The Hearth Contract

Chapter 17: Hard Left

The box was from Second Helping and there were five in it.

He ate them standing at the counter with the lid folded back, and when he came back to himself the paper was empty and his fingers were shiny to the second knuckle. They had still been warm. Nobody ate five of those for the taste.

He turned the lid over and read it twice. Comeback Cakes, in small print under the logo, and a smear where the price had been. No card. No note.

Which left one candidate. She was the kind of woman who would send him as much of a thing as she thought he needed and never once mention that she had done the counting. He had watched her do it at her own table a few days ago — count the plates off the tray, the coins in the jar by the register — without ever looking down at her hands.

So it was a courtesy, or it was a measurement, and there was no third thing it could be.

He had been careful with her. He was almost certain he had been careful with her.

By then he was a little bit too full.

He put the empty box in the trash so he would not have to keep looking at it, and went upstairs.

He sat on the floor with his back against the bed, crossed his legs, and went in after it.

That part he knew how to do. The cakes came apart inside him like wood in a fire, and what they had been holding went up into the thing that was actually him — the flame, the body under the body, the one that had been around a long time before there was an Owen Penn to ride. It took the power and it grew. Not a lot. But a size, and he had been running short for a while now.

And then he didn't hold it.

The flame turned over. Once, in one direction, following a draft. Less than a second, and it was done.

He was on his feet with his eyes open before the thought caught up.

The cold came up the back of his neck and over his scalp. His whole body went quiet and listened. He had felt this before, in other places, under other skies. The familiarity was the worst of it. He knew it the way you know a step that isn't there.

He went to the window.

The sky had been flat all day. One gray lid with nothing in it — the kind of sky this town put up in summer instead of heat. Now there were lines in it. Not strikes yet. The place where strikes get made — something high up, pulling itself together, and doing it directly over his roof.

So that was all it took. One turn of a flame. One breath of power spent in the wrong place, and the rules had him.

He had known they would, eventually. He had lived under a few skies by now, and every one of them had something standing behind the weather that counted what you spent. Some of them were slow to wake. This one was already awake.

He needed to not be here, and there was no plan under that. Just a direction.

Downstairs, the television was going in the front room. He went past the doorway on the balls of his feet and Ms. Tanner never turned her head.

The bicycle was under the eaves on the side of the house where it always was. He got it off the wall and walked it down the steps.

He could have called out. It would have cost him four seconds.

He got on and pushed off.

He rode the roads that ran the town out. Past the last of the porch lights, past the school with its lot empty, past the gas station burning its lights over nothing, and then out where the houses thinned down to shoulder and ditch and the wall of trees.

He picked streets by their windows. Dark porch, car not pulling out, nobody out walking a dog. Empty, empty, gone.

The wind took his breathing away from him, so he could not hear it, but he could feel it, going too fast and too shallow out of a chest that did not know what it was afraid of and had settled on everything. The body he was wearing belonged to a kid named Owen Penn. He was using the boy's name and sleeping in the boy's bed, and if the sky got him, the boy would go first and go all the way, and his own odds after that weren't worth running.

The sky was wrong in the west, where the light still was. A band of yellow-green laid along the bottom of all that gray, like something behind the whole thing had been switched on.

He did not know how long he had been riding when he started telling himself he had read it wrong. That it was a summer sky doing summer, and he had run out of a house over weather.

Then it came again — not at the back of his neck this time, but lower, inside him, where the flame was. The flame drew down flat and lay still.

He caught the silver in the corner of a cloud, a slit of it, opening, and he looked up.

Looking up was the mistake. Under him the front wheel found a rock the size of a fist and turned out from under the bicycle, and the bicycle went over, and he went over with it. Gravel, then shoulder, then the side of his face. His ears rang. He ended on his back with one hand still on the bar and nothing at all in the other.

And the sky came down.

It came down, and then it changed its mind.

Thirty feet up, the strike bent. Hard, and to the left, the way a car turns when the driver finally sees you. It left the road, crossed the ditch, and went into a tree.

The tree was young and thin and took all of it. The crown went up in orange and then in smoke, and something deep in the wood cracked, long and slow, like a chair giving up. The tree made a noise, short and thin, more hinge than voice, with a wet splinter on the end. Then every leaf on it shook at once — all of them, one motion, the whole crown at the same time, with nothing else in the woods moving.

Then it stopped. The noise, the shaking, all of it in the same half second, and the smoke went up straight.

He was not watching the tree. He was on his back in the gravel with his eyes on the sky, waiting for the second one.

Nothing came.

He counted to be sure, and the cold at the back of his neck loosened, and then let go. Above him the cloud went on being a cloud, walking east, with nothing left in it for him.

He sat up. His side hurt when he breathed, and his hands shook, and that was the whole inventory.

Why.

He came at it from four sides and got the same nothing each time. It had been on him. It had been sure of him — he had felt it take his measure, the way a dog takes your measure through a fence. And then it had gone off and hit a tree.

Unless.

He went back through it slower. After the crash, flat on his back, he had pulled in — he remembered doing it — the flame folded down small and boring against the body, the shape a thing makes when it wants to be passed over. If he had done that in time, then there had been nothing up there with a shape worth holding, and the whole thing had slid off him and gone looking for the nearest thing that would take a hit.

It didn't add up. He turned it twice and it didn't add up, and it was what he had. He would take it.

He got up in pieces. He set the bicycle back on its wheels and stood over it and went down his own frame by feel, looking for the broken part, and there wasn't one. Nothing a day wouldn't close.

The tree was still standing. Still smoking, giving off a smell like scorched sugar. He filed it with everything else from the last four minutes, which he had no plans to open again.

He rode home on the shoulder, slow, both hands on the bars. The town came back at him out of the dark with all its lights on and nobody in it. Nobody had come out to look.

Ms. Tanner's television was still going in the front room when he put the bicycle back under the eaves. Same laugh track, same volume. The house had not moved.

He let himself in through the kitchen door and went up and sat on the bed with the light off until the shaking stopped, and then he sat there a while longer.

This place had rules, and tonight the rules had found him, and he was still here. He did not know how much of that last part was his doing. Sitting there in the dark, he decided it was all of it.

Sooner, then. Whatever recovery took — how much he ate, what it cost him, whose table it put him at — he was going to do it sooner.