In the cane field below them, a small fire was burning.
“The flare,” Sugar said. “Let’s go.” He turned sideways and began to run down the dike toward the stadium. Charlie followed. Or he tried to. His ankle groaned, and his legs were growing heavy—too heavy to listen to him. He slipped and slid and ran again. He slipped and almost screamed when his ankle scraped across a jagged stone.
Sugar was waiting on a dirt track at the bottom of the dike. Charlie was better on flat ground, but not much. After fifty yards, he fell. The next time he fell, he threw up.
He only had two glass bottles with breath from Mrs. Wisdom’s ironwood trees. Two. And it was already time for one of them.
Charlie staggered off the track and found himself facedown on soft earth. The dust seemed full of fiery sparks. Bad sign. He tried to blink them away.
Sugar dropped onto his knees beside him. “I’m carrying you, Charlie,” he said, sliding his hands under Charlie’s arms. “I’ll get you to Mack.”
“No. Bag,” Charlie grunted. “Get it off.”
As Sugar reached for the bag, stink swept over them, and they heard the sound of running feet.
Sugar dove onto his belly beside Charlie as a pack of six Gren flashed by. They wore animal skins and struggled as they ran, shoving and slashing like they hated each other. The cloud of reek trailed after them toward the stadium.
“No girls,” Charlie muttered. He felt hot all over. “Why no girls?”
Sugar rose to his knees and slid Charlie’s arms out of the bag’s shoulder straps. Charlie was surprised at how heavy his arms were when they were limp and useless.
“They have a mother,” Charlie added. His voice sounded funny inside his head. “So there could be girls.”
“Maybe that’s why,” Sugar whispered, lifting the bag. “Mrs. Wiz says these things are all envy, right? A selfish dude hates on his sons. Maybe the Mother doesn’t want the competition.”
Sugar opened the bag flap and reached inside. “What do you need in here? Knife? Bottles?”
Acid boiled up into Charlie’s throat. A hammer jumped inside his head. “Panther,” he said.
“You’re scaring me, bro.” Sugar pulled out one of the glass bottles. He held it up. “Medicine, right?” He shook it. “Lead heavy but there’s nothing in it.”
Charlie fought to raise his dead arm. He made one finger almost point. “Panther,” he said again.
Across the track, the big cat was inching out of tall grass and stray cane, muscles taut beneath its fur, golden eyes wide.
Sugar turned and threw up his arms as the cat sprang across the track and slammed into him. They tumbled into the cane, and Charlie’s eyes closed.
He heard the cat return. It gripped Charlie’s shoulder at the base of his neck with its teeth and dragged him across the ground. His heels bounced, and his ankle hurt. Sugar was yelling again. The cat let go, and Charlie’s head thumped against the ground.
Charlie found himself drifting toward something warmer and deeper than sleep. While his body’s eyes were shut, some other eyes opened. He saw that he was lying on a vast bed of fiery sparks. The sparks tugged at him, stinging his ankle when they touched it. It would stop stinging soon. His sparks would join the others. He would be muck.
Smooth cold slid into his mouth. Like syrup without the sticky. If syrup could be as heavy as lead but made from air. If air could taste like silver and forests and stars and ice and years and years and years. If joy and lightning and glory and grief could be coiled up like a spring and dropped inside you.
Boom.
Charlie’s nerves sharpened into crystals. His ankle screamed, but every other part of him was screaming, too. He was made of screaming. It was as if he were an arm or a leg that had grown numb, but now the blood was roaring back with an army of pricking needles. His eyes, his spine, his tongue, his throat—all of him tingled with the agony of returning life.
Sugar stood over him, holding an empty bottle. He was yelling, but his voice was nothing compared to the icebergs smashing inside Charlie’s eardrums. Charlie slammed his arms against the ground and jumped to his feet. He shook. He rolled his shoulders and swung his arms and bounced. He twitched and shivered and kicked. The tingling was growing, and Charlie felt like he was going to explode. Like he was going to shriek off into the air like a firework and light fields on fire where he landed. He yelled and then yelled some more, and when he inhaled, it felt like his lungs were pressing against needles. Despite the pain, they wanted to keep filling, they wanted to expand until they splintered his ribs.
