Normally, this would be the last place anyone could find Percy Mitchell on a Friday night so late it bleeds into Saturday morning. He wanders the quiet floor of the library, his only company the shelves of papyrus-scented reference books older than anyone he knows, the wooden floors lacquered as if in syrup, faded starlight falling through dusty floor-to-ceiling windows.
Silence, the dark, are the things he runs from. Noise is what keeps him safe, alive. Yet right now, there's something comforting about being a ghost. It's the weightlessness of it, he thinks, the utter lack of expectation, the ability to exist without anyone's scrutiny.
He goes to the window overlooking the expanse of the Commons: a dark, silent sea at this hour, the intermittent streetlights like buoys floating through space. He stares at one such streetlight, forcing himself to focus on its fuzzy golden light, as if it's his last remaining anchor to this world. Lately all he has done is slip and slip further. He's afraid he doesn't have much longer to hold on.
There's a quiet shuffle of feet behind him; he barely hears it, thinks nothing of it until a voice cuts through the veil: "Percy?"
He half turns, catching sight of Indy, standing in the shadows of the bookshelves. Knee-high patent leather boots glint in the ill light, the oversized sleeves of her sweater gathered in her hands. A glimmer of moonlight outlines one side of her face, yet her eyes are dark, questioning.
He remembers the words he spoke to her last time he saw her. He can still taste them, the sizzle of them like smoke in his mouth. "It's late," he says, only when he's sure his voice will come out normally. "What are you doing here?"
Hesitation flickers across her face. "Work," she answers. She takes a step closer, and another when he doesn't move away. "And I could ask you the same thing. Since when were you a late night studier?"
Percy leans against the windowsill, half a smirk forming on his mouth before he's conscious of it. "You and I both know I'm not studying."
Indy's face brightens if only for a moment, like she were holding her breath before and only now does she fall back into rhythm. Slowly, she turns so her back rests against the sillâmoonlight a glimmer of silver against her neck, turning the tight curls at her nape a softer brown. When she speaks again, her tone is wary, not yet accusing, but nearly there. "I didn't see you in Clover's class this week."
"I wasn't feeling well." It's not a lie, he doesn't think. More of a half-truth.
Which still isn't enough. "If you're avoiding me, Percy, just say that."
He wonders what the point is, of discussing all these hypotheticals they both already know are true. His tongue simmers in his mouth again, a fine burn he feels all the way in his stomach. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knows there is no apologizing for what he said. That even if he tried, she may never forgive him, and he would have no other option except to accept it.
"I guess I am," he says. "I'm scared. That's what you told me. Doesn't matter what it is, I'd always rather run than face it, right?"
A sigh. "Percyâ"
"No. You were right," Percy says, and the conviction in his voice is enough to make Indy go quiet, look at him with eyes wide and shiny. "Nothing you said was a lie, and I think that's why it hurt."
It's something he's grown to expect from Indy, whether he's aware of it or notâher never-failing honesty, so often mistaken for bluntness, heartlessness. It's gotten her in trouble with teachers, with acquaintances who never became friends, with her own parents. She has a tongue like fire, simple but daring, dangerous but purifying. Even now he isn't quite used to it.
"You didn't lie either."
Percy raises an eyebrow, but says nothing.
"I think about it a lot. Whether or not I'm really doing things for all the right reasons," she says. "And whether or not it makes a difference in the end."
"Indy," Percy says, but he has nothing else. Just a want, a need, to erase this barrier between them, to ease back into what was easy before, to make the night into something new.
Indy takes a breath, and there's a flicker of uncertainty on her faceâquestioningâbefore she says: "Pine's execution date is next month."
Percy jolts like an electric current's just been shot through him. "It's what? Why?"
"I have...suspicions, but I'm not sure. The point is this isn't just a project anymore."
"Please," Percy says. "It never was. Not to you."
The very edge, the very glimmer of a smile. She turns her body a bit, facing him now. "If I really want to do something, if I really want this to work, I can't do it by myself."
There's a breath of silence. Percy waits.
Indy closes her eyes. He looks at her, really looks, at the veins criss-crossing in her eyelids, the darker skin beneath her eyes. She looks tired, so tired, more than he's ever seen her before. A piece of raw guilt crystallizes in his lungs; he feels it when he inhales. He can't fight the thought that it's somehow his fault.
"I can't do it without you, Percy," Indy says at last, opening her eyes. "Or at least, I really don't want to."
The words bleed into the air; Percy feels them like some physical weight against his skin. And there has been so much wrong in his life, wrong done to him and wrong he has done, but maybe this is the one thing he can finally do right.
"I don't want you to, either," he says, as he watches Indy's face soften with relief. "I'm sorry. About what I said, and aboutâ"
The words are on his tongue; he tries to say them, but he can't.
"Will you ever tell me what happened back there?" Indy asks. There is no accusation, no wariness in her tone anymoreâjust an earnest concern, which is somehow harder to swallow. "I'm not saying it has to be today. But someday, whenever you're...I don't know. Ready to talk. I'll be here."
He wants to. God, he wants to. He has the words in mind, can visualize himself saying them, letting the story tumble free from the cluttered cave in his chest where he keeps them. Yet somewhere between his heart and his mouth, they get stuck. They won't move.
He brushes Indy's wrist with his fingers, feels the calming, gentle flutter of her pulse beneath his touch. "Forget about me," he says. Indy glances at his hand, but doesn't move it away. "What else have you figured out? Per your messages, I figured it was something important."
