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CAIN
"IS EVERYONE BUCKLED IN? Anyone have to go potty before we leave? We're not stopping once we get started. I brought carrot sticks to snack on and water bottles if anyone gets thorsty." Sat in the passenger seat of Callie's Nissan, Maya slides her sunglasses down over her eyes. The frames are oversized black ovals, the lenses tinted a sepia hue; they make her look like a PTO mom. She practically is a PTO mom. Listen to the girl talk. "Everyone's got their gas masks, yeah?"
"Why carrot sticks?" I ask. "Jesus Christ, Maya, this isn't the apocalypse."
"Because they're real fuckin' good for your eyes, you ungrateful peace of shit!" Maya replies through a red-lipped smile. "I don't want your dumbass to get cataracts by the time you're twenty, if you even live that long. Based on your diet, you'll probably fall into cardiac arrest and die by the time the year's out."
Atlas pushes his glasses up on his nose, and I just know he's gonna go off in one of his History Rants. "Actually, that was British World War II propaganda to cover up their new radar technology that they were using toâ"
"To kill Nazis," I interrupt, excited. My two favorite things: Atlas and murdering Nazis. Oh, and pasta. But I don't think that pasta is a part of this conversation. Should it be a part of this conversation?
Atlas just stares at me for a second too long, his spiel forgotten. I'm expecting that he's going to defend me to Maya, tell her that my vision's just fine and there's nothing wrong with a teenaged boy that hasn't eaten anything other than carbs since 2005, the last time I ever ate a vegtable. But then his expression momentarily looks like he just realized he's having an explosive bout of diarrhea. At the drop of a hat, he turns his attention to Maya, who's busy fiddling with the radio, dissatisfied with Callie's pop station. "Wait a minute," he says. "Did you say gas masks?"
"Yeah. Gas masks." Maya glances up from the radio, peering at him through the rearview mirror. She says it as easy and casual as if she was asking us if we remembered to turn the oven off. "Did you forget your's?"
"Forget?" Atlas asks. "Why the fuck would I have one?"
"Why would he think to bring one?" Meredith asks.
"Why the fuck do we need them?" my dad asks.
Taking advantage of Maya's momentarily loss of control over the radio, Callie quickly changes the station back to pop, grinning slyly. Ed Sheeran's gentle voice picks right back up serenading us like the romantic motherfucker he is. Satisfied with herself, she pulls the car out of the gas station, maneuvering it back onto the road. I don't know why, but I find the thought of Ed Sheeran existing in this dimension amusing. There are two of him; there are probably (definitely?) at least seven of him. If he keeps it up and keeps multiplying at this rate, he'll have an army of gingers by dawn.
"Babe," Callie tells Maya, "their city wasn't bombed. Remember?"
"Oh." Maya slumps in her seat, all of her easy energy gone. "Right."
"Why do we need gas masks?" I ask, trying to keep them on topic.
"The air inside the wall is radioactive. It's got somewhere between five- to six-thousand mSvs of nuclear radiation." Keeping one hand on the wheel, Callie commences her nervous ticâbunching all of her hair up on top of her head. "I'm not sure if they'll actually do anything to help, but what the hell." She shrugs like it's supposed to be comical, letting out a high-pitched laugh. "It's better than nothing, isn't it?"
"Okay, Miss 4.0, I'm dumb as shit," I say. "What the fuck is a mSv? Is that bad?"
"Millisieverts," Callie responds without missing a beat. "It's a unit of radiation measurement."
"And you said five- to six-thousand?" Real Bianca asks. She's the only Bianca we have with usâwe ditched the Fake Bianca the second we could.
(Actually, that's a lie. She ditched us the second she could. Something about being on call and something else about some old hag having a stroke. It sucks to know that she abandoned us for less important matters, but, hey, people are inherently selfish. The quicker you come to realize that, the easier it'll be to deal with life's disappointments.)
"Mhm." Callie nods then, to my confused expression, quickly adds: "That's enough to kill a man within a month of exposure."
"Can this car go any faster?" I ask, suddenly excited. What a fascinating way to die!
Dad makes a point of turning around to give me a Disappointed Fatherly Look, but he doesn't say anything. I shoot off a pair of finger guns at him, punctuating it with a wink and a click of my tongue.
"You have nothing to worry about," Callie says, like that's supposed to be reassuring. "We're just going in and getting out. We won't even be in there for a day. We'll be fine." She gestures to the back of her car with her thumb. "Also, I was counting on you guys' not having any masks. I brought extras."
"What's with it with y'all and gas masks?" I ask. "Do you have, like, a fetish?"
This time, Dad actually says something. "Cain," he says firmly, probably warning me against saying anything else. But all that makes me want to do is say so much more.
