“Just one left, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one? Math?”
“Yep. What about you? Chemistry?”
“Ugh, yes.”
As one despairing teenage boy, Buck and I flopped backward in our seats and groaned. We were stationed at the library, our class notes spread before us on the puzzle table. Unfortunately for our grades, the puzzle was getting more attention than our notes were. It was a very nice panorama of some sunlit lake, with some perky pine trees on the far shore. Much perkier than us.
“It’s the last final,” Buck mumbled into his hands. “We just gotta do it.”
I introduced the table to my forehead. “Why do I even need precalculus? It’s just algebra III all over again.”
“Because you’d die in a real calc class without it.”
“You don’t need calculus to be a hockey player,” I grumbled. “This is dumb.”
“You’re not going to be a hockey player, Willam!” Buck groaned.
I kicked him under the table. “Stop crushing my dreams and start cramming polyatomic anions.”
“Hockey players smell,” Buck continued, picking up his notes. “In a not-good way. Quiz me.”
I took the papers from him. “You know what hockey players smell like? Nitrate.”
“NO3-. No, but I know what jocks smell like. I can guess.”
“Eugh. Sulfite.”
“SO3-2.”
I rustled through his notes, trying to find a hard one. Buck’s handwriting was better than mine; he’d had ages to practice. It was as familiar to me as my parents’.
Buck jabbed the back of the notes, causing the paper to let out a protesting fwap, and I realized I’d been quiet for a while. “Next,” he urged.
“Oh, right. Umm… dichromate.”
He flopped back against the chair and groaned. “Heck. Chemistry sucks.”
The semester ended. Buck and I passed all our exams and could officially call ourselves seniors without my dad raising an eyebrow.
The pickup games continued. We’d been going most weeks and hung out with Hunter afterwards. Harvey and Kate made cookies once and shared them with us. Buck taught me some basic basketball. Now you won’t be awful, he told me. But you still kinda suck.
The twins’ presence was all that saved him from a violent slew of swearing.
Hunter warned me that the games would become spotty over the summer as most of the players went on vacations, but would start up again in the fall.
If I remained healthy, I could play in those autumn games. My fingers itched at the thought.
Now that the semester was over, my trip to France was approaching fast, and I was terribly excited. My family practiced our French at the dinner table. I unearthed some nice clothes that still fit me, for my mother warned of a fancy French restaurant in the near future. Heaven forbid someone see me without a tie.
“How do you tie a tie?” I wondered.
“You loop it and tuck it,” Buck explained.
“Thanks,” I said, deadpan. I chucked the dark blue tie at my suitcase and sighed. “I’ll ask Youtube later.”
“How long are you gone for, again?” he asked.
“Two weeks.”
“Right. And your dad’s staying for a business trip after?”
“Yeah. My parents planned it that way so his job would pay for his airfare. We have to take the train up to Paris, though, at the end of our trip. His conference is there.”
“Oh no, Paris. How shall you survive?” He rolled over on the bed so he could watch me root through my closet. There were clothes and Legos everywhere. “Where does your grandmother live?”
“Ouveillan. It’s in the south.”
Buck rolled over again so he was staring up at the ceiling. I kicked around for some dress shoes. “Mmm…” he mumbled.
“What?”
“I’m trying to remember that region’s Shire. Argh, there are so many in Europe…”
I’d probably see some vampires during my stay. There were more of them in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa than in the rest of the world’s continents. Vampires originated in Africa, just like humans, but they hadn’t spread out as much. Somehow living longer made them want to stay in one place.
“Vasceux, I think,” Buck said, still gazing up at the ceiling. “Or maybe Ciel-Mont. One of the two.”
“Ha!” I triumphantly held up a pair of black shoes in decent condition. I hoped they’d still fit. “I found them! Circa middle school graduation.”
“Hooray,” Buck offered.
A week passed, and I was on the plane to France. We’d had to drive over an hour to get from our home in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts to the Boston Logan International Airport, and by the time we reached the parking garage I was antsy to escape. The traffic in Boston was the tenth circle of hell.
Takeoff was scheduled for seven pm, so we’d be flying through the night. Though the flight would only be about ten hours, we’d arrive at the Montpellier-Méditerranée Airport around eleven the following day due to the difference in time zones. From there, it would be an hour drive to my grand-mère’s house in Ouveillan.
