always all ideas—he could imagine anything into reality—but Sam and I were the ones that used to have to figure out a way to make his Greenwood schemes actually work.
Sam didn’t have to risk getting Lucas out of the camp, knowing he was like this.
Sam didn’t have to risk getting me away from that hotel, knowing she could just as easily have been caught.
But if she hadn’t, where would Lucas be? Where would I be?
The bed creaks as I push myself off it. I’m a step away from the door when I realize the soft sound I’m hearing isn’t the old house shifting its bones, it isn’t the wind rushing around its rotting skin. There’s a rhythm to it. A melody.
“…little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…”
It’s Sam.
Sam is singing.
It’s that one from all those years ago. We had this game, you know, in Greenwood—our own version of Marco Polo. Lucas would get himself lost in the woods, or he’d pretend to be a prince and I’d be the witch who captured him, and Sam would sing and he would call back and they would meet each other halfway. It was all pretend, but…
I unlock the door and step out into the hall, moving toward her voice. A feather-soft hope rustles inside my chest. Is this how she gets him back to himself? Did she figure something out?
“…all around the neighborhood, I’m gonna let it shine…”
The house is dark, save for that single flashlight. Sam has moved it toward the couch. There’s a dark shape stretched across it, big feet dangling off the edge; Lucas, of course. He’s impossibly still, his face turned up toward the ceiling.
And just like that the hope dissolves, and I wish with all my heart that I could just disappear with it.
She’s in a chair she’s positioned near his head, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. In the instant before the floorboard creaks under me and she looks up, the flashlight perfectly lights—illuminates—her face.
Sadness.
Devastation, I think.
“Sorry—I just—” Sam jumps to her feet, but can’t seem to figure out what she wants to do with her hands. She smoothes her pale hair down before lacing them behind her back, like I’ve called her to attention.
“Why did you stop?” I ask.
Sam flinches, but I see the stiffness in her shoulders ease just a tiny bit as she sits back down. “It’s pointless…I don’t think it helps.”
I don’t either. His eyes are open, almost unblinking, and he doesn’t stir or look in our direction. I come around closer to her, hating the rapid strike of my heart, the way my feet seem to unconsciously take a wide path around the couch to reach her.
For a second, I just look at him. Luc was so bundled up before, came at me so fast, I didn’t even have a moment to really study him and try to sort through the changes. His face is almost the same as I remember it, though it’s not as round or soft as it used to be. Always tall, it looks like he’s grown a solid foot, maybe more, and the process has left him stretched and way too thin. He reminds me a lot of Dad, the shape of his nose, his ears, though we both got Mom’s coloring. I don’t know why I like that—why it makes me feel better to see evidence of people who are gone. The reminders should hurt more than they do.
“Is he…always like this?” I ask, my voice low.
Sam glances up at my face before turning back to Luc. Her shoulders rise on her next deep breath in. I already know I won’t like her answer. She bites her lip so hard, it makes the scar from her cleft palate bright red.
“No…in the beginning, right after I left Thurmond with him, he was…he responded a lot more. Faster, too. He would take care of himself—things like, he’d know that he was hungry and that he should eat when I put food in front of him, and now I have to beg him. His eyes were still blank then, but there was something moving behind them.”
“What happened?” I ask. “What changed?”
Sam rubs at her forehead. “I don’t know. I can feel him just…drifting away, no matter how hard I try to pull him back in. The only way to get him to acknowledge you, just look at you, is if you try to touch him. He hates that.”