“I didn’t know,” Doug sobbed. “Oh, Lee. You told us, you said, you said if something happened to you, we’d have to … What did I do? What did I … oh god, Lee, I didn’t know!”
Doug chose a third option, if choice was a thing over which he had any more control. He burst from his crouched position so fast that he accidentally struck Lee with his shoulder. Doug rebounded and tore off in a mindless rightward curve. He ran like the blood from his ear had flowed into his eyes, and Liv saw, before it happened, that he was headed for the active cluster of Roman candles. He legs struck first, and he bent in half, his upper body dipping into the inferno. He wailed and twirled out the other side, his shabby jacket blooming with fire. He flapped and kicked, tipping the bundle of fireworks, which began pouring hot sparks directly into the corn. The conflagration was instant: Twenty feet of dead crop combusted with a sound like torn fabric.
The destruction dug a second path from the clearing, and Doug, as if beguiled by this radical method of maze making, wandered into it, a human fireball, another flare shot into the field. Liv wondered if his thoughts, in these crazed seconds, mirrored hers: When wounds of sadness, loneliness, and anger healed poorly, any atrocity was possible. Liv’s last sight of her oldest friend was his white-hot shape gazing in wonder at the apocalypse he’d created before he stepped out of view, trailblazing his final path, their conspiracy broken at last.
Liv shielded her eyes. The fireworks were finished now, but the fire was only starting. She looked for her father, identified his shape where he’d fallen. She tried to stand, but her throat was swollen, she could barely breathe so she crawled on all fours, slowly. The thirty seconds it took to reach him exhausted her; she collapsed next to him, draping her arms over his body the same as she’d done in her bed.
Maquahuitl had driven several ribs into his heart. His every smallest muscle twitched. His single eye rotated, sheening with firelight, until it settled, jittery no longer, upon Liv. She curled her arms around his skinny chest and nestled her head into his frail neck. Daddy, this was Daddy, and she was the biologic evidence that he had existed.
She kissed his damp, sticky head and cried, her tears slicing clean lines through his dirty skin. He trembled, and one of his thick fingers grazed the wrist compass. His tongueless mouth gummed but made no sound. Because he couldn’t speak, Liv felt she must, but had no words worthy of the moment. She made herself recall the last thing he’d said to her, his favorite Galvin quote, and now, since she was the one saying goodbye, she repeated it.
“‘Perhaps you didn’t realize / Anything can happen under a sky like this.’”
In the middle of the state he loved, next to the book he adored, alongside the child he would have done anything not to hurt, Lee Fleming died. His body, every infinitesimal flutter, quit at once, and there was a slight sinking like a sedative had taken effect. It was a surprise to Liv how swiftly his body, even in proximity to such a fire, grew colder.
She thought she might stay by his side all night. That’s what she wanted, but a twinkle of rationality survived in her skull—flames would soon surround her. Achingly slow, with a body halfway broken, Liv brought herself to her feet, took her father by the thin wrist, and dragged him toward the whipping flames until the exhalations of heat grew too intense. She knew what to do next. Get down on her stomach. Use her feet to push the body into the first row of smoldering stalks. Her father would catch fire and incinerate, and from his ashes people of science would learn nothing at all.
But she didn’t. She stood there, staring into the storm of swirling ash. Doug had made this clearing plenty wide, and dirt didn’t burn. The Biatalik prisoners, if they were careful, might evade eyes in the Black Glade’s caliginous thickness, but Lee’s body should be found when authorities came to clean up the mess. It would serve as testimony, against her and Doug, yes, but also against everyone who’d thought they could do whatever they wanted, no matter how awful, without moral rebuke.
The Mayorgas, though, deserved none of the poison they’d absorb from Bruno’s involvement. Liv’s throat had loosened enough to claim sufficient, if agonizing, gulps of air. Recoiling from hot gusts, she crossed the clearing and hunkered next to Bruno’s body. His face was still perfect, carrying the same slight smile he’d had when they’d lain together in the costume room. Even his hair, his pride and joy, wasn’t too badly mussed. Liv took out her phone for the third time that night. Her hands were slick with sweat, and the phone slipped to the ground. That was good; the ground held it steadier than she’d be able to. She extended a finger and touched the digits 9, 1, 1, each press pushing the phone farther into the dirt.
She heard a tinny voice answer, no doubt asking after the nature of her emergency, but Liv didn’t pick it up. She was busy picking up Bruno. With one arm under his neck and another under his knees, she lifted. Her legs shook with effort. She didn’t think she could do it. But bravery, she realized, existed all around her. She only had to open her eyes against the stinging firelight to see it. The bravery of the Biatalik mutants, leaving their prison. The bravery of Carbajal, sacrificing everything to the truth. The bravery of her mother, despite her frailties, working to right the sinking ship of their life. And her dad’s bravery, most of all, in the final moments of a life marked by unimaginable terror.
Liv shouted at the phone the pertinent details of the Monk Block, though she had no idea if the operator could hear. Leaving behind the operator’s pipsqueak pleas, she tromped into the corn, over the same stalks she’d bashed down when arriving. The fire hadn’t gotten there yet, and the paths Doug had mowed were forcing the blaze to find creative ways to leap the gulfs. Liv pictured her compass and walked, Bruno not so heavy after all, and this time the ragweed didn’t snatch, the corn didn’t slash. Instead the plants seemed to part before her, bowing in deference.
She emerged from the maze entrance. The outbuilding, she noted, sat on dry, yellow grass and already the blaze was curling in that direction, as if sentient enough to go after evidence. There was nothing Liv could do; Lee’s corpse, she had to believe, would survive. She hitched up Bruno and directed her wobbling body to be the tallest it could and keep going. She collided with the grille of the station wagon, which sprang whole from its hiding spot in the smoke. She opened the driver’s door and managed to turn on the headlights, until the calculus of getting Bruno’s body inside the car became too much. Her legs trembled, her spine wavered, and she lost her footing in the dirt. When she fell, right behind the car, she made sure that it was her knees and elbows that took the damage.
The hazard lights turned everything red. The alien planet—she could imagine she’d reached it after all. On this planet, the air was red and smoky, and death was only a dream. She pulled at the tarp, yanking, even biting, and after a time made progress, peeling it like the skinner skin of Lee Fleming’s flawed memory. Bruno was unbound, and she ran her hands over his red clothes and red skin and red blood. It was like he was made of wounds, but wasn’t everyone? Maybe here, on this backward red planet, wounds only made you stronger.
Liv took her coat off and then her shirt, which she knotted around Bruno’s wounds as tightly as she could. Then she rubbed her hands over his skin, trying to warm him, and when her arms couldn’t move anymore, she used her entire body for the same purpose. The fire’s roar made it difficult to hear, but she believed she detected sirens, and believed they were getting closer, though on this planet, there was no gauging distance, or time, or purpose, or intent. She ducked her head through red snow and pressed her lips to Bruno’s red ear and whispered a word over and over, the only word she knew in this alien language, but a magical one, one given to her by her father, the only word she’d ever need.