When the Sky Fell on Splendor(61)

I blinked it back, and Remy’s dimpled face pieced itself together in front of me. “I’m fine.”

The corners of his mouth twisted down. “You’re not,” he whispered.

“I will be.”

“Promise me,” he said.

Tears sprang into my eyes.

“Please?”

I tore my gaze from him and grabbed the bolt cutters. “Come on. Arthur’s waiting.”

We met him at the fence. The overturned posts had been righted since we were last here, but Arthur pried one loose and tossed it on the ground. I handed him the bolt cutters then stepped over the barbed wire, back into the perma-hush of Wayne Hastings’s woods.

The three of us communicated in nods and waves. We kept our flashlights off until absolutely necessary, which meant we could barely see one another.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and Arthur gave a sharp, reproving look as I slid it out of my jacket. The screen glitched for a second before I could see the message preview onscreen.

Another e-mail from Bill: FRIEND! You REALLY MUST CONTACT . . .

“The others?” Remy whispered. “About Wayne?”

His name sent an icy drip down my spine. I shook my head and slipped my phone back into my pocket. We were almost there.

We’d come a roundabout way, up through the valley behind the house to his back door.

The windows were dark, a good sign.

We crept to the house and split up: Arthur edged around the left side, and Remy and I hurried, bent, around the right, glancing up the side of the house for signs of life in the dark windows.

We came around front, and from the far corner, Arthur nodded the all clear on his side. Remy touched my arm, then pointed toward the truck parked on the gravel driveway.

He’s here? he seemed to ask.

Arthur propped the bolt cutters on his shoulder like Wayne Hastings’s gun and marched in place, then drew a circle in the air with his finger.

What the hell is he doing? Remy’s expression seemed to ask now.

Walking. The. Grounds, I tried to mouth back, but by then, he was distracted, staring with a repulsed expression toward the roof. In my peripheral sight, Arthur’s gaze juddered up too.

I was startled anew by the eerily still birds gathered on the green roof, all angled in the same direction, their focus fixed off the back right corner of the house, the same as they’d been the other night.

Only this time, I wasn’t standing there.

The birds hadn’t been pointed toward me at all.

I thought about the weird behavior of the cows in the field behind the substation. What had Nick said? That usually, they grazed north to south, along the Earth’s electromagnetic field, but the blast must’ve disrupted that.

Birds used that same field to navigate, didn’t they?

Could they have been confused, like the cows and the compasses had been?

I hurried back the way we’d come, and Remy ran alongside me. Arthur met us behind the house and tried to silently ask us what we were thinking, but I was on a mission. We trekked past the cellar doors to the edge of the valley.

The branches overhead were even thicker with birds here.

In a panel of moonlight, I stopped suddenly, grabbing for Remy’s hand before he could go any further.

The soft pfft pfft pfft of the falling rain seemed to fade away, leaving only the rush of my own pulse in my eardrums as I studied the dirt and brush under my feet.

Dead. Blackened. Charred.

A thin burnt streak snaking out through the mud in an intricate, vein-like pattern.

“The burns couldn’t have reached all the way from Jenkins,” Remy whispered. “That’s miles away, and we would have seen them in your yard.”

He was right, but that didn’t change that there were burn marks here. We followed them down the hill, through a tunnel of black: feathers in branches all around us, and the charred dirt underfoot.

Arthur produced his compass from his jacket and angled it under the moonlight so we could see the needle spinning. We took off down the hillside along the trail.

My phone buzzed.

Another e-mail from Bill.

It had only been fifteen minutes since the last one.

I glanced at the preview: THE U.S. GOVT WILL TAKE YOU. IT WILL BE ALL TOO EASY IF . . .

I jammed the phone back into my pocket and ignored the crawling of my skin. I couldn’t deal with him right now. One thing at a time.

Mossy branches lay scattered across the ground, splintered at the ends like snapped bones where the energy must have hit them. We stepped over them and followed the streak toward a small clearing, where four other jagged burn marks met it, like points of a star.

My skin heated and itched as I stepped into the center and slowly turned, staring at the thousands of watchful black eyes, heads that cocked and twisted curiously at the sight of us.

And worse, at the birds I now realized lay along the burn marks in lifeless lumps, just as they had back at the substation. There were feathers scattered across the forest floor, black and brown and gray and red, like a plague.

Remy swallowed. “I wonder if the blast confused their sense of direction so much that they dove.”

“I knew it,” Arthur hissed. “He’s not one of us. There’s a second alien! An evil alien, that we have to stop!”

My stomach roiled. It wasn’t just the birds or the prospect of a second alien, though those weren’t helping. I took a few dizzy steps before I caught a tree and retched into the mud. Remy was beside me in a second. “You’re sick,” he said. “We should get you home.”