Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.
The world ends with a press of bodies huddled together on the beach—
—electric with terror—
—the sky incandescent with smoke. It’s so dark. Black-orange-bloody-bruised. Flashlights throw long beams across the sand. Police lights flicker blue and red, blue and red, blue and red, and the Ferris wheel on the pier glows an obscene neon. No one thought to turn off the calliope. It echoes off the empty boardwalk, cheerfully macabre. The ocean groans.
There are so many of them, hundreds, maybe thousands, children and their white-faced parents, dogs on leashes, cats shivering in their crates, everyone tangled and unsteady. They’re all breathless. Spellbound. Too frightened to speak, to cry, to pray.
It rains ash.
Silent and slow. It flutters softly down from the hills, onto sweat-dampened hair, onto shoulders wearing the only clothes they have left. The lacy edges of the city are alight and burning, burning, burning.
August sits with her back to the tide and wishes it would swallow her.
• • • •
The world ends.
And then—
—it—
Doesn’t?
• • • •
It doesn’t.
• • • •
August goes back to her apartment—her paints, her houseplants, lucky lucky lucky—and smells nothing but wildfire and thinks we were going to die and then we didn’t. She feels nothing. Absolutely nothing, nothing but blank canvas stretched out before her, nothing but roaring white noise and an empty cavern where her heart should be. She can’t hear. She can’t see. Every movement of her body feels strange and unfamiliar, the flex of the tendons in her hands, the angle of her knuckles, the sweep of her hair down her back.
Seawater drips from her fingertips.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
August is too dazed to care. She holds her hand up to the window—the light is still wrong and uneasy—and watches as rivulets stream from under her nails, down the pink valleys of her palm, twisting around the fish-belly pale skin of her arm.
Drip.
It’s indiscriminate and thoughtless, the way disasters bruise remnants of themselves into human bones. Careless as dice tossed onto a poker table, left in the wake of pain terror heartbreak bad-fucking-luck. It’s just something that happens, sometimes, and it’s awful. It’s cruel, it’s kind, it’s a gift, it’s the worst thing that can happen to you.
And the thing is, sometimes it’s beautiful.
It’s just that more often it’s devastating, and isn’t that the way it is, that beauty and devastation share sides of a coin? The things that make wildlings—it’s always an unshakeable reminder of terror, things lost, wrath and ruin. Always wrath and ruin, and so the sheer towering wonder of it is always a little bit wrong. A sour aftertaste, burnt rubber left behind on a cool, crisp mouthful of air. A woman who looks at her drip-drip-dripping fingers and thinks I was going to die and I was afraid and then I didn’t die and when it was over I went home and I took the ocean with me.
• • • •
August’s art is—
Well.
Sinister-dreamy-eerie. Bodies swathed in oil-painted silk, caught in beams of dappled light as they sink weightlessly into the dark and deep of the sea. Indigo and ultramarine, cobalt and lapis. Soft impressionist eddies, waves tipped with brilliant phosphorescence.
Moody, drowning, blue.
The irony of it makes August want to peel her skin off in long, dragging sheets.
• • • •
A close call in Santa Monica today, the newscasters say, unafraid and smiling, shining and perfect on their shining and perfect studio sets, when an out-of-control blaze sent hundreds abandoning their cars to run for the beaches.
• • • •
August’s fingernails are rimed with salt.
• • • •
It’s too late.
She’s running—her lungs are dry and hot, her feet bare, blistered on the ground. It’s too late and there’s nowhere to flee to anymore, nothing is going to save her, help isn’t coming. The air is thunderous with the whum-whum-whum of too many aircraft. She tastes ash on her tongue. Embers the size of her hands fall from the sky, alive with sparks, and she smells her own hair, burning.
Her breath comes in desperate gasps. The streets are empty. Empty, empty, empty, and at her back is the scalding heat of the fire, breathing heavy down her neck. The scream of it is like a freight train.
At the end of the road is the sea.
