Black River Falls (19 page)

It was late, either that same night or the next. She was alone, sitting next to the rift in the wall with a backpack in her lap. A lantern sat in the middle of the ellipse beside my mask and the pile of comics. It filled the chamber with an amber glow.

“Greer ran out to get some supplies. He'll be back in a minute.”

Hannah didn't look at me as she spoke. She kept her eyes on the concrete floor, twisting at the backpack's strap.

“How'd you find me?”

She shrugged. “We asked around. Some people saw you heading this way.”

I started to get up, wincing as I did. “Is everybody—”

“Everybody's fine,” she snapped. “Benny has mostly stopped asking why you just up and left, which is good, since Greer and I ran out of excuses a few days ago.”

The rough steel of the ellipse raked across my back as I fell against it. Freeman's aspirin had long since worn off, leaving my body feeling like a bag of splintered bones. Bruises snaked around my knuckles like vines. My hand was swollen. I flexed my fingers to make sure nothing was broken.

“You okay?”

I drew my hand back into the shadows and said I was fine. Hannah turned to stare into the darkness on the other side of the rift in the wall. I looked up at the skylight, hoping I might see a few stars through the dirty glass haze, but the sky was blank, like something that had been hollowed out.

“These are your dad's.”

She had pulled the stack of comics closer to her. I nodded.

“I read the first two while you were sleeping,” she said. “They're good. I like Blue Jay.”

“Dad based him on this kid he knew growing up.”

She picked
Behold, Abaddon
out of the stack and paused at the cover, struck by it the way people always were. She turned it over, but of course there was nothing on the back. No explanation at all. Dad had been so proud of that.

“It's an origin story,” I said. “Well, the first half is, anyway.”

Hannah glanced up at me. Her eyes were a deep liquid brown in the lantern light. I held out my hand, and she slid the book across the floor. The cover of
Behold, Abaddon
had always been one of my favorites. That clawed hand exploding out of the sidewalk. The Brotherhood reeling back in horror. I slipped on my gloves and opened it to the two-page splash that began and ended the book. A city of crumbling black towers that stood against a blood red sky streaked with smoke.

“A hundred years before the Brotherhood, there was a nuclear war,” I said, tracing the lines of the drawing with one finger. “Liberty City was one of the last cities left, only it wasn't called Liberty City then. It was called Abaddon.”

I moved from the city to the desert plain that enclosed it.

“It was surrounded by this wasteland called the Gardens of Null.”

I turned the page. A gleaming alien ship breaking through the atmosphere above the ruined city.

“Then one day the Volanti appeared. They said they were the last survivors of a war that almost destroyed their own planet, and they wanted to make sure something like that never happened to anyone else. They remade Abaddon into Liberty City and created the Brotherhood of Wings to watch over it. Then they disappeared.”

“Why?”

Hannah was leaning deep into the glow of the lantern.

“Nobody knew,” I said. “After a few decades with no sign of them, most people thought they were some kind of fairy tale and went on with their lives. But then, a hundred years after they first arrived, the Volanti reappeared.”

“Where had they gone?”

I turned to the middle of the volume. Abaddon was Liberty City again. The skies were clear and blue. The Brotherhood's Aerie sparkled in the sun.

“They never really left,” I said. “They just went into hiding. Only a few Volanti had made it to Earth so they decided to wait until their numbers grew and the world became something worth conquering.”

“So it was a trap,” Hannah said. “They were never trying to save anybody.”

I nodded.

“But the Brotherhood stopped them.”

I wanted to say yes, the Brotherhood saved the day. But I couldn't even open my mouth. I paged through the last half of the story, but stopped before I got to those three pages toward the end.

“Card? Come on, you're killing me.”

Part of me wanted to rip that volume in half and toss it away, but who was I to keep it from her? I sent it skidding back across the floor and into her hands.

Hannah leaned against the wall and opened it to the middle. She tucked her hair behind her ears and pored over the pages, moving from panel to panel, eagerly at first, but then more and more slowly as she got toward the end. I knew those panels so well I felt like I was reading them right along with her, or like I was sitting beside Dad as he drew every line and wrote every word.

