Bare scalp and raw feet and gasping lungs.
It’s the three of us now, for as long as possible.
We eat the fish cooked over the flames, picking around the tiny bones, and then Cricket falls into a fitful sleep. Feet twitching, breathing heavy and sputtering, like she’s dreaming of the barn, of wriggling through the wood slats while bullets screamed past us. Or maybe it’s the dust storm that plagues her sleeping mind, the memory of wind and sand biting at our skin.
She needs rest—for longer than just one night—but I also know she won’t take my advice. If she wakes up in the morning, if there’s breath in her lungs, she’ll want to keep moving.
Noah places more wood on the fire, and the tattoos on his arms look like serpents in the flickering light. Monsters with cruel eyes.
“Are you cold?” he asks me.
I shake my head, but in truth, the fire is barely enough to keep my skin from trembling. I wish we had brought the blanket from thecave, anything to keep out the night’s chill. But Noah sinks onto the sand beside me, eyes focused on the fire.
“She’s not well,” I say, glancing to Cricket.
He nods knowingly.
“It’s not good for her, sleeping outside like this.”
“She’s tough,” he answers, but I can hear the doubt in his voice. He’s worried. “And I don’t think we could convince her to sleep anywhere else.”
I smile only a little. “You’re probably right.”
Our small campfire shivers in a gust of wind blowing up off the lake, threatening to put it out completely. Noah rubs both hands over his eyes and yawns.
“You’ve hardly slept in days,” I point out. “I can keep watch so you can sleep.” I know we’re running out of time—soon the twin stars will be out of sight—but he needs to rest. If we don’t sleep, then we’ll be too slow. Clumsy and more likely to make mistakes.
“I’m okay,” he says, eyes skimming over me. Furtive, drowsy. I feel the knot inside my chest, the swimming in my solar plexus, like waves crashing against my rib cage—a feeling that’s only growing worse.
A flock of bats darts out from the trees behind us, skimming over the calm surface of the lake, quick and precise, devouring the night insects. In the summer, we sometimes saw bats in the valley, but they’d vanish again when the air turned cold.
“Have you been this way before?” I ask. “To this lake?”
He shakes his head. “August was always too weak to make the journey, so he only told me the way.” Noah slides his hand into his pocket and pulls out the circular thing. In the firelight, it looks likebrass, and he places it flat on his palm, watching as the little arrow beneath the glass swivels to point out across the lake. “It’s a compass,” he explains for the first time. “August gave it to me the first night he recounted the way to the sea. I would follow it north until I reached the mountains, then turn east.”
His eyes cast out to the water, where the last of the sunset reflects gold and amber against the surface, the air speckled with strange light.The anomaly.
Time is moving too quickly.
“Do you know what’s at the sea?” I ask, curious how much August told him.
He closes his fingers over the compass. “August was careful about what he said—he knew there were those who would kill to know the things he did, to know the way to the sea. Telling me everything would put my life at risk.”
I press my hands together, thinking of all the nights I sat with Mom and she made me recite the names of stars, then point to them in the night sky. If I got one wrong, she’d keep coming back to it, over and over, night after night, until it was burned into my memory. She made sure I knew the night sky as well as I knew the valley. She made sure I knew what our ancestors gave, what was at stake.
But maybe Noah’s right, andknowingis the worst part. The heaviest stones to carry.
He knows the way to the sea. That’s all.
But I know the rest. The stories and sacrifice and the death. And it tears at my thoughts, cutting me apart. This story was born into my flesh.
Noah’s shoulders draw down, the black marks of his tattoospeeking above the collar of his shirt. I sink back on the sand beside him, hands on my stomach, staring up at the clear geography of stars. A sudden rupture of light tears across the sky, spearing the upper atmosphere and peeling away the dark before it burns up just above the tree line. A falling star, cutting across the darkest part of the sky—the place where no stars shimmer from the depth of the universe, a swath of black filling up half the horizon. Always there. “People used to make wishes on falling stars,” I say. “They believed it brought luck. They even wrote songs about it.”
Noah follows my gaze, his breathing low, relaxed. “Did it work? Did their wishes come true?”
“Doubt it. Otherwise we’d still cast our wishes up to the sky.” I think about what I’d wish for now, the words I’d whisper to the stars, but I can’t say them aloud. They are things I won’t let myself feel. Things I can’t allow myself to want. With Noah beside me, there is a roar in my chest, a riddle in the thump of my heartbeat I want to ignore but can’t. So I bite the inside of my cheek, pushing the feeling away. “The Greeks believed the gods put the stars in the sky,” I go on. “Each one is meant to be a lesson, a warning of mistakes made. Like Orion, who was killed by Artemis, who he loved. Or Princess Callisto, who was accidentally killed by her son, then became Ursa Major, the cursed bear. Or the constellation Corvus—the crow—in honor of the princess Coronis, who slept with a mortal warrior, betraying Apollo, so he had her killed.”
Noah lifts an eyebrow. “The gods sure did a lot of killing.”