• • • •
August wakes up and her mattress is soaked through with salty-briny-brackish water.
She’s not proud of the sound she makes—a stepped-on howl of bewildered horror—as she thrashes at the clammy embrace of her sheets. Her hair is plastered to her cheek in slimy clumps like kelp creeping down her spine. She lands on her floor with a wet, awful slap. Her lungs heave with tears before she even knows she’s crying.
Her roommate appears in the doorway with a baseball bat, wild-eyed. “Oh, Christ,” she says, relief tangled with something that sounds like embarrassment. August is too wrapped up in her pounding heart to be mortified. “I thought you were being murdered.”
August can’t even laugh because she’s sitting in a sinister puddle of her own tears and all she can see is that hot, bright line of the fire coming over the hill. It’s scratched into the dark behind her eyes. Grace wasn’t there. Grace was on set in Pasadena, close enough to see the smoke take away the daylight and far enough away that she didn’t have to run.
August’s entire body aches. Salt blurs her sight.
This is what happens when wildling magic careens into you. Everything changes. Muscles and bones and tendons make way for something blistering and strange, and nothing can come from nothing, and so the cost of it will always be breath blood heartbeat pain.
• • • •
She drowns.
• • • •
And drowns.
Her tongue dries out, flayed raw by salt. Her lips crack, and she can’t even taste the warm copper tang of her own blood because everything is burnt bright with salt, nothing but salt.
• • • •
And drowns.
She doesn’t sleep anymore, her eyes hot and tired, blazing feverish in her skull. She can’t look at the ocean without remembering wailing sirens and the bitter taste of fear in the air. Everything she owns is damp, crusted with salt in dried-over patterns like waves washing over the shore, overlapped and abstract.
• • • •
It’s going to be a blistering summer, and the days stretch out, endless, ahead of them. We’ve been fortunate, the experts say. Living among matchstick forests, these mountains full of tinder and sparks, dry as bones, dry as death, dry as an apocalypse.
God help us when fortune no longer favors us.
• • • •
Fuck it, August thinks hysterically one morning.
So she leaves.
It’s so easy, in the end, to run scared. Animals do it all the time, driven by mindless terror and instinct that’s carved itself into their bones over thousands and thousands of years.
August is afraid—of what, she isn’t sure; she hasn’t been able to hold still long enough to think about it, the fire or fearful memory or the tides—and so she plucks herself roots and all from this place she’s never before wanted to leave, and she picks the first city on the map that doesn’t fill her with sinking dread.
• • • •
If Santa Monica was sea-sky blue and deep warm green, watercolor traffic and trees, smudges of earth and ocean pressed in between cracks in the city, Albuquerque is something else entirely. Blurred curls of oil in shades of tangerine and peach, adobe and sienna, a twist of purple at the storm-heavy horizon. A low swell of mountains to the north, a howling, flat span of red rock desert to the west. The crushing peace of it hums under August’s skin.
The dirt at her feet turns damp with every step, and the water disappears as she watches, evaporates in the heat. Her head pounds. She hasn’t painted since the fire because she doesn’t dare, because she’s terrified of what will happen when she does. She’s Alice in Wonderland, standing on chairs as the water rises around her.
“Just let me rest,” she tells the horizon. Her voice trembles around the words. Her throat is bone-dry and scratchy. Words are already so hard for her to come by, marbles saved up in a jar, and now that it hurts to drop them from her salt-burned and swollen tongue she finds herself hoarding them. “Please.”
Saltwater trickles from her fingers, all over her boxes. The cardboard turns softer and pulpier with every passing second. She has sketchbooks in these boxes, piles of cheap spiral-bounds, crack-spined watercolor pads, full of gouache and oil and false starts. She doesn’t mind that they’re battered, but oh, she minds that they’re going to end up wrinkled, damp and salty.
August resists the urge to sit down on the curb and stare helplessly at the sky.
It’s fine.
Everything’s fine.
