XXVIII
The field was too slick to run on, so Coach Nelson marched us onto the red track instead—the spongy rubber glistening from last night’s storm. He acted as if we should thank him for sparing us the mud, then tortured us with stretches that made everyone hate him anyway.
I reached back to tie up my hair, and the elastic snapped. The plastic bit into my wrist. A thin red line bloomed across my skin, bright against the fading marks Heaton had left there.
I hissed—then froze.
Penny stood beside me, holding out a spare hair tie as if she had been carrying it all class.
For one second, I only stared at it.
At her hand. At the small, ridiculous mercy of being known well enough that someone still anticipated the things I forgot.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t lose that one,” she replied, staring straight ahead.
The whistle blew. Sneakers squeaked against the wet track. Everyone groaned and shifted into motion.
For a few minutes, everything felt almost normal.
It was a tiny thing.
But it was us again.
Or at least, the first step back.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of damp corridors, half-finished notes, and teachers acting as if any of us were absorbing a single word.
When the last bell shrieked, the sky outside had settled into a pale, washed-out blue. Everyone flooded the exits, chasing the last dry piece of sunlight left in Mapleton.
Heaton was leaning against the locker next to mine, arms crossed, a dark pillar of impatience while I wrestled with a textbook wedged too tightly between my notebooks.
He saw her before I did.
A subtle tightening in his jaw was the only warning.
“Maddie!” Penny called through the growing crowd.
Heaton pushed off the lockers with fluid, unhurried grace, moving just enough to put himself between me and the approaching students. His body angled toward the current of the hallway like a boulder placed in a stream.
“You good?” he asked.
His voice was low, but his eyes were anything but casual. They moved over my face, my shoulders, my hands—scanning, cataloging, hunting for cracks.
My heartbeat climbed.
“Yeah,” I said. Too thin. “Totally fine.”
He hummed.
A low, skeptical vibration that said he didn’t believe a word of it, but he wasn’t going to dissect me in front of an audience. His arm brushed mine as he reached past me and tapped the stuck textbook once with two fingers.
Then he pulled.
The book came free with a sharp scrape and dropped neatly into my bag.
I stared at it.
He leaned down, his breath cool against my cheek.
“Message me tonight, October.”
But the subtext was clear:
If you don’t, I’m coming anyway.
“Okay,” I said.
He finally turned as Penny reached us, giving her a brief nod.
Then, with a final lingering look at me, he dissolved into the stream of passing students.
Penny watched him go, her expression caught somewhere between awe and concern. She waited until his shadow disappeared before letting out a breath that sounded almost like a whistle.
“Well,” she said, adjusting her tote bag. “That explains a few things. And by things, I mean why you’ve been acting like you’re starring in a spy thriller.”
“Can we just . . . not?”
“Oh, we are absolutely gonna.” She bumped her shoulder against mine. “Walk with me. You are not getting into that car until I get at least a trailer for this movie.”
We fell into step along the sidewalk, away from the after-school rush. Raindrops slipped from the trees in slow, steady taps, dotting the backs of our jackets.
“So,” Penny drawled, stretching the word like taffy. “You and the new transfer hottie.”
I closed my eyes. “Penny.”
“The one you were tucked away with at lunch behind the art wing?” Her brows lifted. “Maddie, that’s pretty secluded even for you.”
“There is nothing—”
“Oh, don’t insult me. I have eyes.”
“I didn’t think we were sitting together,” I mumbled, staring at a crack in the pavement.
Her smile faded.
“I was mad.”
“I know.”
Our boots scuffed against the wet sidewalk in a matching rhythm. The silence between us wasn’t empty. It was waiting for one of us to forgive first.
“I wasn’t just mad that you went off-grid,” Penny said finally, the teasing slipping out of her voice. “I was mostly pissed that you lied to Ford.”
Guilt burned beneath my ribs.
“I haven’t heard him that panicked since . . . ” She stopped, swallowing the rest. “Since Dad died. Ford doesn’t panic, Maddie. Not unless it’s family.”
“I didn’t want him to worry,” I said. “I just didn’t think it through.”
We stopped near the bike racks. The sun dipped low and pale, turning the wet asphalt into streaks of trembling gold.
Penny turned to face me.
“I hate it when you keep things from me,” she whispered. “But I hate it more when you look like you did yesterday. Like you were carrying the whole damn world on your back and waiting for it to crush you.”
My eyes stung.
The lump in my throat came so fast I almost hated her for noticing.
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “Everything. I promise. I just . . . I can’t yet.”
“Can’t?” Penny tilted her head. “Or won’t?”
“Can’t.”
My voice steadied on the word.
“Because if I say it out loud, it stops being a nightmare and starts being real. And I don’t know who else is listening, Pen. Truly.”
Her expression changed slowly, like a girl who knew every version of me was weighing the Maddie she remembered against the one standing in front of her now.
Finally, she nodded.
Once.
“For now,” she said, jabbing a finger lightly against my chest. “My oldest friend gets a for now. But next time? I want a heads-up before you dive headfirst into whatever the hell this is.”
A startled, shaky laugh broke out of me.
“Deal.”
“Good.” She nudged me again, her grin creeping back into place. “Also, for the record? Yeah, he is devastatingly hot. Like, concerningly hot. Like, this-man-has-definitely-ruined-lives hot.”
“Penny, please.”
“But,” she continued, holding up one finger, “if he hurts you, tell him I bite. And I’m pretty sure my tetanus shot is expired, so it’ll be a whole thing.”
