Shutting down her survival instinct, she dives headfirst into the little rectangular hole.
As she suspected, she gets only partway through. Her hips are caught by the rigid wood, so she wriggles and squirms. The heat around her head is unbearable. And now there’s light. The angry fire spies her through the slats of wood up above, like sunlight sneaking through a closed blind.
She grabs a support beam and with all her might pulls on it, until she falls into the basement, cutting herself on broken window glass on the floor.
The air is almost entirely clear down here, because smoke only knows up—but the heat! She can feel the skin on her scalp blistering. She keeps as low as she can, rounding a corner, and there, in the place Connor left it, is the box filled with all the broken parts of the organ printer, waiting patiently for their chance to burn. Ain’t gonna happen. She grabs the box, then opens the stasis container, which is too large to take, and digs into the thick green gel to pull out the slimy ear, shoving it into the pocket of her blouse. Then she heads with the ear and the box of printer parts, back to the small window.
Behind her, a support beam gives way and the remains of the shop up above drop to the basement. The flames, fed by the oxygen-rich air, leap forward, flooding the basement like water. Grace reaches the window, shoves the printer through, then begins the monumental task of getting out the way she came in.
There’s no leverage outside. Nothing to grab on to. She’s stuck halfway in, halfway out, and she can feel the flames on her feet, melting her shoes.
“No!” she screams in furious defiance. “I won’t die this way! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”
And suddenly her deliverance arrives in the form of a stranger grabbing her arms, and pulling. “I’ve got you!” he says. He tugs once, twice, three times. It’s the fourth tug that dislodges her.
The second she’s out, she kicks off her burning shoes, and the man helps to stamp out the fire at the cuffs of her jeans. She has no idea who he is—just a neighbor man—but she can’t help herself from throwing her arms around him. “Thank you!”
The sound of sirens now fills the air, coming from many different directions.
“An ambulance will be here in a second,” says the man. “Let me help you.”
But Grace is already on her feet and gone with the box of printer parts clasped to her breast like a baby.
39 • Connor
“There are places you could go,” Ariana told him, “and a guy as smart as you has a decent chance of surviving to eighteen.”
He’s back at the freeway overpass, on the ledge behind the exit sign. It was once his favorite escape spot/make-out spot/danger spot. This time, it feels like none of those things. And this time he’s alone.
He has been to many of the “places” Ariana had referred to. None of them were as safe as he wished they’d be. He did survive to eighteen, though. That should be enough, but it’s not. Twilight gives way to night as he nests there, on the overpass, gathering fortitude.
Ariana, a girl he thought he loved before he actually knew what love was, had promised to go with him when he kicked AWOL, but when he showed up at her door in the middle of the night, she wouldn’t even step over the threshold. It was as if there was an invisible barrier between them that could not be breached. She was remorseful, but more than that, she seemed relieved to be on the other side of that door, still welcome in her own home. It made it painfully clear how truly alone he was.
Connor was angry at her that night, and he held on to that anger for a long time. Now, however, he’s more angry at himself. Wanting her to join him in this seedy fugitive life was pure selfishness. If he truly cared for her, he would have protected her from it, rather than pull her into it.
So much has changed since then. Connor remembers hearing somewhere that it takes seven years for one’s body to purge itself of all its biological matter and replace it. Every seven years, everyone is literally a new person. For Connor, he couldn’t be more different after two years. It’s as if he’s been unwound and put back together again.
Will his parents recognize the change? Will they care? Perhaps they’ll see a stranger at their door. Or maybe they’ll be strangers to him. And then there’s his brother, Lucas. Connor can’t help but imagine him as the same thirteen-year-old he was. He won’t be. What must it be like to be the younger brother of the notorious Akron AWOL. Lucas must despise him.
The journey here began well enough. Sonia didn’t offer him her car, of course. They both knew he had to leave no ties to the antique shop, in case he got caught. Instead he stole a car that had small dunes of runoff mud wedged beneath the tires, a clear indication that it hadn’t been moved for a while, and wouldn’t be immediately missed. He could probably bring it back, park it in the same place and the owners wouldn’t even know it was gone.
The drive from Akron to Columbus took less than two hours. That was the easy part. But actually going to his old front door—that was a different story.
The reconnaissance ride through his neighborhood earlier that afternoon was the first indication of how difficult this would be. Memories of his pre-AWOL life kept leaping out so vividly, he sometimes swerved the car as if they were actual obstacles in his path—just as he did when he retrieved the stem cells with Risa and Beau. What a waste that whole excursion will have been if they can’t fix the printer. He can tell himself his reason for going home is to enlist his father’s help in repairing it, but Risa was right, it’s just an excuse. Still, if they’ve had the change of heart he dreams they’ve had, it wouldn’t be out of the question.