32.
Once upon a time, Liv knew which names went with which fireworks. Chrysanthemums, peonies, girandolas, willows, flying fish. All she knew about this one was that it was the size of a planet, exploding into dozens of whistling pink streaks. The cornfield went purple, an alien landscape, and Liv wished for it to be true, that she’d been abducted to the place her father had believed he’d gone, and from there watched the distant earth, that tight fist of misery, finally detonate.
Before the wiggling trails dissipated, a fresh round of crackling began, and sparks plumed from a spot maybe fifty yards into the maze. It thickened into a fountain of liquid fire, higher and higher, as green and red gusts of smoke billowed. This one was easy, a Roman candle, or more likely, a ream of Roman candles. I’m here, it said in its bang language. Come and find me. She angled toward the mouth of the maze, tripping and catching herself three times, unable to take her eyes from the soaring, sparkling spout. The corn was as dry as kindling. There would be a fire. The whole field would go up. What was Doug thinking?
Liv hesitated at the maze’s opening. Mazes had brought her here. The improbable twists of her long relationship with Doug, the inconceivable turns of rogue science. The corn on either side of the entrance bloomed with phosphorescent color. She trembled; the pitchfork slipped inches in her grip. Not once had she been able to successfully trace her finger through Doug’s Trick.
She forced herself to think of the Biatalik giant paused at the fringe of Black Glade. He’d had more to fear than she did. Liv looked down, saw Roman candle sparks reflected in the glass of her father’s wrist compass. Captured there, the sparks were so small. All her fears, she told herself, could be that small. His compass told her what it had always told him: The quickest way between two points was a straight line.
Liv charged down the mown path, and when she hit the left turn she did not turn. This was corn, not electrified fencing. She hurtled through a patch before bursting into a mown junction that she also ignored, keeping a compass trajectory toward the towering sparks. The maze seemed to come alive at her rejection of its rules. Thatches of ragweed cinched around her ankles. Corn leaves sliced thin cuts into her hands, neck, and forehead. With the pitchfork she batted away the worst of the stalks, which popped like her father’s bones when hit with a baton.
“It’s Dad!” she cried, though it was lost in the fireworks’ crackle. “It’s Dad, it’s Dad, it’s Dad!”
The size of the central clearing was so big that Liv, expecting more corn soldiers, careened ten feet into it before falling. Keeping both hands on the pitchfork, she hit the dirt hard, her shoulder bursting with pain. She rolled, bringing herself to an elbow, and there he was, Doug Monk, facing away from her, squatting in his army-green shorts, holding a butane lighter to the end of a long wick. It took, and Doug scuttled back to watch it burn. Liv squinted in the strobing light. It looked as if this batch of Roman candles was wired to another, then another, a chain of fireworks intended to keep going for thirty minutes, an hour, even longer.
Doug jumped back from the new flume, his feet knocking over his school backpack. He looked feral, his clothes filthy, his face smudged in mud, shreds of corn caught in his hair. But he looked happy, Liv thought, content at what he’d built and orchestrated. His smiling face oscillated to watch hundreds of sparks fall harmlessly to the dirt he’d cleared, and that’s how he caught a glimpse of the one element he hadn’t planned for, at least not this soon.
He turned so fast that he tripped. Gorp spilled from his pocket.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Next to the candle’s percussive reports and the ringing of Liv’s ears, he sounded distant and muted. His face squashed into bewilderment, or rage, and this time he belted it.
“What are you doing there?”
Liv tried to push herself upward, but her shoulder, her palms, her toe, everything hurt, and she fell flat. Doug showed no sign of concern. He shook his head, his greasy hair twisted like more wicks ready to be lit. He was gesturing wildly.
“Didn’t you see the entrance? I set it up so you wouldn’t miss it! I lit the fireworks to guide you!”
“Where is he?” Liv panted.
Doug looked aggrieved. “A? I told you I’d take care of it.”
“That shed over there. I saw what you did.”
“What I did?” Doug rubbed his weary-looking face with both hands, his sweat turning dirt into mud. “You started it. The first night, remember? I’m just finishing because you don’t have the balls. You literally don’t have them.” He studied the stalks she’d broken, turquoise now in the fireworks’ light. “I’m going to have to repair all that. Do you know how long this took me?”
“Doug, listen to me.” Liv struggled to her knees. “Did you hear what I was yelling?”
“We can repair it together. I’m sorry I yelled.”
“Doug! You need to listen!”
He frowned, pooching his bottom lip like a grouchy toddler. His eyes crept off across black dirt, reaching the second bundle of Roman candles as the nucleus flickered to life. He smiled, watching the sparks chisel through gathered smoke, but the smile faltered. When he spoke, Liv could barely hear over the erupting booms.
“I’ve been thinking it over, the whole thing. Building this stuff was harder than I thought. All the turns, the circles—the Trick? It’s easy to get lost in it. Real easy. You can make yourself think you’re going one way when really you’re going the other. Last night, I got lost inside it all night. Felt like a month. Felt like my whole life.”
He had been lost, for a long, long time, and Liv might have been able to show him a shortcut out if only she, too, hadn’t been lost for so long beside him. None of this should have been her responsibility. There should have been someone else to help. She thought of her stop at the Monk house. Mr. Monk was no father of the year, but Liv couldn’t believe he’d let the property slide as far into ruin as it had. Especially the collapsed roof of the fireworks garage atop the most valuable goods the family owned. That collapse seemed to symbolize so much.
The Roman candles sputtered, dunking Doug’s face into shadow. Liv, still clutching the pitchfork, used her thighs, still strong from years of training, to piston herself to a standing position. The wick on the third cluster of Roman candles crackled and glared like a cigarette, and when the first shots fired, dousing the clearing in yellow light, Doug smiled again, until he turned to find Liv upright, wielding the pitchfork. His smile dropped like the sparks.
“You’re not right,” Liv said. “You’re all screwed up. Now listen to me.”
Doug’s head grew too heavy for his neck; he stared at the ground. It was the same pose Liv had seen him adopt all of his life when facing those who only saw in him the deviant he seemed fated to become. He made a vague, rolling gesture, a sad amalgam of nod and shrug. Then, a single chuckle—a firecracker pop of self-loathing.
“Guess it’s no big surprise,” he said. “Guards at military prisons get mixed up all the time. Turn as extreme as the extremists. Then they ship home and everyone calls them psychos. But it’s not their fault, you know? They got caught in the Trick, too, and can’t remember the way out. It’s all there in those files you never read.”