“Way I love them.” Licking his fingers to avoid the scorch, Peter pinched blackened, molten marshmallows onto squares of Hershey’s chocolate atop a graham cracker, sandwiched this with another cracker, and pressed until the white lava of marshmallows overflowed. Peter crammed the treat into his mouth. “And faster,” he said around gooey s’more. “You going to let me get sick all by myself ?”
“No,” Chris said, but he brought his marshmallows no closer to the fire. He tipped a look at the night sky, milky with stars. The eye of the moon, whiter than a marshmallow, stared.
That’s not right. Grimacing, he put a hand to a sudden ache in his chest: a weird pressure. I’m dreaming again.
“I’m not in any rush.” The flames pulsed. Chris’s breath fogged, although neither he nor Peter wore jackets or even hiking boots, just jeans, tees, sneakers. “I like it here.”
“Me, too,” Peter said, his voice gluey. His hair spilled around his shoulders like spun gold. His eyes were blue diamonds. “One of my favorite places on earth.”
“But we can’t be there, can we?” Chris thought they were on top of a mountain, high above a valley. Yet there was only the fire crackling on a table of flat rock and nothing beyond Peter but a dark blank. Considering the stars, maybe this was outer space. Or heaven.
“No. The fire’s not allowed for real, but it’s my space, my rules. My marshmallows.” Swallowing, Peter skimmed his tongue over a molten dribble and groaned. “And chocolate. Oh my God, I forgot how good that tastes.”
“So, we’re in your head?”
“Pretty much. More like a . . . daydream. My safe place. Kind of where the last part of me hangs.” Peter speared marshmallows with his stick. “Better get a move on with that s’more before they yank you back.”
Yank me back? “How long do we have? I miss talking.” This was not what he’d wanted to say, but the truth was embarrassing. He winced at another jab of pain. “What is that? Feels like someone’s banging on my chest.”
“Because he is. Trying to save your ass.”
“What?” His brain caught up to what Peter had just said, and he recalled Jess’s warning or, perhaps, her prophesy: Someone will die. Someone must. “Saving my ass. You mean, I’m—”
“This close.” Peter pinched an inch of air between two fingers. “Heart stopped, and you’re not breathing. I think Tom might’ve cracked a rib. Guy from the Red Cross who did ACLS for the deputies said it happens sometimes.”
“Tom.” He blinked. “Alex’s Tom?”
“Yeah, Al—” Peter seemed to catch himself. “Her,” he said, nibbling on a marshmallow. “You know these are good raw? I forgot that, too. That’s the hell of this. I can come here, but I’ll forget you and this. It’s the only way I can keep this all safe from him. It’s like I’m behind this one-way mirror, only I can’t mike in and nobody outside knows I’m here.”
This was so different from his previous experiences. Chris felt . . . safer. “Why am I not seeing you in a nightmare? That’s all I’ve had until now,” Chris said, thinking that he also hadn’t tried dying quite so many times before either. He stared at his stick with its marshmallows that refused to brown—and what was up with that? On an impulse, he thrust the marshmallows into the flames. Nothing happened. The marshmallows didn’t bubble or turn black. Withdrawing the stick, he broke off the tip and tossed it into the fire and watched as the flames refused to claim it. A log popped, releasing a swarm of sparks, but the wood itself remained unchanged. Extending his hand, he let his palm drift close and then into the flames. No heat. No pain.
“Like I said, we’re in my special place. I guess all this”—Peter plucked up a marshmallow and stared as if studying a lab specimen— “probably can’t work for you.”
“Why?” Breaking a wedge of chocolate, Chris touched the dark wafer to his tongue. For an instant, he thought of Meg Murry sitting down to a meal that tasted of sand while her brother, lost and already under IT’s control, ate quite happily. The chocolate had no smell and less taste than air. “Why haven’t I been able to come here from the very beginning?”
“Maybe because you were still figuring things out. Digging for the truth, putting together the pieces.” Blowing out his blazing marshmallows, Peter gestured with the stick, chalking streamers of white smoke. “Letting go enough to find a piece of the real me, I guess.”
Truth comes from blood and water. “Letting go of the hammer.”
“Yeah, but we don’t need to get all biblical. This has way more to do with biology and the brain. I’m talking temporal lobe, out-ofbody experiences. Isaac was right about that.”
“And you? Are you really dead, or have you Changed or . . .”
“I think, for me, they’re all related.” Peter let go of a heavy sigh. “There is so much to tell you, and we don’t have time for it all. I’m not sure we can even do this again.”
“How are we doing it at all?”
“Dunno. I built the space a couple weeks ago, when you told me to.”
“Me? How could I—”
“We’re different. All Spared are. Some are really unique, like you and the way your brain’s reacted to that drug Hannah gave you. Me . . . I was Changing before the Change. The boat? Lying?” Peter looked away. “Leaving that girl to drown.”
He’d thought a lot about this. “Peter, there was no time. You couldn’t save them both.” He almost said, Someone had to die, but didn’t. “Peter, she was your sister.”
“But then I made it worse. I said that girl was already dead.” Peter pulled in a shuddering breath. “The good guys don’t lie. They don’t choose. They save everybody.”
That only happens in books. “Hannah said you tried.”
“Yeah.” Peter gave a bleak laugh. “For all the good that did. That one choice ruined Simon’s life, probably Penny’s, too, and then I set up the Zone, I fed . . .” Tossing his stick into the fire, his voice thickened with disgust. “Everything I build, everyone I love, I destroy.”
“I’m still here,” Chris said, quietly. He watched Peter’s marshmallows turn to ash. The throbbing ache in his chest had sharpened and grown much stronger in the last few seconds. “We’re not in a nightmare. No one is here but us, and your eyes are blue, Peter.”