I could tell when Hannah got to those three pages. Her whole body stiffened. She read them once, then again, and then she was still for a very long time before shutting the book and pushing it away from her. All the air had gone out of the room and the light from the lantern felt small and feeble.

Footsteps echoed upstairs. Greer. I grabbed my mask and headed for the door.

“Card, wait.”

I stumbled through the spiral. Greer was there when I came out on the other side.

“Buddy! Good to see—”

He dodged out of the way as I ran past, strapping on my mask as I went. He called my name, but I kept going, up the stairs and into the lobby. Those three pages unfurled through the dark. Sally Sparrow. Cardinal. Blue Jay. Then you were there too. And Mom and Dad. And me.

I ducked through the opening in the door and suddenly realized that I'd left Dad's comics behind. Part of me wanted to just go, but I knew I couldn't. I slipped into the shadows of a nearby hallway and waited. Surely Hannah and Greer would head back to Lucy's Promise soon. Minutes ticked by. An hour, maybe. Finally I couldn't wait any longer. Who cared if they were there or not.

I made my way back down the stairs and into the Serra room. It was quiet. Maybe they'd gone out another way. I passed the first two sculptures and started into the spiral of the third. There were voices up ahead.

“. . . turn up anybody who saw what happened last night?”

It was Hannah. I eased myself into the dark a few feet away from the opening that led to the center of the ellipse. The lantern light threw two sketchy shadows against an inside wall.

“I talked to a guy who lives near the park,” Greer replied. “He said there was some kind of fight the Guard broke up. Somebody on the ground. A bunch of people around him.”

“He see who they were?”

“Couldn't make out the face of the guy on the ground, but it sounds like it was Card. Said it was too dark to really see any of the people wailing on him, except for one. Older white dude. Bald, with glasses. That sound like the one who tried to grab you?”

There was a pause, and then the shadow Hannah nodded.

Greer got up, appeared and disappeared as he stalked through the ellipse. “What the hell was he even
doing
down here?”

“Looking for a fight?”

“What? No way. Card?”

“You didn't see him that day he found me.”

“You mean the day he saved your
life?
”

“You weren't there,” Hannah said. “You didn't see it. The way he went after those guys. And what about the morning he left? The way he looked? He was one second from hitting
you.
You had to have seen that.”

“So—what? You're saying Card's
dangerous?
That's insane.”

“How do you know he's not?”

“Because I know Card.”

“All you know is what he's told you,” Hannah said. “You don't know anything about him from before.”

“Before doesn't matter.”

“Of course it matters!” Hannah said. “How do you even know for sure that he doesn't remember you? I mean, how likely is that? It's a small town. You guys went to the same school. He says he doesn't remember you, but—”

“I know he remembers me.”

I moved closer to the opening. Greer was sitting up against one of the walls, his arms crossed over his chest, his head down.

Hannah leaned in toward him. “What? How do you know?”

Greer shrugged. “Things he says. The way he looks at me sometimes.”

“But you've never asked him to—”

He shook his head.

“Why not? You said you think about it all the time. You said—”

“If Card thinks I'm better off not knowing, then maybe I am.”

“You trust him that much?”

Greer laid his head against the steel wall, looking up at the skylight. He shrugged helplessly.

“He's my best friend.”

Not long after that, they decided it was too late to hike back up the mountain. They pulled sleeping bags from their packs and blew out the lantern, dropping us into darkness. Once they were asleep, it would have been the perfect time to get my things and go, but I didn't move. I sat there in the spiral with my back against the wall, my eyes closed, hearing Greer's words over and over in my head.

Greer came up to Lucy's Promise for the first time just before Thanksgiving. I was leaving the supply shed when I heard someone walking up the trail. Not knowing what to expect, I ducked back inside and watched through a crack in the door. As soon as I saw who it was, I dropped what I was carrying and reached for my knife.

