Страница 65 из 67
Mutiny. It looks my way once and swiftly rushes off to follow its captors. Guns blaze but many of them are quick to be silenced.Kill them all, I think.Fight nobly and honorably and may you kill them all.
I lift my head. Bernie Kosar is motionless in the grass. Henri, thirty feet away, is motionless as well. I place a hand in the grass and pull myself forward, across the field, inch by inch, dragging myself to Henri.
When I get there his eyes are open slightly; each breath is a fight. Trails of blood run from his mouth and nose. I take him into my arms and I pull him into my lap. His body is frail and weak and I can feel him dying. His eyes flutter open. He looks at me and lifts his hand and presses it to the side of my face. The second he does I begin to cry.
“I’m here,” I say.
He tries to smile.
“I’m so sorry, Henri.” I say. “I’m so sorry. We should have left when you wanted to.”
“Shh,” he says. “It’s not your fault.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say between sobs.
“You did great,” he says in a whisper. “You did so great. I always knew you would.”
“We have to get you to the school,” I say. “Sam could be there.”
“Listen to me, John. Everything,” he says. “Everything you need to know, it’s all in the Chest. The letter.”
“It’s not over. We can still make it.”
I can feel him begin to go. I shake him. His eyes reluctantly reopen. A trail of blood runs from his mouth.
“Coming here, to Paradise, it wasn’t by chance.” I don’t know what he means. “Read the letter.”
“Henri,” I say, and reach down and wipe the blood off his chin.
He looks me in the eye.
“You are Lorien’s Legacy, John. You and the others. The only hope the planet has left. The secrets,” he says, and is gripped by a fit of coughs. More blood. His eyes close again. “The Chest, John.”
I pull him more tightly to me, squeezing him. His body is going slack. Breaths so shallow that they are hardly breaths at all.
“We’ll make it back together, Henri. Me and you, I promise,” I say, and close my eyes.
“Be strong,” he says, and is overtaken by slight coughs, though he tries to speak through them. “This war…Can win…Find the others…. Six…. The power of…,” he says, and trails off.
I try to stand with him in my arms but I have nothing left, hardly enough strength to even breathe. Off in the distance I hear the beast roar. Ca
“I wouldn’t have missed a second of it, kiddo. Not for all of Lorien. Not for the whole damn world,” he says, and when that last word leaves his mouth I know that he is gone. I squeeze him in my arms, shaking, crying, despair and hopelessness taking hold. His hand drops lifelessly to the grass. I cup his head in my hand and hold it close to my chest, and I rock him back and forth and I cry like I’ve never cried before. The pendant around my neck glows blue, grows heavy for just a split second, and then dims to normal.
I sit in the grass and I hold Henri while the last ca
I open my eyes, the scout so close that I can smell it. The bowie knife falls from its hand, and there in its chest, where I assume its heart must be, is the end of a butcher’s knife. The knife is pulled free. The scout drops to its knees, falls to its side, and explodes into a puff of ash. Behind it, holding the knife in her shaky right hand, with tears in her eyes, stands Sarah. She drops the knife and rushes over to me, wrapping her arms around me with my arms around Henri. I hold Henri as my own head falls and the world dims away into nothingness. The aftermath of war, the school destroyed, the trees fallen and heaps of ash piled in the grass of the football field and I still hold Henri. And Sarah holds me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
IMAGES FLICKER, EACH ONE BRINGING ITSown sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst an impenetrable and sightless black and at best a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.
A warm summer day in the cool grass with the sun high in the cloudless sky. The air coming off the water, carrying the freshness of the sea. A man walks up to the house, briefcase in hand. A younger man, brown hair cut short, freshly shaven, dressed casually. A sense of nervousness by the way he switches his briefcase from one hand to the other and the thin layer of sweat glistening on his forehead. He knocks at the door. My grandfather answers, opens the door for the man to enter, then closes it behind him. I resume my romping in the yard. Hadley changing forms, flying, then dodging, then charging. Wrestling with one another and laughing until it hurts. The day passing as time only can under the reckless abandon of childhood’s invincibility, of its i
Fifteen minutes pass. Maybe less. At that age a day can last forever. The door opens and closes. I look up. My grandfather is standing with the man I had seen approach, both of them looking down at me.
“There is somebody I would like you to meet,” he says.
I stand from the grass and clap my hands together to knock away the dirt.
“This is Brandon,” my grandfather says. “He is your Cepan. Do you know what that means?”
I shake my head. Brandon. That was his name. All these years and only now does it come back to me.
“It means he’s going to be spending a lot of time with you from here on out. The two of you, it means you are co
I nod and walk to the man and I offer him my hand as I have seen done many times by grown men before. The man smiles and drops to one knee. He takes my small hand in his right and he closes his fingers around it.
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” I say.
Bright, kind eyes full of life look into mine as though offering a promise, a bond, yet I’m too young to know what that promise or bond really means.
He nods and brings his left hand on top of his right, my tiny hand lost somewhere in the middle. He nods at me, still smiling.
“My dear child,” he says. “The pleasure is all mine.”
I am jolted awake. I lie on my back, my heart racing, breathing heavily as though I had been ru
I take a deep breath and exhale. A single tear rolls down the side of my face. I keep my eyes closed. An irrational hope that if I don’t find the day then the day won’t find me, that the things in the night will be nullified. My body shudders, a silent cry turning into a hard one. I shake my head and let it in. I know that Henri is dead and that all the hope in the world won’t change it.