I decide to test the waters and push this fucking raft all the way out to sea. "Atlas, what do you think? Hot or not? Should we hit up the local sex toy shop andâ"
"Cain," Dad growls. "Enough."
"Don't bring me into this," Atlas begs.
"What, do you have something against this?" I ask. "I'm just trying toâ"
"I said enough, Cain!" he snaps.
I hold up my hands in a gesture of mock innocence.
The car falls silent, the only sound Ed Sheeran's melodious voice. Meredith starts singing along to it. She actually kind of has a good voice.
"Can we put something else on?" Bianca speaks up.
"PLEASE!" I agree. Look, I've nothing against pop music in theory. But nothing is worse than Straight Music. Give me gay pop. Give me Troye Sivan, give me Hayley Kiyoko, give me Kevin Abstract. Hell, even Halsey would be better than Ed Fucking Sheeran.
"Like 2000's pop," Maya begs. (She gets me.)
"German rap," Bianca suggests.
"ABSOLUTELY NOT," yells my dad.
"I get road rage!" Bianca shrugs. "German calms me."
"What do y'all have against Ed Sheeran?" Callie asks, sounding genuinely hurt.
"He's British," Bianca explains.
"He's a fucking ginger," Maya offers.
"I don't mean to be that guy, but isn't he . . . you know"âI lower my voice to a whisperâ"straight?"
Meredith crosses her hands over her chest. "Ed Sheeran's literally a lesbian but go off I guess."
"In some universe . . . " Bianca wistfully mumbles.
The car comes to a sputtering stop.
"Cal?" Maya looks over at her girlfriend. "It's not that deep; I just think his music is a little overplayed . . . "
"No, it's not that . . . " In a bout of anger I wasn't expecting from such an even-tempered girl, Callie slams her fists into the horn, digging her foot into the gas pedal. The car lets out a loud, angry honk, sputters another inch or two forewords, and dies all-together. Even the radio quiets.
"Finally," I say, in reference to the loss of Ed Sheeran's music. "The evil is defeated."
Suddenly, the world feels horribly intimate and fragile and lonely. Atlas's hand arches on my knee, his fingertips digging into my skin. Hello. There's no sound. No birds, no bugs. No electricity. The ever-present buzz in my ears suddenly crescendos so violently, I have the urge to rip my eardrums out.
Outside the window, on one side of us, looms the wall, overwhelmingly massive and industrial. It's an ugly metallic smear against a bright blue sky, violent visual pollution. Before we headed out, Callie and Maya told us how they fit the entire city of Warwick inside of it. It's jarring to think that my home is there inside this hellscape, this fifty square miles of barren, radioactive wasteland. On the other side of us is the second lane of a dirt road. Off in the distance, the White Mountains gently reach towards God, just beginning to bud with spring.
"Fuck." Callie slams her head into the wheel. "It's dead."
"What do you mean it's dead?" Maya asks. "We literally just got gas, like, twenty miles ago."
"No, like, the car is dead!" Callie explains. "I don't know what happened."
For a second, my mind snaps to Rachel. She wants to be an engineer. She went to Space Camp, for Christ's sake. She'd know how to fix a car.
God, how pathetic am I, fantasizing about my dead sister's engineering skills because I don't even know how to fix a fucking car?
Wait . . . dead?
Since when have I ever thought about Rachel as my dead sister?
She isn't dead. She can't be. I just saw her on the security tape.
Rachel isn't dead.
The hood is smoking, I realize. Dirty gray slivers sneaking through the cracks in the red paint. It's not all that much; it just looks like Callie put a fog machine where the engine was supposed to go. Still, seeing smoke coming out of a car you're actively inside of is jarring.
But why is it jarring to me? I'm fucking fireproof.
"Oh, my God!" Silas yelps, his face ashen. "The car's on fire!"
"The engine must have overheated or something . . . " Callie mumbles.
"Everyone get out of the car!" Maya snaps.
Callie hurries out of the car, racing to the other side to help Maya out. Bianca gets her wheelchair out of the trunk. and helps her into it. The rest of us pile out.
"What the fuck, the car's on fire!" Meredith turns to me. "Cain . . . fire?"
"I didn't set the fucking car on fire!"
"No, I mean . . . I mean that you're, like, fireproof, aren't you?"
"I am fire," I assure her. "I am death."
"But I thought you were gay," Atlas says.
"Death is gay!"
"Cain, check what's wrong with the car," Meredith insists. "It shouldn't hurt you."
I circle my hand around my face. "Do you really wanna risk ruining all this?"
A sharp and swift BANG ricochets off the car like the firing of a gun. I just about jump out of my skin.
