Everything between the train station and that distant hill is a blackened ruin.
Some blocks are nothing more than ash and rubble, others still have husks of brick, their roofs and doors gone. Even the roads have buckled and bent, in some places indistinguishable from the buildings they separated. There’s a stretch of ground where Seth is pretty sure the sports center was, and he can see what looks like the remnants of a large square hole that could have been its swimming pool, now filled with charcoal and weeds.
Though not as many weeds as the streets behind him, he notices. And not as tall. There are weeds and grasses scattered through the rest of the burn, now that he thinks to look for them, but they’re far scraggier than the ones on his own street, and some of them are just plain dead.
There’s no sign at all of the field where the allotments were. He thinks he can see where his memory tells him it should be, but amongst all the ash and burnt timber and blasted concrete, it could also just be his imagination trying to make it be there.
The destruction stretches on for what must be miles, as far both to the left and right as he can see in the hazy sunshine. The fire – or whatever it was; destruction this big may have even been some kind of bomb – stretches all the way back to Masons Hill, stopping around its base much like it stops at the rise where the train station sits. Too much bare concrete to cross to actually burn down the station.
He’s looking at a wasteland. One that seems as if it might as well go on forever.
It explains all the dust, is the first thing Seth really thinks. The layers upon layers of it, covering nearly everything in the streets behind him. It’s not just dust – it’s ash, dropped from whatever this huge fire was and never cleaned away.
It’s also, in a way that troubles him more than he can really say, a past event. Something caught fire, or was blown up, or whatever happened, and then that fire raged out of control before burning itself out some time later, taking most of this neighborhood with it.
Which means that there was a time before the fire, a time of the fire, and a time after the fire.
He thinks he’s being foolish feeling troubled about this – there are weeds growing everywhere, obviously, and the food didn’t rot in an instant – but those things were just time, time passing in stillness.
But a fire is an event. A fire happens.
And if there was an event, then there was also a was for it to happen in.
“When, though?” Seth says to himself, shielding his eyes from the sun and scanning up and down the ruins.
Then he turns back to his own neighborhood on the other side of the tracks.
What if the fire had happened over there rather than here? What if his own house had burnt down, not all these empty ones of strangers?
Would he have woken up at all?
On the other hand, he thinks, is this my mind trying to tell me something?
Because the blackened ground feels like a barrier, doesn’t it? Feels like a place where hell stops. He’s gone out exploring and reached an area that might as well have a sign on it saying, DO NOT PASS.
The world, this world, suddenly feels a whole lot smaller.
He suddenly doesn’t feel much like exploring anymore today. Silently, he drops his backpack through the window of the bridge and climbs down after it. He heads back down the stairs, taking care to tread quietly when he retrieves the torch so as not to disturb that huge, alien boar from the train.
Then he shoves his hands in his pockets, hunches his shoulders down, and trudges on home.
23
“What do you expect us to say?” his mother asked, angrily. “How do you expect us to react?”
His father sighed and crossed his legs in the other chair facing Seth. They were in the kitchen, which – and Seth wondered if they even knew they did this – was where they always had their serious talks with him, especially when he got in trouble.
He was in here way more often than Owen ever was.
“It’s not that we,” – his father looked up in the air, trying to find the right word –“mind, Seth –”
“What are you talking about?” his mother snapped. “Of course we goddamn well mind.”
“Candace –”
“Oh, I can already see the thinking here. You’re already halfway to forgiving him –”
“Why is it a question of forgiveness?”
“Always just this laissez-faire approach, not giving a damn as long as you can do your precious little projects. It’s no wonder he’s acted like an idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Seth said, arms crossed, looking down at his sneakers.
“What the hell do you call it?” his mother demanded. “How exactly is this situation not one big idiotic catastrophe for you? You know what they’re like here –”
“Candace, that’s enough,” his father said, more strongly now. His mother made a sign with her hands of sarcastic surrender, then stared firmly at the ceiling. His father turned to look at him, and Seth realized with a shock how rare it was for his father to look him straight in the eye. It was like having a statue suddenly ask you for directions.
The thing was, though, Seth couldn’t even say that his mother was wrong. About it being a catastrophe. The pictures had been found. Had gotten out. From an impossible source, one they’d never expected. But then they’d been stupid to ever think they wouldn’t, because how could you keep anything for yourself in this uselessly connected world?
“Seth,” his father continued, “what we’re trying to say is that . . .” He paused again, thinking how to phrase it. For a horrible moment, Seth thought he was going to have to help him along, say the words for him. “Whatever . . . choices you make, we’re still your mum and dad, and we’ll still love you. No matter what.”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence at this.
No matter what, Seth thought, but didn’t say. “No matter what” had happened eight years ago. It had come and gone, and it turned out it hadn’t been true then, either.
“But this . . .” – his father sighed again –“ . . .situation you’ve got yourself into –”
“I knew we couldn’t trust that boy,” his mother said, shaking her head. “I knew he was bad news from the moment I met him. Right down to his stupid name –”
“Don’t talk about him that way,” Seth said, quietly but the anger in his voice shocked both his parents into silence. He’d only been able to see Gudmund today for just enough time to tell him, to warn him, before Gudmund’s parents had thrown Seth out of their house. “Don’t you ever talk about him in any way, ever again.”