eyes pressing in then out, something fleeing me in gouts, a ribbon spiraling out for miles and miles, into the darkness, red and pure, bonding with the spell and whatever remained inside of her, detonating in the centre of the abomination in the sky. Blue light surrounded her, and her hand on my arm blurred, becoming translucent as her mouth continued to move.
A bright bolt of agony in my leg; I forced my head back down, realized that the ledge was crumbling, shards of ancient brick both dropping and soaring, swirling around us in a razor-edged hurricane of edges and sand, tentacles and eyes. One upward-flying chunk of brick missed me by an inch; another clipped Johnny square on the chin, staggering her. The blue light wavered. My stomach heaved as we dropped a foot, then two, and then a shocking lightness—freedom—only pain and sound and air and bricks.
I felt my heart flutter and pause. Dying.
Well. We always knew we were going to. Only the time unknown, and the time was now, and she was falling, mouth still moving.
No. Cannot be. Falling. Finish! Finish the spell! Finish!
I grabbed Johnny and wrapped myself around her, fingertips touching a scar I knew, a round scar, a moon, full not crescent, images flashing behind my shut eyes, the kids’ faces in winter sunlight, Mom laughing as we chased her with the hose, Carla’s braids, Johnny’s small, knowing face under the pyramid as we looked at the century plant, the faces of others, only others, all the light outside of me where it belonged, all the love, my emptied heart gulping to a stop.
With my last breath I whispered her name, unheard beneath her loud, pure voice still crying out the spell, cut short by the stunning impact, an explosion of pain, light, and sound.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SILENCE.
Darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
LIGHT. THE PALEST and purest of golds trembling, flecked with black, long, curved spikes coming for my eyes. Dull, unceasing thumping, like the march of an army. The light wavered, rolled out, vanished, rolled back in.
I slowly came back to myself—not just senses but words, memory, coming back bit by bit, creeping back to me—and realized that everything hurt. Maybe that meant I wasn’t dead?
“Blink, blink,” someone was saying, far away.
I blinked obediently and something warm moved across my eyes and face, making me sputter. I forced myself to sit up. Johnny knelt at my side with a water bottle; I realized she had been washing sand out of my eyes. Everything looked gold and pink.
“Can you hear?” she said.
“What?”
She handed me the bottle and I drank deeply, the plastic-tasting liquid as hot as tea. How long had we been knocked out, in the silence and the dark? The sun had come up, night was over. I looked around; the ruins were gone, or at best more ruined; we lay in the bottom of a vast crater of sand and gravel and broken clay bricks and scraps of toppled steles, surmounted by a circle of perfect, beautiful blue sky.
I stared at it. The thumping was my heart, irregular but strong. I listened to it while I stared, marveling at the cleanness and evenness of the blue, unmarred by even a single cloud or bird, let alone the things we had seen.
God! Those things. I wondered if I would see them every time I closed my eyes for the rest of my life.
“We won,” I said, trying to make it not sound like a question.
“For a given value of winning,” she said. “The gate was open a long time. Too long.”
“I don’t care. I’m calling it a win because we shut the fucking thing,” I said.
“Well, then it’s a win,” she said. “You’re bleeding.”
“So are you.” The cut on her chin had bled in a wide delta, soaking into her t-shirt, and she was covered in fresh scrapes. A blotch on her dusty hair resolved into a bloody handprint—mine, too big to be hers. Tear tracks had sliced through the pale dust on her face and washed away the crust of the nosebleed. I imagined I looked worse, having fallen who-knew-how-far onto a pile of ancient bricks. Had I broken bones, protecting her from that fall? Concussion? Shattered spine? TV had led me to think that I wouldn’t know till I tried to move.
I looked up, where the circle of sky had finally been crossed by a handful of sharp little planes, silver and black and green. “Are we about to be bombed?”