“Moving by yourself is bad for morale,” a tart voice says from behind August. “Hauling all your shit on your own is for college students and newlyweds.” A woman appears at August’s elbow. “Scoot over.”
She’s so hot it’s distressing. Long dark hair like silk knotted up, head shaved at the back, eyes like rich, wet earth, a turquoise-and-silver ring punched through her septum. Gold-brown-beautiful as a terracotta statue. August wants to die.
“I, uh.” She flushes red from her ears to her collarbones. She can’t remember how old she is, let alone her own goddamn name. Left and right, yes and no, please and thank you, they all go up in smoke. She needs to lie down.
There’s something leonine in the way the woman looks at her. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she says, and grins, bared-tooth, as she hefts one of August’s pulpy heavy ruined boxes.
And then she’s—gone?
• • • •
August learns quickly, in the way that one learns not to offer unprotected fingers to a wildcat, that one does not argue with Charlie Nez. No one argues with Charlie Nez. Charlie Nez is a one-woman sandstorm, breezily belligerent, flattening everything in her path.
Which is how August finds herself anxiously supervising two more women who might be neighbors or might be Charlie’s friends or might be both, Vee with the pale and impossible grace of a wildling who has grown up in a wildling skin, and Tasha with enough sunshine cheer to make up for them all.
“Just let it happen,” Tasha advises with a bright, dimpled grin that nearly makes August grin back, reflexive. She’s put together and pristine even in the heat, even after hauling boxes, every curl intentional. Marilyn Monroe in the desert. Her voice is rich and husky, as captivating as the rest of her. “We’ve all been one of Charlie’s ducklings before, love,” she says, and winks. “Just sit back and roll with it; everyone needs a lesbian who likes to build things in their life.”
“As opposed to the other, more useless lesbians,” Charlie hollers from August’s bedroom, where she’s having a frighteningly single-minded negotiation with flat-pack furniture. “Fuck off.” Tasha and Vee cackle.
August stands caught in her new kitchen doorway, a puddle around her bare feet, and aches.
• • • •
Indigo grows wild in the apartment complex courtyard, a sea of bright pink flowers. Keeps the fires away, according to superstition.
• • • •
“You want to talk about it?” Vee asks. Her nails are deepwater blue against August’s couch and her arms are wreathed in white ink snowflakes, half tattoos, half scars. The air around her is like the chill before a snowstorm.
“No.” Too sharp. Too unwelcoming. August wants to take it back immediately.
Vee is unfazed. “You’ll be okay, hon,” she says, and gestures to the tiny ocean at August’s feet. She’s kind enough not to let her eyes linger on August’s bruised eyes, her broken mouth. “I promise. It’ll settle.”
It’s just that August cannot keep waking up choking on the sea.
• • • •
Her paints sit in their haphazard piles, and whenever she looks at them the fire is so close she can hear it crackle. Her tongue burns. Blood trickles down her chin from the topographic cracks in her lips.
• • • •
Pencil isn’t August’s medium. Never has been. She finds too much clarity in pencil, too much space to fill. Detail makes her frantic. There are too many important things. The quirked corner of a friend’s mouth, tilted in the wrong direction, changes their face entirely. A misplaced bit of linework renders a horizon unrecognizable. August would rather live in the loose, abstract world of oil and watercolor, finding love in the suggestion of someone’s breath instead of the careful tributaries of their crow’s feet.
But Tasha—
Tasha’s made for pencil, all detail.
She shows up on August’s doorstep with a bottle of red wine and an old Hollywood smile. Her dark honey curls are scooped into a lovely pile on top of her head, tied off with a scarf. Earrings made out of preserved slices of blood orange swing against the long column of her neck. She’s a riot of marigold perfume and rose linen and buttery nail polish. She’s radiant. August feels like a shadow next to her.
“You want to get drunk and overshare with a stranger?” Tasha asks. A dimple scoops into her cheek. “I hope we didn’t scare you off, the other morning. Charlie’s got a thing about strays.”
