I watch Julie buckling the kids onto the couch. Their bus debacle gave them a few new cuts and bruises to go with the ones from the plane crash—all they need now is a shipwreck to complete their collection—but they appear mostly unhurt.
I hear Sprout asking about her father and Julie struggling to explain. Your father went looking for you and now he’s gone. Your father is lost and broken, and you are rapidly realizing it.
Unhurt? No. No one here is unhurt.
“I used to be Axiom Management,” I tell M, very softly. “I’m Mr. Atvist’s grandson.”
He says nothing, but even his swollen left eye widens a little.
“We’ve all been monsters. We’ve all toured Hell.” I give his good shoulder a slap. “But now we’re here.”
I return to the front.
“She went north on 16th,” Tomsen is telling Julie. “Probably toward 495 if she’s still sane.” She cocks her head. “Is she still sane? Looked like maybe not.”
Julie slips into the passenger seat and doesn’t answer. She looks back at me. “That was her brother, wasn’t it.”
I nod.
“And I’m guessing Marcus…?”
I nod.
“She never told me she had a brother.”
She stares through the windshield at the burnt wreckage of Nora’s home. Tomsen starts the engine and pulls onto 16th. A single tire track cuts through the ash on the pavement.
“I can’t say I know what she’s feeling right now,” Julie says, watching the trail veer from lane to lane, “but I know what it’s like when someone you buried comes back. It’s not a sane thing.”
The ash thins on the outskirts of town, but before the trail disappears, it shoots up the 495 onramp, heading west.
Julie’s voice drops to a whisper. “Where are you going, Nora?”
WE
OUR BOOKS CANNOT BE BURNED.
They can be lost, abandoned, taped up in boxes; their pages can be pulled out, scribbled on, crumpled up and tossed into dark corners; they can be locked in a vault and withheld from everyone, even their authors. But they cannot be burned. Wherever they are hidden, they remain there, their words unchangeable, waiting to be found and read again.
So Nora is writing a new draft to replace them. She is trapped in a house, surrounded by monsters, but this time she escapes unharmed. This time she kills the monsters. This time she saves her brother. She doesn’t wander for years, alone and adrift, looking for someone she can’t remember—a vague ache in her chest, a sourceless sadness that never leaves. This time her brother is with her, sitting on her lap, clinging to the handlebars of this sputtering scooter. He is not a void in a dream, a shadow playing in a sandbox while a lupine hellmouth opens up behind him. He is Addis.
According to calendars and math, Addis is fourteen years old, but he looks the same as the day she lost him. Seven years of resisting the plague’s rot, holding this impossible balance, and now here he is: a boy frozen in time. Nora wonders who he is inside. Did his mind halt, too? Is he still the fragile, good-hearted child she remembers? Or is he more?
It takes a long time for her thoughts to return to earth. She doesn’t know how many miles she’s traveled by the time she realizes she’s traveling. She is on a highway, pushing the scooter’s engine to its limit, but who is pursuing her?
Did she kill someone who cared about her? Did she abandon all her friends?
She buries these distressing thoughts—an ability she retains despite her recent exhumations—and focuses on the road. She is aware that she’s going west. Something important is waiting for her in the west. A task. A home. Some kind of future. Her present feels fragmentary, shattered and scattered by this explosion of memory, but it will come back to her. For now, she has only one concern, and he’s sitting on her lap, his dry, dusty hair like wool against her throat.
The whining engine makes talking to him impossible, but he seems calm, so she sets her questions aside and tries to follow his example. She tries to enjoy the feeling of the warm wind in her face, the pleasant tug on her scalp as her hair forms a parachute. She tries not to feel the pain in her knuckles or see the blood spattered on her clothes.
After a few hours, the engine begins to gasp. Nora forces herself to look down at the light that’s been blinking for a while and finds exactly what she feared: the tank is empty.
She pulls off on the next exit and feathers the throttle, coaxing as much distance as possible before the engine dies in a puff of fry-scented exhaust. Her boots hit the ground with a dry crunch. She looks up, hoping to find herself in a populated area with some possibility of help, but that would be too much luck. It’s one of those roadside blips that may or may not have a name. Inexplicable encampments floating in the vacuum between towns, a lone gas station surrounded by a few moldy houses; no industry, no schools, no fathomable reason to be here. A place where the end of civilization didn’t change a thing.
She helps Addis off the scooter and stands next to him, surveying the dusty ruins. “Well, Addy,” she says, “here we are again.” She laughs at the sound of her voice, the sound of her brother’s nickname filling the air after so many years in storage. “Just like the bad old days.”
He looks up at her with those unsettling yellow eyes. The same color as R’s and Julie’s during that moment of geysering hope when anything and everything seemed possible. The same color as the Gleam, which feels distant and imaginary now, though it was a fact of her daily life less than a month ago.
“Are you still you?” Nora asks him. “Do you remember anything?”
He doesn’t answer, but his stare isn’t blank. It’s not the gape of a mindless corpse; it’s the searching gaze of a philosopher. The same unquenchable curiosity she remembers, but the questions have gone internal.
“All right,” she says. “I see you thinking. Good enough for me.”
It bubbles up suddenly, an uncontainable joy. The absurdity. The impossibility. She is talking to her brother.
She starts wheeling the scooter toward the gas station, hoping for another miracle. Addis remains where she placed him, watching her walk away.
“You coming?” she says. “Or are you gonna stand there like a dumb-ass?”
He considers this like it’s a profound question, then he follows her.
The pumps look too dry to bother with but the repair garage is still locked, always a good sign. She kicks the glass out of the office door and opens it. Rows of dusty snacks; rock-hard chewing gum, disintegrating jerky, and neon orange chips that are probably still edible. Addis picks up a bag of Teddy Grahams and stares at the packaging, bleached silvery white by the sun. He tears it open. He looks inside. He pours its powdery contents onto the floor and drops the bag with a distant frown.
“Sorry Addy,” Nora says, fighting confused tears. “Snacks later.”
The garage is a scrapyard of rusty car parts and oily rags. She finds a barrel marked DIESEL, but a hard kick makes it ring like a gong. Of course it’s empty. Why would anything in this place be full?
She is preparing herself to face a grim reality—that they will have to either continue on foot or risk hitchhiking in a world trained to shoot her brother on sight—when she hears a noise. A distant snarl of tires on gravel. She experiences an emotional paradox:
My friends are here, and I’m terrified. I must get away from my friends.
She hides behind a stack of tires and watches the dust cloud approach. But it’s not her friends. It’s a boxy, armored bank truck hauling a horse trailer. She catches a glimpse of three young people as the truck rolls by: a woman and two men in their early twenties. She steps out of the garage and watches them drive the short distance to the edge of town, where they stop at a train crossing, turn around, and back the trailer up to the tracks.