کتاب 09-04

4

Harper was prepared to step between Allie and Nick, was ready for threats, tears, and flying furniture. But Allie did not seem even a little surprised to see the Portable Mother again, or to find Nick wearing her locket. When they reentered the office, Allie sat on the edge of the couch, rubbing her face with both hands. She looked at them with blurred eyes and asked no questions. Harper took a can of Spam out of her carpetbag and hunted in the cupboard for something to spread it on. She discovered a box of saltines and felt a twang of gratitude that approached the spiritual.

Nick planted himself in front of Allie, chin stuck out, waiting for her to say something. She did, at last, finger-spelling only: “I guess you can wear it. I thought it would make you look like a little girl, but at least you’re a cute girl.”

Harper found a cassette, the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, and punched it in the cassette player. Mick Jagger warned his baby, baby, baby that she was out of time. Just about, Harper thought.

Harper gave Allie the shorter version of what Nick had told her in the tomb, while she spread gelatinous Spam on crackers. Allie did not interrupt or cross-examine. When Harper had finished and they were all sitting on the couch together, eating pasty meat, Allie used her fingers to say, “I can’t believe you fell for Mike’s BS about fingerprints. That’s pretty dumb even for you.”

Nick said, “I know. But by the time I started to think Michael was wrong about fingerprints, there was snow on the ground, and no one could leave camp, so there was no way for me to bring anything back without leaving footprints. Besides. You were the dummy who told me when they found the thief, Ben was going to cut off his hands in front of the whole camp.”

She nodded. “Don’t sweat it. You’re just nine. You’re supposed to be dumb. I’m seventeen. What’s my excuse?”

When had Allie turned seventeen, Harper wondered, and then it crossed her mind she had missed her own birthday, four weeks before.

“How long will the Spam hold out?” Allie asked. She slurred a little. Her upper lip was ugly, split in two halves where Jamie had slashed her mouth. Harper needed to poke around for a needle and thread.

“We’ve only got two cans so . . . not long.”

“Good. Because it will be sweet mercy when it’s gone and we can starve to death in peace.”

“I was hoping to avoid that,” Harper said, and began to speak to Nick again with her hands. “The Fireman said you can find him and show him where we are.”

“If I have to.”

“You have to.”

“I’d need to throw fire. I don’t like to.”

“I know you don’t.”

He gave her a wary, haunted look. “Did John tell you why?”

Harper nodded.

Allie looked slowly back and forth between Harper and Nick.

Harper was going to try and speak to him with her hands, but this time sign language wouldn’t do. She got up and hunted in the drawers and came back with a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen.

What happened was not your fault. It takes a minimum of six weeks for the spore to reach the part of the brain that makes controlling it possible. Maybe longer. Your mother wanted to animate fire, the way John does with his Phoenix or you did last night with your little birds. But her brain wasn’t ready. What she did was like inducing labor before a baby is prepared to survive outside the womb. Instead of a child, you get a miscarriage. But she didn’t know. Neither of you did. THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT. Or hers. It was a shitty accident. That’s all.

But he shook his head, folded the note once, twice, and pushed it down into his pocket. His face—swollen from crying, pink where he had burned himself, filthy and still bloodstained—had nothing like ease or acceptance in it.

“You don’t know,” he said with his hands. “You don’t have any idea.”

Before she could reply, he pushed off the couch with both fists and went to the door out into the garage. He looked back.

“You coming or not?” he asked with his hands.

He led them behind the building. A pulsating harmonic filled the night, seemed to make the air itself vibrate: the shared song of a thousand crickets. Nick moved away from them, into the high grass. He paced in a circle, tramping the grass flat. Wet weeds squealed under his sneakers. He went around and around, going faster and faster, his head swinging back and forth. His fingers danced and played and Harper thought he was singing without a song, listening to a melody that had no sound. Asking for what he wanted without words. It was a little frightening, watching him go about like a figurine in a silent music box lurching along its track. His eyes were closed. Then they weren’t. They snapped open, peepholes into a furnace. His fingers trailed orange sparks.

He lifted his left hand and flame trailed off it. Little flames sheared from his fingers, fluttering into the air, but instead of shrinking and vanishing, they took shape, became dainty birds of fire. A burning flock of them fell streaming from his blazing hand and shot this way and that, spinning like rockets into the night. A dozen. Two dozen. A hundred.

“My God,” said Renée, who had come to the back door to watch. “How come they don’t just burn up and vanish? What are they using for fuel?”

“Him,” Allie said and nodded at her brother. “He’s the kindling and the firewood both. The lighter fluid and the match.”

“No, that isn’t right,” Harper said. “That doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t been able to figure this part of it out yet, no matter how much John has tried to—”

But Nick had stopped going about in a circle. He rapidly flailed his hands back and forth and put them under his armpits and the bluish-yellow streamers of flame went out in a whimsical pink gush of smoke. He bent over to blow on his palms, and while he was leaning forward, something gave, and he toppled headlong into the grass.

Allie got to him first, scooping him up in both arms. His head lolled on a neck that didn’t seem to have any bones in it. Allie glared.

“He wasn’t ready to do that,” Allie said. “He’s been through too much. We should’ve waited another night. You should’ve waited.”

“But John—”

“John Rookwood can take care of himself,” Allie said. “Nick can’t.”

And she marched past Harper into the garage.

It was what Allie needed, Harper supposed: a chance to stand up for her brother, to reclaim the role of Nick’s protector from Harper—or at least reclaim a share of it.

“I really don’t understand,” Harper said to Renée. “What Allie said just now about Nick being the kindling and the kerosene—that has poetry in it, but it doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“That’s what poetic speech is for—for the things that are true but don’t make sense. For the rough beast and the widening gyre,” Renée said, and she lifted her gaze to stare into the night, where a hundred flaming birds turned in a widening gyre of their own before scattering into the stars.