Burn Our Bodies Down Read online

  It’s three more blocks before the town ends. Just like that. One moment it’s houses and streets that might have been tree-lined once, cars scattered like litter, and then it’s gone. Land smothered with crops, and the almost painfully empty stretch of the sky.

  “Oh,” I say, before I can help myself, and I feel Eli’s chest jump behind me, like he’s laughing.

  Tess said her family still plants, and said my grandmother does too. Or tries. This must be the land, hers or mine. The earth, dark and gritty and dry as we pass, and everywhere the yellow rise of the corn. This time of year it should be chest high and a bright, new sort of green. I’ve seen enough of it around Calhoun to know. But it’s not. And I know what Tess meant when she described Gram’s farm. Because this is all wrong.

  The corn is too tall, maybe eight feet, and a strange, flat yellow, like it’s dying even as it grows. I wait for it, for the moment when we hit just the right angle to see all the way down the paths reaching empty and clean between the planting rows. But it never comes. The ranks are long gone, and what’s left is a tangle, stalks knotted together, the smell strangely bitter and almost chemical. I want to shut my eyes, to pretend Phalene has something else to give me, but I can’t. Because there, pluming black and heavy. Smoke on the horizon.

  “Come on,” Eli calls over my head. “This is close enough.”

  “No way,” Tess says. “Let’s keep going.”

  “It’s getting dangerous, Tess.”

  “I think you mean it’s getting good.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Eli mutters. “It’s a fucking fire.” I don’t think he means me to hear, but I’m glad I do, and when he sends us riding after her, I feel a little better, always more comfortable in the breath of a fight.

  He’s right, anyway. Tess is acting like this is all happening a hundred miles from her, like it’s a movie, a dream. It would unsettle me if I didn’t feel almost the same way. Out of my body, all in my head, just wanting and worry.

  We keep going. The sky closer and closer, dropping to wrap us in bitter gray, until I can actually feel the fire against my skin, a heartbeat of heat; can hear the rush of the burn in my ears and the wind carrying it toward us as Eli pedals after Tess, her ponytail streaming behind her.

  Up ahead, the road widens to a gravel shoulder that juts into the corn. Tess swerves onto it, and Eli follows her, braking so hard I tip off the handlebars.

  “Sorry,” he mutters, but I’m not paying attention, because from here I can see the fire. Maybe half a mile out, maybe less. Ripping through the farmland like a bullet, pushed by the wind.

  For all the time I’ve spent with a lighter against my palm, this isn’t any fire I know. Wild and bright and red, red, red, and it drifts up off the crops in waves before breaking, crashing in a spray of spark and ash.

  “Shit,” Eli says. “Guys, we should go.”

  Tess leaves us behind, steps right up to the edge of the gravel. The fields drop off on either side of the highway, dipping to a ditch before stretching out flat. From here we can see over the top of the corn, can watch the fire take more of the earth with every minute.

  “Where’s the fire department?” I ask. “Shouldn’t they be here?”

  Tess has her thumbnail between her teeth, scraping at the underside of it until she swallows, and I forget to look away.

  “It’ll take them a while,” she says, “if they show up at all.” Shoots me a grin, no hint of sympathy or anything close to it. “Nielsen land isn’t high priority.”

  “Is this all Vera’s?”

  Tess nods. “The house is that way.” She points toward the fire, and the air’s too clouded for me to see anything, but she keeps going. “Out near mine.”

  “Will your house be okay?”

  I expected her to care about her own, at least, but she just shrugs and says, “Probably,” like she hasn’t really thought about it until right now. “The wind’s taking it toward town anyway.”

  Eli steps up next to her. My stomach sinks as he drapes his arm over her shoulders, tugging at her until she leans against him. Are they together? Or is this just how people can be?

  I look away, stare out over the fire. This is where my mother came from. And somewhere behind all this is a woman who wants me.

  That’s when I see it. A twitch in the corn, rippling, and the flash of something pale in the sweep of yellow and gold. I squint hard, try to make out any shape through the smoke. For a long moment, there’s nothing, just my own breathing and the trip of my heart, but then there it is again.

  “Do you see that?” I say. “I think someone’s out there.”

  “What?” Eli says.

  I barely hear him. It is; it’s someone, out in the crops, fire tumbling toward them. Too slow. They’re moving too slow, if they’re moving at all. They won’t make it to safety.

  I’m breaking for them before I realize it. Scrambling down the bank, gravel pouring down the slope with me. The corn sways and crackles, beckoning me, and I can hear Eli calling out, but somebody needs help.

  I crash in, leaves snapping against my raised arms, stalks bending, arching over my head to close out the sky. The air thick and thicker with ash, and I can’t remember where I saw it, that slip of skin, of someone. It already hurts to breathe too deeply, the smoke sliding like water down my throat.

  “Hello?” I yell, before my voice dries up. No answer, or nothing I can hear, so I keep on. Heat coming in, screaming up my skin, the fire rolling like fog. Already my arms are red, already my mouth is dry and thirsty. It would be smart to go back. It would be smart to never have come here at all.

  Instead I crouch, peer through the gathering smoke. I’m farther out than I realized, closer to the burn, and the ground is warm where I press my palms into it, leaning on them to get a better look, because there it is, just like I thought. A person, sprawled on their side, and it’s a girl, a girl with long dark hair, and she’s not moving.

