Chapter 20
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Turn Left” by Little Dragon
A sound rips from Bas’s chest like his body might crack in half.
The agony in it cuts me so deep I almost bring the helicopter down.
Only our combined grief, tangling and incompatible in the living world, keeps it flying.
My winter rages; his summer burns. Every time the wings ice over, the helicopter dips, jostling Cain’s empty body.
The pain of it all—the loss loss loss like a second heartbeat when neither of us has a first—cuts a burning swath through my winter gale, melting our rotors into tenuous safety.
Hunkered in the back of the helicopter, braced against abandoned flesh, Bas cups his father’s flickering soul light to his chest to keep it from burning up on the iron around us.
My chest aches. I desperately want to help him, but don’t know how.
Bas’s own stubborn love seems to be the only thing keeping Cain’s ghost intact over this distance, but I don’t know if it will be enough when every mile we eat up tears at the light in Bas’s hands, like gale force winds ripping at a tiny candle.
I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
Chest aching, I lift a hand. I don’t know what I expect to do. I can’t reverse what happened, can’t stop the bleeding when the blood’s already gone. I can’t fix this.
Why am I the most like a teenage girl when I need to be a god?
My hand falls short. I fall short. Turning away, I let Bas grieve in the privacy of bowed shoulders and guttering, blue-lit fingers.
I have to concentrate. Digging my fingernails into the pilot’s neck so he remembers what I am, I stare hard at the dials on his dash.
I can’t understand most of them, but a compass is a compass regardless of the machine around it.
Watching the tiny dial, sweat dampening my hands, I make sure it never wavers anywhere but south.
Eventually, the patchwork quilt of towns and highways wears thin, flaking away into a sea of trees.
West Virginia’s hills rise until they’re close enough to kiss through the open helicopter door, blushing bitter red and orange as we skip across state lines, tracking the snaking Guyandotte River back toward the mountains.
Here and there, I catch the barest traces of civilization through the tangle of branches, brief pops of human color so small and infrequent they barely break the undergrowth.
Even the traffic on the interstate has long faded away, what vehicles remain pulled over into berms and ditches, rusted and unmoving.
Are they blocking the interstate, looking for us? People still live here, right? Every now and then I catch the flash of a car roof moving down a side road in the far-off distance. But the interstate itself stands empty, haunted, dusted in a powdered-sugar sprinkling of snow.
The farther we fly, the thicker it gets.
It lumps up against the sides of buildings, hungry drifts swallowing entire vehicles, devouring whole stretches of roads and sidewalks.
My stomach clenches, wary and warning. I squint harder but can’t find a single blemish in that endless glittering white—not a footprint or a tire track.
How is this place sitting under at least a foot of snow when it was barely even cold up north? I don’t get it.
And then, all at once, I do.
It isn’t snow.
Hell isn’t just where we are. It followed us here seventeen years ago. It’s been here waiting for our return.
“Asphodel,” I whisper.
The endless white hides an ocean of disrepair; split foundations, broken windows, entire grocery stores cracked open and empty as an eggshell.
Not a single living soul wanders through this place, only the dead—what I at first took for streetlights, headlights, occupied homes, and open offices are nothing but a hundred thousand meandering dead.
We’re getting close.
Over the next rise, at the end of a yellow steel bridge spanning the river, sunlight catches on a massive, incomplete dome.
It surrounds the remnants of an entire city like a giant stadium, a broken snow globe cupped tenderly around loose-teeth skyscrapers rattling in their sockets.
Every inch of it glitters with silvered glass and iron struts, down to the massive glowing gate that dominates the only road leading through it.
Mirrors patchwork every plate, blazing in the nearly-noon light.
Complicated symbols—runes?—decorate the beams. Constructed from shards of all humanity’s magic, a dozen schools of belief, it should be beautiful.
It should be.
But my stomach turns, threatening to heave up what little acid I have left.
My throat constricts. Every filament of my body screams with wrongness, with the memory of a splitting sky and falling stars.
My bones burn. Staring at this wound in the world, an entire city walled off, broken memories threaten to swallow me.
They flicker past my mind’s eye faster than I can follow, all of them shattered and indecipherable, nothing left but the agony, the loss, the taste of curses on a baby’s tongue.