"So you did see them."
Percy pauses. "Iâ"
"Hush," Indy says, with the excitement of a detective hot on a new lead. "I'll fill you in."
The flashlight beam scorches Jude's retinas, and for a moment the world around him swims in a watercolor haze.
"That's bright, Baba," Jude complains, flinching away from his grandmother, who's currently holding him captive in a chair at her kitchen table. "I don't see how blinding me could possibly make anything about this situation better."
Maryna pinches his cheek so hard he winces. "I'm trying to figure out what's triggering all this, by any means necessary," she says, but sighs, setting the flashlight down and watching it roll across the table runner. She collapses into the chair next to him, leaning forward, one small hand resting atop his knee. "Judie. This will kill you one day. You know that, don't you?"
Yes. He does know that, and somehow it never gets any easier to accept. "There's nothing I can do about that," he says, but his voice comes out like a croak. "There's nothing you can do about that, either."
It's the wrong thing to say; he sees the hurt flash in his grandmother's face, years' worth of grief resurfacing from where she stores it deep within herself.
The regret is immediate. Jude places his hand over hers; her skin is thin and cold. "Baba. Wait."
"This disease, this curse, whatever you want to call it," Maryna says, "is not just a curse on the men of this family. The women, too. For so many generations we've had to watch the ones we love wither and die with nothing to do but curse at the sky for it. I am tired, Judie. My brother. Your father. Now you. I am so tired of losing, and I know you are, too."
Jude closes his eyes. Forever burned on the back of his eyelids is the memory of his father, his skin gray-blue, nearly the same ashen color as the bathroom tiles below his body, still as a doll. Jude was barely seven then, but he thinks he knew. He understood he was looking at his own future.
The visions are a blessing to the Chernenko men. And then they are a curse.
Jude opens his eyes again and the image is gone, though the pain is not. "I'm doing everything I can."
"The medicine?"
"It worked for a while; this most recent vision was the first one I've had in months. But I'm worried I've somehow developed a tolerance to it."
Maryna pushes a harsh breath out of her mouth, a hand to her chin. "That's likely. I'll have to reach out to someone else."
Despite himself, Jude laughs. "Jesus, Baba. How many of these contacts do you have? Where are you meeting these people?"
She pinches his cheek again, less forcefully, this time. "That's none of your concern. Just let me take care of this. Just let me take care of you, Judie."
He shakes his head, standing and dropping a brief kiss on Maryna's forehead on his way to fill two glasses with water. He's at the cupboard, the cupboard door halfway open, when something makes him stop, pay attention.
Every time he's come to his grandmother's house, the ill-fated house beside itâred brick, black shutters, vines climbing up the sidingâhas sat like a stone relic, empty and vacant, free from visitors. It was almost as though Elizabeth Dobbs's death had spread a dark cloud over it all, a perpetual storm under which no one wanted to even risk living. For that reason, when Jude sees a car, a low, slick sedan, roll into the driveway, he thinks he must be imagining it.
He blinks, leaning closer, nearly close enough for his breath to fog the glass. The car's windows are tinted, and he can't see the license plate. It idles in the driveway, engine still churning. The doors remain shut.
"Judie?" When he doesn't respond, Maryna tries again: "Judie, what is it?"
Before he can consciously think about it, he's already moving, backtracking through the kitchen, snatching his keys and his phone from where he left them on the side table beside the couch. "I'm sorry, Baba, but I think I've gotta run. I'll see you again next week?"
"Judie, don't forgetâ"
He's at the door by then, but he pauses, just a second. "There's no point in taking a medicine that's no longer doing anything for me."
Maryna stands in the hall, hands folded neatly over her stomach, one finger stroking the back of her knuckles as if to calm herself. His grandmother has always been a small woman, in height and in stature. But here, this is a smallness that looks so much like defeat.
"We'll find another way."
Jude touches the doorknob. He is seven years old again, trying to shake his father awake, waiting for his eyes to open though he knows they never will.
He gives his grandmother a weak smile, and then he leaves.
The car remains in the driveway for ten minutes, and then twenty, and then thirty, until finally the back lights flash gold and it reverses, pulls away. Jude tags the license plate, thumbing it into his phone for safe keeping. When enough time has passed, he turns the key, and Dog's engine screams and sputters to life.
There is a voice in his head telling him, You're insane, but since he was a kid Jude has been used to hearing voices in his head, and he knows quite well by now which ones are worth listening to. So he keeps following, even as the close-knit, squat buildings of Erskine melt away into open road, as open road disappears into dense trees, gravel paths, the smell of pine and earth.
Jude kills his headlights, squinting to see ahead of him. There is something in the winding of the path, the way the trees curve over it like fingers clawing at the earthâthat is familiar to him, and he realizes he has been here before. It was darker then, and Indy was with him. It was both forever ago and yesterday.
A knot forms in Jude's throat, difficult to swallow around. The car ahead of him at last pulls to a stop before a wire gate, the wide, flat building behind it just barely visible over the tops of the trees.
17 Ovenshine Drive. He's back at the storage facility.
Jude backs up a bit further, covering his car in shadow. There's the click of a car door opening, and then a man steps out of it, clad in a suit, silvery hair perfectly coiffed.
Jude rummages in his pockets until he finds his cell phone. He doesn't know what any of it means, if any of it means anything. But he owes it to Indy, and to Pine, and to Maryna, to figure it out.