"Shut your dumb ass up and check what's wrong with the fucking car," Maya orders.
Should I tell them that I don't know shit about cars? Probably. I mean, I barely got my license. I failed the test the first four times I took it. Am I going to? Absolutely not. I don't know why, but something's come over me. Something almost . . . competitive. I feel like I have to prove myself to them. Which is ridiculous, because Atlas was there when I locked myself in my own car and had to break a window to get myself out. They already know how dumb I am, but I feel like I've been possessed by the spirit of a straight white guy named Chad. Because, like . . . cars? I've heard of them? Pass me a beer, Helen? I don't know. I don't know what it's like to be straight or named Chad. I know even less about cars. But here goes nothing, right?
I proceed to rip my shirt off.
Everyone besides Atlas and Meredith screams and covers their eyes.
"Yesss, get 'em!" cheers Meredith, who's arguably my biggest supporter. "Slay me, king!"
Atlas whistles.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" Maya yells. "PUT YOUR FUCKING SHIRT BACK ON, YOU FUCKING GIBBY!"
Maybe I've watched too much porn, but isn't this how it always goes? The Hot Mechanic is always shirtless, and then they fuck in the car's backseat.
"Please," Silas begs. "Please."
I grudgingly put my shirt back on and pop the hood. Inside, it looks like an amalgam of burning mechanical guts. Thick smoke pours out of the car and into my lungs. I cough, frantically waving my arms around, trying to swat it out of my face.
Fire doesn't kill a dragon, but the two leading causes of dragon deaths in the United States are smoke inhalation and heart disease. I might be fireproof, but I'm not immortal. The smoke still gets to me.
"Huh," I say between gags.
"Is it the engine?" Callie asks, a sudden gust of wind blowing her hair into her face.
Is now a bad time to admit that I don't know what a car engine looks like, or where it's located? Until about five seconds ago, I'd assumed that it was located in, like, the middle of the car or something. I don't know. I hadn't even considered that it was probably under the hood.
"Well, it's definitely something," I decide.
Callie grunts, frustrated, and shoves me out of the way. She takes a stand at the front of her car, her face far too close to the burning parts, her hair still blowing in the wind.
I decide to be a good friend and hold her hair back so it doesn't catch on fire.
"It looks like everything's on fire," Callie narrates. "But the engine's definitely fucking gone. Fuck." She slams the hood shut and takes a frightened step back, motioning for the rest of us to do the same. "Everyone stay back!"
"What do we do?" asks Maya. "We can't call 911. They can't know we're out here."
"Leave it," my dad suggests.
"What? It'll explode! And . . . and . . . and it's my car! I don't exactly have the kind of money to throw around fixing something like that, unless you want to pay for it!" Callie jams an accusatory finger into his chest.
"Cain." Dad turns to me. "You can start fires. Do you think you can stop them?"
I shrug. I've never thought to try it before. And now, with my powers so weak . . .
"We need to get inside the wall before someone sees us out here," Maya points out.
"Fine." Callie sighs. "We'll leave it. But it'll mean we'll have to walk."
"Heaven forbid!" I say.
"Gas masks come first," Callie decides, pulling her Kanken off her back. She unzips it and lets the contents, four gas masks, fall onto the ground. "If we get any closer, the radiation should start getting to us."
"Callie?" Atlas says.
"Yeah?"
"There's only four masks."
There's eight of us and only four masks. Ten of us, counting Rachel and Avani, and four masks. Sixty percent of us will be walking in there completely defenseless against the lethal radiation.
"What the fuck?" I say. "Are there more? Are you just withholding them from us until you know you can trust us?"
Maya looks like she'd slap me if I was standing closer to her. "We aren't withholding anything from you! Those are all the masks we have, and there's not exactly a Gas Mask Emporium anywhere around here! This is New Hampshire, not fucking Russia!"
"They were originally handed out by TI as this desperate measure against the Mara epidemic." Callie starts knotting her hair. "Most people got rid of their's after the wall went up. They figured the problem was dealt with, we were safe, why keep those things around anymore? But Maya and I, we were paranoid. So were my parents. So we kept ours. Four is better than having none."
Now, it doesn't even matter if Maya actually hits me or not. Her glare, dark and piercing, is harsh enough to bruise. "I'll tell ya what," she starts."I'm not getting a mask, but you are, Cain Fuckin' Terranova. Because I'm a good fucking person. I'm not like your asshole relatives in this dimension that built the fucking wall. If innocent people are going to die, then, dammit, I am, too!"
"You know, surviving sounds like a pretty good idea." I start to reach for a mask, but then I look at Atlas. He's intently watching me, his expression foggy. "Actually, fuck that."
