I knew, too, that I could no longer put Tyler at risk simply because I wanted his help. I’d already put him in too much danger.
I shrugged and shook my head at the same time, hoping more than anything that my dad had managed to get someplace safe.
Tyler held his hand out to me, and I took it, our hands fitting together seamlessly. The idea of leaving him was nearly unbearable, like losing part of myself—something I understood all too well.
As I let him pull me along, something in the wreckage caught my attention, and I hesitated.
“Hold on a sec.” I pulled my hand from his, reaching for the picture that was jumbled in with all the rest. A photograph.
I bent down, brushing aside broken glass to pluck it free. Beneath the first photograph was another. And beneath those, another and another.
I recognized all the images despite never having seen anything like them in real life. Fireflies. Picture after picture of fireflies.
There were faraway images of swarms and incredibly detailed close-ups. Others were artistic—shots taken in the night sky, making the fireflies look like stars against the black canvas of night—and others still that were clinical feeling and stark, in which you could make out each and every detail of the insects, right down to their delicate antennae and bulging round eyes. It was as if my dad had been studying the insects.
At the bottom of the haphazard pile was an image I’d seen before. I’d hadn’t made the connection between it and the nocturnal luminaries, with their delicate, vein-laced and swirl-tipped wings.
My fingers traced the image as I tried to recall the first time I’d seen it: the beetle-like version that depicted what a firefly looked like at rest . . . and burnished in gold.
Just like it had been in the center of Agent Truman’s badge. It hadn’t been a golden beetle at all. It had been a firefly.
My thoughts were interrupted when a single drop of blood fell onto the photo from above me. It landed right in the center of the picture and splattered outward, blooming like a flower. A feeling of icy alarm settled over me as I turned to glance over my shoulder.
I’d half expected to find my father there, with his bloodied hands outstretched to me.
But it wasn’t my father. It was Tyler, standing above me and studying the same images I was.
“Your nose.” I let the picture flutter to the floor. “Tyler, you’re bleeding.”
He frowned at me before using the back of his hand to check for himself. “You’ve got to be—” He shook his head, perplexed. “I haven’t had a bloody nose since I was a kid.”
But I was already on my feet and running toward the bathroom, kicking litter out of my way. When I came back, I handed him a wad of toilet paper. “I think you’re supposed to lean your head back. And pinch your nose. I think you’re supposed to pinch it.”
He did as I said, and without taking the paper away, he dropped his gaze and grinned at me. “So you’re saying I’m not gonna miraculously heal the way you did? I thought maybe some of your superpowers might rub off on me.”
I rolled my eyes, wondering how he could possibly make jokes during a situation like this. It would be hard to leave him when the time came. “They’re not superpowers.” I smirked back at him. He sounded ridiculous with all that toilet paper bunched up and plugging his nose. I grinned. “And I’m pretty sure they don’t work that way.” I nudged him with my shoulder as I shoved past him back into my dad’s room. “I just want to grab a few things and then we need to get out of here before anyone catches us. I was hoping my dad would be here. I have so many questions, and I think he might have some of the answers I need.” It felt so strange to admit that out loud, that my dad had been right after all. I looked around at the room. At the ripped papers and broken glass. Even the computer monitor had been smashed. I couldn’t bear to think that he might’ve been harmed because of me. “I just hope he’s okay.”
“Me too.” Tyler’s voice came out muffled by the toilet paper.
I began collecting what I could find, anything that looked even remotely useful, although most of it looked like junk. I gathered the firefly images and a map with a bunch of colorful dots and lines my dad had drawn, along with the one missing-person flyer I couldn’t ignore: the one of me.
While I was searching, I found the ball from the first baseball team I’d ever been on, back when I was in the first grade—when the boys and girls still played together. Our parents had signed Austin and me up for the same team, and my dad had volunteered to be our coach.
This was the very same ball Austin had hurled through my bedroom window after I’d accused him of throwing like a girl. His parents had grounded him for a whole week for breaking my window—one day for every year he’d been alive on this earth.
And for an entire week I’d regretted taunting him, because for seven painfully long days I’d had to come home from school and play all by myself. I’d lost my best friend because I’d made fun of the way he threw.
My dad, though, had saved that ball. He said it was one of his favorite mementos. I used to think he meant because it was from our first game—his as our coach and mine as a player. But now that I thought of it, I wonder if it was more than that. I wonder if it was because of the lesson I’d learned, about how to treat those I cared about.
My dad had always been big on the power of words and respect.
“The tongue pierces deeper than the spear,” he’d told me when I’d complained about Austin’s punishment. And even though I knew he was trying to teach me some sort of lesson, all I could remember thinking was that it was too bad if what my dad had said was really true, because how cool would it be if our tongues really were spears? First graders thought of things like that, I guess.
“We better get moving,” I told Tyler, putting the ball back. He had his own collection of things, and I appraised his findings with a dubious eye. His nose had stopped bleeding, and his toilet paper compress was gone.
“What do you think?” he asked, holding up a fanny pack by its strap. “You think your dad would mind if I kept this?”
I made a face at him. How long had my dad been holding on to that relic? “Are you kidding? You’re not seriously planning to wear that thing, are you?”
“You never know when you’ll need both hands free.” He strapped it around his waist and started filling it with the things he’d gathered: some newspaper and magazine clippings, a USB thumb drive that had been lying beneath the papers on the floor, and a CD with a handwritten 2009–2014 scrawled across it.
“This isn’t a looting mission.”
He looked meaningfully at all the junk in my hands. “Are you sure about that? Here, I bet you can fit all your stuff in this thing.” He held the pouch open for me.
“I’m not letting my stuff touch that thing. My hands work just fine. You know your nerd status just shot up like a million points, don’t you?” I didn’t tell him the real reason I wasn’t sharing space in his fanny pack, that I wasn’t planning to go with him.
He shrugged like it was no big deal, but I loved that he didn’t care that he was making a fool of himself with that ridiculous pouch.
His eyes shot skyward as his body went entirely rigid. “Shh!” The crooked grin melted from his face. “Did you hear that?” His head cocked slightly, and he strained—we both strained—to find whatever it was he thought he’d heard.
“No,” I whispered, slightly thrown by the sudden shift in his demeanor. “I don’t . . .” But I’d spoken too soon. It was there, and now, just barely and so faraway, I could hear it too. My throat ached, and I nodded this time. “We’re too late.”