When the Sky Fell on Splendor(55)

And then, all at once, the tension left Remy’s body. He slumped to the floor. His pupils reappeared, and he blinked sleepily up at all of them gathered over him. Recognition filtered into his gaze and he shifted, started to push himself up.

The lights went out and an inhuman sound scraped out of me as my relief hit like a wave. My knees buckled, bringing me down beside Remy’s legs, a strangled sob spearing through me.

I thought he was going to die.

“It’s okay,” Levi said, touching both my shoulder and Remy’s elbow with the same anxious pressure. “It’s okay. It’s all over now, whatever it was, and everything’s fine.”

“We need to get him to the hospital,” Sofía said.

Remy shook his head. His dark eyes were wide and his mouth had a grim set to it. “I know what caused it.” He looked at me. “I thought they were just dreams, but they weren’t. I think . . . I think I just saw the future, and if I did, everything most definitely isn’t fine.”

He staggered to his feet. “We need to get out of here, before anyone turns up.”





NINETEEN



“IT WAS THAT FREAKING song,” Nick said as we were running past the cave, back toward the car. “I’m telling you.”

The rain had picked up, and thunder was booming overhead as we sprinted through the forest. With any luck, anyone who might’ve seen the light show at the Jenkins House would’ve mistaken it for lightning.

Either way, I doubted it would be safe to go back there again.

“So it was like a nuclear code!” Levi said. “It unlocked Handsome Remy’s brain!”

“It didn’t unlock my brain,” Remy said. “I’ve been having these dreams ever since we found the disc, but they were shorter, little pieces.”

“What about the seizure?” Sofía asked. “Has that been happening?”

“I—don’t know,” Remy said.

“How can you not know?!” Levi demanded.

“I don’t know!” he shouted back. “There were a couple of other times I woke up on the floor or the couch, but I didn’t remember what had happened—I felt like I’d just drifted off and had the dream. I don’t remember having a seizure.”

“But you remember what you saw?” Arthur yelled over another thunderclap.

We’d just made it to the edge of the woods, legs drenched in mud, heads sopping wet, and Remy stopped halfway between the trees and the car, his hair plastered to his face with rain. “I thought they were dreams.” He looked haunted, shaken. “Get in the car. I’ll tell you everything.”

We moved toward it, but I stopped short at the sight of something white and rectangular tucked into the windshield wipers.

“You guys!” I shouted. “What’s that?”

Arthur came to the hood of the car to see. “Religious tract? Who cares?”

But when I reached for the soggy fold of paper, something small and solid slid out of it and nestled into the bottom corner of the windshield.

“Is that a rock?” Arthur asked.

My teeth had started to chatter. It wasn’t a rock.

Remy came to stand beside me as I reached for the small, blue-gray circle and the long chain attached to it.

An uncanny tingling oozed down my spine as I lifted the nautilus shell. Its smooth, resin-covered surface felt at once familiar and foreign in my palm, and revulsion rose through my stomach as I turned it over.

How did it wind up here?

“Your necklace?” Remy murmured.

I dropped it into my pocket and pried the soggy paper open.

It was so wet the blue-ink words had blown apart into smoky Rorschach blots, but I could still make out the two words scrawled there, oversized and jagged.

I KNOW.

“What is this?” Arthur asked, brow furrowed.

I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. My throat felt like it was collapsing.

“Just get in the car,” Remy said calmly, quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear, but they were still standing at the car doors, watching us. “We’ll figure this out. It will be okay.”

He was lying again, pretending we had any real control over whether everything ended up all right or not.

Sofía’s gaze dropped to the note, and her lips pursed. “Whoever dropped the bullets must’ve written that. They must’ve been following us.”

Every beat of my pulse seemed to shake the whole world. My mouth had gone dry, and there was a ringing in my ears.

Someone knew what had happened to us, and Remy was having seizures and visions, and everything was coming apart.

“We need to go,” Remy said, touching my arm. “We’ll figure this out later. Please.”

But I stayed rooted to my spot. “What did you see?” I asked him.

Levi, Arthur, Nick, and Sofía all floated out into a semi-circle around us. Their gazes traveled between the note (threat?) and Remy. The muscle in his jaw leapt.

“The end,” he said. “I think I saw the end of the world.”





TWENTY



“IT WAS SPLENDOR,” HE said. “I saw your house.”

Arthur pushed forward. “Our house?” Thunder boomed, and the raindrops sliding down his freckled face shivered. “You saw our house? In a vision, from the alien?”