The girl slept during the day, under the cover of trees. At night she walked bareheaded beneath the sky; eventually she made her way to the mountains and up among them. She grew to know the trees around her by name—their real names, not the names humans give them—and for a time she was happy, or as happy as she could be while knowing that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
One evening, while making her way through the mountain woods, the girl came across a boy—a young man, really, creeping quietly through the underbrush, tracking a deer. She was frightened—she remembered the stones—but the boy had a kind face, and he hadn’t seen her, so she followed him in silence, curious to see what he might do.
When the boy lifted his knife some time later, the girl understood his intention and cried out. The boy, surprised, whipped around to face her and threw the knife before he could help it. The blade caught the girl’s long hair and pinned it to a tree, driving deep into the wood. Unable to free herself, the girl looked into the boy’s eyes and saw the villagers and their rocks, but also the trees the boy had climbed as a child, the rivers in which he’d washed his own hair and sung his own songs.
She opened her mouth, but she had no words.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, and he reached for the knife. “I didn’t see you.”
The girl did not understand this, but if she had, she would have told him that the people in the village hadn’t seen her either. She stayed still as he pulled the blade out of the tree. The deer was gone now, safe somewhere in the trees, and for that the girl was grateful.
“Are you lost?” the boy said, but the girl didn’t understand this either. Instead she walked away from him, up the steep mountain path. The boy followed her because he could.
The boy did not know what he was starving for, in truth. But neither did the girl.
As he followed her, the girl became restless and worried. She began to run faster, but the boy kept up—they climbed higher and higher, each one of them afraid of and afraid for the other. The boy chased the girl right up to the peak, so high they could see clouds far below. At the edge, the girl turned back to face the boy.
He held out his hand. “I won’t hurt you,” he said. “Please believe me. Please say you believe me.”
But the girl had no words and could not speak. She took a step back and the ground crumbled beneath her feet. The boy reached for her but he was too late. She fell and her hair fanned about her like moonlight.
Oh, the girl thought. I remember this feeling. She fell down and then up, into the bottomless expanse of the sky, her moonlight hair shining with a different kind of light now, a light fresh and made of stars.
The boy did not see this. But then, he hadn’t seen the real girl anyway. He’d only ever seen his dream of her.
3
They are tiny, Heather’s babies, made of magic, like the stars. They are perfect. They are awful. They gurgle and whimper, feed from her, and cry. After that day under the hospital they show their true selves—they do not sleep, ever, unless they’re attached to her and she is moving. Up one street and down the next. Greta and Jilly, Jilly and Greta. Their tiny curled fists, the squished wrinkle of their faces. The unholy pitch of their screams.
Heather straps them to her chest and goes for long, dizzied walks amongst the trees near the mountain. B does not come with her. He is helping the other survivors. He has become someone everyone recognizes—the people from the basement, who turned reluctantly to him at first and now follow his lead; the people from the ambulance and fire trucks, who know him as the first person who spoke when they arrived.
No one’s in charge here, he said, but he was wrong.
He doesn’t like that she’s taking such long walks with the babies, but he likes it less when she tries to help. The babies won’t stop screaming, and she finds it hard to pay attention to anything or anyone else. Finally B just tells her to take them away, and she goes.
There are so many dead. Some remain only in pieces—an arm here, a buried bit of skull that could have belonged to a child. Three days after the meteors come, she is walking through the city’s central square—there used to be a park here, but it is now a field of rubble—when a man and a woman enter the square a few paces ahead of her, carrying tools and wood. They stop in the centre of the square and drop things on the ground, and she pauses to watch. First they pound a wooden post into the ground with a sledgehammer. Then they nail a sheet of plywood to the post. They loop lengths of string through a hole in the top left-hand corner of the plywood and tie the ends around several black markers.
ANNALISE BOWEN, the woman writes on the plywood. FREYA BOWEN. KARLA BOWEN.
DOMINIC HOLLINGSHEAD, writes the man. AMY GREEN.
The woman holds out a marker to Heather, but she shakes her head. She hasn’t slept in twenty-six hours; she hasn’t bathed in four days.
The man comes toward her. “Who are you missing?” he says. His tone is the kind you might use with someone talking loudly to themselves at the bus station.
Heather steps back and shakes her head. “No one,” she says. “I’m missing no one.”
The woman’s face spasms and she turns away. The man only nods. “Tell everyone you see about the board,” he says.
She nods, avoiding eye contact with the woman, and walks away from them. Ahead of her, the forest beckons, calm and green.
On her way back, she notices that B’s parents’ names are now on the board. When she sees him later that afternoon, he doesn’t mention it.
At first they sleep on couches and mattresses with the others from the hospital basement, refugees in their own city. As the days plod on, Heather and B steal time to go up and down the streets, jimmy locks, slide into bright kitchens. They pad across gleaming hardwood hallways and ash-covered kitchen floors, looking for something that could become a home. Their own apartment is gone.
“Find houses near the city centre,” the doctor has told them. Tasha. “Everyone should stay close, at least for now.”
Sometimes, while she’s walking the babies, Heather searches for a house alone. She slips into houses with unlocked doors and stands in silent hallways, trying to imagine herself in the space. Herself, her husband, her girls. They are a happy family. Look—this house even has a white picket fence.
She’s making her way through one of these houses when a sound behind one of the doors catches her ear—scratching and thumps, a tiny groan. She pictures a raccoon locked in a closet and grasps the handle, opens the door.
A teenage girl and boy fall out onto the dull hardwood floor, all tangled arms and breasts and rapidly shrinking penis. Scrabbling for clothes.
“Sorry,” Heather says, faintly surprised. The door leads to a tiny bathroom. There’s barely enough room for one person to stand up in there, never mind two.
“Do you mind?” the girl snaps.
“Is this your house?” Heather says.
The boy mumbles, “I don’t think it belongs to anybody. At least, no one that’s come back.”
Heather glances again at the bathroom, and then at the rest of the house. From the front hallway you can see through to the glass wall in the kitchen. The backyard grass is already high enough to reach the door. “Why the bathroom when you can have the whole house?”