Broken Sky 1:3

Nothing we said could talk her out of it.

He'd tried to come up with some kind of explanation for that damned rip in the sky. She'd wandered in and out of every church there was. I was the one who went for drink. Drunk was worse than sober because I couldn't not hear the voices under all the other noises, but sometimes I heard them sober, and drunk I could pretend they weren't real. Even if it never really worked. I don't know if reason ever worked for him, but the day she told us her plan he looked as bad as I felt. Maybe he'd have been the next to fade.

Mom was one of the first to die. Don't ask me why or what of, other than that stuff that wasn't supposed to be there. She just started to fade - and I mean by the end her soul was shining through her skin. There wasn't much to bury.

Dad went next. We watched a lot of people fade those two years - my parents, her parents, his brothers. Everyone knew someone, several someones, who'd faded, was fading, was about to fade - there was a look people got when they were going to fade, the blank, blind look of saint's statues.

Eventually it was my turn, and by then it was just the three of us.

She wanted to go back to the island. Maybe I did, and she wanted to give me that. It's the sort of thing she did. I won't bore you about the ship; it was hell to find one that still ran, and someone to run it. Eventually we found one whose captain was fading faster than I was. We spent most of the trip hiding from the noise. I had earplugs, she had music, and he took to the engine room when it got bad, and sometimes all three of us were there, when the noise was the worst. We never talked about it.

I was on deck as soon as the pilot thought we were close. The island didn't appear; the dock did, battered and damaged by two years' neglect, but the island wasn't there. She was wearing a light and summery dress, like the one she'd worn that day; maybe it was the same one. Her glasses kept sliding down her nose, and she kept pushing them back up distractedly, staring down the length of the dock to where the island should have been. He leaned on the rail on her other side. Didn't say anything, just stood there, stiff as the metal railing. He'd argued even harder than I had.

She was shivering when I swung her down to the dock and the two of us jumped down after her. The island appeared halfway down the dock, and when we reached the beach, the ship and the rest of the dock had vanished. Rocks crunched underfoot as we hiked up the path. No gulls, no animal noises, nothing, and even the trees didn't seem entirely real, as if they were fading too. Maybe the animals had died like I was dying, like Mom's cat had died.

Dad had shut the house up tight; it was in good shape inside, everything just where we'd left it, smelling musty and closed-up. I threw open the shutters as we walked up to the largest porch, with the best view; when it rained we'd used it as a dining room. He handed me the knife when she leaned out the window in hopes of catching even the slightest breeze.

She smelled like real sunlight, the kind we hadn't seen in two years, warm and solid when she hugged me.

It took both hands to shove the knife into her back.

Blood fountained out, soaking my hands. She shuddered, clutched me, slumped.

I looked up at the sky, at the jagged tear that had never healed; part of it was framed between two trees.

If you could pull dye back out of water, maybe that was it, but not really; it's just the least wrong I can get. That stuff tumbled and billowed and flowed in great twisting ribbons, but it was going backwards, going back up into that tear.

Her hands loosened and her legs gave out. I let go of the knife and held her.

The sun was suddenly blinding and bright and mattered, like it hadn't mattered in two years, and that wasn't why I was crying. Not all of it, anyway.

That noise that wasn't wind and surf, that had been under everything ever since that day, faded. The voices went with it. That stuff was - if dye could come back out of water, that wasn't completely wrong. It moved in billows and ribbons, twisted and flung itself across the sky, fighting being drawn back into that tear in the sky.

I felt her sigh once, and then nothing else, slumping as limp as a rag doll.

That other noise, between breaking pottery and tearing metal, started up, getting louder and louder as the cracks in the sky sealed over, and a screaming sound like train brakes was added as that tear started to close up. The sky shook and shuddered, that stuff tumbling and flowing back into the tear, and when the last of it had disappeared, the tear turned into a black scar on the sky, almost horizon to horizon, and then it was gone altogether.

The sun was shining in a clear, brilliantly blue sky. Her blood was all over me.