I’d be exhausted. I couldn’t wait.
We got airport food and ate it at the gate. I loved the salty, greasy stuff— it was the taste of going places. It wasn’t that I wanted to leave my hometown, exactly, but going places made me feel alive.
I finished the last of my flat, rather sad cheeseburger and crumpled the paper wrapping in my hand. To my left, my father was typing something in Times New Roman. He was working right up until we got on the plane. He had a lot of preparation to do for the conference in Paris. To my right, my mother sat munching on thin fries. She kept checking the time.
I threw a glance at my phone. 6:12. Boarding wouldn’t start for another fifteen or so minutes.
The gate was crowded; there were a lot of people headed to Montpellier. Around me, voices hummed. Two kids cackled as they chased each other about the seats and carry-on bags. My leg began jumping. It hadn’t done that in years, not since my condition had worsened.
The PA system dinged, and a woman’s voice came on. Boarding was starting.
“Grand-mère!” I cried, wrapping the old woman in a massive hug. I pressed my eyes shut— my nose was getting prickly. I didn’t want to start blubbering all over the place.
My grand-mère squeezed me back. “I missed you, petit,” she murmured. Then she stepped back and patted both my shoulders. “But you’re not so small now, are you? How old are you now?”
“Seventeen this May.”
“Mon Dieu, time's passing fast. A senior, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She smiled, then her dark, brown eyes— the same color as mine— scanned me from head to toe. “You’re looking better.”
“Yeah. The Sa—”
“Maman!” my mother exclaimed, cutting me off. “It’s so good to see you!”
I stood off to the side as they kissed. My mother and her maman were so similar they looked like the same person from different moments in time: the same long nose, brown eyes, and wavy brown hair— though my grand-mère’s was mostly grey.
Grand-mère turned to my father next. She was much shorter than he; Jason Matthews stood at six-one. She barely came up to his shoulder. “How was your flight? Are you tired?”
He yawned impressively. “Oh— mm— me?”
I laughed. Grand-mère ushered us into her car, where my mother sat in the passenger seat and my dad and I crammed into the back, our carry-ons between us. The car smelled like my grand-mère’s house. I sighed.
My mom and Grand-mère chattered about the wonderful sunshine in France and the new patio we were installing at our home back in Massachusetts. Outside, the brown-gold farmlands of L’Occitane blurred by, speckled with grey-purple bushes and great oak trees. In the distance, flat-topped mounds of red-purple rock and earth, too small to be mountains and too large for hills, jutted suddenly from the flat fields to meet the pale blue sky. A few wisps of clouds scudded along the horizon, but otherwise the sun beamed down unimpeded. The shadows were stark.
In the front of the car, Grand-mère said my name. I lifted my head to hear better. “—is looking much better. Have you found a new treatment?”
I opened my mouth, rather bewildered that my mother hadn’t told her yet, but my mom spoke first. “A new trial medicine. It’s working so far, but the doctors think there might be a relapse—”
I frowned. “Mom?”
My father reached over and squeezed my hand. I fell silent. My mother rambled on about some made-up drug that had managed to save my failing internal organs and even helped rebuild damaged tissue. She wasn’t wrong about what it did, but why wouldn’t she say it was the Salvage? It wasn’t a drug. It was a… a person, and he was saving my life. What was she afraid of?
Duh— what was she ever afraid of? The manor and the vampires in it.
I’d learned a lot from my mom, like the notion that putting your feet on the dinner table is bad and washing your hands after returning home is good. She’d probably learned things from her mom, too. And she’d said that her wariness of the manor was an old warning, so…
I was willing to bet she’d gotten it from Grand-mère. My mom didn’t want to tell her that the Salvage had saved me, because Grand-mère didn’t like the vampires.
Why she was afraid of the vampires, I had no idea.
I sat back in my seat. What was the problem, anyway? Sure, Buck could be annoying, but he was just a person. They were all just people.
I watched the French countryside flash by beyond the window and sighed.
“Puis j’avais un profiterole, s’il vous plaît? Celui avec la crème pâte.”
We’d been in France for about a week and a half, and today Grand-mère, my parents, and I had driven to a bakery outside Ouveillan. The aroma alone was enough to send me to pastry-heaven.
My dad paid for our food as the lady behind the counter handed me a profiterole on a ceramic plate. “Des fourchettes sont là-bas,” she told me, gesturing.
