I open my eyes to daylight. It’s nearly two in the afternoon but the air in the bedroom is so chilly I feel sheathed in ice. “It’s the river,” Aunt Irene told me when we arrived, “that’s why it’s so cold. I have to wear gloves if I want to get any work done in here. It can get colder in here than it is outside.”
The river—of course, it’s the river.
I go to the bathroom cabinet looking for some painkillers but I don’t recognize any of the labels. None of the brands are the same as they were in Canada. Paracetamol? Anadol? I take two and hope for the best.
The house is quiet. I wonder if Mom has already left for the crematorium. If she has, this may be my best chance.
I dress quickly, head downstairs and shrug on the green wool coat Aunt Irene bought me for Christmas and a jersey knit hat. I sling a cloth satchel filled with cereal bars and two bottles of Coke over my shoulder as my stomach flip-flops between hunger and nausea. I start to write a note, get about halfway through before I crumple it up and shove it into my pocket. What am I going to say, anyway? What would make sense?
Outside, the January air mists my face with light drizzle. Above me, the clouds huddle close to the peaked roofs of the terrace houses, creating an endless sky. Pure white without detail or shading. I walk to the centre of town where I find a double-decker bus headed north. “Oy,” says the driver. “In or out?”
It’s an unspoken rule that young people go to the top level, and leave the bottom for the elderly. But as I grab my ticket, he nudges the gas. I stumble forward. I can’t risk the narrow stairwell, not with my arm aching like it is from the accident, so I sink into one of the plastic seats on the bottom level.
An old woman with pearl-white hair glances at me. “I don’t see what you’re sitting down here for,” she says. “Someone will be needing that seat.” I feign deafness. The bus is sparsely populated but she doesn’t want me here. I rub self-consciously at my medical ID bracelet and pull my sleeve down to cover it.
“Are you listening, child?” the woman insists, her voice low and querulous. She pokes my foot hard with her cane. “Go on then.”
I don’t answer and she doesn’t try again but I can feel her gaze on me. Doesn’t she know that I’m scared too? That I have no idea why any of this is happening? That I didn’t want it? Maybe death frightens her, but her body is understandable, its decline is slow and predictable. But me? I may as well be another species.
The bus takes me as far as Shipton-on-Cherwell, a tiny village north of Oxford, and I have to do the rest of the journey on foot. An hour later, I find myself hobbling beside the drainage ditch that borders the road a couple of miles from the cement works. The runoff is foamy, the colour of snail shells, creating a treacherous layer of muck.
But the long walk has loosened up some of the stiffness in my muscles. There’s still a nip to the air but the clouds have dispersed enough for the sun to chase the chill from my skin. Green-checkered fields and gently rolling hills surround me, hard limestone beneath. I pass signs for the Oxford Airport but the sky is empty of planes.
Soon I’m climbing steadily up Bunkers Hill. The air is heavy with woodsmoke and the loamy smell of rotting leaves. When I find the place where I went off the road, I can make out streaks of black rubber on the pavement. Shattered windshield sparkles like crystal. There: a trace of the Renault’s paint is lodged in a furrow in the bark of a yew tree. I trace it with a finger and the silver flecks crumble off easily.
Below me, past the tree line, I can see a broken vista of the cement works: trashed offices, gutted clinker silos, a pump house and a rusted water tower perched on the edges of a lake. And that massive two-hundred-foot chimney where I left Kira.
Is she still there? Do I still want her to be there?
When I close my eyes I want to pretend the whole thing has been a bad dream. That I’ll open them to find time has gone backwards. It’s the three of us walking out here, Aunt Irene promising to take us to see castles in Warwickshire when the weather warms up.
But it’s not a dream. Soon they’ll burn up another girl in Kira’s place. Someone’s sister, someone’s daughter. And what will they tell her family?
This is my responsibility. Mine alone.
I abandon the road entirely, push through the line of trees toward the tower while I still have my nerve. I lose my footing almost immediately on the steep decline, slide through the muck until my fingers snag around a gnarled root of an oak tree. A dozen yards from me is the fence. I find a gap and dig my elbows into puddles of water as I make myself small enough to crawl under. Sheared metal whispers and snags my coat, then I push free.
Soon I’m pressing my palms against the rusted metal door of the chimney. The hinges resist but I keep pushing. The door creaks open and light spills through, the colour of honey.