It’s been a long time since August learned how to make friends. She sifts through her dwindling collection of words, hunting for something to say, anything, scrambling to stop herself from revealing that she’s drowning, she’s starving, she’s so fucking lonely. Everything slips through her fingers. She can’t find her voice. She can barely find air in her lungs.
Tasha watches her, kindly.
“Um.” August gulps back a sob. Can’t hold back a hot flush of shame. She wants to be cheerful, and clever, and maybe more like how she used to be, but she can’t remember how she used to be, and all she can do is step to the side. “Come in?”
Tasha beams and drags the last of the day’s sunlight in with her. She chatters endlessly, breathlessly, about the thunderstorm shape of the clouds overhead, the new charms Charlie scratched into her windowsill to keep the birds away from her ambitious, balcony-dwelling cat, the one particular string of notes she heard on the radio this morning, the quick sting of her estradiol injection, the way the golden gilt on her tarot cards shimmered in the sunrise. It’s impossible not to be charmed by her.
The wine is darkly sweet, gentle on August’s salt-burned mouth. Her hair soaks into her clothes. She has no idea where to begin with this barefoot, bewitching stranger in her apartment. Her hands shake.
“Tell me about the best teacher you ever had,” Tasha says, sparing her. Her lipstick is an improbable apple red, and doesn’t leave a single smudge on the rim of her glass.
Tell me about your plants.
Tell me about your skincare routine.
Tell me about the first girl you ever kissed.
Tasha delights in every meaningless pearl that August offers her, her smile wide and loose as the air around them turns into a cloud of alcohol and salt. The world spins and August laughs as she crawls for a sketchbook and a pencil. She thought maybe she’d forgotten how to laugh. They’re both pink-cheeked, damp from August’s seeping skin. Graphite smears on her fingertips. Tasha’s profile emerges on the paper, blurred, a woman seen through a window wet with rain. Detail, abstracted. A wisp of a curl across her brow, the dent in her lower lip. The sun-warmth of her eyes, breaking through a storm.
It’s easier, sometimes, when you’re drunk, and when you feel safe, to uncurl. To maybe reach out, to ask, to try to collect your own meaningless little treasures. August blends a shadow into the soft folds of Tasha’s scarf and finds a few brave words tucked into her pockets.
Tell me about how you met Charlie, and Tasha giggles. “Stanford,” she says merrily, “first day in the dorm. Charlie was homesick as shit and pretending very hard that she wasn’t, and I was like four weeks into my transition, trying to figure out how to use a curling iron without frying my face off.” She tucks her bare toes under August’s thigh. Smiles, expectant, and August can’t resist her.
Tell me about your pets, she says, joyful with it.
Tell me about your lipstick.
Tell me about the best thing you ever ate.
Tell me about your day, and there’s even more to it, a hollered hello to Charlie’s brother over the phone, a glimpse of the moon in the sky well after sunrise, another essay finished for the collection she’s contributing to, the barista down the street put exactly the right amount of cayenne in her hot chocolate and winked, Vee came over and shouted about a client for exactly seventeen minutes and left with half of her stash of emergency gingersnaps, on and on and on and August lets it wash over her.
Tell me tell me tell me.
“Don’t forget,” Tasha says, in the wee hours of the morning, long-limbed and sprawled on August’s couch. August is wrung out. The wet graphite on Tasha’s portrait dries on the windowsill, sunshine laughter and pristine lipstick, every fine line there for a reason. “Don’t forget that you survived, hon.”
• • • •
August wakes up drowning again.
She touches her tube of ultramarine and it explodes. It leaves a splattered imprint on her hands, and the next time her skin floods the droplets that land on her toes are dark as midnight.
• • • •
Most of her clothes still smell like wildfire smoke, scorched and bitter.
• • • •
Vee is a tattoo artist.
