Malorie(29)

“Touch me,” he says. “I dare you.”

His own voice frightens him. The audacity to dare a creature.

Whatever it is, it’s stopped. It’s near the wall. Just as Tom is.

“Touch me,” he says again. “Prove Mom wrong.”

He raises his bare arms to it.

All he has to do is open his eyes. All he has to do is look. Once. See what it does to you. Then he’d really be able to invent something, to make real change. Because if he doesn’t know what they do, how can he stop them from doing it?

He knows all the theories. Most people, like Mom, believe the creatures are beyond human comprehension. That seeing one is like glimpsing the void, infinity, or the face of God.

But Tom wonders…what if they’ve changed? And what if it’s just a matter of accepting them?

He thinks of his glasses in his bag in the barn. He thinks of Athena Hantz.

The creature isn’t moving. Dark wind blows, and Tom imagines it blowing his eyes wide open. Blame it on the night. The night came and lifted his eyelids the way people once raised the blinds in their homes in the morning. Malorie’s told him and Olympia about those days, when her own parents would fill the house with light, how it felt so much bigger because you could see, see, SEE the world outside. And how you felt like that was yours, too, the world outside your home.

Tom begins to open his lids. He’s actually doing it. His eyes roll back in his head so that only the whites are showing. He hasn’t looked yet. But he’s standing before a creature with his lids parted.

The feeling is incredible.

He doesn’t speak. And the creature doesn’t move. Arms extended, eyes rolled back, Tom feels invincible, like he’s going to be the first person on the planet to capture a creature.

Something brushes his arm.

Tom closes his eyes. The bird in the barn loft takes flight. Tom ducks at the sound. He swipes at his arm. Swipes again. Malorie’s words, Malorie’s worst fears, come rushing at him in the darkness of his own imagination. The flapping wings echo in the barn, loud. For a moment he mistakes it for the creature rising into the sky.

Neither Malorie nor Olympia speak from within.

Is the creature still in front of him?

Was he touched? Is he going mad?

“Where are you?”

Tom isn’t able to articulate how he knows this, but it doesn’t feel like the creature is standing where it was. Is it closer now? Farther? Did it flutter away, after all?

Or did it step right to him and…touch…

He goes cold. All over.

What was he just doing, standing before a creature with his eyes partially open? What if he’d seen one? What would he have done to his mom, his sister, himself?

He swipes at his arm again, then bends quick and picks up the blanket.

Grass flattens behind him. To his left, more. Two places now. Three. Something in the distance. Something coming around the side of the barn.

Something on top of the barn.

“Oh, shit,” Tom says.

He’s not shuddering any longer. Now he’s full shaking.

He hears more of them, more steps deep in the fields. A second on the barn. Is one above him on the wall? Literally, on the wall of the barn?

“Oh, shit,” he says again because it’s all he can think to say. He moves fast, grabbing Malorie’s bag, remembering to grab it despite the dread spreading within.

Dread…or madness?

Another behind him. How many?

He moves quick to the barn door. He enters.

“Mom,” Tom says. “Olympia. Get up!”

Olympia doesn’t stir. She’s already awake.

“I hear them,” she says.

Tom, eyes closed, slides the barn door shut behind him.

Malorie is awake now.

“How many?” she says. And her voice is a solid straight line in the darkness.

“A lot,” Olympia says.

Malorie doesn’t tell them to keep their eyes closed. She doesn’t tell them to put on their hoods.

“Come here,” she says. “Both of you.”

Tom goes to her in the darkness. He sets her bag close to where he believes it was. Will she notice if it’s not in the exact place? Does it matter? He’s counted ten of them outside. Three on the barn. Seven in the grass. Does it matter if Malorie discovers he was reading?

That he was touched?

Almost to her, he realizes he’s still holding the pages. He can’t slide them back into the bag now without her hearing.

Does it matter?

Movement outside. He can hear Olympia has already joined Malorie in the center of the barn. No sudden noises out there, no banging, no knocking. All quiet, deliberate steps. The creatures closing in.

He brushes frantically at his arm. He rolls his sleeves down.

His mind is whirling, too fast to hold. Malorie believes you can go mad by touch.

Is it true?

Is it?

“Mom,” he says, horror in his voice. But he doesn’t care about hiding it. He needs her. Wants her near. Wants her to say he’s fine.

He believes, with complete certainty, that if he wasn’t fine, if he did start losing his mind, Malorie would remain hidden from him just like she hides from the creatures.

“MOM!”

Her hand is on his wrist. She pulls him to her. He feels Olympia there, the three of them, crowded together.