When I step inside there are three things I notice.
The first, a sound like rustling.
The second, a figure, tiny and pale—Kira—a barely recognizable muddle of limbs and shadow.
But it’s the third thing that stops me dead in my tracks: she’s not alone.
Who is he? How did he find her?
Fear burns a bright tang on my tongue. There’s an electric shimmer to the air, the same tingling on my skin. My body explodes into the gap between him and Kira and I swing my satchel, still full with two glass bottles of Coke, into his back. I slam into him.
Warm breath bursts from his lungs as the two of us crash into the concrete wall of the tower. He’s bigger than me, stronger too. I grab him, or try to, but he twists, easily, pinning my shoulders against his chest. His heart hammers like it could leap out of his body and into mine.
“Hey,” he says, “hey now. You don’t need to—” His lips are close to my ear. I smash my head backwards into his chin. A hot crescent of pain surfaces where his teeth make contact with my skull. He grunts and loosens his grip enough for me to slip away.
One step, two steps. I spin around to look at him.
“You…”
I know his face, even in the shadows. That wide forehead, almost hidden in curls, those dark eyes.
“I won’t let you take her.”
He takes a step back, afraid of me. Good. I’ll take him apart if he moves again.
His voice is low. “I just wanted to help.”
“Help? Help how?”
He touches his face and his hand comes away bloody. I’ve split his lip. “I followed you from the hospital. You don’t remember?”
“You were there,” I say slowly. There are gaps in my memory after the accident. I try to fit him into one of them. “Out on Bunkers Hill.”
“You nearly hit me. When you—after your car went into the trees you were in and out of consciousness. Talking about her. How you left her here.” His eyes are wide. He takes a step toward me.
“Don’t move.”
He stops, hands in the air. “However you want it.”
Fuck. What to do now?
Keeping an eye on him I kneel down next to Kira and gather her up in my arms. I recognize the sharp joint of her elbow, the way she curls her feet against me. But her lightness reminds me of china teacups, how delicate their arms are, how easily they break. She’s breathing still, and I feel her heart thudding, the blood travelling through her thawed veins and there’s a sweet leaping feeling inside my chest. Hope. I was right then. Somewhere inside, my sister might still be alive.
“When you left her here—”
“Shut up, would you?” I tell him. “I just need to figure this out.”
“You better let go of her. Please.” He wipes his lip on the sleeve of his coat, leaving a smear of blood. “You’ll snap her bones if you don’t leave off.”
I touch the back of her hand, damp, slightly tacky, and her knuckles flex and release. The air goes out of my lungs. How long have I been holding my breath? I lay her carefully back down onto the ground but she’s left a trace of something thick, glutinous and stinking on my palms.
“She listens at last,” he mutters.
“If you come near me I’ll scream.”
“For all the good it will do you. Do you think anybody would hear?”
“I—” A movement from Kira distracts me from finishing. Her hand knocks against my knee gently: sleepy, somnambulant, at once recognizable and utterly foreign.
“Her muscles are breaking down,” he says. “I don’t think you should touch her. She also looks as if she’s lost bone mass. A fair bit.”
I stare at her, trying to decide on my next move.
Where are you, Kira?
She cranes her head toward me, and her neck stretches and elongates. Thin silver lines radiate across her temple where the skin has already been stretched. Her eyes are larger than I remember. A corona of white circles the pupil. The amber rim of her iris is dappled with specks of grey-blue, glossy as oil, as if the pigmentation is beginning to break down. A small fold of tissue has grown into the outer corners of her eye. As she stares back at me, it shutters horizontally across her pupil with the speed of a switchblade and I jerk back.
It won’t be you anymore, Dr. Varghese had told me. It will be something else. A horrible thought: maybe I shouldn’t have taken her. Maybe it would have hurt her less to burn.
He’s close enough to help me up and I let him. “You’re bleeding,” he says. “We need to take care of that.” He’s right. The bandage over my stitches is gluey with blood. I try not to think about infection and septicemia, hemophilia, strokes. All the ways Dr. Varghese said my body might betray me.
Every decision is a doorway and I always seem to be stuck on the wrong side. Should I trust him? The weight of his arms around me, the smell of sweat, smoky and sweet at the same time. Human, at least, and alive. So. Which side of the door do I want to be on?