The shop is an enchanting, horrible little place, so cramped there’s barely enough room to turn around. August’s teeth ache with how charged the air is. It tastes like storm clouds and peppercorns. Her breath clouds in front of her even though it’s a hundred degrees outside. There are unfamiliar shapes scratched into the windows and August’s hands scream at her not to touch them. More sigils are scrawled into the pine-dark walls, the light cool and eerie. Jars sit on the shelves, shining like jewels, full of ink and dye.
A bell tinkles over the door.
“Watch your step, love,” Vee says. There’s a ring of frost around her station, white-hot, and singe marks on the vinyl chair. She looks tired, and sad.
“I brought you coffee,” August says weakly, because she did. The carry-out cup is stained blue like a child’s finger painting. Her footprints leave an indigo trail behind her. “And Tasha wants you to eat.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Vee’s so blonde her hair looks white. “I’m almost done here, camp out and we can get food in a bit.” So easy. Casual. Like August’s seawater skin isn’t going to ruin these creaking wood floors. Like August isn’t a stranger encroaching on a friendship that’s already built on its own foundation. Like she isn’t uprooting them all and poisoning their earth.
While Vee cleans—the chilly smell of snow gives way to antiseptic—August drifts around the room, peering at the art that’s been pinned haphazardly to the walls. Classic sailor tattoos, reds and golds and splashes of brilliant teal, all bold lines. The occasional portrait, snowflakes, a riot of delicate botanical woodcuts. Tucked between them, awful things. Clawing sigils. Formless shapes that link together like chains. They make August’s stomach roll.
“It’s not illegal,” Vee says. The low light catches on the hard lines around her mouth. She doesn’t look at August. Her hands move restlessly on her work tray and the tiny pots of ink discarded there, icy silver, glacier blue, cold cold cold.
“I wouldn’t know if it was.” August can only be honest. She had her own world, growing up, all paint and stories, dreamily distracted from everything around her that was real. She is a stranger to these feral things. “They just.” She reaches out with a blue fingertip, and Vee makes a frightening sound in her throat. She snatches her hand back. “They just make me sad, I think.”
Vee’s expression twists. “Sometimes the things that make us are too big for our bones,” she says bitterly, “and sometimes the only choice is to break our bones to make it fit.” She spreads her hands wide. Her fingers are frostbite purple, her lips corpse pale. “And I’m one of the bone breakers.”
She looks like she wants to hit something. Or sob.
She looks like a child brought up in a world that’s cracking apart at the edges.
August reaches out with tidepool hands and the thought of Tasha’s summer laugh. Vee’s skin is frozen. She doesn’t know how to help. She wants to. She wants to ease whatever hurt Vee’s cradling. “What can I do?” she asks, helpless, desperate for Tasha or Charlie to be there to lead the way.
“Tell this stupid planet to stop getting meaner,” Vee spits. “So that I don’t have to tattoo shackles on hurricane people just so they can live, and then watch as they turn into the fucking walking dead when the thing that made them eats them alive.”
The silence rings.
August is too exhausted to cry. She doesn’t think she can anymore.
“I’m sorry,” Vee adds quietly. Repentant. “That was shitty of me. I know the ocean made you.”
“I’d break my bones, too, to make it stop.” If August could claw the water from her lungs she would. If she could pry the salt from her throat she would. If she could snap her fingers one by one just to make the drowning go away, she would.
“I wouldn’t let you.” Vee folds August into her arms, sharp and angular as she is, the chill of her melting into warmth the longer August holds on. “The pain is never worth the quiet.”
• • • •
Wildling magic has one rule.
You can’t destroy it.
• • • •
August dips her fingers into her indigo and claws a dripping line around her wrist and thinks nothing but stop, stop, stop. A finger in a dam. The thought of telling the ocean that’s crawling up her throat to stop makes her want to laugh. She feels like an idiot.
• • • •
“Sometimes everything’s shit,” Charlie says.
Their complex has a basketball hoop, old school, net made of silver chain that gleams as the sun dips down into the desert. Charlie stands at the free throw line and glares up at the backboard.