I glanced over my shoulder to find the silverware in buckets on a side table. “Ah. Merci.”
The four of us sat at a metal table in the sunshine. My dad had coffee and a cookie, my grand-mère a piece of raspberry tart, and my mother had chosen an impressively massive chocolate macaron. I munched the choux pastry before me while they talked about my dad’s upcoming conference in Paris on medieval history and Old English literature and absorbed the French sun like a sponge. It was a bright day, the kind people call beautiful. The sky was so blue.
“Willam! How’s school?”
I swallowed my mouthful of pastry cream. “Good, Grand-mère. Not too much summer homework.”
“Do you have your classes picked out for next year?”
“Mmhmm. World history, calculus, English lit, chemistry, French, and painting.”
She nodded. “Have you thought about college?”
“Hah! No.” I never thought I’d live long enough for college to be practical.
She seemed to see my unsaid words written across my face, because for a brief second she looked very sad. But it was gone before I could be sure. “Well. I never went to college. You’ll be fine no matter what you do.”
I smiled, a little awkwardly. “Thank you.”
My dad and I brought the dirty dishes back into the bakery. The plastic tub set aside for used plates and silverware was stationed in the back of the bakery above the trash and recycle, partly full of dishware. Behind the tub, the wall was plastered with old newspapers, now faded to a comfortable golden-yellow. I stacked my plate neatly on top of another that looked like it had once held a slice of chocolate pie.
My dad moved forward to deposit the rest of the dishes in the tub, and I stepped back to give him room. There were faint clinks as he dropped the spoons amidst the pre-existing silverware. We turned to go.
…un cratère énorme…
A massive crater?
I backtracked a few steps, my eyes flicking over the papered wall, trying to find the phrase they’d caught seconds before. There— a headline dated to about fifty-five years ago. The serif font spelled out in thick black letters, now dulled to a deep grey:
Explosion silencieuse: un cratère énorme à Coursan
I remembered my late-night Google rabbit hole from months before, searching for something resembling what had happened to me in the hospital courtyard.
Silent Explosion: a Massive Crater in Coursan
Ignoring my father’s questioning glance, I all but flattened myself to the wall in an attempt to read the decades-old newspaper.
During the night or early morning, a large crater appeared in the farmlands of northern Coursan. Nearby households report no sounds in the night, initially leading scientists to suspect that the hole was a sinkhole that happened to cause very little noise.
However, the pit’s bottom is curved like a bowl, while a true sinkhole would appear more straight-sided, like a chute. Due to the pattern of debris and the shape of the crater, the hole does not seem to be an impact crater, one a meteorite impact would create. Instead, it appears to have been caused by an explosion on or just beneath the surface of the soil. Scientists are still trying to decide how such a crater, almost a kilometer across, could have been created without generating a deafening sound.
The pit was discovered early this morning by a—
And here, my French failed. But I’d read enough to understand: a soundless rending of the Earth, caused by something on the ground.
It could very well be the Shattering.
My stomach jerked with a weird mix of excitement and anxiety. It was unbelievably convenient: an exact match of what I was searching for, found in a place I simply happened to go. It was almost worrying, but on my high of discovery I didn’t take the time to care.
“Find something interesting?” my father asked, peeking over my shoulder.
“Uh—” I poked at the wall. “A weird hole.”
My dad’s French wasn’t as good as mine. He squinted at the text for a few minutes before looking at me in defeat. “I give up. What does it say?”
“It’s a crater made by a silent explosion. Fifty years ago. Dad— maybe it’s the Shattering, you know, the thing Lyre talked about— maybe we can go and see if—”
“You two sure are taking your time,” my mother said, walking into the bakery with my grand-mère behind her. “Are you ready to go?”
“Mom, look at this,” I said, pointing at the paper. “Can we go see it? It’s just over in Coursan.”
The two women bent to read the faded newsprint. My mother looked up at me with a frown. “They’ve probably filled it in by now. Why—”
“It’s too dangerous.” My grand-mère’s voice was sharp. “You could fall in. Don’t go there. I don’t want you anywhere near that spot.”
Huh.
Well.
I suspected this crater was connected to the vampires, and here was a woman who avoided the vampires like the plague, telling me not to go near it.
Interesting.
“Dad, please?”
“Willam…”
“But, c’mon, I might find something there!”
“What you’ll probably find is a pit of dirt, if they haven’t filled it in. No.”
