The Storm King(30)

Adam clocked him with his lacrosse stick, sending him hard against a table. Nate fell into an array of test tubes and beakers, knocking them onto the floor, where they disintegrated into a cloud of singing fragments.

The big teen caught him again with a strong cross-check to the other side of his face. Nate quickly detected a strategy in Adam’s strikes. He’d bring the stick hard on Nate’s left side in order to move him to the right. He’d knocked him on the head in order to bring Nate’s face within the range of a savage kick. Nate realized he was being herded to the corner of the lab with the emergency shower, where there’d be no chance of escape.



Stick to ribs. Knee to stomach. Fist to kidney. Nate knew he had to do something while he still could.

He fought past the pain and leapt for a lab stool to throw at Adam. For a moment, the lacrosse stick got entangled in the stool’s legs. This caused Adam’s assault to stutter, and Nate seized his chance to lunge for a second stool, which he whipped at Adam’s head, swinging for the horizon.

He threw his whole weight into the blow, and the force of its impact knocked him to the floor. Adam joined him a moment later. Eyes rolling to white, blood at his temple, knocked out cold.

Nate couldn’t have sparred with Adam for more than a minute, but in that time the lab had transformed. Broken glass glittered across the floor alongside pieces of cracked molecular models and fragments from shattered shelving units. Stocky slipped in a pile of Beans’s vomit and crashed into the bottles of chemicals that had spilled from the busted cabinet.

The warnings around the room were right: A laboratory was a hazardous place.

Nate looked over in time to see Tom fumble with a fire extinguisher, and a cloud of vapor engulfed Stocky and Beans. Nice one, Tommy, was Nate’s last thought before he felt the floor lurch beneath where he lay. He unspooled onto the firmness of the tiles.

As the room dimmed, he caught a glimpse of a shadow watching from the doorway. But before he could articulate a thought, the world went black.





December 1

Mom,

I’m proud of you and I love you, and that’s why I have to go.

I thought I could handle everything with Dad and what happened with my friends, but that was before I knew that wasn’t the end. Things aren’t going to get better for me. I get that now. Everyone here wants me to fail, and I’m just going to drag you and the twins down with me.

I know this sounds dramatic, but I swear I’ve thought it through. I know you haven’t touched my college fund. College isn’t what I need right now. Use it for yourself, Tara, and James. You deserve a break, and I want to give it to you. That’s one thing I can do right.

Don’t worry about me. Once I leave this place and these people, I know things will get better. I just need a fresh start. Or maybe I don’t know exactly what I need, but I know I need some time to myself to figure it out. It’ll only get worse if I put this off, Mom. I know you’ll say that it’ll all be fine, and that’s one of the things I love about you, but try to see my side of this.

This isn’t goodbye. Not at all, okay?

I love you and Tara and James, and I love Dad, too. Tell them for me? Tell them every day so there’s no chance they’ll forget. I’m sorry to leave like this, but I know it’s the best thing. You can be mad at me, but I promise that you won’t ever be as angry at me as I am at myself. I hope you forgive me. I swear that this isn’t goodbye.

Love,

Lucy





Six

Nate hadn’t worn his old black raincoat in fourteen years, but a bespoke suit couldn’t have fit better.

As he dressed in it, he felt like a druid preparing for something sacred. And in a way he was. No task was more important than protecting the ones you loved.

He’d waited for Grams to turn in before venturing out. When he took the stairs down he avoided the third and sixth steps from the bottom. He extinguished the kitchen lights behind him and exited through the back door into the weeping night.

Outside, he let his eyes adjust to the dark.

The town was battened down. No cars, no voices. The only sounds were from the rain and the wash of leaves in the branches above him.

After the accident, Nate had sometimes spent nights listening to these trees as they were tossed by the breeze that swept in from the lake. The leaves murmured like a stadium of people. He’d lie between two knotted roots, close his eyes, and try to pry meanings from the sound. Was that Gabe’s whisper? Was that Mom’s laugh? But if there were messages to be heard, they weren’t meant for his ears.



Sometimes their sound lulled him to sleep, and he dreamed.

In these dreams Nate ran along an endless loop of a hallway somewhere in the depths of the Night Ship. The floors were lined with wooden planks, as were the walls and ceiling. He ran but also fell, as if the corridor sometimes became as vertical as a mineshaft. The hall was empty, but Nate wasn’t alone. There was someone else, a shadow always just out of sight—either ahead or behind Nate, he wasn’t sure. In this chase, Nate couldn’t tell if he was the hunter or the prey.

The dream always ended the same way. His feet began to slap against water as the lake slowly filled the space. At first, the flood was easy to run through, but soon the planks pulled away from one another to let more of the lake in. The water was so cold that it burned his skin. The pressure of its weight crushed his rib cage and squeezed his lungs to bursting.