“I mean.” August can’t disagree. “That sounds about right to me.” August’s arms are still streaked with salt. Exhaustion burns at her eyes—sleep, these days, is a distant memory. Every time she tries to go to sleep she hears helicopters and screams and that stupid fucking calliope. The smell of the sea follows her from room to room. She leaves smears of blue wherever she goes. Wet blue footprints and breathless dreams. Her head blazes with pain from all the salt. Everything is shit.
But every Friday Charlie hammers on August’s door and pretends not to be relieved to find her alive, un-drowned, and every Friday August allows herself to be dragged outside. She pretends to be a person for a few hours—on Charlie’s balcony, in her kitchen, and now here, in the purple dusk. It’s a respite, her head breaking above the water.
Charlie is none of Tasha’s brilliant warmth and none of Vee’s chilly edges. She has the stubborn jaw of a lonely child, the strong and capable hands of someone who builds things and fixes them when they break. She’s the first blush of stars as the horizon yields to night. The regal line of her profile, gilded in the evening light, snatches August’s breath away.
“You know, I loved the ocean,” Charlie says, wistful. “It was the closest to the desert I could get when I was at school.”
August blinks.
“Big. Still.” Charlie flicks the ball up. It hangs suspended, a bright spot of orange against the sky, and sings through the net. “Unknowable.”
August chases after the ball and bounces it to Charlie, clumsy. Charlie moves like a lightning strike, all coiled heat, like she has to stay in motion. Like if she sits still her world might collapse. There’s a tension in her spine, straight-backed frustration. Her attention on the ball, on the net, is ferocious.
“I didn’t know you played,” August says.
Charlie smirks. “Rez ball.” She shoots again. Moonlight catches on the ring threaded through her nose, the white flash of her smile. “Got me a full ride.”
August stations herself under the hoop, butt on the dusty concrete, legs kicked out in front of her. The ground is deliciously sun-warm, even as the air starts to cool around them. The ball stings her palms. She passes it to Charlie. “Would you have stayed in California?”
Charlie’s laugh comes and goes between one breath and the next. “Nah, never.” She dribbles aimlessly for a long moment. “I love this place,” she finally says. “And I love being near the community that raised me.” She shrugs. Shoots again. “I thought about it, though, for about two seconds. College, you know. But it’s like. I grew up in Monument Valley, you’ve seen it, it’s in like every Western. I drove out there to see one of the high school games, probably my senior year at Stanford, and it was already dark as shit, this huge electrical storm right over me.” She paces, back and forth, back and forth, the ball never still in her hands. “And I came around this blind and the road opened up and these ancient fucking monoliths that I spent my childhood with were just there, lit up by the lightning, and it was like I’d laid down and cracked open my ribs and offered up my lungs. I knew I could never bear to leave.”
“But it’s still complicated?” August hazards.
Charlie sighs and shoots one last time. She hasn’t missed once. The net jingles. “But it’s still complicated.” She tucks the ball against her hip. “C’mon, let’s go in before you freeze.” She tosses her free arm around August’s shoulders and squeezes her in close, familiar. “Tell me about why you paint the ocean.”
“It’s like—” August flounders. All she can see when she closes her eyes is the pier, and the smoke, and the terror on everyone’s faces that bled into twisted relief. The ocean used to be something else when she looked at it, before it was salvation. Something else, something—
—else.
“It’s like you’re driving through houses, right, neighborhoods and regular streets, just houses with their lawns and their driveways, and then all of a sudden you look to the side in just the right place and there’s this little sliver of blue, and you’re not sure what you’re seeing yet, because maybe you’ve never seen it before, but then you get closer and closer and then all of a sudden it’s in front of you and it’s all you can see and it just never ends.”
Like a monolith in the dark, limned with white lightning.
She knows how she’d paint it, that ocean. The wonder and brilliance of it, the gleam of the sun on that first glimpse of hazy blue, the fog in the distance. No crashing waves, no drowning, no storms. No dire, desperate thoughts of oh thank god there it is there’s our only hope we can finally see it and if we can get there we’ll be safe. Just that serene stillness of the world falling away. Oh hello, it’s good to see you. I was wondering when I would.