“I looked it up! It’s still there; some seismologists lobbied or something to have it protected so they could study it— you can go up and see it and everything—”
“Just look at pictures on the web, then.”
“But, Dad—”
“Will, look. Your grand-mère’s been touchy ever since the bakery, and if your mother finds out I’ve taken you to this pit, she’d throw a fit. Besides, they’re right— it’s a deep pit in the earth and it’s dangerous. Weigh that against the chances of you actually discovering something worthwhile, and it works out to just being a bad idea.”
“Dad!” I was outraged by the sheer unfairness of it all. “I’m dying because of this! Don’t you want to know what it is?”
His face softened and crumpled at the same time. “Of course I do, Will. I want to know as much as you do. But you won’t find answers there. Please, just drop it.”
I puffed out my cheeks. It was useless to argue more, I could see that. I couldn’t appeal to my mom, either; that was a definite no. And my grand-mère would probably lock me in my room. “Fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll drop it.”
I stomped off and rather dramatically slammed myself into my room to sulk. I stared up at the dark ceiling for a long time. There were still no answers written up there.
My hands made fists of my sheets. I was so close! If I could just figure out what the Shattering was, maybe I could fix myself somehow. And then I could live without always having to watch for signs of my illness creeping back.
Drop it, my butt.
I sat up, rolled across the bed, and grabbed my computer. Into the url bar, I typed ‘ouveillan buses’ and hit Search.
The crater was enormous. The newspaper article had said the deep pit was almost a kilometer across, which was over half a mile. The far edge was blurry with distance. The bowl-shaped rend itself was apparently about ninety feet deep in the middle, around the height of a six-story building. As the area was only about 28 meters above sea level, the bottom had filled with water. It was impossible to tell how deep the small lake was, though it couldn’t have been much more than a couple of meters.
The walls of the pit had eroded with time and grown up with grass and low shrubs, but they still sloped downward at a surprising angle with few footholds. If I fell in, it would be pretty hard to get back out, provided I hadn’t broken one of my still-sort-of-crap bones on the way down. I was beginning to see why this might be a bad idea, but I refused to admit that my dumb, over-protective parents might have been right.
There was a metal-rail fence protecting the edge of the crater where the touristy look-out was, complete with a tiny gravel parking lot and a plaque. I’d had to walk over a mile to get here from the bus stop, and with the sun beating down I was hot and tired. I sat down in the shade under an elm to catch my breath, thanking Lyre for my newly-functioning lungs.
I wasn’t a total idiot; I’d brought a waterbottle and some food I’d pilfered from my grand-mère’s pantry. I chomped on walnuts and stared out across the great crater, trying to imagine the vampire that might have made it. They must’ve been very powerful, much more than me, to have been able to carve out such a massive chunk of earth. It was hundreds— thousands— of times bigger than my turned-up dirt at the hospital.
I dawdled for a while, reading the plaque and peering over the edge. There was nothing I hadn’t already known, and no hints to if it really had been the Shattering. What had I expected? A group of vampires? A lingering bite of ferocious energy? Some psychic connection to a place rent by the same power that dwelt inside me? The trip was beginning to feel pointless and rather stupid. I hadn’t gained anything, and my parents were going to be pretty mad by the time I got back.
I went back to my elm tree and flopped onto the dusty gravel. I needed to start walking back to the bus stop soon, if I wanted to be home by dusk. The water in the crater winked at me in a mocking way. Stupid water. Stupid crater. Stupid Shattering. I sighed grumpily and moved to get back on my feet.
As I stood, my backpack snagged on the tree behind me. I was yanked back to the ground, barking my elbow and clonking my head. “Ow…” I murmured, clutching my head as red blood welled from the broken skin on my forearm. I felt so luckless and battered and pitiful that I just curled there on the gravel, feeling very sorry for myself.
“Vous allez bien?” a female voice asked.
I shot off the ground into a seated position, trying to appear a little less pathetic than I felt. A young woman peered down at me, a concerned expression on her face. Behind her, a man looked on with passive interest.
Her hair, gathered up in a big, curly bun atop her head, shone red in the late afternoon light, like deep, deep wine. She held incredibly still, but when she did move it was with the grace of a great cat. I recognized that movement; I’d seen it almost every day since the start of high school. This woman, and the red-haired man behind her, were vampires.
