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The spiral of words catches my eye. The spiral trails outward, the last of the words reaching the edge of the page. I flip it over. The handwriting is different on this page. Sloppy, careening over the lines, letters crammed together or tumbling apart.Watch for her light. Stay to the shadows. Listen for the spider’s singing. Step softly when it comes. Keep on the move. The words are a weapon. If things look wrong, THEY ARE.
“That’s a lot,” Anthony says as I read it out loud. “Watch for the light? Listen for its singing?”
“I guess we’ll know what it means soon enough,” I say. “We should pick partners. Make sure nobody gets left behind.”Again, I don’t say, Miranda’s name a prickle across my skin.
I guess I’m not surprised when Anthony nods to Jeremy. They bump fists. Bro version of kiss and make up, I guess.
“Mel?” Kyle says.
“I got you, kid,” Mel says, and that leaves me with Trina, who is distracted, flipping through the pages of the preacher’s book again. I clear my throat. She looks up, startled, and sees Kyle with Mel. A faint frown traces her lips before she steps close to me.
“Too cool for his big sister, I guess,” she says with a flip of a smile, closing the book gingerly.
That I don’t get. I never wanted to be apart from Becca. The more she drew away, the more I wanted to press myself into her life. I used to pretend we were twins, real twins, never mind the obvious difference in ethnicity. I wanted to dress like her, act like her, but I never had her talent or her poise. I imagined we were matched, but I was only a mirror held up, reflecting a bit of her shine.
But I only say, “It’s a younger sibling requirement. Making sure you don’t get complacent.” Her smile stabilizes for a moment.
The rain has cleared, and the sky is an utterly normal shade of blue. We could be anywhere, under a sky like that. We could be home.
Except there is an odd substance to it. A thickness. Dimensionality. What my eyes read at first as clouds is—folds. Wrinkles and creases, striations, so faint they nearly vanish against the blue. And for a moment—for a moment—I think it moves, seething like the skin of an animal when it’s been pricked. And then the movement and the folds and the thickness of the sky are gone, the blink of my eyelids clearing them back to vast and empty blue.
“Did you see that?” I whisper, but when Trina doesn’t hear me, I let the question drown in silence.
We pause long enough to put on our shoes again—mine uncomfortably wet—and climb the hill. Up to the gnarled tree. It’s so twisted and lumpy it looks like puddled wax; its branches stab out of it in crazed directions. Its roots have grown beneath the stones of the road, buckling them into a hazardous ripple.
A knife, a short switchblade, is stabbed into the trunk of the tree at the point nearest the road, pinning a torn sheet of lined paper in place.
If anyone comes after us—we made it this far. Going to try to make it to the end. Thought someone ought to know.
—Becca Donoghue & Zachary Kent
I snatch the page from the tree, tearing it free of the knife. The ink looks practically fresh, though I know that doesn’t make sense. Any more than it made sense that Zoe was still wandering, dead, or that Isaac lingered so long in his tangle of iron and misery.
Anthony takes the note and runs his fingertips over the words as he reads them to the others. A faint smudge of blue comes off on the pad of his middle finger. He rubs it clean with his thumb. Then he carefully folds the note and tucks it into his jacket pocket. I have the urge to grab his hand. I want this moment to belong to him and me, but the others are tense, nerves thrumming, and I know we have to keep moving before someone snaps. A few more steps to the brutish head of the hill, and I take them at a loping jog.
At the top, I halt. The hill spills away, steep but not alarmingly so, and at the bottom is nestled a town. Or something like a town, at least. Houses with roofs and windows and paths between them, dirt paths that lead from the road like veins and arteries. But theborders are wrong. Grass growing a foot up the side of one house, the pattern of wood spreading flat on the ground at the base of another. And something wrong with the windows, too—no emptiness behind them, but a kind of fleshypresencethat reminds me of what I saw in the sky.
Planted in the middle of the town stands a massive house—the mansion. Its surface is a pale, gray-toned, off-white, too smooth for stone. I can see veins running along it, but not the veins of a human body. More like the veins of a plant. Beneath the eaves of the roof are gills like beneath a mushroom cap, black and withered, though the roof itself is shingled and firm. A pair of crows hunker in the eaves, feathers ruffled against the chill air.
“This is fine,” Kyle says. “This is all fine.”
The road leads straight to the door of the house. The stone continues, flowing from road to steps and in through the door that stands open like a surprised mouth. Or a hungry one. There is no way around. Only through.
So through it is.
The slant of the hill makes it seem as if we’re being pulled forward, pulled down, steps too heavy and too loud against the stone. Sometimes I think I see a quiver in the sky, hear something not quite like wind.
We pause at the bottom of the steps. At the top of them, the stones fuse, then meld seamlessly into wooden flooring in the same constant gray. It flows down a hallway and into a wide foyer. Through the dust and shadows I can make out twin staircases, flanking a pair of double doors.
“I guess we go in,” Anthony says.
“Keep an eye on the floor,” I say. “We don’t know if all of it counts as the road. Make sure you don’t step off accidentally.” And then, more boldly than I feel, I march up the front steps, Trina right behind me, and into the shadowed house.
[Note: The remaining text of this section has been torn from legal pad. Contents recovered at later date and appended. Text is scribbled out. Paper is crumpled, torn. Reconstruction was difficult.] I pause just inside a moment to let my eyes adjust. In that instant, before I can properly see anything, I seeher.
She stands in the foyer, hands at her sides, staring straight at me. A shaft of sunlight cuts through the dust-choked air—and through her, too, turning the curve of bone to gold beneath her skin. Just for an instant, and then she’s gone.
Miranda.