The pilot winces, cussing softly through his teeth. A bead of blood wells under my thumbnail, digging into the flesh of his neck. With effort, I force my hand to relax.
Fat lot of thanks I get—he sees it as weakness.
“I can’t take you any closer than this,” he says, glancing at me shiftily. Trying to see if I believe him? Gauging if he can distract me long enough to get his gun?
I’m too tired to play this game. My soul aches. I’ve never held my party trick this long, never used my ghost hand and flesh hand as a double threat. A deep and terrifying part of me wants it to stop being a party trick at all.
“The hell you can’t.” Without the buoying tide of godhood and fury, fading adrenaline leaves me cold and sick. My voice cracks. I clear my throat, try again. “Drop us in the city. The dome’s busted; you can fly right through.”
At least, I think he can? My eyes swim, my vision throbbing the longer I force it on the dome.
It’s cracked, isn’t it? Or—maybe it isn’t?
Reality keeps shivering every time I blink, warping around the bulk of this awful thing, the city trapped and pivoting on its edge in the instant when it was both alive and dead, entire skyscrapers engraved in its distorted reflection.
I blink again and find their long bodies crumbled into girders and asphodel and ash.
“That fence scrambles anything that crosses it. We’d drop out of the air like a rock,” the pilot says, slanting the helicopter sideways. As if I won’t notice. As if I won’t do anything about it.
Hell, I can’t complain—he’s right. The compass spins southeast and I watch it right itself as we veer away from the snow-globe city.
Ripping my eyes away from the dome takes teeth-grinding effort, but it brings cold and bitter relief.
Just the sight of it makes me want to vomit and yet, it’s so hard to keep from staring, every fiber of my being drawn to something within those walls.
I know in my bones whatever I need is trapped inside that hateful ring but at the same time, a small voice in my head keeps screaming at me to run.
“There’s a field outside the old treatment plant,” he offers, eyes darting at my face, angling the helicopter down. “I can land there.”
And maybe he’s not my mother, only looking me in the eyes to lie, but I don’t trust him any more than I trust that lurking abomination in the distance. That he knows so much about it—what it is, what it will do, where to go instead—smells like a worst-case scenario backup plan.
“Not there,” I snap, fingers tensing. “And not a word on the radio.”
The man obliges. He swerves, nosing the helicopter back up to an altitude above the broken buildings, but not before I get a good look at the field.
Entirely devoid of ghost lights, the grass salt-yellowed and dead.
“Is that where your team is?” I demand. “Is that where they’re waiting?”
A vein flickers in the pilot’s temple. His hand tightens on the controls, muscles cording all the way up the back of his neck, down his arm.
“What team? You slaughtered my team.”
My vision narrows, white around the edges. The helicopter motor whines. Frost creeps across the windshield.
Slaughtered. The word pounds in my head, brighter than a migraine. Slaughtered. As if he is not, at this moment, carrying the dead and murdered body of an innocent man.
As if he didn’t help to kill him.
“Oh no,” I snarl sarcastically between my teeth.
“The entirely predictable consequences of your fucked-up actions.” My fingernails sink a little deeper in his neck, party trick sending an electric threat down his soul’s spine.
“This is a trap, isn’t it? How did you contact them? Where are they waiting?”
“Does it matter?” Bas snarls, tearing his eyes away from Cain’s still body for the first time in more than an hour. “Of course it’s a trap. It was a trap seventeen years ago and it’s a trap now. It was never going to be anything else.”
My un-heart aches at the look in his eyes. It feels too much like the world breaking, like a hand outstretched but never truly reaching.
I don’t want to argue with him. Not when he’s cradling his father’s remnant, stony shoulders braced like a gargoyle’s, absorbing every motion so the little light won’t flicker quite so bad. Still trying to eliminate suffering when the sufferer is already dead. What could I possibly say to that?
I tell the pilot, “Fly along the river.”
He obliges, but begrudgingly. Flying so low we could somersault onto the broken rooftops of abandoned buildings, dirt devils stirring in the wake of our propellers, we inch along the river’s northern bank, following a deserted stretch of a highway.
A rusted green sign hangs cockeyed above the road, just barely legible:
i-199 exit 58c
macdougall memorial research center
“MacDougall?” I frown, chewing my lip, an itch flaring in the back of my brain. “Why do I remember that name?”