her open mouth feels terrible and necessary in equal parts, and I head for the kitchen with Gage's heavy footsteps following me down the marble stairs.

This kitchen is the size of Luna's whole main floor, all imported stone and appliances nobody in this family ever learned to use. Pulling open the first of the fridges, I start cataloging with my mouth on autopilot. "Grab those boxes from the pantry. There's a full second freezer in the butler's kitchen, and the wine cellar has shelf goods on the back wall from when Mother went through her doomsday-chic phase."

"Doomsday-chic?" Gage repeats it flatly as he moves for the pantry.

"It was a whole aesthetic in her circle a few years back. Gold-leaf emergency rations. Don't ask."

We work in silence for a few minutes, stacking and sorting, and the whole time my mind is on the girl upstairs. She's my responsibility now, a sister who is basically a stranger, one I can name maybe five true facts about. One of those facts is that she prefers to be called Miss Stillwell by the staff. She was born when I was eight, our mother's last-ditch effort at producing a version of herself after I turned out disappointingly human. The woman promptly handed her to a separate nanny from mine and lost interest. By the time Reid, Kara, and I blackmailed our way home from Switzerland, Briar was eight going on forty. Every attempt I made at knowing her bounced off polish that was already hardening. Then they shipped her off at twelve, same as they did to me, and that was that. There are fifteen years of shared blood between us and maybe nine real conversations.

I slam the freezer door shut harder than I should in my frustration. Atlas would have known what to do with her. That man collected strays and made them family without even trying. He made me family, a rich kid with a mask so good even I couldn't always remember who I was. He brought all of us together and taught us what the word family really and truly means.

Reid and Kara were lucky to have each other so completely and that helped save my best friend when his mother tried to break him. All of us learned to be a family from the Bolton’s, but Briar has been learning it from the same people who originally taught me, except she never got an Atlas or the Boltons to undo the damage.

Maybe that's the job now. The thought hits me uncomfortably. Maybe this is the way to repay them for what they gave me, us. I know Hannah Bolton would scoff at there being anything to repay so maybe it’s not a repay so much as a pay it forward thing. She’s my sister even if I don’t really know or like her. I’ll never be the man Atlas was, but I can try to be the kind of brother he was to Luna. Something to work on but right now I can hear the clock ticking so I shove it into a mental drawer for later and get back to packing cans. But also…

Fuck our parents. Honestly, from the bottom of whatever they left me for a heart, fuck them both. They told their fifteen-year-old daughter she wasn't welcome and sent her home to an empty house and I fucking know it had nothing to do with them being embarrassed by whatever she did to get expelled. It was because they didn’t want to be inconvenienced by parenting her at all.

The radio this morning said the coastlines are drowning as the moon drags the tides all wrong and tsunamis are hitting coastlines everywhere, and a vicious little hope curls up warm next to my heart. I hope that island of theirs is sitting twenty feet under water.

Overhead, footsteps hammer across the second floor toward Briar's room fast, and a suitcase wheel squeals against the marble. I guess she made her decision.

Chapter 19 - Torrin

By the time Reid gets the tailgate closed, I'm starting to question whether the suspension on my truck is rated for the end of the world. Especially when the end of the world arrives with Louis Vuitton luggage. A lot of Louis Vuitton luggage.

I stare at the collection of bags wedged between boxes and plastic bins while Kara supervises the last tote going in.

"Is that seriously another suitcase?"

Kara doesn't even look at me. "Yes."

"What's in it?"

"My things."

"That clears it right up."