“He was hard to see, though,” Brendan clarifies later, referring to the figure he saw during the Minneapolis attack. “Dark from head to toe. I’m not crazy. I saw what I saw.”
3
THE MAYOR’S SPEECH was a collection of trite phrases about moving on from grief and the triumph of good over evil and honoring the dead. Halfway through, Ines leaned over to whisper a quote from Friday Night Lights—“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”—and Sloane had to cover her mouth so no one in the crowd could tell that she was laughing. Albie faked a coughing fit, and Esther elbowed Ines in the ribs. Matt schooled his face into a serious expression. For just a moment, Sloane felt like she had gotten something back.
Cameras flashed everywhere as the speech concluded, and the crowd applauded. Sloane joined them, clapping until her palms started to itch. Next came a series of firm handshakes, and finally, it was time for the Chosen Ones to bless the Ten Years Monument with their holy footsteps or whatever the hell Mayor Clayton had said about it. Sloane wondered if she could use that as an excuse to take off her shoes, because they were pinching her toes. Surely you couldn’t bless something with uncomfortable high heels on.
The land around the metal box had been paved with concrete. Sloane walked down the steps of the stage and felt the warmth of it through the soles of her shoes. She felt like she was standing on the surface of a gray sea, the monument a bronze island one hundred yards ahead of her. It was the only spot of warm light in the midst of desolation—ethereal, mirage-like. Staring at it, she was surprised to find tears in her eyes. In time, the bronze would age, its luster giving way to flat green tarnish. Their memory of what happened would flatten, too, and become dull, and the monument would be forgotten, something for school field trips and bus tours for the history-minded.
And she would tarnish too. Always famous but always fading, the way old movie stars were, carrying ghosts of their younger selves in their faces.
It was a strange thing, to know with certainty that you had peaked.
She walked in Albie’s wake to the box, the others at her back. She couldn’t help but look across the river to where Matt had stood during their last stand, the Golden Bough held aloft, casting supernatural light on his face. One of a handful of moments in which she had fallen in love with him.
There was a narrow opening in the wall for people to step inside, and Albie went straight through it. Ines was about to follow him in, but Sloane stopped her with a hand. “Let’s give him a second,” she said.
They all fit together in different ways, knew different pieces of each other best. Esther knew how to make Albie laugh, Ines could almost read his mind, and Matt knew how to get him to talk. But Sloane was the Albie expert on his bad days, and there was no way today wasn’t one of them.
“This thing is totally going to get peed on,” Ines said.
“You don’t need to fill every silence,” Matt said.
“I’m gonna go in and see if he’s okay,” Sloane said. “Give me a minute or two.”
Matt said, “Sure.”
“Yeah, it’ll give Esther time to figure out the right camera angle or whatever,” Ines said.
Esther smacked her arm, then took out her phone. Sloane fled the scene before Esther could talk her into another selfie, finding the gap in the wall and slipping into the monument.
Tiny letters—the name of every person killed by the Dark One—were carved out of the metal walls. It had taken years to find and cut them all, according to the artist, and most names were so small you could barely read them. The artist had set up panels of light behind the metal sheets so each name glowed. It was like staring at a night sky somewhere deep in the wilderness, where pollution didn’t interfere with the light of the stars.
Albie stood in the middle of the cube, staring at one of the wall panels.
“Hey,” she said to him.
“Hey,” he said. “Pretty in here, isn’t it?”
“The bronze was a good choice. Almost cozy this way,” she said. “Did you find your dad’s name?”
“No,” he said. “Needle. Haystack.”
“Maybe we could ask the artist.”
Albie shrugged. “I think the point is, you’re not supposed to be able to see the individual names. You’re just supposed to get an impression of how many there were.”
So many it stopped mattering, Sloane thought. She already knew the number of people lost to the Dark One. Anything from one hundred to one million was just a number, her mind too limited to really comprehend it.
“I like it this way,” Albie said. “It reminds me that we’re just a handful of people who lost something among thousands of other people who lost something. Not hurting any more or less than any of the families of these people.”
He gestured to the panel in front of him. Albie was only thirty, but his hair had gone feather-light and was receding at the temples. There were creases in his forehead, too, deep enough that she had noticed them. Time was wearing on him.
“I’m tired of being special,” Albie said with a shaky laugh. “I’m tired of being celebrated for the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
Sloane went to stand next to him, close enough that their arms touched. She thought of the stack of government documents in the bottom drawer of her desk, of Rick Lane discussing her like she was a slab of meat at a butcher, of the nightmares that chased her from sleeping to waking.
“Yeah,” she said through a sigh. “I know what you mean.”
Or at least, she thought she did. But when she watched Albie’s hand tremble as he brought it up to scrub at his face, she wondered if she really did know.
“Knock-knock!” Esther said. She was holding up her phone—at a flattering angle, of course—as she walked into the monument, her hair arranged perfectly over her shoulders. She turned so the shot included Albie and Sloane. “Say hi to my Insta! followers, guys!”
“Is this live?” Sloane asked.
“No,” Esther said.
Sloane glanced at Albie and then put up both her middle fingers while Albie put his palms up to his cheeks to make a loud farting noise. Ines walked in after Esther, looking nervous, to see Sloane waving her middle fingers around Albie’s face. Esther put the phone down, scowling.
“That was supposed to be a live capture of my first time through the Ten Years Monument!” she said. “Now I’m gonna have to do it again and act like it’s the first time.”
She stormed out, passing Matt on her way.
“What’d I miss?” he said.
“Hold on,” Albie said, touching a finger to his lips.
Esther came in again, the phone held up and away from her face, her eyes wide in faux-wonder as she looked at the glowing names. Albie darted forward and tipped his head so he was in the shot with Esther and said, “This is her second time doing this! Don’t let her lie to you—”
Esther shoved Albie away and put her phone down. “What is wrong with you guys?”
“Us? You’re the one who basically has a phone grafted to your hand!” said Sloane. “You’re worse than Matt.”
Matt put up his hands. “I am not involved in this.”