And then Charlie was still, his head was back, his face up. Hot tears slipped over his jaw and down his neck. The clouds had broken. He could see stars. He thought he knew what it must feel like to be one. He understood how a tree could spring up in a grave. If he died right here, with the breath of the ironwood in him, he knew another tree would come up for him.
“Charlie,” Sugar said behind him. “Charlie, the panther …”
Charlie looked down. The panther stood directly in front of him. He realized he’d seen her eyes before, in a tree above him. He’d helped Cotton honor her fallen mate. She was Lio’s.
The panther bit the hem of Charlie’s shirt and tugged. Mrs. Wisdom had said that Lio’s panther had been hunting the Mother with him. Lio’s last panther.
“I have to go,” Charlie said. He looked back at Sugar. His brother was wide-eyed and confused. Charlie’s bag was on the ground between them. “Find Mack. Tell him everything—Mrs. Wisdom, Cotton, me, all those sick sleeping boys. And stay clear of the Stanks.”
Charlie walked back to his bag, his legs shivering as he stepped, wanting to spring. He lifted the bag and slid it onto his shoulders.
“What’s your real name?” Charlie asked his brother. “I should know.”
Sugar bit his lip, almost objecting. Almost.
“Bobby,” he said. “Bobby Reynolds Diaz. But don’t you ever call me that.”
Charlie nodded. “Thanks for finding me. And for … telling me.” He was feeling a lot of things, impossible things, and most of them didn’t have words. “I’m sorry that our dad … I’m sorry that he was like that. To you.”
Sugar smiled, barely. “Wasn’t roses on your end, either. I wouldn’t trade.”
“If I don’t … if we don’t …” Charlie stopped. The panther was nudging the back of his leg. “Tell my mom I love her. Tell Mack thanks for everything. And please be Molly’s brother. She needs one. Everything I have is hers. Including you.”
“Tell them yourself,” Sugar said. “I’m coming with you.”
But Charlie had already turned. He was running toward the stadium and Taper beyond it, matching strides with the panther loping beside him.
Sugar shouted and jumped forward. He dug in and lengthened his stride and chewed up the dirt track at his top speed, and still Charlie pulled away. Forty yards, and Sugar slowed, chest heaving.
Charlie was gone.
Charlie was running at daydream speeds. Years before, when Mack would drive him to school, he’d press his head against the glass and imagine running alongside the car, leaping roads and mailboxes and pedestrians and cyclists as he kept pace. Daydream fast.
The panther turned into a field with waist-high cane. Charlie turned after him, ignoring the blades slashing his arms as his feet pummeled soft earth. They crossed a dirt road and the panther leapt a canal. Charlie planted and followed, arms swinging, floating too far, too high. The panther landed and turned. Charlie landed and tumbled into a wall of stalks.
The pain was like laughter. Like a joke between his already-throbbing ankle and the rest of his body. Charlie fought free and kept running.
A train mounded high with burned and diced sugar bones was rolling through the cane without lights, without bells or horns or warnings, clicking and sparking on tired rails. The panther turned and led Charlie alongside it, lengthening its stride. Charlie followed, the burning in his muscles ignored by something older and stron
ger and more stubborn. They were near the train engine, then they were pulling away, and the panther leapt the tracks.
Charlie was alive, and he was quick. Something inside him that had only ever whispered was roaring. Every spark in every cell of his body was firing. He was planting his left foot. He was turning in front of the train. He was jumping.
He was flying.
The engine slid behind him as he twisted in the air and landed. The panther was waiting. A gravel road ran between cane fields to a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence was the underbelly of shaking bleachers, beaten like drums by thousands of feet. Beyond that, white lights on green grass. Boys running in bright helmets.
Charlie could smell popcorn and hot dogs and pizza. He could smell fryers frying. But there was something else, too. Something much, much worse.