Maya bursts out laughing. "Big mood."
"Atlas gets a mask." I grab one of them and throw it at his chest. "I don't."
"It's like hot potato," Silas observes.
"But, like, a lot more fucked up," Meredith adds.
"No, no, no, no!" Atlas shakes his head, his expression bursting into sudden clarity: he's on the verge of tears. "I am not picking which of my friends get to live and which get to die from the comfort from my own mask. Cain should get one." He adds the last part quietly.
"Absolutely not!"
"Look, Rachel and Avani should get one, when we find them," Silas inputs. "They're the youngest. They have the most life ahead of them."
"Uh, no. It might be too late to do anything for them," Callie points out. "They've probably already been in there for so long, whatever damage the radiation's going to do to them has already happened. We'll triage and keep all four for us. We're more likely to benefit from them."
"I agree," Bianca mumbles, then lets out a shrill laugh. "It sounds pretty fucked up, but . . . "
"Great. Perfect." My dad nods. "My son gets one. So should Bee."
"Why doesn't anyone want me to die?" I whine. "I'm too popular for my own good."
"Luca . . . " Bianca mumbles. "I can't."
"I'm nominating Silas," Meredith says. "The purest son-of-a-bitch around. If anyone deserves to live, it's him."
"I don't want one." Silas's jaw is set hard, but he looks flustered. "If the maskless people die . . . I couldn't live with myself."
"My point exactly."
"That's real sweet." Maya sarcastically claps her hands together. "Y'all are a bunch of brave motherfuckers, but is there anyone that actually wants one?"
"I want one!" Meredith adds, her voice quiet but certain. "Like, I don't . . . I don't want to die."
Bianca hesitates then declines. So do the rest of us.
"Look, I'm not letting us walk into that place completely defenseless. Four of us are wearing a goddamn mask. Meredith's one of them, but is it so fucking hard to decide who the other three are gonna be?" Maya asks.
Callie grabs a notebook and a pen out of her bag. She rips a page out of the book, tears it into seven little pieces, and starts scribbling away on them. "We'll do a drawing," she suggests, her tongue stuck between her lips. "Everyone gets an equal chance."
"This is some Hunger Games bullshit," Maya mumbles.
When she finishes writing all the names out, Callie shoves all seven slips into one of the masks. She tosses it like a fucking salad, mixing them all up. Once she's satisfied, she reaches in and pulls three names out. "Silas," she reads, her voice devoid of emotion. "Callie, and Cain."
I actually feel a littleâno, a lotârelieved to be getting one. I'd kind of wanted one the entire time we were arguing over it, you know? It was just that everyone else didn't want one and I didn't want to be the asshole that did. But, like, I'm too young and pretty to die; there's so much I haven't done yet. Like BDSM, but I'm hopeful!
What if I live? some part of my brain wonders. What if I live and Atlas dies? What about my dad, Bianca, Maya? What if the mask isn't enough; what if I still die? What if Rachel's dead by the time we get to her?
Callie passes the masks out to the four of us lucky bastards. Maya goes through the steps of putting them on and makes sure we're aware of all of the emergency safety measures. My dad helps me put my gas mask on like I'm three years old.
"You look hot," Meredith tells me, her voice normal, mostly, but a little warbled, a new CD coming out of an old radio.
She looks funny with it on, bug-like and vacant under the narrow black mask. We all do; we look like a bunch of creepy-ass aliens, and when we breathe, we make a sound like a cheap AC unit pumping out ancient smoky air. I have all of us stand up in a line and tell my dad to take a picture of us so I can make a meme out of us when we get into a less horrific situation.
I don't have to remind myself that there's a very real possibility that I might live while my friends die. It's all I'm thinking about. I can't stop thinking about it, can't stop imagining their dead bodies combusting as we cremate them, bones crackling, the smell of burning human flesh.
If they die in this dimension, will they legally be considered dead?
"We should get past the fence next," Callie decides. "Get it out of the way before we get too tired. The gate should be a ten minute walk east." East. Like we're fucking Lewis and Clark. Left or right, bitch? I'm dumb.
Yesâthe fence. Surrounding the wall in a pathetic last-ditch attempt to keep trespassers out is a six-foot barbed wire fence.
It would have been easy to scale. When my friends and I first got here, we did. But our new group of friends presents a unique problem: Maya Zaman is completely paralyzed from the waist down.
Callie instructs me and Atlas to scale the fence first, using our sweatshirts to cushion the barbed wire. Still, the chains cut through the fabric and burn themselves into my hands. My shoes are too big to fit into the tiny holes (hah!), so I keep slipping, and it's horribly embarrassing. Atlas, who's literally the size of a toddler, doesn't have this problem. He climbs the fence with the sure-footedness of a wild cat.
