The pages were swollen and brittle, the words smudged with water. I realized it didn’t matter. I stared at the writing by the blue LED light, trying to make sense of it. “I can’t read Icelandic. I can only speak it.” I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice. Getting to speak a whole new language is pretty cool by itself. But I wanted to read Ari’s poetry.
“Heh. I bet no one was writing yet when that mead was brewed. I’m spared from you reading my terrible words, then.” Ari took the notebook back.
“I bet you’re good,” I said.
Ari tried to smooth down the pages, gave up, and shoved the notebook back into his pocket. “You’ll lose all your money making bets like that.”
“No, I mean it. Can you sing something for me?”
“When we get home. I’ll sing—and play—for you then.”
“You play, too?”
“Keyboard, mostly.” He brushed his pale bangs out of his face, looking uncomfortable. “Did you mean what you said? About needing me here?”
“Yeah.” A rockslide blocked the road. We walked on the sand to get around it. “But—I don’t know if I meant it like that.”
Ari nodded, as if he’d expected as much. That made me angry for some reason. “I don’t know that I didn’t mean it like that, either,” I snapped. “I just don’t know. You know?”
“Yeah,” Ari said, as if that had actually made sense.
I drew my arms around myself. “All I know is that we have to deal with that coin. After that …” My fingers dug for my palms. I forced them away. How am I supposed to go home without Mom? I can’t do this. “I don’t know what happens after that. Okay?”
Ari nodded again, more slowly. “I’ll try not to be an idiot about that, too.” He stopped and looked into the distance.
“What are you thinking?” I asked him.
Ari smiled for real. “I’m thinking that looks like a farmhouse on that hill, and that maybe they’ll let us use their phone.”
Bits of jagged glass littered the ground around the house—all the windows were broken, and an entire wall was missing in the back, turned to a pile of concrete rubble and leaving a kitchen filled with broken dishes open to the wind. My throat went dry. Had I really caused the quake with the fire in me? I reached down and touched a piece of broken glass. It pierced my finger, and blood flowed from the wound.
Blood and a thin wisp of smoke. I pressed my finger swiftly to my mouth, fire receding as I focused on the pain. My blood couldn’t have been burning. … I drew my finger free. There was no smoke now, just a pinprick cut that had already stopped bleeding.
There was a tent set up in the backyard, but no one answered from it when we called. “Maybe they left to stay with family.” Ari turned back toward the broken wall. “You think we can find a phone in there?” He set a foot on the pile of rubble.
I grabbed his arm. “That really would be stupid.” A metal roof arched over the spot where the wall had been. Who knew when it might fall in?
“Just trying to do something useful for once.” Ari stepped back. “Doesn’t matter. Phone’s probably dead, anyway.”
We ate the last of the malt balls and drank the last of the water as we walked on. My stomach rumbled. At least water wasn’t a problem. We refilled the bottle when we passed a stream that trickled down the hillside, after Ari said it was safe to drink.
The road turned to thick mud that coated my sneakers. The clouds cleared, leaving behind a sky full of stars, the white band of the Milky Way burning across them, visible even with the moon.
The mud began to freeze, slush crunching beneath our feet. The moon set, and the stars faded. Color slowly returned to the world, revealing bright yellow and orange grasses clinging to hillsides dusted with frost. The road veered away from the water, and the sun rose behind us. The frost glittered like diamonds, bright as the stars had been. I caught my breath. “Beautiful,” I whispered.
Ari smiled a little. “I’ll show you something more beautiful.” He pointed into the distance. Sun glinted off the windows of a long white building. “Maybe someone will be home this time.”
As we got closer, we saw people outside. We hurried up the building’s low gravel drive. “You have to understand,” a man was saying in English, “that it is very unusual to have earthquakes in the Westfjords. I don’t know how long it will take to get the all-clear to go back inside. We have no injuries, so we’re not a priority.”
“The Westfjords.” Ari nodded, as if he knew where we were. “That’s not so far.”
The building—Hotel Laugarholl, the bright red words painted on it said—didn’t seem damaged, even with its large windows. Maybe it hadn’t been a very large quake—or maybe the hotel got lucky, the way houses did in wildfires, when the flames spared some homes but not others. A half dozen people stood around in pajamas and jackets on the building’s yellow lawn. A few rumpled blankets lay on the ground. In spite of not being cleared to go inside, a couple of men were bringing out food and piling it onto a table.
Ari walked up to one of the men. “Excuse me, could we borrow your phone?” he asked in Icelandic. The man didn’t look at him, just set down a tray of sliced meat and headed back toward the door. Ari followed, repeating the question in English, but the man didn’t turn around.
Two women in jackets and jeans headed for the table, talking quietly in what sounded like German. Ari followed them. “Guten Tag, haben Sie ein Handy?” His German was more hesitant than his English. The women walked right by, as if they didn’t see him.
An uneasy feeling crawled down my spine. I thought of how that emergency vehicle had driven right past us. Of how no one had answered by the farmhouse we’d stopped at.
The other guests—two older couples—got into line behind the Germans. They were debating in English whether to still go on a hike they’d planned. I tapped one of the women on the shoulder. She drew her arms around herself but didn’t turn around.
Ari stepped right in front of a man carrying a couple of pitchers. The man kept walking, stumbling as he bumped into Ari. Thick milk sloshed over one of the pitchers. The man cursed himself for his clumsiness as Ari stepped out of his way.
They couldn’t see us. They really couldn’t. Just like—
A cloud drifted past the sun. Ari returned to my side.
“‘None shall remember you, beyond these stones.’” My voice sounded unnaturally loud. “‘None shall see you, comfort you, aid you. I leave you alone, alone, alone.’”
Ari’s eyes went wide. “We are like ghosts to them.”
“That’s impossible.” Even more impossible than everything else that had happened since I came to Iceland.
Ari began cursing in English and Icelandic both. I stared at the people piling food onto their plates. I didn’t feel like a ghost. How could anyone make the entire world forget us?
Ari stopped cursing and laughed a little. “At least if we do anything stupid now,” he said in Icelandic, “no one will know, right?”
In the distance, a gull cried out. Even if we made it back to Dad and Katrin, what if they couldn’t see us, either? What if they couldn’t remember us? What if no one could, not Jared or any of my friends at school or my grandparents or cousins? Panic rose in me. It made no difference how long we’d been gone if no one remembered us—knew us. “What are we supposed to do now?”
Ari shrugged uneasily. “Eat breakfast? I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. And, well, we should eat while we can.”
I forced the panic down. Sweat beaded on my skin. My stomach rumbled, louder than before. When had I last had anything but stale jerky and chocolate malt balls? “Can ghosts even eat?” I followed Ari as he got into line behind the hikers.