Part IDÉJÀ VU
LEAVING
They left town at dawn. They left behind a corpse sprawled on a couch in the spare room upstairs and a string of fires burning in the engine bays. They left behind the apartment, the shop, the street where Ethan and his brother had once played Cowboys and Indians until well after dark. They left behind Ethan’s brother. They were heading west, into the rising sun, and as they slipped onto the highway a cloud of smoke rose in the rearview mirror: Ethan’s whole life, going up in flames.
No turning back now.
Ethan was behind the wheel, exhausted from the night’s work and numb with shock. Hunter brooded on the other end of the truck’s long seat, watching the sunrise, quiet as a knife.
Six weeks ago, just after Christmas, Hunter had wandered into the little east Texas town of Ellersby like a man from nowhere. No driver’s license, no social security number, no phone. Nothing but a backpack with a change of clothes that didn’t fit him and the most remarkable pair of hazel eyes Ethan had ever seen. All Ethan had going for him was an auto shop he’d inherited from his mother. His mother’s shop, and her mountain of debt.
Hunter had wandered in off the street. Taken a look around the shop. Asked for a job.
Ethan had almost laughed out of despair. His hometown of Ellersby had somehow been dying for a decade, and it was trying to take the shop with it. Ethan ran sales and promotions. He turned on the lights every morning. He survived, because what else was there to do? He didn’t have the money to pay this handsome stranger a regular wage—some days, Ethan barely had the money to eat after the bank took their cut of the pie—but he said Hunter was welcome to hang around, help with odd jobs when they came up. Hunter said that would be fine.
Hunter asked if there was anywhere cheap around town he could sleep. Ethan said there was a couch in the spare room upstairs.
Ethan would always remember the moment that came next. A pile of tires, gaskets discounted for two years, dust turning in the pale winter light. Hunter meeting Ethan’s eyes. Ethan had always been good with people, the same way he was good with engines. The flicker of an eyelid, the twitch of a half-formed smile—they were the clicks and rumbles of an engine, all betraying the motor of the heart.
But for a long, long moment, Hunter’s face betrayed nothing, absolute zero, and Ethan realized this might have been the first man he couldn’t understand. Hunter’s heart was impossible to read, his desires utterly opaque. This was thrilling to Ethan. Uncharted territory.
It never occurred to Ethan that a man so skilled in hiding himself might have something dangerous to conceal.
That day six weeks ago, after a long, long hesitation, Hunter smiled. Both men knew, in that moment, that Hunter wasn’t going to sleep a night on that couch in the spare room upstairs. Not with Ethan’s bed just down the hall.
What they didn’t know was how sick Hunter would become after he moved in, or how fast, or how hard it would be to get any decent medical attention in the wooded abyss of east Texas. The world was only a few years into a new millennium. Progress was still miles away. Ethan hadn’t known how many nights he would lie awake watching Hunter sleep, watching the scars on Hunter’s chest glow and shiver in the moonlight as the man struggled to breathe, his lungs making a sound like a clogged carburetor gasping for air.
So last night, when Ethan and Hunter heard the shotgun go off, they knew their opportunity had come. Hunter laid out a plan. Ethan listened. Gasoline, socks, documents. A prayer to anyone listening. Before he left, Ethan risked a single glimpse at the horror in the spare room. He started to practice the lie he would have to tell for the rest of his life.
The shirt on Ethan’s back wasn’t his own. The old Ford truck, the wallet in his pocket, the ID inside—they weren’t his. His name wasn’t even Ethan Cross.
They were driving to California. Everyone started their lives over in California.
Ethan still believed, then, that it was possible to start your life over.
THE SILVER GLARETHE TWINS
4:00 p.m.
The end of the day is just the beginning. That was the only thing their father had taught them about running a motel. Would he have taught them more if he’d known it would turn out like this? Taught them more about this place? More about tonight? In the end, a single letter was all he left them.Nothing matters more than this.
This: Thomas and Tabitha at the empty edge of the west Texas desert, marooned in the shadow of a mountain no one ever hiked, halfway down a road no one ever traveled. Thomas and Tabitha ran a nine-room establishment complete with gas pump, cafe, and bar. A motel with a ludicrous name. A legend from another age.
Thomas and Tabitha were the twin stewards of a place they’d never asked for and could never leave.
Remember: death sustains it.
They split their duties around the motel. Tabitha cleaned the floors and changed the linens. Thomas handled the common areas, the bathrooms, scrubbed the blood in the bathtub left over from last night. Every afternoon, the same routine. The motel returned to perfect condition. You would think, being this far from civilization, that they would never receive enough business to justify all this work.
You would be wrong. The night’s guests were already on their way.
The day things finally changed, Tabitha was in room 5. She was standing next to the room’s second bed, stuffing pillows into fresh cases, when she looked out the front window. The old gas pump in the parking lot. The tarnished gold haze of the desert scrub. A translucent sheet of blue sky, its horizon so infinitely far it felt like they’d been set adrift in a great uncharted sea.
A sudden flare of light passed over that pale sky. The light wasstrange and quick and brilliant, like the glare off a tilting mirror. The light was everywhere; it was almost blinding—and then it was gone.
Tabitha never did get used to that light.
There was a softtick, and the clock on the room’s nightstand flipped over from 3:59 to 4:00. It was a familiar sound, so common she’d almost forgotten to hear it. With long practice, she tossed the pillows onto the bed, where they landed with a softthwumpat precisely the right angle to look dense and inviting. Her rag whispered along the headboard.