“Yeah.”
“Which one? Math?”
“Yep. What about you? Chemistry?”
“Ugh, yes.”
As one despairing teenage boy, Buck and I flopped backward in our seats and groaned. We were stationed at the library, our class notes spread before us on the puzzle table. Unfortunately for our grades, the puzzle was getting more attention than our notes were. It was a very nice panorama of some sunlit lake, with some perky pine trees on the far shore. Much perkier than us.
“It’s the last final,” Buck mumbled into his hands. “We just gotta do it.”
I introduced the table to my forehead. “Why do I even need precalculus? It’s just algebra III all over again.”
“Because you’d die in a real calc class without it.”
“You don’t need calculus to be a hockey player,” I grumbled. “This is dumb.”
“You’re not going to be a hockey player, Willam!” Buck groaned.
I kicked him under the table. “Stop crushing my dreams and start cramming polyatomic anions.”
“Hockey players smell,” Buck continued, picking up his notes. “In a not-good way. Quiz me.”
I took the papers from him. “You know what hockey players smell like? Nitrate.”
“NO3-. No, but I know what jocks smell like. I can guess.”
“Eugh. Sulfite.”
“SO3-2.”
I rustled through his notes, trying to find a hard one. Buck’s handwriting was better than mine; he’d had ages to practice. It was as familiar to me as my parents’.
Buck jabbed the back of the notes, causing the paper to let out a protesting fwap, and I realized I’d been quiet for a while. “Next,” he urged.
“Oh, right. Umm… dichromate.”
He flopped back against the chair and groaned. “Heck. Chemistry sucks.”
The semester ended. Buck and I passed all our exams and could officially call ourselves seniors without my dad raising an eyebrow.
The pickup games continued. We’d been going most weeks and hung out with Hunter afterwards. Harvey and Kate made cookies once and shared them with us. Buck taught me some basic basketball. Now you won’t be awful, he told me. But you still kinda suck.
The twins’ presence was all that saved him from a violent slew of swearing.
Hunter warned me that the games would become spotty over the summer as most of the players went on vacations, but would start up again in the fall.
If I remained healthy, I could play in those autumn games. My fingers itched at the thought.
Now that the semester was over, my trip to France was approaching fast, and I was terribly excited. My family practiced our French at the dinner table. I unearthed some nice clothes that still fit me, for my mother warned of a fancy French restaurant in the near future. Heaven forbid someone see me without a tie.
“How do you tie a tie?” I wondered.
“You loop it and tuck it,” Buck explained.
“Thanks,” I said, deadpan. I chucked the dark blue tie at my suitcase and sighed. “I’ll ask Youtube later.”
“How long are you gone for, again?” he asked.
“Two weeks.”
“Right. And your dad’s staying for a business trip after?”
“Yeah. My parents planned it that way so his job would pay for his airfare. We have to take the train up to Paris, though, at the end of our trip. His conference is there.”
“Oh no, Paris. How shall you survive?” He rolled over on the bed so he could watch me root through my closet. There were clothes and Legos everywhere. “Where does your grandmother live?”
“Ouveillan. It’s in the south.”
Buck rolled over again so he was staring up at the ceiling. I kicked around for some dress shoes. “Mmm…” he mumbled.
“What?”
“I’m trying to remember that region’s Shire. Argh, there are so many in Europe…”
I’d probably see some vampires during my stay. There were more of them in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa than in the rest of the world’s continents. Vampires originated in Africa, just like humans, but they hadn’t spread out as much. Somehow living longer made them want to stay in one place.
“Vasceux, I think,” Buck said, still gazing up at the ceiling. “Or maybe Ciel-Mont. One of the two.”
“Ha!” I triumphantly held up a pair of black shoes in decent condition. I hoped they’d still fit. “I found them! Circa middle school graduation.”
“Hooray,” Buck offered.
A week passed, and I was on the plane to France. We’d had to drive over an hour to get from our home in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts to the Boston Logan International Airport, and by the time we reached the parking garage I was antsy to escape. The traffic in Boston was the tenth circle of hell.
Takeoff was scheduled for seven pm, so we’d be flying through the night. Though the flight would only be about ten hours, we’d arrive at the Montpellier-Méditerranée Airport around eleven the following day due to the difference in time zones. From there, it would be an hour drive to my grand-mère’s house in Ouveillan.
