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“The fire in Grant Woods continues to burn, for the second day in a row. Firefighters have been unable to approach the heart of the blaze…”
Sam punches the power button on the radio so hard the dashboard squeaks in protest.
Mr. Sparks had offered them all excuses for the rest of the year. She’d taken it yesterday, but she can’t stand another day just…sitting. Even school would be better. The noise, the people… Something that says she isn’t alone in the woods, or even worse alone in the underworld, again.
They have a substitute in science. Seychelle is there, though, her skin a muddy grey and her eyes bruised-looking. She brightens when she sees Sam, and it makes her look a little less dead.
Seychelle actually had died.
Sam gets a rush of dizziness so strong her vision goes black. Her blood roars in her ears in the darkness.
“Hey,” someone says, a long way off at the end of a tunnel. People are surrounding her, hands clutching at her, and Sam tries to fight them off and can’t make her body obey. She’s back in Grant Woods, voted off, getting dragged away by the Hunger—
“I’ve got her,” Seychelle says, clear and firm. Her arm slips around Sam—not her hand, no fingers, just long clean lines. “Hey, Sam, put your head between your knees.”
Sam manages it, more or less, and after a minute color starts coming back into the world.
“You need to go to the nurse,” says the substitute. Miss Casey, her name is. Sam knows her, like she knows everyone in Grantstown, or at least like she thought she did. “Can you walk, or should I have her bring the wheelchair?”
“I can walk.” Sam’s pretty sure she’s telling the truth. Maybe. She doesn’t want the wheelchair, anyway.
Miss Casey is chewing on her lower lip when Sam looks up. “All right. Seychelle, can you go with her?”
“Absolutely,” Seychelle says, like a promise.
“I can walk,” Sam says again when they’re out in the hall. She says it softer this time, because she’s not trying to convince Seychelle the same way she was trying to convince Miss Casey. “People are going to look.”
People are already looking. The story they ended up telling, to account for how rattled they were and how they had none of their stuff, was that there was a spontaneous fire that had almost killed them all. Well, there was a fire all right. Sam has no idea how it got as big as it did, or why it’s still burning, but everyone wants to see the kids who’d almost burned to a crisp on a routine, boring field trip.
Seychelle lets go, reluctantly. Sam wraps her own arms around herself, huddling tighter into her flannel.
“So Grant State, huh,” Seychelle says after a minute. Her shoes squeak on the floor. Sam’s boots don’t. “What do you think?”
Sam thinks about Prudence Grant’s box full of teeth, her dresser full of trophies, her siblings’ frantic last messages. She thinks about the Hunger poisoning the land and the minds of the people who lived there.
“Mark thinks you should still take it.”
“You asked him?” Sam doesn’t know why she’s so surprised that they’ve been talking. Just because she spent yesterday staring at the ceiling, all her lights on, doesn’t mean everyone else did.
“He feels…” Seychelle gestures. Sam looks at her nails—red and finely shaped—and thinks about Seychelle begging her to recognize them. “I think if he had the cash for it he’d offer you that instead, but…”
But.
Sam wants to say something mean about how nice it is that Mark feels responsible, but she thinks of finding him shaking and sobbing at the mouth of the underworld, the way he’d begged to make up for it. If he’s trying…that’s what she’d hoped for, wasn’t it, when she brought him back up too?
Still, though. “You…talked to him?”
“I didn’t call him, he called me.”
“To ask me to go to Grant State?”
Sam stops and turns to face Seychelle, who looks away. “He thought I’d be invested,” she says to the ugly cinderblock walls. “In getting you to go.”
Sam opens her mouth and then closes it again. She wants to know if Mark thought she’d listen to Seychelle in particular, and at the same time she doesn’t. She wants to know if she should, and doesn’t know that either.
Grantstown is tiny. Always has been. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. Sam’s been a foster kid, and she doesn’t like to make waves.
She looks at Seychelle’s hands again. There’s dark blue paint ground into the creases of one knuckle. “Have you been painting?” she asks. It’s easier than Grant State. It’s easier than wondering if they could hold hands again, here, with no monsters and nobody about to die.
“Oh, uh, maybe a—maybe I was working on something,” Seychelle says with an embarrassed laugh. “I can show you later if you want?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I’d like that.”
Seychelle is waiting outside Sam’s English class when the final bell rings. They’re watching the movie version of Hamlet, which isn’t great but at least is long enough that Sam can just zone out in a nice populated classroom.
“You have a car, right?” Seychelle asks.
“A truck.” It’s a good truck, even if it looks like crap.
Seychelle nods. “I usually walk—I don’t know if you want to drive or come back for it?”
“I can drive,” Sam says. She starts to hope Seychelle won’t say anything rude about the truck, then reconsiders. Of course she won’t. She’s nice, and she likes Sam, and also Sam did literally just bring her spirit back from the underworld. Nobody on Mr. Sparks’s nightmare field trip gets to say shit to Sam, ever again.
