Trust no one from the Enclave.
When someone tells you they’re not betrothed, don’t believe them.
The Screamers don’t fight fair; you shouldn’t, either.
Rules to live by, rules to be obeyed, rules that sometimes don’t make sense. The list is the first thing I see each morning when I step into the kitchen and the last thing before shutting down for the night. At some point, I stopped questioning, stopped asking why.
That morning, three months ago, I headed to the kitchen first, giving the list a mock salute rather than detouring to the front room. Would that have changed anything? Could I at least have said goodbye? I don’t know. I can forgive myself the one.
But not the other.
That morning, strains of something light and buoyant came from the front room. Mozart, one of the concertos. No news. No television. This signaled a good day. My mother was content to watch the sunrise, listen to her music, and otherwise ignore the medical intrusion and the pain.
Dawn flooded the kitchen with pinks and golds, painting the air with hope. While coffee brewed, I spooned loose tea into a strainer and let the tension in my chest unknot ever so slightly. If I squinted through the window over the sink, a pale green haloed the trees in the backyard. It had been a long, cold April, one filled with wintery mixes and sullen sleet. Today, the promise of spring felt real.
Except the air tasted wrong. Not foul. Not toxic. Not stale like the gray-speckled snowbanks and icy mud that remained in the yard.
Wrong as in not of this world. The sort of wrong that meant I should be on my guard.
And that morning, I wasn’t. I ignored the pinpricks at the back of my mind and worked overtime to push the Sight away. After all, I knew I was losing my mother. I didn’t need—or want—to know when and how.
I was pulling the half-and-half from the fridge for some coffee when the air shifted again. So strange, so wrong, I couldn’t ignore it. The container slipped from my fingers and smacked against the floor, cream splattering my shins. In the front room, the volume spiked, and the violins screamed. I thought we’d wake the entire neighborhood.
I’d gotten as far as the kitchen threshold when the pocket door—on its own volition—slammed shut, nearly taking a few fingers. I yanked once, twice, before realizing that was fruitless. Then I spun and sprinted out the back door.
Icy mud soaked my socks. I stumbled, arms pinwheeling, ankle twisting and singing out in pain. I peeled off one sock and then another, hopping and running. I rounded the house and halted.
A man was on the sidewalk, his back to me. In his arms, he cradled a slight figure, as if that someone was the most precious thing of all. I only caught a glimpse. The blue fleece robe. The fuzzy slippers. The hair prematurely gray. The man glanced over his shoulder, his face obscured by a sweatshirt hood. He ran.
So did I.
We raced past the last few houses on the street. The paved asphalt melted into a slurry of gravel that led to the abandoned housing development. Fear gripped me, urged me faster. He couldn’t be taking her there, could he?
He moved as if the burden in his arms weighed nothing. I was gaining on them, but cold made my legs ache, and my stride faltered. Every last stone and pebble stabbed the soles of my feet. I was pretty sure they were bleeding, but I didn’t stop to check. The air washed the perspiration from my brow as soon as it sprouted. In front of me, a preternatural glow encased the man and my mother as if it were a cocoon. Once, twice, I reached out, could just brush its edges.
But I couldn’t catch them.
They passed the entrance to the housing development, and I nearly wept with relief. But the man gained speed and, with it, uncanny power. The glow thickened. The sky turned a deep, midnight blue, filled with pinpricks of light—it was like staring into the Milky Way. A force reared up, like a wave, and crashed into me.
I flew through the air, landing hard on my tailbone. The man spirited my mother away. Before they vanished into the windbreak that separated the housing development from a stretch of fallow fields, my mother shifted in the man’s arms.
She spoke, or at least mouthed words. Despite the glow, the uncanny stars, and all the rest, her message was clear, as was the gentle smile, the one she bestowed only on me.
It’s okay.
Was it? I sat in the frigid mud, pondering that. I understood enough about my mother to know that this was final. But my heart disagreed, and it was my heart that had me on my feet, racing past the windbreak, the fallow fields, and toward the silo.
I ignored the farmhouse—with its peeling yellow paint and caved-in front porch—and headed straight for the crumbling silo. I’d only ventured inside it once on my own—a very long time ago, before I knew any better.
Today, I didn’t care.
In the mud was a single set of footprints, obvious tracks that had trekked both to and from the silo. I yanked open the door, and it shuddered and screeched, almost angry. Inside, nothing marred the dusty floor except a couple of plastic bags and a Swiss Army knife. No stardust. No glow.
Nothing but an afterimage remained. A man. A woman. An embrace.
They were gone.
My mother was gone.