I laughed, shielding my face. “There’s nothing to bite about. We’re just . . . figuring stuff out.”
Penny skipped backward a few steps, her blonde hair catching the late light like static.
“Figuring stuff out is girl-code for: I like him, but he’s definitely going to ruin my life.”
“I’m going to my car now,” I called, though I couldn’t stop the smile from spreading.
“Admit I’m right and I’ll let you leave.”
“Not happening.”
“Coward!”
Her laugh trailed after her as she turned down the path.
For the first time all day, something in the air felt lighter. As if she had reached into the dark, hooked her fingers through mine, and pulled me back toward the surface.
When I finally slid into the driver’s seat, the dashboard lit up like a welcome home.
I cranked the volume until the speakers rattled, rolled the window halfway down, and let the wind tangle my hair.
Then I sang.
Loud.
Off-key.
Completely shameless.
Something that made me feel eighteen again.
If only for the length of a song.
The song faded before I reached the foothills.
The road narrowed into a ribbon of dark asphalt threading between pines and red sandstone—one of those stretches where the world fell away and left you feeling like the last person on earth.
With every curve, the daylight thinned. Pale gold slipped into gray-blue. Gray-blue into something colder.
By the time the woods broke, the October Estate had swallowed the horizon.
It didn’t look as broken as it used to be.
The ivy had been cut back. The rot scraped down to the bone. A few shutters hung straighter now, though the windows stayed black, swallowing what little light reached them.
Leaves drifted in slow spirals as I cut the engine.
Out here, there was no neighborhood noise. No distant traffic. No laughter carried from open windows.
Just the canyon breathing.
Wind threaded through the trees, soft and irregular, like something sleeping with one eye open.
I sat there with my phone in my palm; Heaton’s name glowing like a dare.
I had promised to message him.
But hitting send felt like pulling the pin on a grenade I wasn’t ready to throw.
So, I locked it and shoved the phone into my bag.
The front door was useless, still sealed like a wound, so I circled around back. The door resisted, swollen from the storm. When it finally gave, the hinges let out a low, drawn-out moan—like a man waking from a bad dream.
Inside, the house smelled of damp wood, old plaster, and something floral I couldn’t place.
Too sweet.
Too faded.
Like a bouquet left in a room after everyone had gone.
My bag hit the bench with a soft thud. I should have gone upstairs. Showered. Changed. Done homework. Eaten something that didn’t come from a vending machine or a crumpled sandwich bag.
Instead, my feet carried me toward the narrow door beneath the house.
The temperature dropped with every step. The world above faded by degrees—the smell of rain, the memory of Penny’s laugh, the bright, shameless sound of my voice singing in the car.
By the time I reached the lower corridor, all of it felt like something I had dreamed.
At the far end, the lab emerged from the dark. The dented metal door waited beneath a flickering light, its sensor blinking like a watchful eye.
Heaton had opened it like it was nothing.
Harvey had built it like it was everything.
I stood there, listening to the faint hum behind the walls.
It had been weeks since Harvey had tried to reach us. No calls. No answers. No proof he was alive beyond a few cryptic messages that sounded less like my dad and more like someone wearing his absence as a mask.
Heaton had been right, too. Even knowing where to start felt impossible. Hundreds of files. Sealed crates. An entire wall of formulas that might as well have been written in another language.
The only compass I had ever known was a ruin.
I remembered it at the epicenter of the blast this summer: a perfect sphere of cloudy crystal, fractured by a single crack that split its surface like black lightning.
I hadn’t known what it was then.
Now I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I crossed into the lab.
The lights overhead buzzed softly awake. I moved toward the back, scanning the walls, shelves, and crates stacked with military precision.
That was when I saw it.
One of the steel wall panels sat slightly off its track, as if someone had slid it shut too fast. I braced my palms against the cool metal and pushed. It resisted—then rolled away with a low, metallic scrape.
Cold light spilled out.
Rows of metal glinted back at me.
Not tools.
Weapons.
For a second, my brain tried to soften the shapes. Tried to make them harmless.
Equipment. Prototypes. Field devices.
But there was no mistaking the rifles mounted along the wall. Salt cartridges glittered beneath them with a faint, luminescent light. Modified shotguns sat in a locked lower rack, their leather grips worn smooth by hands that knew exactly how to hold them.
The smell hit me next—the mineral sting of industrial salt and gun oil.
Another wall of rock salt stood stacked waist high: bags, buckets, sealed containers.
Enough to coat every doorway in town twice over.
I brushed my fingertips along the barrel of a rifle.
It was colder than I had expected.
He had built these.
Every bolt. Every trigger.
He wasn’t preparing for the unknown.
He was preparing for war.
Did he really think he could fight his way into the dark and bring my mother back with salt and steel?
The question should have sounded insane.
I turned toward the wall papered with notes. Equations that looked like physics. Physics that looked like spells.
He used to say ghosts were just science we hadn’t explained yet. He said it with the patience of a man humoring lesser minds. In interviews. Lectures. Arguments with people who stopped inviting him back.
But looking at the arsenal hidden behind the wall, I realized he had stopped trying to explain the dark.
He had tried to conquer it.
I pulled a notebook from the desk and began cataloging—item by item, label by label.
If there were a needle in this haystack, I was going to find it.
Even if I had to bleed for it.
And as I stood there, surrounded by his brilliance and his madness, I realized something else that was unsettling.
I wasn’t just searching for proof anymore.
I was searching for the line he had crossed.
Only to realize I had already stepped over it myself.