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Len streaks past us, continuing toward the courthouse, calling Cas’s name.

“She has to be in the Sanctuary,” Jayne says, between sobs. “Go, Syd. You have to go.”

Inside the ground floor of the Sanctuary, the Governor and Perry are breathing, but motionless beneath one of the big entryway pillars. The stairs seem to be intact, but there’s a wall of burning debris in front of them. I knock away as much as I can with the crowbar, but the metal gets hot and I can’t hold it anymore. I still can’t clear the wall.

An ax falls down on the debris next to me. There stands Becky Purcell, swinging the blade as if her own life depends on it. “I’ll keep clearing this stuff to keep it from going up the stairs, but you have to move. Now.”

I’m not sure where she wants me to go. I’ll be in flames by the time I crawl over the pile.

“Look,” Becky says. “You’ve always been a good jumper. It’s what we all hated about you. So jump this goddamn pile and find Cas before this whole place comes down around our ears.”

Pi is all I can think about. There’s snot all over my face, and I reach in my pocket for my handkerchief. Buster’s tag falls onto the floor. He and Mina would be brave enough to do this. We aren’t finished yet. I have to find a way.

“For crying out loud, Syd,” Becky screams. “Your father had air magic. It’s in you. Go.”

I think about the promotional photos the Company took of the dancers. I think about how high I could jump. I think of fire. I think of wind. I close my eyes and leap.

“Atta girl,” Becky yells.

And I’m on the stairs, taking them by twos. The door to the Acolyte apartment is open, and inside the fire is blazing in pastel colors: pink and peach and lilac. The smoke is strange, swirling and acrid. Furniture is stuck to the ceiling, scattered around the room, and the countertops are melting like warm frosting. Cas is sitting in a corner. Her arm hangs at a strange angle and though her eyes are open, she doesn’t seem to see me.

A hand closes around my ankle. I jump with my other leg, landing on the Bishop’s wrist. He cries out as it cracks, but he releases me. I back up into a burning chair, singeing my ass. He is pinned by the couch and a fallen beam, another beam threatening to come down on his head any minute. I have to risk it to get to Cas.

I reach down deep once more, Becky’s voice in my head, and hurdle the smoking couch. I reach for Cas’s throat to take her pulse and she shoves me away with her good arm, scooting tighter into the corner. “Don’t.”

“It’s me, Cas,” I say. “I know it’s going to hurt, but I have to get you out of here now, okay?”

“Syd? Syd, I can’t see.”

“It’s okay. There’s fire. A strange fire, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Take some deep breaths, okay? I’m going to pick you up, all right, so just hang on to me.”

“I’m too big. You can’t.”

“I can too. Will you try and stand?”

“It won’t work. I tried. Just leave me.”

“We’ve made it this far,” I say. “I love you, and I’m not leaving you.”

It takes us longer than I’d like to stand her up. She’s broken in a lot of places, and I know she’s in agony as I try to move myself underneath her.

The beam over the Bishop cracks and shifts.

“Wait,” the Bishop says. “Free me.”

“After what you’ve done?” I say.

“They took my daughter first,” he says.

“That’s not how people deal with loss,” I say. I pull Cas’s arms around my neck, and she sobs. I look down at his face, unrecognizable with flame. “You think you took everything, but we still have each other.”

“Save me and I’ll give you anything you want,” he says.

“Anything?” I ask.

“Yes. Anything.”

Cas doesn’t even pick her head up when the beam comes down behind us.

Becky has made good headway on the debris in front of the stairs, clearing enough in one spot that we can hand Cas over the top. Becky is much stronger than I am, and picks Cas up like she’s a doll.

“Tell me who it is,” Cas says. “Syd, please.” She’s biting her lip, no doubt to keep from screaming every time the raw ends of bone shift within her body.

“It’s our friend Becky,” I say. I squeeze Cas’s hand. She squeezes back and then promptly passes out.

I make one last jump over the jumble of smoldering pews. But I’m tired, and my back foot catches on something and I land sprawling next to Perry’s body. I scramble up, but something is wrong with my leg. It won’t work right. I half hop, half crawl to the doorway. The ceiling shifts and part of the apartment comes crashing down, the Bishop’s body and the couch among the debris. I roll out of the doorway and into the street.

