Chapter Twenty
“We have to move.” I tugged at Julian’s arm, but his golden-brown skin had gone gray, his lips pale. His cold fingers trembled as I grasped them. “Julian, we can’t stay here.”
“Maybe we should.” Ezra was steady and warm against my back, one hand on Julian’s shoulder, fingers curled around it like he meant to pull him away from the wreckage before us. “That fire’s too precise to be natural. Whoever did it could be out there waiting to attack us.”
“I don’t care about that!” Radiance snapped between my fingers, and Ezra flinched. Guilt tried to make itself known in my heart, but I tamped it down. I was too angry at whatever had made Julian look like this—so undone. “We can protect ourselves.”
Julian returned to his senses with a shuddering breath. He straightened, shrugging us both off. “Yes,” he said simply. “I have to find them.” He took a few unsteady steps before running across the field toward the inferno.
There was no approaching the buildings. The fire was a living thing, daring us to get too close so that it could consume us, too.
Following Julian, we skirted around the wall of flames, sleeves pressed against our faces when the wind changed and hot smoke washed over us.
I’d never seen a fire this big. Where the structures burned, it raged thirty feet high and roared like a beast. The roof of a tall barn caved in with a thundering crash, sending a cloud of sparks skyward like a firework.
Watching it fall, Julian stumbled and made a sound that the fire swallowed up.
“Nobody’s alive in there,” I shouted over the sound of destruction. I grabbed Julian’s sleeve and tugged him, scared of the wild look in his eyes, scared he’d run into the dark smoke billowing from the blackened maw of a house. His body shook violently.
Coughing, Ezra grabbed him and wrestled him out of the worst of the smoke, then deposited him in the dirt. “Julian! Whoever was there isn’t there anymore.”
Julian wasn’t watching either of us. He sat, limbs scattered like he wasn’t sure what to do with them in the face of what he’d lost. “This is their home. Their laboratory. It’s everything.”
“Maybe they’re in town,” I offered, trying to find a scrap of hope for him. “Let’s go look for them there.”
Startling, Julian scrambled up. Ezra tensed, clearly fit to tackle him if he made a move toward the fire again. We both followed his wide-eyed gaze to the sight of a hobbling figure emerging from the smoke.
“Someone made it out!” I shouted.
“Keep him back,” Ezra said quickly, shoving Julian at me as if he weren’t over a full head taller than I was. He jogged forward, his mouth set in a serious line that made my chest swell with a strange sort of pride. This was Ezra the apprentice healer.
It wasn’t difficult to hold Julian in place. I swallowed down growing panic over how thoroughly shaken he was.
Smoke poured across the ground in waves, briefly obscuring Ezra before he returned with a frail woman in his arms. Her face was burned raw on one side, her gray hair singed and bloody. Ezra met my frantic gaze and shook his head once, quickly.
My knees went watery.
The woman had small soot-stained hands. She looked to be in her seventies, her tan skin deeply lined with wrinkles and dotted with age spots. With horror, I saw the blistered ruin of her bare feet, the way her trousers had melted into her charred skin. No one could survive these kinds of burns.
“Maggie.” Julian’s hoarse voice broke through the ringing in my ears. Ezra carefully eased the woman into his arms, and he sank to the ground, cradling her. “Maggie. Can you hear me?”
She opened dark brown eyes clouded with pain and trembled a smile at him. “You’re more handsome than I imagined you’d be.”
He began to cry, and the sight of it shattered what was left of my composure. I allowed Ezra to pull me close, to tuck his arm around my back. I thought of Julian’s journal, of all the letters he’d carefully transcribed in code to remember Maggie’s words, always.
“Maggie.” Julian choked on her name. “What happened?”
“The House.” Smoke had wrecked her voice. It was barely more than a whisper. “They sent their Transistors.”
Pain crossed Julian’s face like she’d slipped a knife between his ribs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Hush. You’re too clever a boy to think it’s your fault.”
“Your research …”
“It will live on. Listen to me. Everyone’s dead. They’re gone. But Nikola wasn’t here. She ran back to that dirty city to continue her work.”
“She’s alive,” Julian said breathily.
“Find her and keep her safe, Julian. She’s got no sense. Neither do you. Maybe together. Maybe together.”
“I will find her.” Julian clasped her sleeve, careful not to touch her burned, ruined fingers. “We’ll continue our work, Maggie. Your work.”