I’d be exhausted. I couldn’t wait.
We got airport food and ate it at the gate. I loved the salty, greasy stuff— it was the taste of going places. It wasn’t that I wanted to leave my hometown, exactly, but going places made me feel alive.
I finished the last of my flat, rather sad cheeseburger and crumpled the paper wrapping in my hand. To my left, my father was typing something in Times New Roman. He was working right up until we got on the plane. He had a lot of preparation to do for the conference in Paris. To my right, my mother sat munching on thin fries. She kept checking the time.
I threw a glance at my phone. 6:12. Boarding wouldn’t start for another fifteen or so minutes.
The gate was crowded; there were a lot of people headed to Montpellier. Around me, voices hummed. Two kids cackled as they chased each other about the seats and carry-on bags. My leg began jumping. It hadn’t done that in years, not since my condition had worsened.
The PA system dinged, and a woman’s voice came on. Boarding was starting.
“Grand-mère!” I cried, wrapping the old woman in a massive hug. I pressed my eyes shut— my nose was getting prickly. I didn’t want to start blubbering all over the place.
My grand-mère squeezed me back. “I missed you, petit,” she murmured. Then she stepped back and patted both my shoulders. “But you’re not so small now, are you? How old are you now?”
“Seventeen this May.”
“Mon Dieu, time's passing fast. A senior, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She smiled, then her dark, brown eyes— the same color as mine— scanned me from head to toe. “You’re looking better.”
“Yeah. The Sa—”
“Maman!” my mother exclaimed, cutting me off. “It’s so good to see you!”
I stood off to the side as they kissed. My mother and her maman were so similar they looked like the same person from different moments in time: the same long nose, brown eyes, and wavy brown hair— though my grand-mère’s was mostly grey.
Grand-mère turned to my father next. She was much shorter than he; Jason Matthews stood at six-one. She barely came up to his shoulder. “How was your flight? Are you tired?”
He yawned impressively. “Oh— mm— me?”
I laughed. Grand-mère ushered us into her car, where my mother sat in the passenger seat and my dad and I crammed into the back, our carry-ons between us. The car smelled like my grand-mère’s house. I sighed.
My mom and Grand-mère chattered about the wonderful sunshine in France and the new patio we were installing at our home back in Massachusetts. Outside, the brown-gold farmlands of L’Occitane blurred by, speckled with grey-purple bushes and great oak trees. In the distance, flat-topped mounds of red-purple rock and earth, too small to be mountains and too large for hills, jutted suddenly from the flat fields to meet the pale blue sky. A few wisps of clouds scudded along the horizon, but otherwise the sun beamed down unimpeded. The shadows were stark.
In the front of the car, Grand-mère said my name. I lifted my head to hear better. “—is looking much better. Have you found a new treatment?”
I opened my mouth, rather bewildered that my mother hadn’t told her yet, but my mom spoke first. “A new trial medicine. It’s working so far, but the doctors think there might be a relapse—”
I frowned. “Mom?”
My father reached over and squeezed my hand. I fell silent. My mother rambled on about some made-up drug that had managed to save my failing internal organs and even helped rebuild damaged tissue. She wasn’t wrong about what it did, but why wouldn’t she say it was the Salvage? It wasn’t a drug. It was a… a person, and he was saving my life. What was she afraid of?
Duh— what was she ever afraid of? The manor and the vampires in it.
I’d learned a lot from my mom, like the notion that putting your feet on the dinner table is bad and washing your hands after returning home is good. She’d probably learned things from her mom, too. And she’d said that her wariness of the manor was an old warning, so…
I was willing to bet she’d gotten it from Grand-mère. My mom didn’t want to tell her that the Salvage had saved me, because Grand-mère didn’t like the vampires.
Why she was afraid of the vampires, I had no idea.
I sat back in my seat. What was the problem, anyway? Sure, Buck could be annoying, but he was just a person. They were all just people.
I watched the French countryside flash by beyond the window and sighed.
“Puis j’avais un profiterole, s’il vous plaît? Celui avec la crème pâte.”
We’d been in France for about a week and a half, and today Grand-mère, my parents, and I had driven to a bakery outside Ouveillan. The aroma alone was enough to send me to pastry-heaven.
My dad paid for our food as the lady behind the counter handed me a profiterole on a ceramic plate. “Des fourchettes sont là-bas,” she told me, gesturing.
