There was a whoosh as the wall next to us caught fire, exploding into a curtain of red and orange. The smoke swelled and thickened.
I dropped to my knees at Jenny’s waist and thrust my hands into the smoldering pile of wood, ignoring the feel of my fingers searing as I threw the timbers off. I shook Jenny by the shoulders, but by then she was unconscious.
I looked all around me. The doors I’d come in had caught fire, as had the walls on every side. Fire flowed over the ceiling. I was trapped. The old wood of the barn, dry and weak from years of neglect, popped and hissed, burning as easily as paper.
I rolled Jenny onto her back, then muscled her up over my shoulder. The ceiling groaned louder. There was no time to waste.
I stood up, eyes watering and lungs aching, then dropped my head and shoulder and ran as fast as I could, straight at one of the burning walls. There was a panicked instant when it resisted, but then the wood cracked and flames gouged into my shoulder and cheek.
Our momentum carried us out of the barn and to the tree line, where I stumbled and Jenny went spilling out into the brush. I collapsed, coughing and heaving beside her. Jenny moaned. Her one good eye was open, but barely. She was breathing.
“You’re going to be okay,” I said. “We’re going to be fine.”
“I thought it was Will and them,” she rasped. “But it wasn’t. It was a group of men. They didn’t even say anything, they just—”
“It’s okay,” I said.
There was a crash behind us as part of another wall fell in. The relief of safety washed away, though, when I realized that everything we owned — my pack and supplies, Jenny’s clothes, Grandpa’s rifle — was all in the barn. We couldn’t go back to Settler’s Landing and without shelter or supplies, and with winter coming on fast, we were dead.
I could still make out the hole in the wall I had broken through, a splintering oval wreathed in flame. Fire had spread nearly everywhere, but the roof still hadn’t come down. I had seconds. If that.
“What are you doing?” Jenny said as I pushed away from her. “Stephen!”
I ran for the barn and took a deep breath before jumping through the gap, stumbling toward what was left of the bed. My lips were sealed tight and my fingers pinched my nose closed. If I tried to take a breath, I was dead. I tripped over a pile of timbers and landed hard. The smoke had dropped almost to the level of the floor. I felt around wildly, squinting into the gray clouds until my fingers hit the side of my pack. I pulled it to me and threw it over my shoulder. My knife was in its sheath next to it. I stuffed it into my back pocket.
There was a crack behind me and the sound of falling wood. I caught sight of the rifle lying next to Jenny’s sketch pad, its barrel pointed toward me. I reached for it but the red-hot metal singed my fingers and I had to yank them back.
There was a growl above me. The roof was coming down. I reached out again and my fingers closed around Jenny’s sketch pad. I scrambled to my feet and ran toward the opening in the wall. The growl above me turned into a long moan. There was a whoosh and the wall behind me collapsed. Then the ceiling started to come down, forcing the smoke and heat down on my shoulders like two giant hands. Burning wood fell at my heels, popping and hissing.
The way before me was closing off. All I could see was gray and livid yellow. I thought of Jenny, lying out there alone, and threw myself into the air.
TWENTY-FOUR
We stumbled through the woods, our arms clasped around each other, until we crossed the highway and came to the parking lot that surrounded the Golden Acorn casino.
When we got there, I eased Jenny down inside. The lobby was musty and cold. A jumble of gaming tables, chairs, and slot machines, most of which had been stripped of anything useful years ago, littered the main room. I followed a corridor that branched off to one side and was lined on either wall with rows of identical-looking doors. I pushed on each one until I found a door that gave. The room was empty except for a mattress that lay on the concrete floor, stripped of sheets and its metal frame, and the husk of what used to be a giant television set. It wasn’t much. I pulled the curtains back and saw that the big glass window on one wall was still intact. It would do.
I brought Jenny inside the room and we collapsed on the bed, both of us covered in small burns and soot. Jenny’s legs had gotten the worst of it. I pulled out my first-aid kit and carefully cleaned and dressed her wounds. We’d have to keep an eye on them, but for now they didn’t look serious.
Jenny patched me up and then we drank the rest of the water in my canteen. After that we were exhausted and lay down, our arms draped over each other.
Soon Jenny was asleep, but I lay awake for hours as the land outside and the hotel room around us dropped into deeper and deeper darkness.
For some reason I kept seeing the quarry. Me and Jackson surrounded by all his friends. My friends. I skipped back to earlier that day and felt the jolt as I connected with that ball and ran the bases. I felt the wind against my skin and heard the sound of those voices cheering me on.
But all of that was gone now, wasn’t it?
I looked over at Jenny, who was sleeping fitfully, burned and slashed, and my nails dug into my palm. I grimaced at the pain but welcomed it. Because it had been me, hadn’t it? I was the one who sent those people to Jenny’s with torches in hand. If they had killed Jenny, it would have been my fault. If there was a war, it would be my war. The people of Settler’s Landing were a bomb, but I was the one who lit the fuse.
I rolled out of bed and drew the curtains aside. I thought of Dad lying all alone at the Greens’ and felt low and sick. If the war came to Settler’s Landing, it would come for him too.
“They won’t come here.”
I turned away from the window. Jenny was sitting up on the mattress, watching me. “Who?”
“Will and his family. They won’t follow us here.”
“Why not?”
“The square pegs are out of the round holes. They can do what they want now.”
I leaned against the windowsill. “Do you think they’ll really do it? Start a war?”
Jenny winced as she drew her burned legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Her face filled with moonlight as she peered out the window.
“I think they want the world to be like it was when they were our age. Maybe a war is just the last piece of the puzzle.”
I left the window and pulled out my old bedroll, spreading the small blanket as best I could over us both. We sat up, huddled close together. Jenny laid her head on my shoulder.
“I shouldn’t have gotten you involved,” she said. “In any of it. The fight with Will. The thing at the Henrys’. It was stupid of me.”
“You didn’t know what would happen.”
“I didn’t care,” Jenny said, a knife-edge of bitterness in her voice. She turned and stared out the window, her back to me. “Maybe I just wanted to get back at them and didn’t care who got hurt in the process.”
I reached out until my hand found hers and clasped it tight. She turned. Her cheek was silver in the moonlight.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We left the casino and Jenny led me down to a billboard on the side of the road. It was the tallest one I had ever seen and dwarfed the trees around it. We climbed to the very top, up rusty and vine-covered handholds — past the smiling, tanned family that claimed AT&T cell phones would keep them connected forever — and sat looking out over the miles of empty land around us.