کتاب 02-02

2

It was barely a mile to Camp Wyndham, but it seemed to Harper they were tromping after Father Storey, through the weary, stifling darkness, for hours. They wallowed in drifts of leaves, wove in and around pine trees, clambered over a pile of rocks, always moving toward the briny scent of the Atlantic. Her ankle thrummed.

Harper did not ask where they were and Father Storey did not say. Not long after they started moving, he popped something into his mouth—it was the size of a blue jay’s egg—and after that made no sound.

They emerged alongside Little Harbor Road, looking across the blacktop at the turnoff into Camp Wyndham: a lane of hard-packed white shell and sandy earth. The entrance was barred by a chain hung between a pair of tall standing boulders that would not have looked out of place at Stonehenge. Beyond, the land mounded up in green hills. Even at night, Harper could see the white steeple of a church, sticking up over the ridge a half mile away.

The burned-out and blackened hull of a bus was parked off the road, just past those totemic blocks of granite. It was up to its iron rims in weeds and had been baked down almost to the frame.

Before they crossed the road, Father Storey clapped twice. The four of them hobbled up out of the brush and crossed the blacktop to the sandy lane. A boy descended the steps of the bus to stand in the open doorway and watch them approach.

Father Storey removed the white egg from his mouth and glanced back at Harper and her human crutches.

“The bus may look like a wreck, but it isn’t quite. The headlights work. If someone unknown were to come up our road, a boy in the bus would wait for our visitors to move out of sight, then flash a signal. Another boy, in the steeple of the church, keeps a lookout for it. The eye in the steeple sees all the people.” He smiled at this, then added, “If necessary we can get into hiding in two minutes. We drill every day. Credit to Ben Patchett—this inspiration is his. My own ideas involved a fantastical system of bird whistles and the possible use of kites.”

The boy in the bus had a beard that made Harper think of Vikings: a stiff coil of braided orange wires. But the face behind the beard was young and soft. Harper doubted he was any older than Allie. He lazily twirled a nightstick in one hand.

“I guess I misunderstood the plan, Father,” the boy said. “I thought you were off to bring us a nurse, not someone who needs a nurse.” His gaze shifted from one face to another and he smiled in a worried sort of way. “I don’t see Allie.”

“We heard a thunderous crash, a stupendous roar of mindless violence and senseless destruction,” Father Storey told him. “Naturally, Allie ran straight toward it. Try not to worry, Michael. She has the Fireman with her.”

Michael nodded, then dipped his head toward Harper in a way that was almost courtly. His eyes shone with the fevered innocence of someone who has been Saved. “Hello to you. We’re all friends here, Nurse. This is where your life begins again.”

She smiled back at him but couldn’t think how to reply, and in another moment it was too late, Ben and Renée shuttling her along. When Harper looked back, the boy had vanished into the bus.

Father Storey was about to put the gumball back in his mouth, then saw Harper looking at it. “Ah. Bit of a compulsion of mine. Something I picked up reading Samuel Beckett. I stick a pebble in my mouth to remind myself to be quiet and listen now and then. I taught in a private school for decades, and with all these young people wandering about, the urge to deliver impromptu lectures is very strong.”

They followed the winding lane through leafy darkness, past a dry swimming pool and a riflery range where brass cartridges glittered dully amid dead leaves. All seemed long abandoned—an appearance maintained at some effort, Harper learned later.

At last they reached the top of the hill. A soccer pitch lay on the other side of the slope in a shallow, grassy cup below them. Children yelled and chased a ball that glowed a pale, eerie green, the color of a ghost. Beyond that, through the trees, loomed a long boathouse and the heaving blackness of the sea.

The chapel was on the right, set back from the road. It was placed on the far side of a sculpture garden of mossy dolmens and tall monoliths. The Monument Park was an odd, primitive sort of thing to find guarding the way to a perfectly modern-looking church with a tall steeple and bright red doors. The church might be a place of worship, but the sculpture garden looked more a place of sacrifice.

What caught Harper’s attention in particular was a knot of six teenagers, sitting on logs, at one corner of a vast barn of a building that turned out to be the cafeteria. They were gathered around a campfire that burned a peculiar shade of ruby-gold, as if the flames were shining through red crystal.

A slim-shouldered beauty swayed in the undulating crimson light, strumming a ukulele. At first glance, she might’ve been Allie’s twin. But no, she was older, mid-twenties maybe. Her head was shaved, too, although she had preserved a single black lock of hair, like a comma, on her brow. The aunt, Harper guessed.

She led the others on a sing-along, their voices lacing together like lovers’ fingers. They sang an old U2 number, sang about how they were one but not the same, and how they would carry each other. As Harper went by, the woman with the uke lifted her gaze and smiled and her eyes were bright as gold coins, and that was when Harper saw there was no campfire at all. It was them making the light. They were all of them tattooed with loops and whorls of Dragonscale, which glowed like fluorescent paint under a black light, hallucinatory hues of cherry wine and blowtorch blue. When they opened their mouths to sing, Harper glimpsed light painting the insides of their throats, as if each of them were a kettle filled with embers.

Harper felt she had never seen anything so frightening or beautiful. She shivered and for a moment was conscious of her body beneath her clothes and a feeling like fingers gently tracing the lines of Dragonscale on her skin. She swayed with a sudden giddy light-headedness.

“They’re shining,” Harper muttered, a little thickly. Her head was filled with their song and it was hard to push a thought through it.

“You will, too,” Ben Patchett promised her. “In time.”

“Is it dangerous?” Harper breathed. “Can they catch fire doing that?”

Father Storey popped the stone out of his mouth and said, “The Dragonscale is like anything that makes fire, Nurse Grayson. You can use it to burn a place down . . . or light your way to something better. No one dies of spontaneous combustion in Camp Wyndham.”

“You’ve beaten it?” Harper asked.

“Better,” Father Storey said. “We’ve made friends with it.”