I will myself to get up and move. I look around for something to use as a crutch. I wave down Sheriff Jayne, and she slides her shoulder under my arm.

“Don’t look down, okay?” she says. I think she means my injury, and I look anyway. Pi is at my feet, on the ground next to James.

“Stay with me, Syd,” Jayne says. “You have to help me get you out of here, okay?”

A tide of grief washes over me, and I don’t want to move. My parents, Pi, Danny, Troy. “Can’t you just leave me?”

“He loved us, Syd. Now let’s get on. That’s it. Fast as you can.”

A sound like thunder, with wind and shifting earth, heralds the fall of Sanctuary, raining down around us as we run.

Downtown New Charity is decimated, so I decide to bring everyone out to the ranch. Len puts me on a horse behind Becky and he takes the hay cart that holds an unconscious Cas, and we start an uneven procession.

Jayne, Becky, Len, and I set up our base of operations from the kitchen. I sit on the counter as Jayne splints my leg. Severe injuries are to stay on the main floor for the clinic doctor to look after. Small injuries we send to the basement, where Tess is sewing and bandaging. And then there’s Cas, whom I put in my old bedroom. Len tries to keep helping, but after he comes back with a week’s worth of generator fuel in a wagon, I send him upstairs to rest.

Bill from the mercantile arrives with more food and drink, yet more generator fuel, bandages, and toilet paper. Others show up with folding chairs and crutches. It’s barely controlled chaos, but the community is supporting itself, showing what the Spirit was always meant to be. I wish Pi could see it happening. The Spirit he believed in, at work in the townspeople.

Becky almost saves me from my tears “Syd, there’s some giant guy out here. Says he’s from the camp and wants to help. Keeps calling me
love
.”

His great big orange-haired head peers around the corner behind her. “How would you feel, love, if you got the hell out of here and let a man feed some folks?”

Linsey tells us that Nelle, Mangold, and Paul arrived back at camp, injured but whole, though Nelle was apoplectic over Perry. She swore to Linsey she’d finish repairing the power station once we were ready.

Becky helps me upstairs on my crutches. I make her promise to wake me in a half hour, though I can see her fingers are crossed.

“Say, I left some things on your bed for you,” she says, closing the door to the mud-brown guest room behind her softly.

My backpack sits on top of the bed. Inside, the miscellany is wrapped in tissue paper with baling-twine bows. The tuna is gone, instead replaced by hand-crimped tins labeled ‘Smoked Trout.’ And a note.
After all this time, I figured out the only gift we ever needed was each other.

For what might be the first time in my life, I can’t stand the idea of being alone. I knock and Len lets me into the tulle vomitorium. We wordlessly crawl into the double bed around Cas.

It’s then we sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Cas

I dreamt of lilac flames, again, though when I opened my eyes, there was only darkness. And pain, everywhere, like hot knives.

I tried to shift my body, but there was no room to move. On one side of me, the shape of a brother I’d known all my life, his easy snores in my ear. On the other side, I could feel Syd’s silken hair, cool on my arm. I couldn’t move the arm on Len’s side; it felt as if it was bound to my body.

I didn’t think about all we’d lost until later. Much later.

In that first conscious moment of the life I came to know after, I concentrated on one tiny piece of elation: these ones I loved were safe.

A week passed, then two. New Charity already felt very different without the Bishop, without my father. With the power restored, with the floodgate open.

Seeing the future had once defined me, defined my perspective, but for the first time my voice was now my own, not a tool for anyone else. And while I couldn’t say I minded the quiet, the darkness was novel. And frightening.

Len said that, for him, the worst reminder of the explosion was the gate. He told me how it hung open like a jaw. He and Becky led a group out to tear it down. I made them describe the process from start to finish, trying to make pictures in the continued black miasma of my mind. The horses had been twisted into charred serpents.

Daytime, nighttime, I’d seen nothing, Spiritual or visual, since. Everyone speculated on whether my eyesight would come back again. But I knew I’d given all of my gifts to the Spirit the day of the explosion.

It had been a worthy exchange.