is part of me, that to separate us will tear the skin where we are joined.
"You'll be fine with Jared." I have to sound brave, whether I feel that way or not.
"I know that. I'm scared for you. I'm scared you won't come back. Like Dad."
I flinch. When Dad didn't come back-though his body did eventually, trying to lead the Seekers to us-it was the most horror and the most fear and the most pain I'd ever felt. What if I do that to Jamie again?
"I'll come back. I always come back."
"I'm scared," he says again.
I have to be brave.
"I promise everything will be fine. I'm coming back. I promise. You know I won't break a promise, Jamie. Not to you."
The shaking slows. He believes me. He trusts me.
And another:
I can hear them on the floor below. They will find me in minutes, or seconds. I scrawl the words on a dirty shred of newsprint. They are nearly illegible, but if he finds them, he will understand:
Not fast enough. Love you love Jamie. Don't go home.
Not only do I break their hearts, I steal their refuge, too. I picture our little canyon home abandoned, as it must be forever now. Or if not abandoned, a tomb. I see my body leading the Seekers to it. My face smiling as we catch them there...
"Enough," I said out loud, cringing away from the whiplash of pain. "Enough! You've made your point! I can't live without them either now. Does that make you happy? Because it doesn't leave me many choices, does it? Just one-to get rid of you. Do you want the Seeker inside you? Ugh!" I recoiled from the thought as if I would be the one to house her.
There is another choice, Melanie thought softly.
"Really?" I demanded with heavy sarcasm. "Show me one."
Look and see.
I was still staring at the mountain peak. It dominated the landscape, a sudden upthrust of rock surrounded by flat scrubland. Her interest pulled my eyes over the outline, tracing the uneven two-pronged crest.
A slow, rough curve, then a sharp turn north, another sudden turn back the other way, twisting back to the north for a longer stretch, and then the abrupt southern decline that flattened out into another shallow curve.
Not north and south, the way I'd always seen the lines in her piecemeal memories; it was up and down.
The profile of a mountain peak.
The lines that led to Jared and Jamie. This was the first line, the starting point.
I could find them.
We could find them, she corrected me. You don't know all the directions. Just like with the cabin, I never gave you everything.
"I don't understand. Where does it lead? How does a mountain lead us?" My pulse beat faster as I thought of it: Jared was close. Jamie, within my reach.
She showed me the answer.
"They're just lines. And Uncle Jeb is just an old lunatic. A nut job, like the rest of my dad's family." I try to tug the book out of Jared's hands, but he barely seems to notice my effort.
"A nut job, like Sharon's mom?" he counters, still studying the dark pencil marks that deface the back cover of the old photo album. It's the one thing I haven't lost in all the running. Even the graffiti loony Uncle Jeb left on it during his last visit has sentimental value now.
"Point taken." If Sharon is still alive, it will be because her mother, loony Aunt Maggie, could give loony Uncle Jeb a run for the title of Craziest of the Crazy Stryder Siblings. My father had been only slightly touched by the Stryder madness-he didn't have a secret bunker in the backyard or anything. The rest of them, his sister and brothers, Aunt Maggie, Uncle Jeb, and Uncle Guy, were the most devoted of conspiracy theorists. Uncle Guy had died before the others disappeared during the invasion, in a car accident so commonplace that even Maggie and Jeb had struggled to make an intrigue out of it.
My father always affectionately referred to them as the Crazies. "I think it's time we visited the Crazies," Dad would announce, and then Mom would groan-which is why such announcements had happened so seldom.
On one of those rare visits to Chicago, Sharon had snuck me into her mother's hidey-hole. We got caught-the woman had booby traps every-where. Sharon was scolded soundly, and though I was sworn to secrecy, I'd had a sense Aunt Maggie might build a new sanctuary.
But I remember where the first is.