  “Hey!” I yell, crawling forward. Thirty yards away, maybe. I can’t stand back up, not if I mean to keep breathing. The sky blotted out overhead, my lungs catching closed. Closer now. The girl’s skin is too pale, and her body too still. “Can you hear me?”

  She’s wearing a dress, faded and too small for her, seams stretching and pulling across her ribs. Finally I’m near enough to touch her. I reach out, palms stained ash-black, and shake her arm. She doesn’t move.

  “Are you okay? Hello?”

  The fire cracks, hisses and spits, and I throw my arm up to keep a spray of sparks from my eyes. The wind is carrying it too quickly—if I don’t move soon, my way back to the road will be cut off, and I’ll be trapped. But I can’t leave her here. I don’t know who she is or how she got out here; I just know I can’t leave her.

  I get to my feet, my body bent in half to keep out of the smoke, but it’s no use. My tongue fuzzy with the taste of it, my eyes watering. I grab her hand, hold my shirt over my mouth with my other hand, and pull as hard as I can. Her body jerks toward me. Hair falling across her face, gauzy air clinging to the shape of her. I try again, only manage to get her a few inches farther before I have to let go and catch my breath.

  She’s too heavy, and the smoke is too thick, and I need help. I can’t do this on my own. Most everything I can, but this is too much. The fire is too close. I cannot do this by myself.

  “Hey!” I yell over my shoulder. “Eli! Someone!”

  There’s a shout, and I turn to see Eli’s tall figure coming through the gray, his elbow raised to shield his face.

  “You’ve been out here too long,” he calls, and I could cry. Somebody came after me.

  “There’s a girl,” I say. He closes the last distance, his eyes red, a streak of soot across his cheek. “I think she’s hurt.” Or worse, but that doesn’t matter. “You have to help me carry her.”

  “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?”

  A fire engine blares past, its sirens at a shriek, the sound so loud it seems to shake the whole world. I can feel my body trying to get back to normal, trying to settle in spite of the adrenaline racing through my veins.

  “The two of us?” He must mean me and Eli. Unless—

  “You and your sister here,” Anderson says.

  It jolts something loose in me, hearing it from him. “No,” I say, and I manage one step toward him before Officer Connors hauls me back, fingers tight around my arm. “No, that’s not. She’s not. I’ve never seen her before. Not ever.” I want to keep talking. I have to make him understand. I have to understand it myself—that this girl is not mine. She is not my mother’s. She can’t be.

  “Never?” Anderson raises his eyebrows. “Not once? I’m sure you can understand why I have a little trouble believing that.”

  “Margot was with me all morning,” Tess says from over his shoulder.

  He barely blinks. “And I’m sure you can understand why I have a little trouble believing Miss Miller.”

  “She’s not lying,” Eli calls. His face flat and pale with shock, his fingers flexing like he’s trying to shake the feeling of that body in his arms. “We brought Margot out here. She didn’t do this.” His eyes meet mine for a fraction too long. I can almost hear him ask it: Right?

  “I swear,” I say, my voice unsteady. “I just came to Phalene this morning.” It feels ridiculous to be standing here talking about this when there’s a body like mine laid out on the pavement. But she isn’t impossible to them like she is to me. She’s just another girl they’ve never seen before. A simple story. Two girls go in, and one comes out.

  “All right,” Anderson says. Indulg
ent. Fake. “You just got here and you’ve never seen this girl before. Let’s say that’s true. So what happened?”

  “Tess and Eli heard there was a fire,” I say. I want to look to Tess, want her to confirm it, but I know if I look away even once, Anderson will call it guilt. “They wanted . . . we wanted to see. So we rode out here.”

  “And you’re sure it had already started?” Anderson says.

  “Yes.” I try to remember what happened in town, whether it was Tess or Eli who got the message. “Someone saw it and told us.”

  “Because this is Nielsen land.” Anderson nods to the fields, to the fire sweeping closer. “And you can tell me any kind of lie you like, Margot, but you two are Nielsen girls. That means something in this town.”

  “And what’s that?” I ask. A challenge, sure, but more than that, something I need to know.

  Anderson smiles grimly. “Trouble.”

  The blur of adrenaline is leaving my body, and pain is taking its place, prickling over my skin, throbbing and fuzzy. “I’m telling the truth. We were watching and I saw someone out there.” I sway suddenly, the heat gripping me hard and letting go. I need some water. I need to sit down.

  Take a deep breath. Eyes back on him. “So I went to look.”

  “You just ran out into a fire?” Anderson leans in. “You weren’t scared?”

  I have to be careful. I’m alone here, and there’s a reason they’re not talking to Eli, even though he’s the one who carried the body out of the field. Treat it like Mom, I tell myself. Only what you’d say to her on her very worst day. “Of course I was scared,” I say. “But I thought someone needed help.”

  “Sure.” Anderson nods like he believes me, but nothing about him relaxes. “So you went out there to help. Then what?”

  “Leland and Polk are on their way,” Connors says. He nods to the third police officer, the one setting up traffic cones across the highway behind Tess and Eli. “Mather can hold the scene until then. Let’s go, yeah? They need some water and a medic.”