It’s almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there’s really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn’t mean there will be a tomorrow.
What did Evan say?
And I whisper, “Mayfly.” His name for me.
He had been in me. He had been in me and I had been in him, together in an infinite space, and there had been no spot where he ended and I began.
Sammy stirs in my lap. He dozed off; now he’s awake again. “Cassie, why are you crying?”
“I’m not. Shush and go back to sleep.”
He brushes his knuckles across my cheek. “You are crying.”
Someone is coming toward us. It’s Ben. I hurriedly wipe the tears away. He sits beside me, very carefully, with a soft grunt of pain. We don’t look at each other. We watch the fiery hiccups of the fallen drones in the distance. We listen to the lonely wind whistling through dry tree branches. We feel the coldness of the frozen ground seeping up through the soles of our shoes.
“I wanted to thank you,” he says.
“For what?” I ask.
“You saved my life.”
I shrug. “You picked me up when I fell,” I say. “So we’re even.”
My face is covered in bandages, my hair looks like a bird nested in it, I’m dressed up like one of Sammy’s toy soldiers, and Ben Parish leans over and kisses me anyway. A light little peck, half cheek, half mouth.
“What’s that for?” I ask, my voice coming out in a tiny squeak, the little girl’s from long ago, the freckle- faced Cassie-I-was with the fuzzy hair and knobby knees, an ordinary girl who shared an ordinary yellow school bus with him for an ordinary day.
In all my fantasies about our first kiss—and there’d been about six hundred thousand of them—I never once imagined it would be like that one. Our dream kiss usually involved moonlight, or fog, or moonlight
“Hey, Ben, I was wondering if you remember…We rode the bus together in middle school, and you were talking about your little sister, and I told you Sammy was just born, too, and I was wondering if you remembered that. About them being born together. Not together, that would make them twins,
“I’m sorry…Babies?”
“Never mind. It’s not important.”
“Nothing is not important anymore.”
I’m shaking. He must notice, because he puts his arm around me and we sit like that for a while, my arms around Sammy, Ben’s arm around me, and together the three of us watch the sun break over the horizon, obliterating the dark in a burst of golden light.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a novel may be a solitary experience, but seeing it to a finished book is not, and I would be a total schmuck to claim all credit for myself. I owe an enormous debt to the team at Putnam for their immeasurable enthusiasm that only seemed to intensify as the project grew past all our expectations. Huge thanks to Don Weisberg, Jennifer Besser, Shanta Newlin, David Briggs, Jennifer Loja, Paula Sadler, and Sarah Hughes.
There were times when I was convinced that my editor, the unconquerable Arianne Lewin, was channeling some demonic spirit bent on my creative destruction, testing my endurance, pushing me, as all great editors do, to the shadowy boundaries of my ability. Through multiple drafts, endless revisions, and countless changes, Ari never wavered in her belief in the manuscript—and in me.
My agent, Brian DeFiore, should be awarded a medal (or at least a fancy certificate tastefully framed) as manager extraordinaire of my writer’s angst. Brian is that rarest breed of agent who never hesitates to wander into the deepest thickets with his client, always willing—I won’t say always eager—to lend an ear, hold a hand, and read the four hundred and seventy-ninth version of an ever-changing manuscript. He would never say he’s the best, but I will: Brian, you’re the best.
Thanks to Adam Schear for his expert handling of the foreign rights to the novel, and a special thank-you to Matthew Snyder at CAA for navigating that strange and wonderful and baffling world of film, working his mystical powers with awe-inspiring efficiency—before the book was even finished. I wish that I were half the writer that he is an agent.
A writer’s family bears a particular burden during the composition of a book. I honestly don’t know how they took it sometimes, the long nights, the moody silences, the blank stares, the distracted answers to questions they never really asked. To my son, Jake, I owe hearty thanks for providing his old man with a teen’s perspective and particularly for the word “boss” when I needed it most.
There is no one to whom I am more indebted than my wife, Sandy. It was a late-night conversation filled with the same exhilarating mixture of hilarity and fear so characteristic of many of our late-night conversations that was the genesis of this book. That and a very odd debate a few months later comparing an alien invasion to a mummy attack. She is my fearless guide, my finest critic, my most rabid fan, and my fiercest defender. She is also my best friend.
I lost a dear friend and companion during the writing of this book, my faithful writing dog, Casey, who braved every assault, stormed every beach, and fought for every inch of ground by my side. I will miss you, Case.
THE MONSTRUMOLOGIST
ONE
“A Singular Curiosity”
These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed.
But he is dead now and has been for more than forty years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets.
The one who saved me… and the one who cursed me.
I can’t recall what I had for breakfast this morning, but I remember with nightmarish clarity that spring night in 1888 when he roused me roughly from my slumber, his hair unkempt, eyes wide and shining in the lamplight, the excited glow upon his finely chiseled features, one with which I had, unfortunately, become intimately acquainted.
“Get up! Get up, Will Henry, and be quick about it!” he said urgently. “We have a caller!”
