When the Sky Fell on Splendor(71)

The line clicked dead.

I was even with my driveway now. I thought I saw the drapes move in the front window. My whole body was shaking.

I kept pedaling. I didn’t know where I was going. Not Levi’s house or Remy’s. I couldn’t risk going to Sofía’s or Nick’s either. I could head to Walmart, but that was five miles in the opposite direction, and they were probably under observation now too.

The panic was building, and as it did the headlights of passing cars were flickering in and out.

Shit. I focused all my energy on pedaling, on getting as far from my house as I could, typing out a message into our group chat as I went: DON’T GO HOME.

What were they doing at my house?

What were they telling Dad they were doing at my house?

What excuse had they given Sheriff Nakamura for digging through his nephew’s stuff?

For taking his son?

I lurched back onto the asphalt in time to pass under the stone bridge that held up the train tracks, and the car passing through in the opposite direction slammed on its horn at the sight of me.

I turned my handlebars so hard I nearly fell off my bike as I shot out of the tunnel and onto the cross street beyond. I jerked the bike right again as the left handlebar clipped the rearview mirror of a car waiting at the stop sign there. Fog slipped down my throat as I swore and lost control, careening furiously into the marshy bank off the road.

The gray world cycloned around me as I flew clear of the bike and tumbled through the soggy end-of-summer grass.

I was vaguely aware of the car turning around, to check on me, maybe, or more likely to scream at me for hitting their mirror. I staggered to my feet, left ankle stinging where it had caught most of my weight, the same one I’d rolled the other night, and swung my legs back over the bike, kicking off hard.

There was no time to look back.

I needed to get somewhere safe. Somewhere isolated, where no one would think to look for me.

The cord of energy running through me shivered, like a metal coil charged to the brim.

I hadn’t realized I was already heading there.

To the mill.

I chanced a look over my shoulder, to see if the car I’d clipped was still following me. It was, but the driver was taking it easy, cruising along the rain-slicked road at the approximate pace of an eighty-year-old who’d given himself forty minutes to make it to bingo night at Ray’s Sports Bar & Grill.

He was crawling along like he had no intention of catching up, leaving plenty of space between us.

Between me and his powder-blue Cadillac.

But when I looked back at him, he sped up.





TWENTY-SIX



THE CADILLAC’S OLD ENGINE whined, and the windshield wipers made rubbery squeaks in time with my racing heart.

Pedaling through the marshy grass was slow going, but moving up onto the road wasn’t an option.

One swift jerk of the wheel and he could be in front of me, cut me off.

My lungs burned. Condensation slipped into them with every anxious breath. There was no one else around. No foot traffic on these country roads. No other cars.

Ahead on the left, another road dead-ended into this one. I’d have to ride in front of the Cadillac to turn onto it, but if I managed it, I could cut into the wooded gap on the road’s far side and lose him.

I concentrated on my stinging thigh muscles rather than the crunchy pain shooting through my ankle. Overhead, something popped and shattered—a streetlight, raining glass down on the Cadillac’s hood.

The driver hit the brakes, the wheels skidding sideways along the slick road then whipping back in the other direction as he corrected his mistake.

It was enough. I shot clear of the hood of the Cadillac for a second, two seconds, three seconds, and ramped back up onto the road, straight toward the tilted sign for Galbraith Road and the pine trees beyond it.

The Cadillac’s tires shrieked as the driver hit the gas again. I stood, giving full weight to my pedals as I forced the bike forward in furious pumps. I hit the edge of the road, thunking into the mud beyond with another painful spurt up my leg.

The headlights flashed across the trees ahead of me, and the car’s brakes squealed as the driver made a sudden turn, and then the engine’s hum rose to a roar as it sped off.

I didn’t look back. I didn’t stop to catch my breath or check my phone.

The trees thinned out until I was smack in the middle of the dead mill yard, the rust-edged towers and ragged block buildings stabbing the gray sky.

I’d be safe here. No one would find me. I could call the others, and—

And what then?

My mind slogged through murky thoughts and half plans. All I could do here was hide and wait.

I slid off my bike and stumbled toward the nearest supply warehouse, foisting most of my weight onto my handlebars as I stumbled over the train tracks that had once brought raw materials from West Virginia and Kentucky and taken the steel made here to just about everywhere else.

Mom had drawn a diagram of the mill in crayon on a paper place mat at the Macaroni Grill once, her eyes lighting up like she was telling a particularly juicy fairy tale.

It’s extraordinary, really, she’d said. People have been using iron to make tools for practically all of human history, since long before we knew how much of it there was in the Earth’s core.

It had fallen from the sky, she’d explained, eyes going wide and glossy. Meteorites. Rock from space that changed all of human history. Isn’t that extraordinary, how a rock from space could change the course of the world?