Once we're both safely on the other side, me crying about my pain, Atlas standing there like a normal person, Callie helps Maya out of her chair. Bianca picks her wheelchair up and tosses it over the fence. It lands on its side, kicking up a plume of dry dirt, and Atlas rights it. Callie then hoists Maya up as far up onto the fence as she can, and while the paralyzed girl uses her upper-body strength to pull herself up, her girlfriend pushes her feet along. When she reaches the top of the fence, Callie swing her legs over the side of it so that she's straddling it, and Maya grabs hold of the barbed wire, slowly lowering herself using only her upper-body strength, hissing in pain, until she's low enough that Atlas and I can reach her to pull her the rest of the way down. We help her back into the chair as the rest of themâBianca, my dad, Callie, Meredith, and Silasâscale it.
Maya's muscular arms are ribboned in red from the barbed wire. She's only wearing a plain black tank-top, having quickly discarded her green flannel in the spring hear and wrapped it around her waist, so she didn't have any sort of protection up there, even with my sweatshirt (which is now completely RUINED, if anyone was wondering) still covering the barbed wire. Her bloody cuts make the purple indents on my hands look like a child crying over a paper-cut while their friend got shot right in front of them.
"You are one weak-ass motherfucker," Maya tells me.
I flip my hair. "OMG, I, like, totally know, right?"
"Every time you speak you sound like a baby boomer trying to fit in with millennials," Atlas complains. "What is up, fellow cool cats? My name's Ajit Pai, watch me fidget spin for the 'gram!"
All of a sudden, Maya's gotten real spacey. Her eyes are pointed with deadly accuracy at a point just above the car. It's really smoking now, giant gray plumes exploding into the sky like volcanic ash. I swear I can see her nose twitching and her alert ears swiveling this way and that like a hunting dog in search of its prey.
"Maya?" I ask. "What is it?"
And then I hear it. A spec of sound somewhere far off in the distance, the screech of tires spitting up dirt.
"We need to move," Maya mumbles. "Now."
"Who could it be?" Callie asks, craning her neck. "Nobody's dumb enough to come out here."
"I don't know!" Maya exclaims. "We need to hurry before someone sees us!"
"A ten minute walk is a five minute run," Silas points out.
"Honey," I drawl. "I don't run."
"Honey." Maya's voice comes out a cheap imitation of my own, but she can't do my accent for shit. She sounds more Scandinavian than Italian. "You're either going to run like the devil herself is chasing your sorry ass, or I swear to God I'll rip you to pieces and leave you to rot while the vultures pick away at what's left of you." She looks me up and down. "Which shouldn't be all that much."
Well. I guess I do run. Honestly, Maya scares me more than the prospect of exercise does. She's a little bit terrifying, okay? Like a grandma with an AK-47.
We all take off, Callie lagging a little behind. Because she's a fucking badass, she helps push Maya along, the extra weight making her about as slow as I am. I start counting in my head to try and distract me from the running.
Thirty seconds in, and I'm ready to take up on Maya's vulture offer. My legs hurt, my chest hurts, my stomach hurts, my feet hurt. Everything hurts. My calves burn with every step. My chest feels full of wet sand. My stomach feels suddenly nauseous and liquidy. My feet feel like I'm running barefoot; Converse, while fashinable, offer so little support, it might have been better if I was.
"Ughghhghghghghg, I want to killlllllll myself," I whine.
Maya yells me some encouragement. "Keep up, drama queen! We're losing you!"
I flip her off.
Five (or so) agonizing minutes slowly tick by, and the gate materializes. It looks less like a gate and more like a bank vault, but the only thing actually keeping it shut is a simple padlock. There's no guards out here, considering the high radiation levels even here outside the wall. It seems almost too easy to get in.
"Goddamnit!" I hear my dad, the first person to reach the gate, yell, upon beginning to examine the lock. "It's a fucking electric lock. How do they expect me to pick this bullshit?"
"What are we gonna do?" Silas, the second person, shrieks.
A second later, most of the rest of them join the two at the gate. I'm still a couple steps behind. The screeching's growing louder, no longer a spec but a thing bursting into life, into being. I can feel my friends' panic sizzling like oil in the air.
I reach them, panting, bending over with my hands on my knees and my head hanging between my legs. Already from the run I feel like I'm about to get violently ill, but what if I . . . ?
"I have an idea," I announce.
Atlas scoffs. "Probably not a good one."
