Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

was, here, no stink or commotion. The birds around her were content among the seeded stalks of grass. But Rachel was badly afraid. She spread her body out in all directions like someone caught on thin ice. She gripped the ground with her fingernails and dug in her toes. And then, remembering the sight of that chimney rising up out of the corrupted earth, she scrambled to her feet and fled.

  Book

Three

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

—ROBERT FROST, from Reluctance

Chapter 32

        Joe stood at the door to his sister’s apartment and wondered how he had gotten there. The long trip west, which had felt endless, now collapsed into a single, ponderous moment. Despite having traveled the world, he was bewildered to be in a place thousands of miles from where he had been that morning. His senses told him that it ought to be dark by now, but with the change in time zones and the length of summer days, it was still light in Northern California. Night would already have fallen in Belle Haven. He would call Rachel as soon as he could. He didn’t want to wait too long and risk waking her. Then Holly opened the door.

“My God,” was all she said at first. She said it as she looked at him standing there. She said it again as they grabbed each other and he lifted her off her feet. She said it as she led him inside and closed the door.

“I don’t think I believed you were really alive until now,” she said, taking his face in her hands and looking at his eyes as if to be sure they matched her own.

“Quit saying everything I’m thinking,” he said, taking her hands in his. “Even if that’s what twins are supposed to do.” He’d never called her his twin before, and she knew it. It was the first clue to the changes in him.

They stood looking at each other for a long moment. After two years of mourning each other, they were easily silenced by the shock of meeting face-to-face.

“Are you hungry?” she finally said.

Which seemed to awaken Joe. He blinked. Took a deep breath. “As a horse.” He looked around him suddenly. “But I think I’d better get my bag before someone walks off with it.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Holly waited while he went back out for his bag. “I’m a bundle of nerves, Kit. This is all so strange. He said you were dead.”

“He said you were, too,” Joe said, putting his bag by the door. The “he” hung in the air between them. “You called me Kit, didn’t you?” He massaged his temples. “No one’s called me Kit for two years. Except Mrs. Corrigan, last night. Was that only last night? Jesus, Holly. I feel like my head’s about to explode.”

“Mine too.” She rolled her eyes. “This is getting ridiculous. Last time I saw you we had nothing good in common. Now I feel like I’m looking in a mirror.” She touched the ruined side of her face when she said this.

“Me too.”

Which made Holly grin. “So what do you want to eat? There’s a great little Thai place on the corner. Or I can make us a pizza. Or … what? You name it.”

Joe suddenly found himself thinking about Belle Haven. A town that lived on corn-fed beef and homegrown crops, plenty of bread and butter, whole milk, and fruit pies. The lure of Thai food, so spicy it cracked lips, was incredibly strong. He felt disloyal. He felt hungrier than he had in years.

“Thai,” he said. “That would be perfect.”

And it was only after they were out the door and down the street that he remembered he hadn’t called Rachel after all.

Somehow being in the restaurant together made it easier for them to discuss what their father had done. The place was crowded and noisy, the air so full of pepper it stung their eyes. Holly had been there enough times to know what to order, to set things in motion as soon as they were seated, which meant that for every awful thing they discussed that night, there was a chance to say, “Good God, that’s hot,” or “Water just makes it worse.”

Still, it was hard to say out loud that their father had hurt them as badly as he knew how. It was hard to say that, having done such a thing, he had never made any attempt to right the wrong. Had never sought forgiveness. Had never even tried to find out what had become of his children.

And it was hard, as well, to acknowledge that they had accepted their father’s lies without question, had never tried to find out for sure what had become of each other.

Joe, who had accepted nearly everything his father had ever told him, was nonetheless horrified that he had not questioned the news of Holly’s death. And Holly, who had for years known that her father was a cruel and dishonest man, was astonished that she had taken him at his word. True, by the time he had called with the news of her brother’s death, she had spent weeks building a new life and trying her best to forget the one she’d left behind. True, too, that the sound of her father’s voice alone had so shocked her that the words he had fired down the telephone line had shattered, one by one, against her skull until she felt as if she had been caught in an explosion. In defense, she had retreated, shut down, sealed off her past and refused to look back at it for a long time. She now confessed to her brother that she had been too afraid, in those days, to dwell on his death or on anything else their father had last said to her. Even