I glanced over my shoulder to find the silverware in buckets on a side table. “Ah. Merci.”
The four of us sat at a metal table in the sunshine. My dad had coffee and a cookie, my grand-mère a piece of raspberry tart, and my mother had chosen an impressively massive chocolate macaron. I munched the choux pastry before me while they talked about my dad’s upcoming conference in Paris on medieval history and Old English literature and absorbed the French sun like a sponge. It was a bright day, the kind people call beautiful. The sky was so blue.
“Willam! How’s school?”
I swallowed my mouthful of pastry cream. “Good, Grand-mère. Not too much summer homework.”
“Do you have your classes picked out for next year?”
“Mmhmm. World history, calculus, English lit, chemistry, French, and painting.”
She nodded. “Have you thought about college?”
“Hah! No.” I never thought I’d live long enough for college to be practical.
She seemed to see my unsaid words written across my face, because for a brief second she looked very sad. But it was gone before I could be sure. “Well. I never went to college. You’ll be fine no matter what you do.”
I smiled, a little awkwardly. “Thank you.”
My dad and I brought the dirty dishes back into the bakery. The plastic tub set aside for used plates and silverware was stationed in the back of the bakery above the trash and recycle, partly full of dishware. Behind the tub, the wall was plastered with old newspapers, now faded to a comfortable golden-yellow. I stacked my plate neatly on top of another that looked like it had once held a slice of chocolate pie.
My dad moved forward to deposit the rest of the dishes in the tub, and I stepped back to give him room. There were faint clinks as he dropped the spoons amidst the pre-existing silverware. We turned to go.
…un cratère énorme…
A massive crater?
I backtracked a few steps, my eyes flicking over the papered wall, trying to find the phrase they’d caught seconds before. There— a headline dated to about fifty-five years ago. The serif font spelled out in thick black letters, now dulled to a deep grey:
Explosion silencieuse: un cratère énorme à Coursan
I remembered my late-night Google rabbit hole from months before, searching for something resembling what had happened to me in the hospital courtyard.
Silent Explosion: a Massive Crater in Coursan
Ignoring my father’s questioning glance, I all but flattened myself to the wall in an attempt to read the decades-old newspaper.
During the night or early morning, a large crater appeared in the farmlands of northern Coursan. Nearby households report no sounds in the night, initially leading scientists to suspect that the hole was a sinkhole that happened to cause very little noise.
However, the pit’s bottom is curved like a bowl, while a true sinkhole would appear more straight-sided, like a chute. Due to the pattern of debris and the shape of the crater, the hole does not seem to be an impact crater, one a meteorite impact would create. Instead, it appears to have been caused by an explosion on or just beneath the surface of the soil. Scientists are still trying to decide how such a crater, almost a kilometer across, could have been created without generating a deafening sound.
The pit was discovered early this morning by a—
And here, my French failed. But I’d read enough to understand: a soundless rending of the Earth, caused by something on the ground.
It could very well be the Shattering.
My stomach jerked with a weird mix of excitement and anxiety. It was unbelievably convenient: an exact match of what I was searching for, found in a place I simply happened to go. It was almost worrying, but on my high of discovery I didn’t take the time to care.
“Find something interesting?” my father asked, peeking over my shoulder.
“Uh—” I poked at the wall. “A weird hole.”
My dad’s French wasn’t as good as mine. He squinted at the text for a few minutes before looking at me in defeat. “I give up. What does it say?”
“It’s a crater made by a silent explosion. Fifty years ago. Dad— maybe it’s the Shattering, you know, the thing Lyre talked about— maybe we can go and see if—”
“You two sure are taking your time,” my mother said, walking into the bakery with my grand-mère behind her. “Are you ready to go?”
“Mom, look at this,” I said, pointing at the paper. “Can we go see it? It’s just over in Coursan.”
The two women bent to read the faded newsprint. My mother looked up at me with a frown. “They’ve probably filled it in by now. Why—”
“It’s too dangerous.” My grand-mère’s voice was sharp. “You could fall in. Don’t go there. I don’t want you anywhere near that spot.”
Huh.
Well.
I suspected this crater was connected to the vampires, and here was a woman who avoided the vampires like the plague, telling me not to go near it.
Interesting.
“Dad, please?”
“Willam…”
“But, c’mon, I might find something there!”
“What you’ll probably find is a pit of dirt, if they haven’t filled it in. No.”
