Girl One(120)

I shook my head, throat thickening with tears. “No,” I managed. “No, I—”

From outside, a sudden, muffled shout. My mother flinched. I stayed very still, listening, holding up one finger—another shout, a rise of voices. Then one word resolved from the fray, shouted again and again. Fire. My heart jumped: They’d already done it. Isabelle had lived up to her promise.

My mother spoke in a strained whisper. “Are they coming for us?”

“There’s a fire,” I said crisply. “We have to go now.”

“Oh god, Fiona—” My mother shrank back deeper into the cramped room, moving automatically, as if her body had memorized every inch. “We can’t upset her, Josie—”

“No, no, it’s all right,” I soothed. “It wasn’t Fiona, it was us. It’s part of our plan. We’re getting you out of here, okay?” Grabbing the votive candle, I started toward the door. I was eager to take a full breath again. The air in here was like a cloth clamped over my face.

“It’s too dangerous,” my mother said, and the fear in her voice broke my heart. “Have you seen what Fiona can do? I never forgot what she was like as a child. I used to dream about it.” I paused, breath catching in my chest. “I thought whatever it was—whatever was different about Fiona—went with her. When you were growing up, I watched you for hints of it—I almost wanted—”

Slowly, I turned. My mother had been just like me. She’d been waiting quietly for some spark of magic to manifest in my blood. The two of us yearning for the same thing without ever speaking a word about it, carrying out our lives of homework, leftovers, card games.

I made a swift decision. “I’ve seen what she can do. But you haven’t seen what I can do.”

It took a moment for her to understand my meaning. My mother stared at me, searching my face, something opening up behind her eyes. Relief. Wonder. Fear. “Does Joseph know?”

I shook my head. “We have a plan. You’ll have to trust me.”

I held on to my mother’s elbow, unwilling to lose the physical contact. In the main chapel, the darkness expanded and changed shape, huge and cool compared to the prison. My mother stumbled at the doorway, like she wasn’t accustomed to even this much space. I caught her, silently counting the days since she’d vanished. Three weeks of captivity.

With my free hand, I held up the candle in its glass shell, throwing a wavering wedge of radiance along the empty pews. Out here, the chaos swelled louder, the shouts and screams cutting more sharply. I imagined that trail of flame slowly eating its way up the walls of the shed. The anticipation of the explosion was a hard bubble in the pit of my stomach, rising and rising. I started toward the front of the chapel. “We need to get to—”

Something was wrong. The guard. The guard was gone. I’d told him to stay right here.

Before I could fully react to the implications of this, the room was illuminated in a swoop: all the candles that ringed the edges of the room flickered to life, one by one by one, a glittering wave. It only took a few seconds, barely the space of a blink. A part of my brain stood back and recognized the simple magic of all these flames springing to life without a source. Beautiful.

The chapel was blazing with brightness now, my own candle useless in my palm. I kept clutching it anyway, as if it could anchor me to something familiar. A shout crested above the noise outside. Too close.

Beside me, my mother tensed. “You’re here,” she said, and she didn’t sound surprised. Her voice was stretched with a resigned fear, well worn.

Bellanger stood at the back of the chapel, a half smile on his face, staring right at me. His gaze was so pointed, cutting right through everything, through the heat and the haze, that I almost didn’t notice Fiona standing right beside him.





50

“Dr. Bellanger.” Instinctively, I stepped in front of my mother. “We’re leaving.”

He moved forward, unhurried and almost friendly. “That little trick out there—is that you and your friends? You want to take everything away from me, is that it?”

“Only fair,” I said. “You’ve burned down two of my homes now, by my count.”

He smiled without warmth. “Other people live here. You’re taking their home too.”

Sudden, hollow echoes of gunfire: bullets cooking in the heat. “Shouldn’t you be with them, Dr. Bellanger?” I asked. “Maybe you should help your faithful followers instead of wasting your time with us. We can let ourselves out.”

Fiona watched us.

“But where will you go?” he asked, as if he really wanted to know. “Margaret, will you return to your life of TV dinners and shelving books? Josephine, will you keep playacting as a great scientist, clinging to my coattails?” I didn’t even flinch. “Or perhaps both of you will run off and tattle, like spiteful children. You’ll come charging back with a self-righteous cavalry and attempt to take what’s left of my work. Throw me into a prison cell. Have your grand trial and your tawdry headlines. Revenge at last.”

My mother and I were both quiet. I could feel both of us trying to calculate how to get out of here as quickly as possible. Fiona’s eyes on us were so intense that they seemed to be the source of the heat growing in the chapel.

“Neither of you will spare a thought for me, but think what this is doing to Fiona,” Bellanger said. “You already took one refuge from her, Margaret.”