• • • •
August buys new, unfamiliar paints. Countless shades of ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium yellow, claret, rose madder. New brushes, even though they cost a fortune. She shies away from her piles of blue. Her canvas is backlit with soft gray, thundercloud silver, dripping asphalt after a rain, warm without indigo to temper it. The place Charlie was born emerges from the storm, red-rock desert spearing up through fog.
Big and still and unknowable.
A quick, clean breath before her head goes back underwater.
• • • •
Charlie tastes like oranges and strong, sweet coffee.
• • • •
Her apartment is a watercolor wash, nothing but seeping blue, the tub a mess of overlapping rings. Every morning for a week August stands in the shower and shivers. She lets the tub fill to her shins, a tiny sun-warmed ocean, too bright. When it drains she does it again, and again, and again, like a medieval doctor opening a vein to let out the sickness.
She walks around like a ghost, hazy-eyed.
It’s not enough.
Underneath the unsteady distance—she’s not herself, she hasn’t felt like herself since the fire—she’s seething. Her hands shake with the effort it takes to keep it tucked away. The tide swells in her lungs, and it’s going to destroy her.
• • • •
Tasha and Charlie and Vee, all together, have an infectious, crow-cackle laugh. Tasha drives with the windows down, her hair a wild tangle as the wind howls through the car. Charlie shouts to be heard. Vee turns the volume up—something old and loud, wailing guitars—just to be an asshole.
August can’t stop smiling.
And then—
And then—
Salt.
August can taste it on the air, dry and sharp and still, so still, with no coastal wind to lash it into her skin. The lake spreads out in front of them, flat, mirror-bright. Scooped out of the earth by the hands of the gods, so shallow under the scorching desert sun that August could lie down at its heart and still have air to breathe. She pokes her toes into the water and the wet, choking hand around her throat bleeds away into nothing. Cobalt and cerulean stain the impossible white of the salt-dried banks. She tips her head back, lets her damp hair fall down her back, lets her skin blister under the sun, and breathes, clear and sweet. The relief is immediate. Glorious.
Vee drops August’s paints into her lap. All blue.
“What are you afraid of?” she demands, merciless.
August feels hazy, like she’s floating. She wiggles her toes. It’s easy, here, somehow, without the tide pounding against her heartbeat. It’s so easy to say it. “The thing that might come out of the paint.”
“So let it happen,” Vee says. “Find out.”
“If something comes out of the paint, something comes out of the paint.” Tasha settles herself in the sliver of shade cast by the crater’s edge. She’s managed to make a sun hat the size of a UFO materialize out of thin air. Charlie suns herself in a lawn chair like a lizard. “You can’t keep living like this, hon.”
“Yes, but—” August’s chest seizes with terror. Yes, but what about you, she doesn’t say, heartsick with it. I can drown myself but I can’t drown you.
“I am made of ice so cold it could ruin your lungs,” Vee says, and August hears frost in her voice. Her eyes are so pale, gunmetal gray, unflinching and unyielding. “I am made of frostbite and avalanches and snow on the saguaros, I am a bone breaker, you will not hurt any of us because I will hurt you first.”
August’s lip trembles.
“The way I see it,” Vee continues, relentless, “you’re running out of options.” She holds up a rune-etched finger when August opens her mouth to protest that what she’s been doing is not not working. Anything to not have to look at it. Anything to not have to face it. “You might as well try ripping open an artery.”
So August just—
—lets go.
Drops into the wide unknowable deep and drifts down, down, down.
Abstract. No detail. Oil on the canvas, brushes as wide as her hand, gestural strokes. The layers of paint dry in an instant under the blazing sun. Moody teal and foam-capped waves against a thunderous sky. This is not the ocean she wants to share with Charlie, that sparkling childhood miracle. There’s a storm caught behind her ribcage, rushing up her throat. The calliope echoes.
This is what she’s been drowning on.