“I looked it up! It’s still there; some seismologists lobbied or something to have it protected so they could study it— you can go up and see it and everything—”
“Just look at pictures on the web, then.”
“But, Dad—”
“Will, look. Your grand-mère’s been touchy ever since the bakery, and if your mother finds out I’ve taken you to this pit, she’d throw a fit. Besides, they’re right— it’s a deep pit in the earth and it’s dangerous. Weigh that against the chances of you actually discovering something worthwhile, and it works out to just being a bad idea.”
“Dad!” I was outraged by the sheer unfairness of it all. “I’m dying because of this! Don’t you want to know what it is?”
His face softened and crumpled at the same time. “Of course I do, Will. I want to know as much as you do. But you won’t find answers there. Please, just drop it.”
I puffed out my cheeks. It was useless to argue more, I could see that. I couldn’t appeal to my mom, either; that was a definite no. And my grand-mère would probably lock me in my room. “Fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll drop it.”
I stomped off and rather dramatically slammed myself into my room to sulk. I stared up at the dark ceiling for a long time. There were still no answers written up there.
My hands made fists of my sheets. I was so close! If I could just figure out what the Shattering was, maybe I could fix myself somehow. And then I could live without always having to watch for signs of my illness creeping back.
Drop it, my butt.
I sat up, rolled across the bed, and grabbed my computer. Into the url bar, I typed ‘ouveillan buses’ and hit Search.
The crater was enormous. The newspaper article had said the deep pit was almost a kilometer across, which was over half a mile. The far edge was blurry with distance. The bowl-shaped rend itself was apparently about ninety feet deep in the middle, around the height of a six-story building. As the area was only about 28 meters above sea level, the bottom had filled with water. It was impossible to tell how deep the small lake was, though it couldn’t have been much more than a couple of meters.
The walls of the pit had eroded with time and grown up with grass and low shrubs, but they still sloped downward at a surprising angle with few footholds. If I fell in, it would be pretty hard to get back out, provided I hadn’t broken one of my still-sort-of-crap bones on the way down. I was beginning to see why this might be a bad idea, but I refused to admit that my dumb, over-protective parents might have been right.
There was a metal-rail fence protecting the edge of the crater where the touristy look-out was, complete with a tiny gravel parking lot and a plaque. I’d had to walk over a mile to get here from the bus stop, and with the sun beating down I was hot and tired. I sat down in the shade under an elm to catch my breath, thanking Lyre for my newly-functioning lungs.
I wasn’t a total idiot; I’d brought a waterbottle and some food I’d pilfered from my grand-mère’s pantry. I chomped on walnuts and stared out across the great crater, trying to imagine the vampire that might have made it. They must’ve been very powerful, much more than me, to have been able to carve out such a massive chunk of earth. It was hundreds— thousands— of times bigger than my turned-up dirt at the hospital.
I dawdled for a while, reading the plaque and peering over the edge. There was nothing I hadn’t already known, and no hints to if it really had been the Shattering. What had I expected? A group of vampires? A lingering bite of ferocious energy? Some psychic connection to a place rent by the same power that dwelt inside me? The trip was beginning to feel pointless and rather stupid. I hadn’t gained anything, and my parents were going to be pretty mad by the time I got back.
I went back to my elm tree and flopped onto the dusty gravel. I needed to start walking back to the bus stop soon, if I wanted to be home by dusk. The water in the crater winked at me in a mocking way. Stupid water. Stupid crater. Stupid Shattering. I sighed grumpily and moved to get back on my feet.
As I stood, my backpack snagged on the tree behind me. I was yanked back to the ground, barking my elbow and clonking my head. “Ow…” I murmured, clutching my head as red blood welled from the broken skin on my forearm. I felt so luckless and battered and pitiful that I just curled there on the gravel, feeling very sorry for myself.
“Vous allez bien?” a female voice asked.
I shot off the ground into a seated position, trying to appear a little less pathetic than I felt. A young woman peered down at me, a concerned expression on her face. Behind her, a man looked on with passive interest.
Her hair, gathered up in a big, curly bun atop her head, shone red in the late afternoon light, like deep, deep wine. She held incredibly still, but when she did move it was with the grace of a great cat. I recognized that movement; I’d seen it almost every day since the start of high school. This woman, and the red-haired man behind her, were vampires.
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