Tears pricked at my eyes, and I looked away, blinking them back. I studied the porch steps, picturing Merry on them snapping peas, while Mama peeled potatoes in the rocking chair, singing and smiling. Papa was out in the fields, his big straw hat blocking the sun, while he chatted with the bees buzzing around him. Even Sam was there in my imagination, pushing Sadie on the rope swing under the oak tree. I drank the sight in, savoring the little details so ingrained in my memory. It was like reading a beloved old book. Would we ever be together like that again?
“If I don’t…If something should happen to me…you will always have a home here, if you want it, but you’re free to leave, free to swarm away if you need to. Do whatever you need for the good of the hive, all right?”
I wasn’t sure how to end my speech, so I simply stepped away before the tears overwhelmed me.
As I trekked toward the barn, a trio of bees raced out in front of me, weaving around themselves. They hovered there for a moment, bobbing up and down, before rising into the sky, taking flight, and leaving me behind.
It felt like a blessing.
It felt like goodbye.
A miserable hot breeze swept by, carrying echoing cries and lingering screams from town. A dark haze blanketed the village, smoke and ash, dirt and debris kicked up from the explosions.
My resolve began to waver as I considered it. Nothing good would be discovered within such malignant murk.
I was in the barn for only a moment, grabbing what I needed from the wall.
With Papa’s hatchet heavy in my hand, I made my way back to Amity Falls.
“Rule Number One: A rope of great cords will not fray, snap, or weather. The Falls stands strong if we all bind together.”
The smoke smelled of burning timber and pitch, vile and black. It hung thickly in the air, stinging my nostrils and eyes, turning the bright afternoon into a false twilight hellscape, and making it nearly impossible for me to see my surroundings. Though I knew I was on the outskirts of town—there were the Maddins’ flower beds, withered away to ragged husks—I’d lost all sense of direction within the poisonous haze.
There were darker shadows that moved within the smoke, warped into nightmarish shapes and creations. I watched agape as an absolute giant swung back a scythe and brought it down upon a writhing mass again and again until the mass moved no more. The titan then turned, shifting its path toward me. I ducked behind a bush in time to see the small form of Mark Danforth hurtle past me. The scythe was easily twice his height. Its blade was slick with red and black and things I cared not to think about. His eyes were completely flat, unable to engage or understand anything that was going on around him.
“Where are you, Finnick?” he sang in an off-key taunt, all but whistling his glee. “I know it was you. You can’t hide forever. I’m coming. Oh, I’m coming.”
His head shot toward the left with a reptilian snap, and he listened to an approaching skirmish. Rather than flee, he took off after it, his curved blade raised high.
Shrieks rose from inside the Maddins’ house, and moments later, a window on the second floor shattered from within. Deadly shards of glass rained upon the parched ground, followed by the meaty thud of a body pushed from the gaping hole. Bonnie let out a final gasping moan before she fell still.
“You there!” growled a voice from the window. A figure—too smudged in soot for me to clearly see—peered down at me.
Alarm flooded my chest, then raced up my throat like a splash of hot vomit.
It was Alice Fowler.
She’d been the one to push Bonnie from the window, killing the girl.
“Is that Ellerie Downing I see?” she called out. With the fire reflecting off her wide eyes, she looked crazed. Alice darted from the window, presumably on her way for me. I stumbled into the murk, heedless of where I was headed. I only knew I needed to get away.
I turned down the street to the right as the Maddins’ front door swung open.
“Where are you? Come back here!”
Shouts rose across the road, and the schoolteacher raced after them, certain she was following me instead.
I pressed on, heading deeper into the Falls. Some houses were ablaze, having been caught by falling embers. Others were already gone, burnt down to charred remains. As I turned up Main Street, I found the source of the explosions.
McCleary’s general store had been blown to pieces, bricks blasted out across the road like in a game of Trinity Brewster’s jacks. The storage room must have caught fire, igniting kegs of gunpowder. The force of it had destroyed all the nearby houses, and the ensuing fires had raced to Matthias Dodson’s livery.
Stallions galloped up and down the road, their eyes rolling madly as they tried to escape the inferno, racing like demons set loose upon the earth. Their screams rattled the air. I’d never heard a more horrible sound.
Behind me, hidden somewhere in the hazy madness, a fight broke out. Though unseen, I could hear every accusation hurled, every punch thrown. One of the men was Leland Schäfer. I would have recognized his nervous stutter anywhere.
“Get back, Winthrop, I’m warning you!” he cried. “I’ll shoot, I swear!”
“Not if I shoot you first!”
Winthrop Mullins.
He blamed his grandmother’s death on the Elder.
And now they both had guns.
I wanted to stop them, to somehow intervene, but I couldn’t tell where they were in the shadowy mayhem. Their voices echoed off the walls of smoke, at my left one moment and my right the next.
A gun went off.
Once.
Twice.
The third shot zipped by, nearly grazing my ear as it sped past.
I had to get out of here.
But where to go?
Where would my sisters have been taken?
The Gathering House?
It seemed possible, given that the last Judgment had played out there, but all three Elders would be required, and Leland was too occupied with murdering or being murdered by Winthrop.
My mind skirted past the Gallows. If my brother was there—if all my siblings were there—I did not want to know, didn’t want to imagine it, didn’t want even a trace of it entering my thoughts, lest I somehow conjure it into existence.
With McCleary’s and the livery stables destroyed, my list of public places narrowed considerably.
The tavern…or the church.
Squinting through the fiery haze, I picked my way closer to the center of town, dodging altercations, ducking every time I heard gunfire. My axe would do me little good if I found a rifle pointed in my direction.