I DIDN'T WATCH COLE DRIVE AWAY. I DIDN'T NEED TO. INSTEAD, I TOOK EVERETT by the hand and ran up the mountain to the forest outside where the City should have been, while the rest packed up the cars they'd brought down, and headed back to their house in Canada. But I had something left to do.
"What are we looking for?" Everett asked.
"Andrew seemed to think that Lizzie is out here somewhere. Since I'm a rational person and can remember that we burned her body yesterday, I know it's not her, but it still could be something. So we're looking for something having to do with Lizzie," I said.
"Fair enough," he said.
We wandered all around the invisible walls, eastward and deeper into the mountains, north and higher up the peak.
I didn't expect to find anything, not really. This was at least a moment I could spend with Everett, his hand in mine, while making what seemed like progress.
"Anything happen with Cole I should know about?" he asked.
I shrugged. "He left, didn't he?"
Everett nodded, seeming satisfied. "I guess he wouldn't have if he'd finally gotten what he wanted."
I didn't say anything. What was there to say?
"Do you think he really loves you?"
I thought carefully about what to say, and I settled on the truth. "I think he thinks he does."
Everett thought this over and seemed satisfied with this too.
A few minutes later, we came to a large boulder with a carved stone cross atop it. It had detailed beveled edges, and, most bizarrely, its back was covered in tiny carved numbers. They were uneven yet somehow uniform, done neatly and in square lines but obviously by hand, worn with moss and moisture. The question was, who was supposed to find it?
I looked to Everett. "This cross . . . it does look . . . placed here, doesn't it?"
"Yeah and look at this," he said, pointing to sticks and green leaves sticking out from underneath the base of it. The leaves weren't withered. Someone had set it here recently.
I reached my hand out to it, and before my fingers made contact, I was overwhelmed by a humming and buzzing that felt so familiar to me it may as well have been my own.
It was Lizzie.
I fell to my knees. Everett dropped beside me in a flash. "Sadie?" he asked, frenzied worry coloring his face. "What happened?"
I tried to speak, but I couldn't form the words for what had happened, what I was feeling. And I knew she wasn't here. I knew that. But part of her was. It had to be.
I tried to get to my feet, bracing myself against the boulder, and Everett did the same, using the cross to push himself up.
On contact, out of the pores in the stone cross, a crimson red, mercury-like substance flowed onto his skin. It looked as if the cross were bleeding.
"What is it?" I asked.
He inhaled sharply, a look of pain on his face. "I don't know." As if meant for him, the red substance attached to his skin.
I had no idea what was going on, but the sound of Lizzie got stronger as the red substance flowed onto Everett's hand.
The substance soon coated his entire arm and forearm, forming a glove around his skin. Everett's initial look of stifled pain gave way to a look of terror when his hand began to shimmer and glow a brilliant red. And I had to brace myself against the rock as the crimson blaze intensified the sounds in my ears. I saw Everett's lips moving, but I could hear nothing save for the muddled, reverberating humming in my ears.
Something had gone wrong.