After her friends left, Alma headed up to bed. Her parents had agreed to let her sleep in her room that night.
“We’ll be checking on you though, Alma,” her father had said. “You’re going to have to earn our trust back.”
In her room, Alma turned out her light. Her curtains were open, and starlight was filtering in, glinting off the element containers on her bookshelf. Without the quintescope, the earth was a dusty rock. The water was muddy and stagnant. And the wind jar looked completely empty, with the windmill barely fluttering within.
Her friends wanted to keep trying. But Alma didn’t think she could.
“I’m sorry, Starling,” she whispered to the closed window. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Then there was a knock—the second knock of the night—and Dustin’s scowling face appeared.
Alma scrambled over to the window, trying to move quickly so that Dustin wouldn’t knock again but not so quickly that her parents or James would hear her. The window was still blocked by the bolts her parents had installed, but she lifted it the six inches she could.
“Hey, were you talking to yourself?” Dustin asked, peering through the opening at her.
“Shh,” Alma whispered. “Yes, I was.”
“You do that a lot,” Dustin said.
“I know,” Alma replied. “What are you doing here?”
She noticed suddenly that he looked terrible. There were dark circles around his eyes, and he was chewing on his lip, and his hands kept balling into fists, then opening, over and over.
“I climbed up,” he said. “I just—I wanted to tell you that I was sorry. I’m sorry about everything. About pushing you and yelling at you that one day and about—about the fire.” He shook his head, eyes down. “I’m so sorry about the fire. My mom told me how bad your hands were.”
“Your mom?”
“Yeah, my mom. She said she and Mrs. Johnson were your nurses last night.”
Alma pictured the woman with the blond-gray ponytail who had helped her so expertly last night, who had spoken so soothingly. “I thought your mom had panic attacks like me,” she said.
Dustin shrugged. “Yeah, but not like twenty-four hours a day. She’s still a normal person with a normal job. Anyway, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m—why I’m not nice. I’ve always been that way.”
“Always? I don’t think you can be born not nice,” Alma said, tucking what Dustin had said about his mother away to consider later.
“I don’t know about that,” Dustin replied, gripping the window ledge. “I just know I’ve never—you know how Shirin is always smiling? And you know how Hugo is—he’s always right? He always knows everything.”
“I’m not like that though,” Alma said. “I’m not always happy. I’m not always right.”
“But you have other stuff,” Dustin said. “You have ideas and you—you believe in things. Not everyone has that.”
It was the same thing that Shirin and Hugo had said, and Alma still didn’t know what to make of this, so she said, “Well, you saved me in the Deep Downs.”
“Only because it was my fault,” Dustin muttered. “And then you saved me.”
“You were brave,” Alma said. “You are brave. And—and determined. You wanted to help us.”
“You didn’t want me there though. I followed you.”
Alma couldn’t deny that this was true. “We didn’t want you there,” she agreed. “And you know why. But maybe now we understand you better, and maybe now you understand us better. I’m glad you were part of our quest. We needed someone determined and brave.”
Dustin was quiet for a minute. “I’d rather be happy all the time,” he said. “Or know everything.”
“No one’s happy all the time,” Alma said, smiling a little as she said the words that had been said to her over and over again now. “No one can know anything for sure. And no one can be everything. That’s why we need each other.”
Dustin seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he put his head down and started rooting through something he’d brought with him to the roof. A moment later, he came back up with a gleaming object clutched in his hands.
It was a jar. A bronze-tinted jar with a copper triangle on its rounded side and a bronze cap that he unscrewed and removed. Inside, there was a small copper spike, and Alma watched as Dustin pulled on it, extending it like a radio antenna. The spike, now several feet high, was connected to dozens of strands of copper wiring that filled the bottom of the jar.
The fire jar.
“I found it a while ago,” Dustin said. “In the Fifth Point. I think you light the top, like a candle, and then the fire travels down to those little wires. When we were at Hugo’s, I thought—I thought that if you lit the fire, I could get the flames in there. I wanted to be the one to do it. I wanted to be—I don’t know, part of the Astronomy Club, I guess. But I think I’m supposed to give it to you.”
“Why do you think that?” Alma asked.
Dustin placed the jar on the windowsill. “I’ve been out here for a while,” he said. “I came because I thought—I thought I saw a light outside my window.”
Alma gasped. “Was it sort of red gold?” she asked, hardly daring to hope.
“No,” Dustin said. He shook his head. “It was blue. Anyway, I followed it, and it led me here, to your house. I thought maybe I’d apologize, but then I got nervous. So I went around back, and I saw that crater you told me about. Your quintescope was out there—did you know you left it out there? Here.” He grabbed the scope from the roof and shoved it through the gap in the window. “Anyway, I was looking through that, and then I thought I saw that light again, only this time it was kind of reddish and gold. But it was inside your house, this light. And it wasn’t a star. It was you, Alma. I could see you through your window. And you were shining.”