“Hello?” he called. “Anybody here?”

There was something off about his voice. It wasn't the growl I remembered. It was lighter, softer, less certain. For a second I thought maybe it wasn't Greer Larson at all, just someone who looked liked him, but then he came closer, and there was no question. Before I could decide what to do, the first two kids appeared behind him. Ren and Makela. They were a mess. Blank-eyed, in dirty clothes. Carrie came next. Then Isaac and Tomiko. They all huddled around Greer. He made a joke I didn't hear, and they laughed nervously. I came out of the shed slowly and stood between the cabins, my hand resting on the hilt of the knife.

“Hi there!” Greer chirped when he saw me. “Few quick questions.”

“Uh . . . okay.”

He waved his arms around the campsite and the surrounding woods. “All this—it's not a mirage, right?”

“No. It's real.”

“Perfect!” Greer clapped his hands in front of him and looked back at the kids. “It's cool, guys. It's
not
a mirage.” Back to me. “And are these cabins yours or are they for, you know, whoever?”

“No, they're not mine.”

“Great. Awesome. Last question. You ready?”

I nodded.

“You don't by any chance know who the hell I am, do you?”

He gave me that grin of his, the one that would soon become a daily part of my life, but that I'd never seen the slightest hint of up until that point. I hadn't even been sure he
could
smile. And all at once, I understood. Greer Larson was gone. This person had his face and his voice but he was someone else entirely. My hand fell away from the knife.

“No,” I said. “Never seen you before in my life.”

I don't know how many times I'd told myself what a good thing I'd done for him in that moment, what a friend I'd been. I'd never considered until right then, sitting there against that steel wall in the dark, that maybe I had it backwards. Maybe I hadn't been a friend to him at all.

The next morning, Hannah and Greer found me lying against the wall of the ellipse and said they were heading back to camp. I nodded and let them pass, listening to their footsteps as they left the Serra room and climbed to the lobby. Once they were gone, I went inside and began gathering up the comics, but stopped the second my hand touched
Behold, Abaddon
. I stared at that cover for a long time before opening it and slowly turning to those pages.

I thought maybe seeing them again after all that time would feel different. Maybe the horror wouldn't be as sharp, maybe that sick feeling in my gut would be gone. But I was wrong. It was as if no time had passed at all. I felt exactly the same as I did the very first time I saw them.

Sally Sparrow on her knees, beaten bloody, her armor torn, the barrel of a gun pressed to the back of her head as she cried.

Cardinal, wings flailing as he screams across the Liberty City skyline, desperate to warn the others about his discovery of secret protocols the Volanti buried deep in the Brotherhood armor that, when activated, would render them utterly helpless.

An explosion of glass as Cardinal smashes through the window, and then—

Sally Sparrow lying crumpled on her side, her hands tied behind her back, her lifeless body framed in the same pool of blood that surrounds the rest of the Brotherhood. Black Eagle. Kestrel Kain. Rex Raven. Goldfinch. Lord Starling. Blue Jay.

Cardinal sees that he's too late. They're all gone. He's the only one left.

I dropped my face into my hands and cried until my throat burned. When I was done, I closed the book and looked up at the walls of the ellipse. What was it, really? A carousel? A ship? A rose? A prison? Right then it didn't feel like any of those things. It felt like an empty room in a house where no one had lived in a long time.

I stepped outside the museum. The rising sun was painting the sky above Lucy's Promise pink and gold. I tightened the straps on my mask and started the long walk back. I left Dad's comics behind.

A 
COUPLE OF DAYS
later I was sitting by my tent when Gonzalez emerged from the woods.

“Love the new digs, Cassidy! Very Yoda in Da­gobah. Luckily, Mr. Larson's quite the spymaster, or I never would have found you.”

For the first time since I'd known him, Gonzalez wasn't wearing his Guard uniform, just camo shorts and a Green Lantern T-shirt. I was about to ask him if it was casual Friday, but then I saw the backpack he had over his shoulder and it hit me how much time had passed.