"Cain," Bianca interjects, putting her hand on my shoulder. Of course she knows what I'm thinking. Of fucking course. "I wouldn't . . . I just don't think it's a good idea. We don't know what effect it might have . . . "
I lay my hand against the wall. It's freezing, yet oddly warm, too. Like when you're swimming in a cold sea and all of a sudden a strong warm current knocks you off your feet. I can see my reflection in the metal. For a guy that's on the verge of death, I look hot. I fix a couple flyaways with my free hand. "What's the worst that could happen?"
"You could literally destroy the universe again."
"What?" Maya shrieks, her panic bubbling up through her chest and into her voice.
"Don't be so negative!" Also, ouch. I didn't literally destroy the universe. I just almost did. There's a difference. "Maybe I'll rip a hole in the fabric of this dimension and we'll get to go home."
"Maybe you'll what?" Maya demands, the same shrill panic dripping through her voice.
Maya knows about Maras. She knows about the Terranova Institute. She knows about the rift, and she knows there's different dimensions out there. But how much, exactly, does she know? Does she know how fragile our worlds are; does she know about me, about what I did? What about Mo? Was she around for him?
"Cain, think of dick," Atlas suggests.
"Why?" Maya asks.
"Something he loves."
"'Kay," I reply. "So I'm thinking of you."
And I swear, out of the corner of my eye, I see him blush. That absolute motherfucker. "Aw, you love me?"
No. It's because he's a dick. But I'll let him have that. Let him think I love him, then I'll crush his little heart into . . . no, no, no, I can't even think about it! I was totally kidding about that. I'm 100% in love with this dumb boy.
The screeching grows louder and louder by the second. I squeeze my eyes shut, sweat pouring into my hairline. I know that, in order to activate my powers, I need to think about something that gives me powerful emotions. Which of my emotions are the most powerful? Well, right now, the answer is all of them! I'm an emotional wreck! I'm in severe pain! I think I might have pulled a muscle running!
Earlier in this dimension, when I burned that house down, I didn't have to think of anything. I just snapped my fingers, and BAM! I set fire to the rain. Just because I only needed that little spark to set the gas ablaze. Used to, I'd think of Atlas. Or I'd think of someone like Bianca Mendoza back when we wanted to kill each other. Sometimes, it happened as an act of self-defense, which is what it's wired to do. The hosts basically become armor for their Maras; the power is an extra line of defense.
I try to think of Atlas and his dumb face. I try to think of kissing him and walking with him and falling asleep with him and almost losing him. The first time my power ever worked under my own control, that's what I thought of; my fear of losing him. Nothing happens. I think of the old Bianca Mendoza that nearly killed her daughter for some fucked up experiment. I think of the old Bianca Mendoza who tried to imprison me. I think of the old Bianca Mendoza who . . . who . . . who . . . what did she do to me? Why did I hate her so much?
"What the fuck is he doing?" Maya yells. "They're, like, right here, and he's just standing there meditating or some hippie-ass bullshit! What does he think he's gonna do, bring the wall down with the power of love? Trick ass bitch, that isn't how the world works. We need to destroy it! Burn it! Rip it to shreds!"
I'll have to admit, Maya's fiery nature is a little inspiring.
"Maya, let him concentrate," Bianca whispers. "He's more powerful than you'd think."
"Hurr durr durr, he's more powerful than you think," Maya snarks. "Bullshit."
In a last ditch effort, I think of burning Nazis. That warms my heart, but not my hand. I swear I feel my skin start to grow colder. Why isn't it working? My head's too foggy. I'm too distracted. I'm too out of practice. The damn tires screeching have made the air so thick with dirt it's like a swarm of little black bugs. I feel panicked, but it's the kind of panic that makes you forget your entire presentation. Not the kind of panic that invokes your superpowers to actually fucking start working.
I think of Atlas again, and then I think of the old Bianca Mendoza and burning Nazis. I think of burning down the Westboro Baptist Church. I think of burning polyester fabric, and burning treadmills, and burning pineapple pizza. I imagine everything I hate going up in flames, and . . .
. . . there it is. A spark.
And then I lose it. My vision swims like someone's shoved my head in a meat grinder, and it hurts that bad, too. An electric sort of pain shoots up my spine. I stagger away from the wall, every single one of my internal organs throbbing. It feels like my insides are boiling. It feels like my blood's gone rotten. I've been liquified, smashed into tiny chunks in a blender. God's about to lap me up like I'm a motherfucking smoothie.
I'm hot and restless. I need to run; I need to get out of here; I need to get away from . . . from something. Maybe if I take my shirt off again, it'll help?
My body heaves. Vomit rises in the back of my throat, frothy and unpleasantly warm. I cup my hand over my mouth. I heave again, and everything spills out of me, a filmy puddle of brown. I stare at it for a second, not trusting myself to move, and then it happens again, and again, and again, and again, all in such a quick succession I don't have time to breathe. The entire time, I'm spraying vomit everywhere like a malfunctioning water house.