Charlie watched the panther accelerate, then rise up and over the fence. He watched her clear the line of cops on the other side, and saw them jolt in surprise and reach for their guns when she landed. And then Charlie was jumping. His hands grabbed the top bar and his legs swung to the side. He rotated and landed with hands up, facing the cops.
“Don’t” was all he said. And he was running again.
Charlie followed the panther past an ambulance, past a marching band with dancers and cheerleaders and three drum majors with huge hats and massive scepter batons, all assembled and waiting for halftime.
Then he followed her out under the lights as she shot onto the field.
The crowd jumped to its feet, and Charlie saw the ball flying. He saw three players racing toward him with eyes up, tracking the ball. They didn’t see him.
But the crowd did. There was a slow moment of pure silence. And then shrieks. Shock. Fear. Laughter.
The panther darted between the players, sending one of them tumbling. Charlie jumped the player as he rolled, spreading his legs above flailing cleats.
On the sideline, Sheriff Leroy Spitz tugged off his sun visor and leaned forward squinting. The ball was caught. The player scored. But no one cared. There was a boy chasing a panther—a panther—across the field. Spitz burst out laughing.
“Hell in a basket,” Spitz said. “I told Mack that kid would show. I told him.”
Hydrant pulled off his sunglasses. “He got some speed.”
Spitz looked around. “Bobby should have been here for this. He shoulda seen his boy run, shoulda seen his boy fly.”
Spitz laughed again as Charlie and the panther shot past the rest of the players, more than a few of them scrambling out of the way, and scattered the other school’s band.
“I tell you what,” Spitz said, settling his visor back onto his head. “Most boys chase rabbits.”
Charlie followed the panther through a tunnel of shocked kids in baggy uniforms, holding horns and strapped to drums. He and the panther jumped another fence and the lights were behind them. Wisps of reek drifted around them and then were gone, clinging close to the stadium.
Away from people, the panther slowed to a trot, her head forward and low like she was hunting. Charlie didn’t feel quite as springy as he had when they’d started. His lungs were heaving quickly, and pain was more noticeable underneath the cold, sharp burning life that had filled him.
They cut through Taper, jogging behind houses, hopping fences, disturbing dogs, avoiding nothing. Then Charlie could see the church.
The panther turned onto a road between a cane field and a canal that ran straight back toward the dark wall of the swamp. Charlie knew where they were going.
The panther quickened her pace, her tail stiff and her shoulders rocking but her head and neck always level with the ground. Charlie could feel her tension. Something was different in the fields. Something had changed, and not for the better.
The panther slipped off the road and padded through soft, thick muck cut bare between fields to control the burns. Road. Track. Ditch. Track. Canal bank. The panther was choosing her course carefully, sinking lower and lower to the ground as she went. Doubling back. Circling around.
Charlie didn’t argue.
When they were right beside the swamp, dark trees jutting against the sky, she went into cane too dense for him to walk through.
As Charlie paused, a breeze rustled through the cane and the smell hit him like a fist. He dropped to his knees and stifled a gag. Now he knew why they’d been circling. They were downwind.
Holding his breath, he wormed into the cane, grateful that the wind would cover his rattling with its own.
The darkness under the leaves was total. His hands and knees sank inches into the cool, silty muck, too sheltered to have become mud in the rain. His hand found the panther’s tail, and it twitched, thumping him in the face. Lowering himself onto his stomach, he slithered forward. Trying not to smell. Trying to ignore the resentments springing up in his mind:
Mack was Molly’s real father. She had it so much better than Charlie ever would.
His mother would never stop being scared. He needed a mother who was brave.
Cotton was dying in some happy dream. Charlie was going to die in a nightmare.
Sugar was a football star.
As soon as he pushed one away, the next one would pop up. Anger. Hate. Self-pity. Anger. Just about every human on the planet was better off than Charlie at this moment. Every single one of them.
