“You make stuff up all the time.”
“Yeah, but in this case it might be illegal.”
Sophia drifted farther into the inky interior while Kane climbed to the second floor. From below she called, “You never know. Maybe you’re suppressing your memories subconsciously.”
Kane thought this was a very clever way of making him feel guilty for not being able to produce an explanation. Sophia continued: “Maybe it’ll only manifest through, like, art or something. You should try drawing, or painting, or—” There was a small crash that awoke a brood of bats somewhere in the rafters. Sophia appeared at the top of the steps. The bats settled. “Maybe you should decoupage something. You used to decoupage a lot of things.”
“You think delivering my testimony as a kitschy craft project is going to convince a judge that I’m not dangerous?”
“Maybe.”
“Sophia, that is the gayest thing I have ever heard.”
Like a sudden spark, the familiar joke flared between them. In unison, the siblings repeated their favorite refrain: “Just gay enough to work!”
They laughed, and for a second, Kane wasn’t full of dread.
Sophia hopped over a mess of broken bottles to join Kane on a crumbling sill that overlooked the river. They sat in silence in the mill’s stagnant air until Sophia hugged his shoulder. This surprised him; she hated hugs.
“Hey,” Sophia murmured. “We’re all glad that you’re okay. That’s what matters most. We should be grateful for just that.”
A stitch of guilt pulled tighter in Kane’s chest. He agreed that being okay was what mattered most. He just didn’t agree that okay was what he was.
“Plus,” Sophie said, “your scars are gonna look awesome.”
Kane smiled. His fingers itched to feel the tidy network of burns that wrapped like a crown around the back of his head, from temple to temple. They perplexed the doctors. They were shallow and would heal quickly, but sometimes at night they prickled with heat, turning his dreams to smoke and ash.
A gust dragged across the river, hit the shore, and whipped against the hemlocks and birch.
“Have you talked to anyone from school?” Sophia asked.
“Homeroom sent a card. The librarians sent flowers.”
“What about friends?”
“Lucia sent a note.”
“Lucia is a lunch lady, Kane.”
Kane chewed the soft flesh of his cheek. “I know that.”
“I know you know that. But what about people in your grade?”
“Umm…” Kane felt her consideration as a physical thing. “Homeroom sent a card.”
Sophia let this go, and he was thankful for it. In the past, Sophia had taken it upon herself to conjure him a social life, which she assured him would do wonders for his self-esteem. Wonders! Always said with jazz hands. It was a well-intentioned hobby of Sophia’s but had always deeply embarrassed Kane, who did not think he had low self-esteem to begin with. He just wasn’t like Sophia, who needed to befriend everyone and everything. No, Kane liked to think of himself as Discerning! with jazz hands.
And besides, if he truly wanted to, Kane could talk to people. But why risk it? It felt unnatural. It was better to resign himself to safer companions: dogs, plants, books, and Lucia the lunch lady, who gave him extra fries on Pizza Tuesdays.
Something poked Kane’s cheek. He swatted Sophia away. “What?”
“I said that I overheard Dad on the phone with the police today. They said that your accident…wasn’t looking like an accident. That the whole thing seemed deliberate and thought out, and they wondered if maybe you were trying to…”
The cicadas simmered through the silence, an invisible crowd gossiping around them. Kane had to be careful with his words now. Sophia had asked a question without asking it.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” he said.
“How can you know that if you say you can’t remember that night, or the months leading up to it?”
Kane could feel each jagged edge of denial in his throat. He tried to force it up but it cut and clawed. He just knew.
“Kane, two days is a long time to go without calling. And stealing Dad’s car? That’s larceny. And I know you don’t want to talk about it, but if you don’t clear your psych evaluation, Mom says that you might have to go live—”
“Stop it,” Kane said, harsh now. “Look, I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you more. I wish I knew where I was, or what I was doing.”
In a small voice Sophia said, “Or who you were with.”
“What?”
“Well, someone must have pulled you out of this burning building and then helped you to the river. They should have checked your body for fingerprints.”
Of everything, this unsettled Kane the most, as though he could feel the grip of ghosts upon his flesh. He felt the way the mill looked: history, in smithereens, haunted with the sort of shadows that squirm.
“Not that you can leave prints on a body,” Sophia said. “I checked.”
A familiar sense bristled over Kane. Sophia had always thought of him as a bit of a project. Had she made investigating the accident her latest focus? Did she know more about this than she was letting on?
“What else do you know?”
Kane might have noticed Sophia look away too quickly if he wasn’t watching a shadow behind her break away from the wall and scamper, huge and spider-like, across a doorway.
“Something’s in here,” he whispered.
“What?”
He pulled her beneath the sill and along the wall, his eyes never leaving the doorway. “Something’s in here,” he repeated. “I saw something move.”
“Kane, relax, it’s probably a bat.”
Just then they both heard a creak on the stairs—the cry of the fifth step. Whoever it was must have known they’d given up their position. The mill shook as something large and fast thundered up the stairs and burst onto the second floor.
Kane and Sophia dashed into the closest room—one with a vaulted ceiling blackened by soot, a floor rotted through, and a heavy metal door. Kane swung it shut and slammed down the latch a moment before something rammed into the other side. The hinges screamed, but the latch held. Again and again something tried to muscle through, the ceiling releasing clots of dust with each impact. Then came the awful sound of metal scraping metal. A key, maybe? Or claws?
“There!” Sophia pulled Kane toward a window leading onto a roof so badly damaged it looked ready to cave in. Together they picked across sagging, broken beams. Inside the building, the shadows boiled—unreal, massive shapes that scuttled through the darkness below, tracking them.