They hit Seychelle’s locker first since it’s closer, then Sam’s. Seychelle doesn’t say anything about the truck, just hops up and buckles herself in.
Very cautiously, Sam turns the radio back on. It’s playing some bubblegum-sweet pop song now. She has no idea if the fire is still burning, and for right now she doesn’t have to care.
It’s less than ten minutes to Seychelle’s house. There are no cars in the driveway, so Sam carefully parks on the street instead. “It’s not your driving test!” Seychelle says the second time Sam backs up to try to parallel park a little better.
Sam gives up. It’s good enough. “Sorry. I got a little…” The wires, the pipes, the strange locks, the clock, the— She takes a deep breath. “So this is your house, huh?”
“You know my dad, right?” Seychelle asks.
“Kind of?”
Seychelle nods. “He’s nice! I think you’ll like him.” She leads the way up the sidewalk, past a neatly-mowed lawn to the front door. It’s not locked, which Sam thinks is a little weird for the middle of town until Seychelle calls, “Dad, I’m home!”
There’s a scrape of wood, and then Mr. Farshid sticks his head out of one of the doors. There’s more grey in his beard than the last time Sam saw him, but other than that he looks about the same. “A guest,” he says, surprised and a little pleased. “You must be Sam Winthorp.”
Sam flicks a glance at Seychelle, who nods encouragingly. “That’s me,” she says, with a dorky little wave.
“Thank you.” Tears well up in Mr. Farshid’s eyes. “Seychelle says that without your quick thinking she would have perished in the woods.”
“She found the way out through the fire,” Seychelle says firmly. “And then when I tripped she went back for me.”
That’s completely made up, but Sam just gives Mr. Farshid a panicked smile.
“Thank you,” he says again. “Will you stay for dinner, or are you expected at home? I don’t wish to keep you from your own family.”
He does something with books, Sam can’t remember what, and the careful precision of his speech makes her feel like she’s about to say ain’t. Still, it’s nice of him to offer. “I am, but maybe another day?”
“Of course.” Mr. Farshid smiles at her. “You’re welcome here at any time.”
Sam wonders if he’d still say that if he knew his daughter had made a move on her, and that Sam was thinking about taking her up on it. Maybe. Maybe at Grant State, if she goes. “Thank you,” she says politely.
“I was going to show her some of my art,” Seychelle says. “We’ll just be out in the shed.” She looks like she’s about to leave, then stops and darts in for a hug. Her father pats her shoulder.
“Shed?” Sam asks, as they go down a hallway with a little strip of carpet down the middle and through a shiny blue and yellow kitchen. It has really pretty painted tile backsplashes, with flowers and geometric patterns, and she wonders if Seychelle made them. They don’t match the floor.
Seychelle opens the kitchen door and gestures out into the backyard. “It’s to contain the paint.”
There is a shed, not the ratty tumbledown thing Sam had been half-expecting from what she’s used to hearing called that. It’s plain and neat, the wood and shingles mostly weathering silver except for a few bright patches, and there are two windows in the front and a skylight in the roof—maybe two, another on the other side. The door says “No kids allowed” in Seychelle’s neat handwriting.
“Does that actually work?” Sam asks. “The sign.”
Seychelle sighs. “I tried locking it, but my sister just broke one of the windows. They take it as a challenge.”
“Sounds rough.” Sam has never been sure if she wanted siblings, on balance, but some things she knows she’s glad she never had to worry about.
Well. She guesses she has Mark, now.
“I love them,” Seychelle says. “Even when I want to kill—”
She stops, a few paces short of the door to her studio. Just stops like she’d been rooted there.
They’d all voted, is the thing. Sam gets her arms around Seychelle right before Seychelle starts crying.
“I don’t want to kill them,” Seychelle gasps into Sam’s shoulder. “I don’t, I don’t want to kill anyone, ever again.”
“I know,” Sam says helplessly. “I know. Me neither.”
Seychelle’s hair is silky under her hands, downy-warm. Sam isn’t any good at hugs, she’s never had much practice, but she’s doing her best. God knows they deserve each other’s best.
She holds on until Seychelle pulls away and wipes her face with her cardigan sleeve.
“Sorry.” Seychelle checks her pockets, doesn’t find anything, and sniffles. “I wanted to… You did so much for us, and I wasn’t even there for all of what you went through, and I wanted to help you…”
“It’s okay,” Sam says. She digs into her bag and finds a tiny travel pack of tissues, which she holds out to Seychelle. “I’m gonna freak out again too. We can take turns.”
Seychelle blows her nose. “Really?”
“Really.”
Seychelle opens the door to the shed and flicks on a light. “So this is…where I work.”