Finally, I stop vomiting. Shaky and in pain, I collapse on my back in the grass. My mouth tastes like rotting flesh, and I can tell that there's nothing left in my stomach but bubbling acid. That's how I feel: bubbly. It's not a pleasant feeling.
Maya snorts like she finds my current predicament hilarious. "Powerful my ass."
"Cain." Atlas, my loving boyfriend, is standing a good ten feet away from me, looking like he wants absolutely nothing to do with me. "Are you all right?"
A drop of vomit dribbles down my chin. I wipe it off, and it smears like bleeding lipstick, but there's nothing I can do about that. "Does anyone have a tissue?"
I watch out of the corner of my eye as Dad kneels beside me and hands me a handful of Kleenexes. "Here you are, my pukey son."
I wipe the vomit off my chin, but I don't know what to do with the tissues when I finish with them. It's not like there's anywhere out here for me to throw them away in. I try to hand them to my dad, but he refuses to take them, so I just . . . wad them up. And stick them in the pile of puke.
"So are you going to explain what the fuck just happened?" Maya asks. There's tension to her voice, making it shake like a rubber band pulled too tight.
"How much does she know?" Bianca asks Callie.
"What TI told the public. Which is to say not much." Quickly, she adds: "She knows about the powers."
"We aren't from this dimension," Bianca calmly explains, like she's telling her we're from Florida. (Now, just between us girls, Florida actually isn't real. The quote-unqoute Florida you know is just an alternate dimension manifesting itself as a tourist hellscape.)
"Oh, my sweet Jesus." Maya clutches her hand to her heart. "So, like . . . so, like, is that why he's supposedly so powerful?"
"No." I offer her the best explanation I can. "It's 'cause I'm a Leo."
"Maya, do you remember Mo?" Callie asks.
"That weird kid that died?"
"He's like him. A host."
I notice that Callie's deliberately skirting around the fact that she's a host, too. Does Maya not know? Why wouldn't she tell her?
Maya crosses her arms over her chest. "What's the fuckass's power, then? Projectile vomiting?"
"Close. I can set things on fire."
"He's like Mo," Callie repeats, her voice quietly obsessive. "So very much like Mo."
Maya pinches the bridge of her nose. "So you were trying to burn the wall down, huh?"
"Yeah."
"God. I fucking love you." Maya breaks out in a grin, but it's short-lived. "So how are we going to get in, if you can't burn it down and your dad can't pick the lock? Does Silas have a secret super-power too?"
"HAHAHAHA!" says Silas, a little too enthusiastic.
Maya makes an okay face.
"Fixed it!" announces Atlas.
"What?" asks Callie.
"While you guys were busy unlocking each other's backstories, I rewired the circuits on this puppy," he explains, the absolute fucking nerd. The gate behind him, I realize, is wide-open. "Same concept as when I hacked our school's online gradebook so Cain didn't flunk freshman science essentials."
"But how are we going to find them, once we get in there?" wonders Dad.
"My mom said the security footage was from some elementary school," Callie says. "I think it was, like, Reagan Elementary? Something like that. We can head there."
"Nixon Elemntary?" I ask.
"Maybe. It was named after some gross Republican president."
"We live across the street from there," Dad says. "Jesus. She went home."
[ ââ â â§Ëâ｡â¾â©Ëâ｡à¿â ââ ]
WARWICK IS EMPTY.
It's sketching me out. It feels like this is where the world ended.
Maybe it is.
It's an hour walk from the gate to my house, which doesn't look all that different in this dimension. Except that the owners' made a horrifying attempt at painting over all the graffiti in a violent shade of turquoise, the grass reaches my knees, and there's a FORECLOSURE sign hung from the mailbox on rusty chains. Also, there are pink flamingoes everywhere. And I mean everywhere. It's flamingo hell. There's plastic lawn flamingoes lurking ominously in the grass. There's flamingoes spray-painted on the walls. There's signs nailed under the windows with flamingoes in Hawaiian print shirts and sunglasses. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to go inside and find toilets shaped like flamingoes. Personally, I'm looking forwards to shitting into an innocent flamingo's gaping mouth like a mother bird puking into her children's mouths for nourishment.
I love what they've done with the place.
The door's unlocked, and the house is empty but alive.
Warm late-afternoon sunlight filters through the dirty windows, spinning dust like confetti. Some old Disney Channel show is loudly playing on the TV. Clothes are haphazardly scattered and thrown on the floor like someone ransacked the place. Flies buzz around an open box of room-temperature pepperoni pizza set on the counter. I find one of Rachel's headbands hanging from a coatrack.
