“I’ll do it,” he says, stepping around me. “You go ahead.”
But I can’t leave her, not just like that, so I watch as he bends and hoists her up like she’s nothing. Drops her over his shoulder, her head hanging down, fingers curled delicately.
A gust of wind. We both flinch as a lick of fire whips past us, and Eli shouts, his voice breaking with panic, but he’s yelling, “Go, Margot, go!” so I run. I run so hard I can feel every step shuddering up through my bones, so hard I forget to breathe, and when I do the air burns me from the inside out. Fire is not like this, not the way I know it. It’s swallowing the field, the dry scorch stealing the life from my skin. I don’t last long before I’m gasping, the air turning to dust in my lungs. Eli behind me somewhere, but if I turn around I’ll see it, the reach of the flame, and I have to keep going.
Ahead, a break in the smoke, and there’s the road, the shoulder a bank of broken glass and gravel. Tess is waiting, her phone pressed to her ear, lit red and blue in the flash of police lights. A cruiser parked across the highway, and sirens muffling the scream of the fire.
One more step. Another. It’s gonna be okay.
“Hey!” Tess yells when she sees me. “There they are!”
A man in uniform kneels at the top of the bank, reaching down. “Come on, honey,” he says, his eyes fixed on Eli behind me. I let him haul me out of the corn, to the safety of the road.
He lets go as soon as I’m up, and I pitch onto my hands and knees, the air so fresh it’s almost cold. I forgot what breathing was like.
Somebody crouches next to me. “You’re okay,” they say. Tess, her face knit tight with concern.
“Help!” I hear Eli yell, and I try to get up, but Tess keeps me still.
“They’re right behind you,” she says, smoothing her hand across my forehead. I shut my eyes, gulp down another breath.
“Shit,” one of the officers says. I open my eyes in time to see him using his uniform hat to smother the girl’s dress where a spark has caught, burned it black and left her skin scorched red. Eli’s jaw is set, his eyes wide as he hurriedly passes her into the other officer’s arms.
Tess helps me to my feet. Something’s different about her, about the look on her face, like in the rush of everything she forgot to put on that perfectly bored expression she was wearing before.
There’s a fire truck barreling past us, but it’s probably no use. The fire is spreading too quickly. It’ll take this land, and more besides, and when it dies, it will be because it’s finished, not because somebody decided it was.
“I’m going to set her down,” the officer carrying the girl says. “Just until the ambulance gets here.”
Eli collapses onto the gravel. “I don’t think you’ll need one.”
I step closer as they lay her out. Her dress is flowered, with a high neckline and sheer, puffed sleeves that cut into her arms. She looks like she’s from twenty years ago. A hundred. I kneel next to her, ignore the warning from the officer.
Her head is tilted away from me, hair across her face—all I can see is her mouth, only just open. I adjust her head. She’s still warm, the heat of her leaking into my hands. One of the officers grabs my arm, tells me to stop, but he’s too late, and her hair’s falling away, streaks of gray at the temples, and “Shit.”
I scramble backward into the officer’s legs, breathing hard.
Pale freckled face. Strong nose and stronger chin. Eyes open, dark and staring and empty, empty, empty. I know that face. It’s mine. It’s my mother’s.
Nielsen land, I think, for one wild moment. A Nielsen body on Nielsen land. I can hear the officers talking, can hear Tess say my name, feel her hand on my arm, but none of it matters.
Because there is a stranger wearing my face. And she’s dead.
eight
i only have a second to tip over onto my hands and knees before my stomach is seizing and the chips I ate are spattering onto the pavement in a mouthful of bile.
“Jesus,” one of the officers says, and the sound of it, of somebody else, brings the world slamming back into me. First the officer’s hands on my arms, tight and binding as he lifts me up. Then Tess next to me, her jaw slack, her eyes wide.
“Who is that?” she says. “I don’t understand.”
And I don’t either, because I am here, I am breathing, and I am laid out on the highway in a too-small dress, and for a second, for an age, I can’t tell which of us is which. Whether I’m living or not. Sister, sister, the word running through my blood, but that can’t be right. There can’t have been another of me. I would know. Wouldn’t I?
No, a voice at the back of my head whispers. Never. Your mother has spent your whole life building walls around the both of you. Maybe this was why.
“I need you to step back, Miss Miller,” the officer holding me says to Tess. Officer Connors, according to the name tag on his chest. I focus on the letters, on the fade and scratch of them, because that, at least, is real. He’s got his other hand on his gun, casually, like he doesn’t mean to. I don’t buy that for a second. “Right now.”
“What for?” Tess asks even as Eli pulls her away. “Margot. Margot, are you—”
“I said,” Officer Connors repeats more firmly, “step back.”
He still hasn’t let go of me. I don’t think he will anytime soon. I don’t know, really, what this looks like. Just that it doesn’t look good. And I wish, I wish I could explain it to them, but how does any of this fit together in a way that makes sense? She’s still there. Staring up at the sky. A sister of mine that Mom left behind? Or something else—my mind giving me what I wanted and making it a nightmare.
The first police officer, Officer Anderson, steps in front of me, blocking my view of the body. I let myself be relieved until I catch the look on his face. Suspicious and accusing, and I don’t like it, but at least it’s familiar. Just like Mom.
He’s tall, his face beaten with sun, his dark uniform drenched in sweat. “I’d ask you your name,” he says, “but I think I can guess.”
“It’s Margot,” I say, before I realize that’s not what he meant. Nielsen. What else could I be, with a face like mine?
“We should get everybody back to the station,” Officer Connors says next to me. “Leave this to the techs.”
Anderson doesn’t move. “Not yet,” he says, eyes fixed on me. “Margot? Okay, Margot. Can you tell me what happened? What were the two of you doing out there?”