Charlie couldn’t bite his brain, so he bit his lip. Not true, he thought. He adored Molly. He would die for Molly. He apologized to his mother in his head. He threw his arms around her and lifted her off the ground until she laughed. If she hadn’t been brave, he wouldn’t still be alive. Cotton had gotten hurt saving Charlie, and he wasn’t going to die. Sugar should be a football star. He should be winning a game right now. But he’d given that up to look for a brother who’d known nothing about him.
Charlie saw light. Fire. He pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose, then pressed his face between two cool stalks of cane. The panther was warm and solid against his shoulder. They had cut across the corner of the field and were looking at the trees. At the canal bank. At the mound that bridged it.
There were a dozen Gren at least. The muck on their skin was still wet. Every one of them was holding a torch. Every one of them held a weapon—clubs, hooks, claws, spikes, spears.
A tall, slender woman stood above them on the mound that dammed the canal, just beyond where the chalk death stone would be. She wore a fur hood and cloak that reached the ground, hiding all but her mouth in shadow. There was a man’s body curled on the stone at her feet. Torchlight glistened on his dark skin. There was a broken sword beside his hand. A helmet lay on the ground beside his head.
Lio.
The woman spoke and it was like the voice came from behind her, like she was funneling wind and releasing it in the shape of vast but quiet words.
“The stone is broken. The lion soul has departed. I have killed the one you could not.” The cane swayed. Charlie felt the panther whisper a growl beside him.
“My mounds will draw strength enough for you, my newborn sons, and many more to come.” The wind grew and the voice with it. “Gather them for me.” The torches flickered. The Gren stirred.
“Burn the church. Burn the fields. Make this your mother’s holy place. Quiet every mouth but mine.”
The wind swirled, and the cane with it.
“Your older brothers begin already. Go.”
The Stanks opened their mouths in silent howls and then sprang away. Only one Gren remained, tall and broad and still. Shadow and darkness clung to him where the others had worn skins. Light avoided settling on his face. Charlie knew that he had seen that darkness before. He had smelled its stench. The Mother looked down at Lio. She pushed back her hood. Her hair was thick and straight and white, like ice spun into silk. Her face was pale underneath a spatter of freckles, like a thrown stain.
Charlie held his breath. He was looking at a version of Mrs. Wisdom, but taller, thinner, and without the softness or the goodness or the creases of age. r />
She nudged Lio with her toe.
“Bring him,” she said. And as the shadowy Gren bent over Lio’s body, she turned and disappeared into the swamp.
When Sugar came to a stop outside the stadium fence, the teams were already in the locker rooms for halftime and the first band was marching onto the field. Rows of girls in flowing gold pants led them, flags snapping and twirling in their hands.
The crowd was restless, angry, the mood wrong for halftime. Too few people laughing, too few heading for the concession stand. Sugar looked up at the scoreboard. The game was close. It didn’t make sense.
The announcer’s voice crackled through old speakers. “Behold! The ladies of elegance …”
Flags arced high and were caught again. Sugar scrambled up the fence and dropped inside. The whole place smelled like the bathrooms had overflowed, like Porta-Johns had been upended under the bleachers.
“Aren’t they elegant?” the announcer asked as the crowd started raining insults down on the girls.
Sugar frowned and jogged toward the locker room. He needed to find a coach with a phone and Mack’s number. On the opposite sideline, he saw two cheerleaders fighting. The others joined in. Then one of the flag girls turned and broke her flag across another girl’s back. The music staggered and struggled. A trombone was kicking a saxophone. A bass drum knocked a smaller drum flat. In the bleachers, fights were breaking out. Someone was thrown over a rail.
All around, cops were springing into action, racing toward the brawlers. As they ran, Sugar saw a shorter fat cop pull his gun and shoot a faster lean cop in the leg. As the fat one passed the wounded man, he threw his hands in the air in triumph, like the winner of a race. He got a baton across the kneecaps for his trouble and tumbled to the turf.
At the far end of the field, beneath the scoreboard, Sugar saw Stanks pour over the fence and race across the grass toward the stands.