Sign Here(58)

“What?” she asked, and sipped her soda.

If we were animals, that would be when I’d see the hair rise on her neck.

“Nobody remembers their life on Earth. We all lose the memories eventually, and you’ve had it rougher than most, with millennia on the belt.”

Cal was scared. Not wide-eyed, admonished-by-KQ scared, or even the kind of scared she seemed the morning after she gave away too much at the Honey Pot. This was not the fear of prey. It was the fear of a hunter who blinked.

“What are you not telling me?”

“I need to take a shower.”

“No, you need to answer my question.”

Cal bit down on her lip, thoughts spinning so fast there was practically smoke coming out her ears. Then she put up her hands.

“Just let me take a shower,” she said. “I need to show, not tell.”

I didn’t answer right away but instead took her and her new fear in, a fear I’d caused. What would’ve made me feel powerful a few days before now made me uneasy.

“Just wait; I’ll be out in a minute, and I’ll explain. I’ve been trusting you since the Looking Glass; you owe me the same.”

Finally, I nodded. Not only because I was curious to see what her memory had to do with hygiene, but because something else occurred to me when she said “the Looking Glass.” If she took a shower, I could be alone in the rest of her apartment. I could find my results.

I listened as she turned on the water, the pressure like a weepy drunk against the tile, and I listened as the sound changed when she stepped under it.

Then I didn’t waste another second.

Her apartment was exactly like mine, so I worked quickly. I started in her bedroom, careful to skip the floorboards in the hallway I knew were prone to creak. I found her closet open, her jacket over the back of the regulation chair. The pockets were empty, so I moved to the closet, touching each of her bland sweaters with desperate fingers.

I heard her shift under the water, a thunk of a plastic bottle.

I cleared the closet and moved to the desk. I shuffled through papers and shook out the two books (hardcover, obviously) that she owned, dog-eared but hiding nothing.

There was another sound from the bathroom, and I paused before turning back to the desk and pulling on the handle of the middle drawer.

It was locked.

My paper had to be in there. Why else would she lock it? I couldn’t lock mine. I searched the back for a release switch. I got down on my knees and crawled under the desk, feeling blindly.

I was too focused—too damn close—to hear the water trickle to a stop.

“Looking for something?”

I shot up and slammed my head underneath the desk. By the time I shuffled out, backward and on all fours, the world was spinning.

“You can’t blame me for trying—” I started, rubbing my eyes. But then I saw her.

Cal stood in the doorway, a towel clasped together in one fist over her chest. It was a big, weighty towel, the kind that never gets dry and always smells a little like onion sweat and wet dreams. But even it wasn’t big enough to cover all of them.

The burns were everywhere. They started at her toes and climbed their way up her shins, her knees, and her thighs: a latticework of scar tissue abloom with blisters. More still spread across her collarbone and unfurled all the way down her arms to the swollen, broken tips of her fingers. The only part of her that wasn’t textured, sticky like honeycomb, was her face.

“Fuck,” I said, forgetting my spinning head and my smoking gun of a position. “Cal, what is that?”

“You mean the water doesn’t do this to you?” she asked sweetly, and when she grinned, the skin of her neck wept.





SILAS





SILAS HADN’T MEANT TO hear their conversation. He wasn’t one of those parents who spied. As he liked to say at family reunions with his Las Vegas cousins, who looked like their children sucked more color out of them with each passing year, he trusted his kids. So he did not go into the boathouse that afternoon to eavesdrop.

He went looking for bullets.

When Evan died, Rose insisted they get rid of all of his guns, except the 9mm carbine. She always liked that one. She said it made her feel dangerous in a good way, but it didn’t leave her shoulder sore.

Despite her aversion, Rose had always been a damn good shot.

Silas knew where the gun itself was: right where it had always been, behind Rose’s old shoeboxes in their closet. The bullets used to be in a drawer nearby, but at some point, Lily moved them. For years, she went back and forth: Was it safer to keep the bullets close enough to the gun that they could be put together by a home invader and used against the family while they slept? Or was it safer to keep them out in the boathouse, where no one could reach them, including them? She worried too much, he thought as he blindly swept his palm along the dusty recesses of the boathouse shelves.

The first voice he heard was Ruth’s. Maybe if Sean or Mickey had talked first, he would’ve ignored it, found what he needed, and left. But Ruth’s voice made him go still.

“Cody keeps texting me,” she said. “He wants us to go over there tonight.”

“All of us?” Sean asked, and Ruth laughed.

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m sure he did mean all of us,” Mickey said. “Sean is the one who is actually friends with them.”