“I think she might have loved you, you know,” Lewis says.
“I know.”
Clark reaches for Lewis and at first he flinches from her. Her hand pauses in the air between them and then continues and she runs her fingers across his scalp, his hair now as white and stiff as a horsehair brush. “What happened to you?” she says.
“You. You happened.”
She smiles with her whole face, everything bending into an expression of warmth. “Did you ever think you’d see me again?”
“I hoped I would.”
“What’s going on in that head of yours?”
When he thinks about the Clark he grew up with and the Clark who stands beside him now, he might as well be staring at a mirror with a crack running through it. He sees a similar division in himself. While the Sanctuary brutalized them, the journey has humanized them. He is not the same man; she is not the same woman. To blame her for what she did would be to blame a hard-faced stranger. He would have never been capable of such a gesture before, but he takes her hand now and their fingers knit together.
Lewis blows out a sigh, and, like an echo, another explosion concusses the air.
More and more people appear in the streets. They appear frenzied, lost. They run one way, pause, and then run the next, like ants rushing out of a kicked hill. The sky is dirty with smoke. Maybe they are afraid. Maybe they should be afraid. Maybe they need a wall of their own.
“Somebody is fighting back,” he says.
Clark sees him, knows the potential inside him more clearly than Burr ever could. “So are we going to join them or fucking what?”
He feels a small flash of hope once more. “I thought I came here to join something. Now I understand it’s to stop something.”
“That’s the spirit.”
He leans against the window, pressing his cheek against the cold glass, fogging it with his breath, trying to see where the latest explosion has come from.
That is when the first gull swings by, a flash of white that startles Lewis back a step. It is followed by another, this one tapping at the glass, chipping it with its beak.
He looks up and sees a flock swarming the sky, so many of them that they make the yard swim with shadows. He sees, then, in the center of the lawn, Gawea staring up at him. The gulls scream and her black eyes shine and she raises a hand to him in greeting or apology. He returns the gesture, his hand flat on the glass.
Behind them, in the hallway, there are voices. Lewis cannot hear the words but recognizes them as pitched high with anger. This is followed by the thunder of a body rolling down the stairs. A second of silence passes. The knob turns and catches and shakes.
There is a bang and the door strains against its hinges. Then another that rains splinters. Then another — and the door crashes inward and Colter steps through the storm of dust and motes of plaster. He waves them forward with his prosthetic. “Come on already. Didn’t you hear me knocking?”
Chapter 58
THE STREETS ARE buzzing with people, but they are distracted by the explosions and give the four of them no more than a passing glance. Some wear necklaces linked with shells. Some have colored scars and pearls jeweling their noses and ears, forked beards or strange braids stiffened by egg whites. Lewis sees one man with no legs dragging himself along on a wheeled sled. Another with what appears to be a fleshy tail hanging out the back of his pants. So many have physical deformities of one kind or another, and so many more are brightened by sores and lumped with tumors.
Only one man calls out for them to stop. He reaches for the pistol at his belt. But his attention soon turns skyward, where he sees the birds, a white cloud of gulls, all screeching at once. Gawea sends them rushing down. Their white wings make the air appear stormed with windblown paper. Lewis throws up his hands, but none molest him. They concentrate on the man with the pistol, who vanishes into a cyclone of beaks and wings and webbed claws and eyes as black as those of the girl who commands them.
The gulls depart as suddenly as they arrive. They leave behind a damp, musty smell and hundreds of feathers pinwheeling the air and the body of a man with hollowed eyes and bones glimpsed through the many holes in his skin.
They hurry on, down gravel roads, past rows of houses, until they push into the moss-furred woods and then find the bay beyond. Lewis feels suddenly uncollared as he escapes the town, able to breathe better with every step he takes, distancing himself. With the dangerous attraction of Burr so close, he cannot help but think about the black hole at the heart of every galaxy, and how the biggest grow out of elliptical galaxies, where black holes merge and become one, forming antimatter more powerful and dangerous than any other force in existence. He cannot allow himself to be taken again.
They splash along the beach until the cliffs fall away, replaced by sand dunes that roll into a hillside choked with rubber-leaved salal and bony manzanita. They find a cedar with a kink of roots hanging over a shallow gully and they settle beneath it to rest.
Lewis looks to Gawea and says, “You came back for me.”
“All this time you’ve been following me. I decided it was time to follow you.”
“We need to find who set off those explosions. Can you help?”
She nods and looks to the sky, where the cloud of gulls spins. At that instant they break apart and spread in every direction.
* * *
The sewage-treatment facility is north of Astoria, on a peninsula that reaches like a mandible across the mouth of the Columbia. There are massive open-air cauldrons, walled in by concrete, with metal walkways reaching across them. This is where they find the sisters, who dip long poles with screened scoops into the sludge beneath them and splat it into one of many five-gallon buckets they have lined up on the walkway. Their rifles are strapped across their broad backs, and when Lewis calls out to them, they drop the poles and quickly arm themselves.
“I’m a friend,” he says.
They do not ask him what he wants, but they do not fire either, when he approaches them with his hands up. The rest of his party remains below. The seagulls whirl overhead and dapple him with shadows.
At the museum, in his office, there was a section of his desk worn smooth and discolored from where he always rested his arm. It was the best kind of polish, shabbied over time, earned. That is what their faces remind him of. The women resemble each other, broad figures, short graying haircuts that look like tweed caps set on their heads. They both wear denim pants, canvas coats. If he didn’t have a rifle pointed at his chest, he might notice more about them, but for now, one is in front, the other in back, and that is what distinguishes them.
“What do you think?” one says.
“Don’t know,” the other says.
“I don’t think he’s one of them.”
“You one of them?”
“No,” Lewis says.
“What about the rest of them. The ones down below?”
“They’re good.”
“They’re good, huh?” The women look at each other. Some sort of unspoken communication seems to pass between them. “I don’t know.”
“Weird,” the other one says. “There’s something weird about you.”
Lewis lowers his hands and they tense their rifles. “We want to help you,” he says.
“Help us?”
“You mean you want to harvest some algae?”
He can’t tell if they’re joking. Everything they say comes across as a gruff bark. “You set off the explosions earlier today?”
“You bet we did.”
“We blew the shit out of them.”
“Well,” Lewis says. “We want to help. We want to join your army.”