It’s really bright, between that and the windows and the skylights. There’s a big cabinet with flat drawers, an angled table, a couple of easels, and something kind of like a deep locker, where Sam can see canvases propped against the walls. One of the easels has a painting on it.
“And this is, um.” Seychelle points at the canvas. “It’s done, it’s just drying. I did it instead of sleeping.”
Sam steps closer to the canvas and takes a long look at it.
It’s cold, dark blue-green, the shuddering color of deep water. Seychelle put the paint on thickly, the brushstrokes pushing up and out like it’s reaching out from the canvas itself. Sam thinks she can see hands, but maybe they’re seaweed, or branches.
From that hopeless twisting mire of blue a chain of figures rises. The last one is chopping at a vine or an arm or maybe his own leg, reaching up with his other hand as the person in front of him reaches down. They rise, all of them, together, and at the front of the chain is a red girl, the color of Sam’s favorite flannel. She’s holding a torch pointed skyward, and flames like wings sprout from her shoulders.
“It’s beautiful,” Sam says hoarsely.
“I know,” Seychelle says, which is surprising until Sam turns around and sees Seychelle looking at her instead of the painting. “It had to be. Sam…”
“I don’t know,” Sam says.
It was, what, she doesn’t even know, a week ago? that Seychelle had asked if they could live together at Grant State, and she’d agreed, and she’d liked the idea. She still likes the idea. She doesn’t think Seychelle would be weird about it if she decided she just wanted to be roommates. She thinks she might want to try the other thing.
She looks back at the painting. Seychelle made her look like an angel. “I’m not, like… Whatever you think of me, I’m not that special.”
“You saved us,” Seychelle says, eyes ablaze. “That’s special.”
Sam wants to say any of the rest of them could have done it, if they’d been alive, but maybe what matters is that she had been. She looks at the painting again, her with her torch, the sparks arcing out from it into the gloom, someone clinging to her as they take flight.
“Do you think I should take Prudence Grant’s money?”
“Yes,” Seychelle says immediately. “You said you wanted to study mechanical engineering, and you’re brilliant. What if going to college means you can invent, I don’t know, a better engine that solves global warming, or something, or saves enough money that people who couldn’t have afforded it otherwise can buy whatever you just improved?”
It’s a little muddled, but Sam appreciates the thought. Seychelle isn’t wrong, either. It's take Prudence Grant’s money, or else get a job at the feed store or Wal-Mart and save all her thinking for arranging boxes in the storeroom and tinkering around with her truck. She really doesn’t like that idea. She wanted to go to college.
“And besides,” Seychelle adds, reaching out toward the bottom figure and then letting her hand drop away, “Mark was sorry afterwards.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. She’d thought about leaving him, but he’d been so horrified, and maybe she’s stupid for believing him but she’d felt the whole mood of the forest change when she set the Hunger on fire. “You think Prudence was, too?”
Seychelle says wistfully, “Maybe she was.”
Prudence had kept a box full of teeth. Sam has her doubts. But she’d been raised in some kind of freaky murder cult, and maybe she really was sorry once it was too late.
Great-aunt Prudence. Ugh.
“And you want me to come to Grant State with you,” Sam says, because one of them has to.
“I want to spend more time with you.” How Seychelle manages to just say things like this Sam has no idea. Maybe it’s from growing up with Mr. Farshid’s books.
Sam thinks about it. An apartment, maybe with a nice sunny kitchen like Seychelle’s. Someone who’d get it when she woke up with screaming nightmares, and hold her, the way she and Seychelle already had the last couple of nights before Seychelle got sacrificed.
Nobody else is ever going to get it like the eight of them.
“I have to think about it,” she says.
Seychelle tries not to sound disappointed and fails. “Oh…okay.”
“The Grant State thing,” Sam says, looking at the painting because it’s easier than looking at Seychelle, except at the same time it isn’t. Seychelle made her so…beautiful. Powerful. She looks like a hero. “If you wanted to spend more time with me, like, this summer, we could…try that?”
Sam Winthorp, slayer of monsters, underworld rescuer. That’s her all right.
“Yes!” Seychelle hugs her, and this time Sam doesn’t have to think about death or weeping. She still does, a little, but only a little, and she’s going to keep doing that for a while anyway, with or without a…girlfriend? So it’s good.
“What else have you been working on?” she asks. She wants to see more of the way Seychelle sees things, while she’s here.
“Okay, so.” Seychelle opens the locker thing and pulls out a rack of canvases. “…Can I hold your hand again? I’ve got a weird thing…”
Sam grimaces. “Me too. Yeah, let’s try it.”
Seychelle’s hand in hers is warm and firm, their pulses beating together under the skin. Alive, the grip says. We’re alive.
Seychelle starts shuffling canvases one-handed. “Okay, this one is McAllister's field,” she starts, and Sam leans in against her to watch the town unfold.