The Shimmers in the Night by Lydia Millet

Author:Lydia Millet [Millet, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The three of them hunched at the corner, whispering.

“Maybe we should just go home,” suggested Jaye when Cara told them about the people with huge black eyes. “I mean—get help. Cara, you got hurt. By guys who breathed fire. And I bet even worse things could happen—”

“No way,” interrupted Hayley, and shook her head.

It occurred to Cara that Hayley was more confident since she’d figured out about the cooling towers.

“Seriously,” went on Hayley, “I can’t go back right now. I’ve gotta have something to show for all this. Like Jax. A rescued kid might be my only get-out-of-jail-free card. The crap I’ll be in with my mom? A bunch of stoners standing around a giant water cooler is like no sweat compared to that.”

“Um, I don’t think they’re stoned,” said Cara grimly.

“You know that stoner dude in tenth grade? Muller? He couldn’t guard his way out of a paper bag. He just drags his feet around and drones on about fractals and Phish.”

“They’re not stoners,” insisted Cara. “I know they have the dilated pupils. But I promise you it’s not drugs. Or at least not the kind you mean.”

“My point is, we went to all this trouble to get here. We should finish. Even if we never tell my mom. I mean, best case she never notices we’re gone.”

“But we can’t get past the people,” said Jaye. “We’re outnumbered. I mean, even if we got by them, which is assuming the door’s open and we can even find it before they grab us, they’d just come in, too.”

“We have to get in without them knowing,” said Cara.

“Can we use the book again?” asked Hayley. “And just, like, be beamed in there?”

“It’s worth a try,” said Cara. “Except…I don’t know, but something tells me there’s a reason it didn’t take us there in the first place.”

“Let’s just try anyway,” said Hayley, and Jaye knelt and opened the book on the ground. The three of them squatted down around it.

“We have to be touching,” said Cara. “It takes all three of us, I think.”

With both of them pressed close against her sides, she moved one hand over the other to touch the nazar and stared down at the book, thinking We want to go inside. Inside the guarded tower.

She was hoping for a scene of the inside of the cooling tower, like what she’d gotten when she asked, back in the refrigerated room at the Institute, where her mother was. She waited for it to wash across the page the way the scene of the power plant had.

But the pages stayed snowy white.

Please, book, take us inside, she begged. We can’t face… those people. Whoever or whatever they may be. Take us past them. Take us inside.

Nothing.

Maybe the book had simply taken them as far as it could. Maybe there were wards here, or something. That had to be it, she thought. It had brought them as far as it could. But if the book could take you places, she wondered, could

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