I back into the kitchen, feeling like a giant has its fist around my chest, needing to get out, needing to breathe. I heave my shoulder into the back door—swollen with heat, it resists—and finally go stumbling into the backyard, coughing, eyes watering. I’m not thinking anymore; my feet are moving me automatically away from the fire, toward clean air,
I don’t know what makes me reach back and wrench open the door—instinct, maybe, or superstition. A set of steep wood stairs runs down to a small underground cellar, roughly hacked out of the earth. The tiny room is fitted with shelves, and stocked with cans of food. Several glass bottles—soda, maybe—are lined up on the ground.
She’s squeezed so far into a corner, I almost miss her. Luckily, before I can close the door again, she shifts, and one of her sneakers comes into view, illuminated in the smoky red light pouring in from above. The shoes are new, but I recognize the purple laces, which she colored in herself.
“Grace.” My voice is hoarse. I ease down onto the top step. As my eyes adjust to the dimness, Grace floats into focus—taller than she was eight months ago, thinner and dirtier, too—crouched in the corner, staring at me with wild, terrified eyes. “Grace, it’s me.”
I reach out to her, but she doesn’t move. I ease myself down a step farther, reluctant to go into the cellar and try to grab her. She was always fast; I’m afraid she’ll duck and run. My heart is throbbing painfully in my throat, and my mouth tastes like smoke. There’s a sharp, pungent smell in the cellar I can’t identify. I focus on Grace, on getting her to move.
“It’s me, Grace,” I try again. I can only imagine what I must look like to her, how changed I must appear. “It’s Lena. Your cousin Lena.”
She stiffens, as though I’ve reached out and shocked her. “Lena?” she whispers, her voice awed. But still she doesn’t move. Above us, there is a thunderous crash. A tree branch, or a piece of the roof. I have a sudden terror that we will be buried in here if we don’t move now. The house will collapse, we’ll be trapped.
“Come on, Gracie,” I say, invoking an old nickname. The back of my neck is sweaty. “We’ve got to go, okay?”
At last Grace moves. She strikes out clumsily with a foot, and I hear the tinkle of glass breaking. The smell intensifies, burning the inside of my nostrils, and suddenly I place it.
Gas.
“I didn’t mean to,” Grace says, her voice high-pitched, shrill with panic. She is crouching now, and I watch a dark stain of liquid spread on the packed dirt floor around her.
The terror is huge now: It presses me from all sides. “Grace, come on, sweetie.” I try to keep the panic from my voice. “Come take my hand.”
“I didn’t mean to!” She starts to cry.
I scuttle down the last few steps and grab her, heaving her up onto my waist. She is awkward, too big for me to carry comfortably, but surprisingly light. She wraps her legs around my waist. I can feel her ribs and the sharp points of her hip bones. Her hair smells like grease and oil and—faintly, just faintly—like dish soap.
Up the stairs and into the world of flame and fire, air turned watery, shimmering with heat, as though the world is breaking apart into a mirage. It would be faster to set Grace down and let her run next to me, but now that I have her—now that she is here, clinging to me, her heart beating frantically in her chest, pounding its rhythm into mine—I won’t let her go.
The bike is where I left it, thank God. Grace maneuvers clumsily onto the seat, and I squeeze on behind her. I shove off down the street, my legs heavy as stone, until momentum begins to carry us; and then I ride, as fast as I can, away from the fingers of smoke and flame, leaving the Highlands to burn.
Hana
I walk without paying attention to where I am or where I am going. One foot in front of the other, my white shoes slapping quietly against the pavement. In the distance, I can hear the roar of shouting voices. The sun is bright, and feels nice on my shoulders. A breeze lifts the trees silently, and they bow and wave, bow and wave, as I pass.
One foot, and then another foot. It’s so simple. The sun is so bright.
What will happen to me?
I don’t know. Maybe I will come across someone who recognizes me. Maybe I will be brought back to my parents. Maybe, if the world doesn’t end, if Fred is now dead, I will be paired with someone else.
Or maybe I will keep walking until I reach the end of the world.
Maybe. But for now there is only the high white sun, and the sky, and tendrils of gray smoke, and voices that sound like ocean waves in the distance.
There is the slapping of my shoes, and the trees that seem to nod and tell me,
Maybe, after all, they are right.
Lena
As we get close to Back Cove, the trickle of people swells to a roaring, rushing stream, and I can barely maneuver my bike between them. They are running, shouting, waving hammers and knives and pieces of metal piping, surging toward some unknown location, and I’m surprised to see that it isn’t just Invalids rioting anymore: It is kids, too, some as young as twelve and thirteen, uncured and angry. I even spot a few cureds watching from their windows above the street, occasionally waving, a show of solidarity.
I break loose of the crowd and bump the bike onto the churned-mud shores of the cove, where Alex and I made our stand a lifetime ago—where for the first time, he traded his happiness for mine. Grass grows high between the rubble of the old road, and people—injured or dead—are lying in the grass, letting out moans or staring sightlessly at the cloudless sky. I see several bodies facedown in the shallows of the cove, and tendrils of red sweeping across the surface of the water.
Past the cove, at the wall, the crowd is still thick, but it looks like mostly our people. The regulators and police must have been driven back, farther toward Old Port. Now thousands of rioters are flowing in that direction, their voices unified, a single note of fury.
I ditch the bike in the shade of a large juniper and, at last, take Grace by the shoulders, examine her all over for cuts or bruises. She is shaking, wide-eyed, staring at me as though she believes I’ll disappear any second.
“What happened to the others?” I ask. Her fingernails are coated with dirt, and she is skinny. But otherwise, she looks okay. More than okay—she looks beautiful. I feel a sob building in my throat, and I swallow it back. We aren’t safe, not yet.
Grace shakes her head. “I don’t know. There was a fire and . . . and I hid.”
So they did leave her. Or they didn’t care enough to look when she disappeared. I feel a wave of nausea.
“You look different,” Grace says quietly.
“You got taller,” I say. Suddenly I could shout for joy. I could scream with happiness while the whole world burns.
“Where did you go?” Grace asks me. “What happened to you?”
“I’ll tell you all about it later.” I take her chin with one hand. “Listen, Grace. I want to tell you how sorry I am. I’m sorry for leaving you behind. I’ll never leave you again, okay?”
Her eyes travel my face. She nods.
“I’m going to keep you safe now.” I push the words out past the thickness in my throat. “Do you believe me?”
She nods again. I pull her to me, squeezing. She feels so thin, so fragile. But I know that she is strong. She