Maggie’s gaze wavered, slow to settle on mine. When our eyes met, it was like wrapping my hand around a conduction line. I straightened, more eager to please this woman than I’d ever been to impress my teachers at the House. She was important to Julian—dearly. I didn’t want her to find me lacking.
I didn’t know why it mattered.
“You’re Dunn’s girl?” she asked. “The little troublemaker?”
It took me a moment to understand what she meant. Professor Dunn must have corresponded with her. About me. Claimed me, in her own way, as her own. Stunned, I nodded.
“End it,” Maggie whispered to me.
My mouth fell open. I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her right. Ezra’s breath sucked in with a hiss, close to my ear.
“What?” My voice was too small. I wasn’t enough.
She narrowed her eyes, focused on me like a thread of radiance. “The poison flows from the top. End them. End it.”
“Maggie,” Julian murmured. It was the start of a protest, but he closed his mouth when she looked back at him. The resolve in her eyes was a living thing, sharper than a blade.
“If it comes to that,” she whispered, “don’t stop her.”
My pulse thundered in my ears. She was voicing my desire to destroy what they’d built, no matter what kind of violence it unlocked in me. My radiance sang in response to her quiet conviction.
But what if killing ripped me apart? Or worse—what if I liked it?
Ezra and Julian watched me, both frowning, but neither would argue with this woman’s dying wish. I wasn’t sure if she’d freed me or shackled me.
“Please.” Julian looked up at us, lost. “Help her.”
Heat and smoke washed over us in waves. Ezra released me and crouched beside them. Sheltering Maggie’s body with his own, he stroked her hairline, his hand trembling. “Julian, I cannot,” he said, voice thick with regret. “No healer could.”
Maggie smiled up at Julian. “Oh, dear boy,” she said, wavering. The tight furrow of pain between her brows released as her lips parted in a silent sigh. We held vigil, smoke whipping around us, as she took rattling, shallow breaths—and then took no more.
The fire raged on.
A dozen people from the town arrived soon after Maggie passed, and together, we built a firebreak to keep the wind from driving the flames toward the town.
Leaving Julian with Maggie in the shade of a lone apple tree, Ezra and I took up tools and worked alongside the townspeople to dig a wide furrow.
A group carrying pails drew water from the farm’s well and doused the freshly turned dirt.
“I’ve never seen the ground give way so easily,” an old man with pale skin and freckles remarked, stopping to wipe the sweat from his brow and rearrange his hat. “Thank the stars for that.”
My hands were already blistered, torn palms stinging as I stepped on a shovel to turn the soft soil.
He was right—it was as if the roots snaked away from my shovel and sank back into the ground.
With a start, I looked around for Ezra and saw him raking steadily, his brow creased with far more concentration than it required.
I made my way closer to him, lowering my voice. “You’re doing this?”
“If I don’t, the fire will spread to Cascade,” he said tightly. “I’m only coaxing the roots away.”
“Oh, only that.” I wanted to say more, to tell him to stop. But his efforts had likely saved the little hilltop town overlooking Maggie’s farmland.
It was a bittersweet victory. Every structure on the farm had been destroyed. The Transistors who had set this fire had done so ruthlessly, with a clear intention to maximize damage. And death.
Once the firebreak was complete, the townspeople began to pick through the smoking rubble.
I hurried toward the sound of shouting and found Ezra standing at the skeletal edge of one of the burned-up structures.
He had his bandana pulled over his nose and mouth.
When he saw me, he gestured for me to stay back.
“It’s the rest of the family,” someone said. Following their gaze, I made out misshapen forms in the ruins. Without having it pointed out to me, I would have mistaken it for rubble. But now it was clear there was something organic about the forms.
The bodies.
The people.
I turned away, eyes stinging with more than the smoke.
“It’s not safe to get closer,” Ezra was saying to the group searching for remains. “We’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
Stumbling away, I found a patch of soft dirt and let my knees buckle. A tired sob caught in my throat, but I couldn’t cry. Not now, not yet.
In the distance, I saw a small group of women carefully pulling Maggie from Julian’s arms to prepare her for burial. One of the townswomen had ridden away to fetch an old sheet embroidered with white carnations, and it hung from a bough of the apple tree, waiting for its final purpose.
A kind-eyed woman crouched in front of me and pushed a tin cup full of cold well water into my hands. She had deep-brown skin and wore her hair shorter than mine, a close crop of tight curls. “I’m Francis.”
“Josephine,” I gasped out between gulps.
“Did you know the Taylors?” she asked.
“I didn’t. My—friend.” I tripped over the word I’d rarely spoken. “He did. We traveled here to work on the farm.”