Much like the rest of the residents of Warwick, New Hampshire, the remnants of them are still here, but Rachel Terranova and Avani Nagarkar are long gone.
"Dammit." Dad slams his fist into the wall so hard the plaster shudders. "Dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit!"
Bianca grabs his arms and holds them behind his back to keep him from, you know, seriously injuring himself or, God forbid, the pink-and-blue flamingo wallpaper. "Luca, calm down," she orders. "All of their stuff is still here. So they must still be here. Maybe they went for a walk or something."
"It looks like they left in a hurry," he mumbles.
"Maybe they're hiding in the closet getting a good laugh at us," I offer, walking over to the coat closer and sliding the door open. "Surprise! They aren't in here. What a fun prank!"
"Do you think the school would have gotten it on camera if they went somewhere?" Callie asks.
Dad shrugs. "Not unless they have cameras leading right up into the front door of this place."
"They're going to come back, Luca, I promise," says Bianca.
"Maybe they're into voyeurism," Meredith offers, in reference to the school. "Maybe they do try to film everything."
"What's voyeurism?" Silas asks.
Meredith looks like she's about to explain it, but I'm across the room in a single stride. I slam my hand over her mouth before she gets the chance to soil his innocence. It wouldn't be as bad as when she told him what a golden shower was, but I try to keep every last shard of his purity in place, no matter how small.
"Oh, you know," I say. "Government spies."
Meredith licks my hand.
"Ew!" I wipe her spit off on her sweatshirt. "What was that for?"
"What do you have against voyeurism, you fucking kinkshamer?"
[ ââ â â§Ëâ｡â¾â©Ëâ｡à¿â ââ ]
BIANCA MENDOZA IS a disgusting liar. Rachel and Avani don't return.
Okay, okay. I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me rephrase that: they don't return in time to get any of their pizza. Me, Meredith, and Atlas shove it down our throats the moment we decide to stay and wait on them, and everything's good for a while. My stomach's full of pizza and, as to be expected, I'm happier than I've ever been.
Then ten minutes pass, and the boredom starts to set in. We're sprawled out in the living room. Maya's spinning herself around in circles. Meredith's passed out on the couch. Callie's pensively looking out the window, her hand cupped around her chin like the absolute edgelord that she is.
"You know," Callie points out, "the house next door has a swimming pool, and I don't think anyone's home."
Meredith rolls over, her eyes sliding open. I'm sitting on the floor right in front of the couch, my back pressed against it, and she digs her hand into my shoulder. Considering what happened the last time we thought we could take advantage of a supposedly abandoned house, I don't think she's too keen on the idea.
"What are we supposed to do, skinny-dip?" I ask.
"Absolutely!" says Atlas, looking more than eager.
"I saw an old Target on our way here," Maya suggests. "We can break in, see if they have any swimsuits left over."
Silas looks nervous. Very nervous.
"I don't think that's the best idea," Dad mumbles.
I stare at him. "What, breaking and entry?"
"Leaving this place. They might come back while we're gone."
"We can just go," Callie offers. "You guys can stay here."
Bianca shakes her head. "Splitting up is an even worse idea."
Maya throws her arms up in defeat. "You guys are no fun!"
All of a sudden, the door clicks open, and everything starts feeling Horribly Not Real. I'm not actually here; this isn't actually happening. It can't be.
My dead sister is standing in the doorway.
[ ââ â â§Ëâ｡â¾â©Ëâ｡à¿â ââ ]
k. so. first of all. i always try to respond to comments and stuff, but because of the MESS of an update, and the sheer amount of people i'm following i don't get, like, ANY actual notifications. so sorry if i don't reply to stuff, it's not that i'm ignoring y'all, it's just that i didn't get the fREAKING NOTIFICATION
second of all. i've heard rumors about accounts getting deleted. so if y'all wanna follow my backup @gaycouture in case something happens to me that'd be lit. y'all can also follow my instagram @feministwriter for some updates nd stuff on my current WIP, A Shrine to an Unknown God. it's about this lil american teenager that finds out her great-grandma's hellenistic cult is all too real when her plane crash-lands on a tiny Greek island and she kind of accidentally stabs someone that turns out to totally be a freaking god
last of all. YALL THIS BOOK WAS LONGLISTED FOR THE WATTYS AND IM SCREAMING AJJHTEVSDNBEFWYHIUAJOS I CANT EVEN TELL YALL HOW MUCH THIS MEANS TO ME, THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH FOR ALL UR SUPPORT. I REALLY DO APPRECIATE EVERY LIKE, COMMENT, OR READ, SO MCFREAKIN MUCH!!!!!!!