Girl One(125)

But I couldn’t forget where we were, the fire pulling closer, danger still lapping at our heels. I turned to Bellanger, crouching on the floor. He’d escaped a fire before. He’d walked out of the flames, remaking himself, starting over, and he’d do it again. Rising, I walked to Bellanger until we were only inches away. I knelt and took his face in my hands, his beard scratching at my palms, his skin beneath it feverishly hot. He flinched, began pulling back, and then he relaxed into my grasp. My palms were wet with my mother’s blood.

I remembered looking up at him as a child. Watching him work. His intensity and concentration. His wisdom, his willingness to change everything we knew about the world, whatever it took. I had wanted that wisdom for myself. I had spent a lifetime steeping myself inside it. It was wound through me now, impossible to escape.

The lives he’d taken: Lily-Anne, dying alone; the tenth Girl, gone before she even started; Angela and Gina, dead and unnoticed, their bones standing in for more consequential deaths. Fiona and the thwarted, half-formed life he’d given her in exchange for her mother and her sister.

My mother.

He spoke so quietly that only I could hear him. “You can have the world, Josephine. You can take it. Everything else is yours. Just let me have her.”

There was a renewed blaze of heat against my back. Fiona had let go of the flames, and they roared to life now, unrestrained, eating away at the ceilings and the walls. The fire was out of her control. It was the same as the fire outside, just as hungry and just as wild. This place would burn too quickly, surrounded by miles of dry, merciless wilderness.

I looked deep into Bellanger’s eyes. Milky brown, swollen irises. The very first eyes to look at me when I emerged into the world. His face changed. He was reverent, like he was seeing me for the first time. “Girl One,” he whispered.

I said, “Get up. Walk into the flames. Stay there.”

My hands fell from his face. He rose; I rose. Mirrors of each other. I turned and went back to the three of them, pulling Fiona tight against me, feeling her fine bones. Her skin was sheened in damp sweat. Cate had her arm looped around my mother’s shoulders, steadying her. We turned in the heat, and we began walking toward the door. I held on to Fiona. I didn’t let her go. Behind us, the sizzling crash of the roof collapsing. We walked, Fiona’s steps matching mine.

At the doorway, I couldn’t help it. I turned once. Dr. Joseph Bellanger walked in the opposite direction, deeper into the flames, only the white of his coat shining for a second before he was lost to us.



* * *



The world was fire-streaked and smoke-darkened. We followed the people running, running, everyone fixated on their own private escape, ghostly silhouettes darting through the haze. Seventeen years of Bellanger’s life vanishing. Fiona leaned against me, half stumbling. The shed was the bright center of the blaze, the heart of the destruction, with sparks hopping to the surrounding buildings and carrying the fire along the arteries of the compound.

The gate hung open, barely discernible from the blur of smoke and the mesh of the fence. It was nothing now, barely a barrier, and I walked through, following my mother and Cate. Fiona hesitated for just a moment, the fire at her back, everything else before her. She stood with her head ducked, her sweat-slicked hair curled against her neck. I thought for a moment that she couldn’t step into this future without him. Then she gripped my hand, and we walked out of the compound.

Our heads down, we kept moving. Even here, the smoke was a veil hanging over the compound. I imagined how it would look to anyone watching from a distance: the frosty silver of the desert in the moonlight, and then the explosive spray of heat and noise and chaos. People were crowded at the edges of the gates, some of them walking farther out, most still clustered close, watching the compound burn as if they could still sift through the ashes and find enough there to rebuild their lives. I felt an instinctive pity for them. I remembered the sensation of running into the black woods with my mother, already understanding in my gut that I’d lost something I could never replace. But I knew now how much I gained when I was torn from Bellanger, running into the future with my mother’s hand in mine.

He hadn’t wanted us to run from the flames but we’d run twice now, emerging into a different world each time, remade.

Nobody else approached the four of us. Some of them ignored us, their eyes glassy with the reflected flames, their bodies sagging with defeat and shock. An older woman hugged a younger woman, their pale hair mingling as they leaned into each other. A man stood alone, arms hanging limp. I looked around, searching for Isabelle, and anytime I accidentally made eye contact with a stranger, they’d look away, dropping their eyes. As I led Fiona farther from the heat and the smoke, I realized that a path was clearing for us. They were afraid. Of her; of us. I breathed deeply, letting the dry, sparkling night air reach deep into my lungs.

I scanned the desert for Isabelle, my anxiety growing. Isabelle could’ve run into trouble without us. The fire—the explosion—any strangers who didn’t yet know to fear us—

“Over here.”

Isabelle stood underneath the outcropping of a cliff, the thin moonlight and the wash of firelight just illuminating her. She stepped out, raising one hand in the air. My whole body lit up with relief at seeing her safe. Letting go of Fiona, I hurried toward her.

“What took you so long?” she asked.