He didn’t move, though. He didn’t shift position, to protect the parts already burned with the parts that had spent these hours protected by canvas and shadow. He didn’t even lower his head. He just faced forward, his eyes closed, his expression serene and confident even as his lips cracked and the sweat pooled in the furrows between his muscles began to shine like tiny sun lamps. Not once did he let me see that it was bothering him.
By then I already knew that I was losing.
My skin was on fire. My tongue was a dry, swollen worm scraping the roof of my mouth like sandpaper. Something had gripped my bowels and twisted, turning everything inside me to acid. I’d fouled myself and not even realized it. When I moved, I could feel the stored heat rising from me in waves.
I felt snakes crawling over me. They were burning snakes, with razors instead of scales, and when they slithered over my breasts they left gaping wounds behind. They went away and were replaced by flies, each as hot as embers snatched from a fire, each with little buzzsaw wings that, twitching, shredded whatever remained. Then came the worms and the maggots. I threw up, choked on it, managed to get it down again, decided that the long day had to be over after all these hours of hell and looked down to see that the cutting edge of that line of direct sunlight hadn’t moved any closer to me in the year or so I’d been hallucinating.
I cried. I don’t know how many tears came out, but I cried. I didn’t care if Ethan heard me. He knew how much this was hurting.
I couldn’t fool him about that.
Even if I’d lied to him about Daddy.
“You have to be a rock,” Daddy said. He had come to me early in the morning of my twelfth birthday, his eyes dark and his thing dangling from his thatch like a blind, rooted worm. “You have to take whatever happens to you. A broken nose is nothing. A broken leg is nothing. A broken rib is nothing. A lost eye is nothing. Days without sleep or rest, more pain than you can imagine, it’s all nothing. He will hurt you any way he can, everywhere that you’re soft enough to be hurt. He can even try to rape you, if he wants—after all, he’s a boy, and that’s always been one of the best ways for boys to hurt girls. It’ll be even worse for you if it happens, because you’ll know all along that it’s your own brother doing it. Of course, if you’re strong enough, he won’t be able to. You can make it more work than it’s worth. You might even make it the last dirty thing he ever tries. But even if he does manage to pin you down, and hurt you in that special way, you’ll have a chance as long as you know that you can get past it. And the only way to know that is to know that you’ve been past it before.”
He’d only done it that one time.
And I knew almost immediately that it hurt him as much as much as it hurt me, because when I tiptoed to his room the next morning, clutching the carving knife I’d plucked from its rack in our kitchen, thinking only of not letting him do that to me again, planning to separate him from the thing he’d jammed up inside me, I’d found him sitting on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands, his shoulders wracked by convulsive sobs. He hadn’t seen me as I’d padded up behind him, not so fired by certainty now, my right arm trembling as the knife grip grew heavier and heavier and the sobs coming from the broken figure before me resolved into self-recriminations about what kind of monster he was. And I’d thought about burying that knife between his shoulder blades and watching his life blood seep into the sheets as he fell over dying but not dying so fast that he couldn’t turn his head and gaze at me and see that I was the one who had done this to him, his stunned expression betraying a hurt a thousand times worse than the pain of the wound or the violation I’d suffered for a few short minutes in the middle of the night. He really did love me. He was my Daddy. And so I dropped the knife and threw my arms around his shoulders and wept, “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” and he grabbed me back and buried his head in my shoulders and cried, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I had to, I didn’t want to but I had to, you had to experience it once,” and I said, “I know, I know, I know,” and then it was all about him feeling bad and me trying to make him feel better, because I loved him, as he loved me, which meant that I would have to let him do it to me again if he thought it would help. He just wanted to make me strong, that’s all.
I was a rock. Nothing could hurt me.
I looked down through the haze and thought I saw little plumes of steam rising from skin that now seemed scarlet enough to have been dipped in blood. I recoiled, gasped as the burns I already had chafed against the concrete and the sodden canvas of my arm restraints, and shifted position to pull my knees a few inches further away. It wasn’t much of a reprieve, I knew. It would give me, at most, a few extra minutes of relative protection.
The line advanced, and touched skin again.
I hadn’t seen Ethan move, but he was lying down now, pressed against the curve of the wall with the paler skin of his back, partially obscured by the canvas restraints binding his arms, presented to the sun that would soon be attacking both of us with all its considerable force. The skin on the top of his head was also fire-engine red, and popping with blisters. He was so still that he could have been dead. But I could tell from the corded tension in his shoulders that he was still alert, still strong, still aware of the toll this was taking on me. I should have been mad at him for not grunting or something, just to make sure I followed his example, but I couldn’t blame him. He was my brother.
I lay down and rolled against the wall, pressing my face against the gentle curve that marked the junction between pool wall and pool floor. The seam, seen up close, turned out to be littered with the curled, blackened forms of ants, similar to the living ones I’d seen before, these baked to a crisp by previous mornings or afternoons. Their thoraxes pressed against their abdomens in pretend fetus positions, their little legs outhrust as if in protest. If they all came from the same colony, which was likely, then they all had the same mother, and they’d all died here, as we were dying here, as the siblings they were.
Ethan and I had more in common with them than with anybody else on the planet.
My throat thickened.
When the line of fire touched my skin again, there was no longer any safe place to retreat.
I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but as I came to there was a dead weight, several times my size, pressing down on me.
I didn’t care. If I was buried alive at least I’d soon be dead. If I was being attacked at least I’d soon be dead. If I was being raped at least I’d soon be dead. I was beyond feeling or wanting anything at all.
After a long time I registered the slippery feel of bare flesh, slick with sweat. It took me a while to identify it, because my nerve endings were all on fire, but eventually I registered as a naked human being, taller and broader than myself, covering me, shielding my head, my torso, my bound arms, and most of my legs, from the direct rays of the sun. I was still burning alive, and still dying of thirst, but the sun itself was no longer touching me, not even in reflection.
The weight made me protest. “Unnnh!”
The heavy body bore down, pinning me, but not making any further move as long as I refrained from struggling.
I passed out again.
My mind wasn’t working very well, because it wasn’t until much later that I realized it was Ethan protecting me.
It didn’t make any sense to me. He had tried to kill me last night. If we survived the day he would no doubt try to kill me again. The sooner I fell, the better off he was—at least, as long as Daddy and the Bitch intended on ever coming back for us, which was far from certain.