When the Sky Fell on Splendor(93)

“What’s he doing?!” Nick shrieked.

I couldn’t answer through my tears, through my fists pounding uselessly against the wood as I screamed his name.

“There were lanterns,” Remy said somwhere in the dark behind me. “I saw them the other day.” There was a rustling along the metal shelves and then a click, a flood of fluorescent light just as Sofía raced up the steps. She thrust her shoulder against the door while I kept pounding on it, but it didn’t budge.

She looked at me, wide-eyed, confused. “Did he lock us in?”

“Why would he do that?” Levi asked.

I couldn’t answer. The door was rattling on its hinges. The storm was deafening. I pictured Arthur being swept up by a gust and slammed into a tree.

Shot by Wayne Hastings.

Forced into the back of a black SUV by Agent Rothstadt.

Taken somewhere I’d never see him again.

Maybe his plan was to do all three.

He still has scars.

A wordless scream tore through me. I pounded harder against the door.

Not him. Not him too. Mom may have never belonged to me, but Arthur was mine. Even when he held me back, even when he rode out ahead, he was mine.

“Fran, you’re bleeding,” Remy said. I shook him off and ran back down the stairs, Nick jumping out of the way as I beelined for the wall of tools.

I pulled an ax down and headed back for the stairs.

“There’s a tornado out there, Franny!” Levi said.

“My brother’s out there,” I screamed.

Because no matter what he was willing to say to get me to climb, Arthur had always been my safety net.

He’d always been there, waiting in case I fell, and I knew he couldn’t always be, that life made no promises. But right now, in this moment, I still had him, and he still had me.

“My brother’s out there,” I repeated, “and I’m going to get him.”

“The worktable.” Sofía jogged back down to the wall of tools. “Anyone who wants to stay should barricade themselves in with it when we’re gone.”

I looked at her as she hauled a sledgehammer down from a hook on the wall. She shrugged at me. “Your brother can’t get all the credit for saving the world.”

“I wasn’t saying I’m not going, by the way,” Levi said. “Just establishing the stakes!”

“And I just wanted you to stop breaking your hand bones,” Remy said seriously.

Nick pulled a shovel off the wall. “I came back for a reason, y’all. I’m with you till the end. I swear to God.”

“See?” Levi said. “Nick just used the Lord’s name, and you know he’s not doing that in vain.”

“No way in heck,” Nick said. “Ma’s probably got me bugged.”

Even Droog gave an anxious wag of the tail, like she understood and agreed.

My instinct was still to tell them to stay, that I didn’t need them, but that wouldn’t work any more than Arthur shutting us into the cellar had.

They were mine too, and I was theirs.

I turned back to the doors and swung the ax into the wood. Beside me, Sofía slammed the sledgehammer into the other door. Nick’s shovel speared through the space between us, cracking the place where the doors met, and together we swung, pounded, and smashed the door apart enough that I could reach through the hole and knock the metal pipe out of the handles.

Remy shoved the doors open, and we scrambled out with our tools still in hand, makeshift weapons.

The forest was in chaos: massive branches blowing across the ground, trash and bits of wood and shingles everywhere, wind so strong we couldn’t run straight, and an electrical charge in the air that I knew wasn’t coming from me.

My legs felt weak and my ankle was on fire, but I promised myself this was the home stretch as I broke into a sprint. Lights flickered in every one of the cabin’s windows, and the front door was open, clapping the side of the house.

I stopped just inside, grip tightening on the ax, and surveyed the first floor. All the windows were open, everything within gusting around. The bookshelves along the wall were half-empty, their contents spread across the blue floral couch and the bulky coffee table and the floor.

The five of us stood for a beat, scanning the mess in the flashing lights of every bulb and lamp in the house as Droog trotted forward, sniffing madly. “Spread out,” I said. “Be as fast as you can.”

We veined out through the house with great effort as the gusts fought to push us off course. I pulled myself up the staircase by the rickety banister, and on a step near the top, a flash of red caught my eye. A four-by-six photograph, pinned against the step by the force of the wind.

I glanced over the banister into the room below with new understanding. The books spread across every surface, pages whipping wildly, were photo albums, all of them.

I reached for the picture in front of me, and my stomach tightened. Everything in me tightened, though now there was no energy bound up in me.

In the photograph, a tow-headed girl with bushy, over-sprayed bangs sat at a cherry-red piano, fingers braced against the keys, her smiling face turned over her shoulder toward the camera, but not so much that you couldn’t read the hot-pink Puffy Paint bubble letters arcing across the back of her black T-shirt:

MOLLY.

My ears started to ring. My heart felt more like a thrumming engine than a beating thing, resting between pulpy pulses.