When the Sky Fell on Splendor(23)

As I pedaled and Droog bounded along beside me, I checked the time on my phone. Two minutes until midnight.

We sped up the access road, and at the top, I hopped off my bike and walked it, Droog and I making our way through the bleached rock to the tracks.

That first summer after the accident, when Remy and I were thirteen and twelve respectively, we’d met here a lot. He wasn’t a good sleeper, due to his nightmares, and the sheriff took his phone every night so he wouldn’t just stay up playing on it.

But Remy and I had found a way around this: We’d invested his lawn-mowing money in a pair of a five-mile walkie-talkies that could just barely reach between our houses. We’d turn them on every night at eleven, just in case one of us had something to “report,” but really, we coordinated meet-ups at the train tracks for no real reason except Remy wanting to avoid his nightmares and me wanting the rush I got from leaving my house without anyone knowing. It made me feel capable and independent, like I could manage the world on my own, without worrying my parents, who were busy with their own troubles.

Tonight, I’d figured Droog and I would have to follow the tracks halfway to Remy’s house, but he was right inside the tree line, sitting on the propane tank.

He hopped off it and came toward us, ignoring Droog’s excited snuffling, to pull me into a rough hug for a few seconds. The soft scent of grass, sweat, and bonfire hung around his denim jacket, weeks of skateboarding and filming and nights around the fire pit distilled into the smell that would always mean Remy Nakamura to me.

It still caught me off guard whenever he or Levi hugged me. Even before the accident, my family had never been very physically affectionate, but the Lindquist-Nakamura clan were big on hugging hello and goodbye. It took a couple of years of seeing each other multiple times each day for Remy’s and Levi’s habit to fade. Now their tight embraces were saved for special occasions.

Like seeing each other for the first time after a possible near-death experience.

The white rushes into me, cold and—

“How did the interrogation go?” Remy asked, releasing me. “My dad wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“It was more weird than anything,” I said. “Apparently someone stole the wreckage from the electrical tower. Your dad basically warned us to get rid of it before we get busted.”

Remy’s brows peaked. “But you didn’t take it, right?” Droog nosed his hand, and he began to pet her absently. “Arthur didn’t go back for it?”

“He was as surprised as I was to hear it was gone.” And twice as intrigued. Ready to follow the missing debris right to the thing from the video. My skin crawled.

Remy’s shoulders relaxed. “Good. Your brother needs to stay out of this.”

My stomach twisted. Remy didn’t know Arthur was absolutely not going to stay out of this, because Remy didn’t know about the video.

“There’s something you need to know. About what happened the other night.” Tears sprung into my eyes, not from fear but from the sudden rush of sensation. I jammed my eyes shut.

White light. Voices. Pain that isn’t quite pain. It’s more like . . . awareness, feeling every fiber of your being existing at once as the cold rushes through it, rattling you.

A gentle touch on my arm brought me barreling back into my body as if I’d been hovering two hundred miles over it and made the journey back in a millisecond. “You remember?” Remy said.

I opened my eyes. His brows were pitched together, his brown eyes narrowed and a worried dimple in his chin. “I’m so glad you remember. God, Franny, I didn’t know how I was going to tell you . . .”

I balked. “You remember?”

He nodded. “Not all of it, and not all at once, but I think I woke up first—maybe because I was farthest from it. I don’t know, but Franny . . .” His voice thickened. “I saw what that thing did to you, and I’m—I’m so sorry I couldn’t stop it.”

“What?” It came out as a whisper. It was hard to hear over the blood rushing through my eardrums, and possibly the crust of the Earth coming apart underfoot. “What it did to me?”

Remy looked stricken. His mouth twisted. His voice was hoarse. “I thought you remembered.”

“There’s a video,” I managed. “Levi got footage before the battery died, and we saw the—the thing, made of light, and the way it shocked us. All of us,” I added, almost defensively.

What it did to you.

Remy’s eyes darkened. He turned away from me, gathering himself. I reached for his elbow, and another static shock jolted down my arm.

The white furled across my vision and the not-quite-pain-but-definitely-sensation scorched through my head. As if through glass, I heard Remy swear and jerk away from me, and when the light faded, he was standing a few feet away, breathing hard, gripping his elbow.

His eyes were still fearful and glassy, but somehow unsurprised. “Try to remember, Franny,” he begged in that same throaty gravel. “We weren’t unconscious, not totally, and if it’s all starting to come back to me, it’s only a matter of time before the others remember. You need to know what you want to do before that. We need to have a plan.”

A knot caught in my throat.

I didn’t want to remember.

All I wanted was to forget. If you couldn’t control life, you could at least remove yourself from it, never experience its pain too deeply. That was the only way to survive.