She wants to scream it.
This is what has been keeping me awake.
The terror of a boat being tossed around, too far from shore to make it back in time. A white fork of lightning cleaves the sky in two, rain and salt lashing through the air, and everything smells like ozone and deepwater brine. There’s no way to tread water, nothing to hold onto. Once you’ve tripped overboard it’s done, you’re lost to the black, neck mouth nose eyes sinking into the depths.
August’s fingers are wet. The paint slips on the canvas, once twice three times. Thunder rolls in her ears.
The painting erupts.
Seawater pours into the lake, crashes around August’s feet. The bottom edge of the canvas disappears under the rush of it, blurring the edges of the sky and the mirrored lake and the window into August’s storm. The noise is enormous. August’s lungs creak, and her clothes are soaked through, and she might be weeping, she might be sobbing, but she’s not afraid, she’s not afraid, she should never have been afraid. I was going to die and I wished I would drown instead and then I didn’t die and when it was over I went home and I took the ocean with me.
This thing, murmuring at her ankles—
It’s safe.
• • • •
They sit in the shade next to Tasha in silence for a long, ringing minute. August drinks six bottles of Charlie’s emergency car water. Every single one tastes like hot plastic. Her eyes throb.
“Feel better or worse?” Tasha finally asks.
Everything hurts. Every bone, every muscle, every tendon, every nerve. But it’s—August stretches, experimental. It’s a delicious kind of hurt, she thinks. Sore and new, like exhausted muscles or a just-pulled baby tooth. She’s so tired she could die but she’s wildly alive.
And—
And.
She’s dry.
• • • •
August wakes up one day in September and the sky is wildfire orange.
She vomits seawater and bile.
• • • •
Her friends—her friends, a delighted part of her brain sings, the part that isn’t paralyzed with dread—elbow their way into her apartment by midmorning. Charlie, prickly with the need to do something, barricades herself in August’s kitchen with a pot of something tart and sharp and spicy and clatters around so obnoxiously that it can only be to cover the sinister rattle of helicopters overhead.
“I think,” August says distantly, “I might be having a panic attack.”
“The first one after you have to run is always the worst,” Tasha says gently, and tucks August against her chest without another word. Her hair smells like strawberries.
• • • •
“Do whatever you need to do,” Vee says, her chilly hand cupped under August’s chin, “to make yourself feel protected here.” She drags a crackling line of frost along her jaw. “You know what you’re afraid of.”
August picks up a brush and paints.
A heavy band of cerulean that wraps its way around the apartment like a protective circle. Like the warding-off hamsas of the Middle East, like the brilliantly blue doors of Morocco and the water-glint domes of Santorini. August breathes salt into every brushstroke, tidepools and summer nights and marine fog, eyes half-lidded and unfocused as she lets herself float into drowning.
Do not let us burn.
She pours herself into it. Keep us safe. Please keep us safe. Do not let this place go up in flames.
When even that doesn’t feel like enough—even as that cerulean band thrums and roars like the ocean and cools the air around her—August pricks her finger and bleeds into her pot of indigo ink and swirls the words into the wall with bloody-blue hands. Do not let us burn.
Her head spins, but she can’t stop. The ground beneath her feet is slick and slippery, tenuous, like it’s inches-seconds-heartbeats away from sweeping her legs out from under her.
“Honey.” Charlie’s hot-dry-desert hands settle on her shoulders.
And she feels so silly, so stupid and fragile, to be undone by something that’s miles away, something that she knows she’s safe from, but all she can manage to think is that it’s not enough, it will never be enough, because they’re safe now, but they might not be. The wind can change, a spark can burrow under a rooftop, it’s not enough, it’s not enough, it’s not it’s not it’s not. Tears drag down her cheeks.
Water laps at her toes.
Yes, it says, but now you have me.
• • • •
The world ends.
And then—
The wind shifts away, and the sunlight turns clear and perfect and gold, and the sky is nothing but blue, blue, tidewater blue.