When I stopped shooting, I felt myself being swallowed up in an eternal silence.

My ears rang.

I breathed.

I whispered, “Ben? Griff? You guys okay?”

Nothing.

A black figure rose up, slowly, cautiously, from the flat of the ground.

Then others.

“Jack?” It was Griffin.

“Is anyone hurt?” I called back.

“Jack? Where are you?”

I could see the kid moving around, bent forward, as though he were scanning the ground around him.

“We’re all okay,” Ben said.

I shut my eyes and exhaled.

“Stay there,” I said.

“Jack—” It was Frankie.

“Give me one minute,” I said. “Ben. Griff. Just one fucking minute, okay?”

And Griffin said, “It better be good, Jack.”

thirty-one

Conner was gone.

“Conner!”

I kicked the ground, sending a spray of salt and ash upward in a dusty gray cloud around my feet.

Maybe I’d gotten disoriented, I thought. Maybe he was still lying right where I’d left him. He had to be there.

I began moving back and forth, sweeping the ground with my eyes and feet.

“Con!”

“Jack!” Frankie shouted my name from the distant blank gray of the Marbury night.

I knew he’d be coming this way, too; I could feel it. There was no way to stop him. So I didn’t answer him, hoping Frankie and the others might not see where I was standing.

I whispered for Conner, more frantic now as I began jogging around the empty area where I was certain I’d left him.

My foot twisted, caught up on something.

It was a shirt.

It had to be Conner’s.

“Conner!” I whispered again, but there was no answer.

I jerked my head around, strained to see if I could detect the shapes of the four boys out there, looking for me. And I could hear them moving, the crunch of their boots on the crust of the ground as they came closer and closer.

I picked up the shirt. It was damp from sweat, it stunk, and the collar was slick with snotty blood. Holding the rifle with one hand, I fed the fabric of the shirt back and forth between my fingers, feeling, feeling, trying to find that goddamned lens.

Then I came upon a boot, thirty feet away from where I found Conner’s shirt. It was lying on its side, laces wildly pulled out from eyes, the tongue lolling into the ash like the victim of a strangling.

I had to pick it up, had to look inside it, too.

Nothing.

Fuck this.

“Con. Please!”

Want to play a fucking game, Jack?

Getting warmer?

Colder?

Colder?

A trail of clothes led me out farther into the emptiness of the desert—another boot, empty, socks, wet with Conner’s sweat. Jack liked keeping his lens inside his socks.

But not Conner.

There.

Pants.

And ten feet away from the twisted pants he’d flung away from his burning body, I saw Conner there, like an emaciated insect, naked, skeletal, squatting in the dust and watching me with a dark, empty stare.

“Con?”

I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and slowly, cautiously, I lowered myself so I could scoop up his pants.

“Get away.” Conner’s voice was a garbled, raspy hiss.

“It’s me, Con—”

“I fucking know who you are! You think I fucking don’t know who you are? Get away from me!”

Slowly, steadily, I crept to where I could see him more clearly.

Conner jammed his fingers down into the crusty surface of the salt flat, digging. His hands gripped so tightly into the ground, like he was trying to hold himself down, or as though he were strong enough to keep the world from spinning away beneath our feet. It seemed that every muscle on his body was tensed to the point of bursting, exploding; his face contorted in anger, the tendons in his neck strained taut, like cables.

It was Conner, but it wasn’t Conner.

I watched him as I squatted down and laid the rifle to rest across my knees. Then, cautious and deliberate, I began going through each of the pockets in his discarded pants.

“We’re getting out of here, Con.”

He spoke through bared, gritted teeth. “I … We waited too long. I can’t stop this.…”

And behind me, Ethan’s voice, not twenty feet away from us. “There he is.”

Conner began whimpering. He covered his eyes with twisted, shaking hands. The mark above his groin blazed so fierce.

It could not be too late.

Then I found the lens.

He’d wrapped it up inside a scrap of torn cloth that looked like it had once been a sleeve on his T-shirt, wadded, just like Jack would do, tucked away in one of the buttoned outer pockets on the uniform fatigues of a Ranger.

He began to pant, grunting between breaths. I could hear him swallowing great gobs of drool.

“Get the fuck away from me, Jack Whitmore!” Conner growled. It sounded like it hurt him to free words from his constricted throat. He slammed his fist down into the ground.

Carefully, I placed the wrapped fragment of lens in my palm. Even then, as soon as I held it out beneath the hole that dripped fire from the sky, I could see how the thing burned within the stained cloth.

My hand felt heat, and through the sack in which I’d covered my scar, I saw the seep of blood that spread out across the dirty rag covering my palm.

“It’s going to be okay, Con. I promise.”

How the fuck could I promise that?

Blood ran, tickled the back of my wrist.

Drip.

Conner stood up.

He looked like a bug.

White eye.

Black eye.

The fire brand.

Hands, muscles, twitching like over-tight springs.

He wheezed and drooled.

“A fucking bug!” Ethan shouted.

“No!” I said. “He isn’t! Stay back!”

I jammed my other hand into my pocket.

There it was, the Marbury lens. I could feel it tingle between my thumb and finger.

I pulled it out and placed it on my palm beside the piece wrapped in Conner’s shirtsleeve.

Drip.

*   *   *

Jack is bleeding again.

The sky lights up, an instantaneous dawning of gray Marbury nothingness.

I flip Conner’s lens around, try to unwind its cover.

He slurs, “Get the fuck out of here!”

Conner limps toward me, moving as though he’s fighting himself, giving up.

As my fingers nervously grope the edges of the filthy cloth and begin to pull it free from the lens, I glance across and see the four boys standing, frozen, under the sudden blaze of the sky.

Only Frankie starts coming toward the place where I crouch in the ash.

And on my opposite side is Conner.

The lens tumbles from my bloody hand.

“Fuck!”

Frankie has a bow, captured from one of the dead Hunters. He notches an arrow, pulls it tight against the strain of the bowstring.

All arrows point to the center of the universe.

All arrows point to Jack.

I sweep my hand across the ground, let the other half of the lens fall there.

Conner growls like an animal. He is so close to me now I can feel the heat from his skin.

Frankie raises, aims.

He shouts, “Don’t fucking move, Jack!”

Conner twists his fingers into my hair, grabbing, jerks my head so my chin notches upward. I look at him, but he can’t see me anymore. He clenches his other hand into my throat.

“Con!”

And I can’t breathe.

Blindly, my fingers find the pieces, lift the tattered rag away from the one I’d taken out of Conner’s pocket.

Now I have them both.

Black dots begin to swallow everything I see, a closing aperture on a camera’s lens. I can’t say anything, and when I move my head I can feel Conner’s fingers tear into the flesh on my neck.

But I see Frankie as he releases the arrow.

This is how it always is.

Drip.

I push myself up. It takes all my strength; and I can feel the aching, the blood as it runs down my chest.