June swiped soot off her forehead. She reached out, bare-handed, and lit another.

  * * *

  One moment, Bolt was pushing Rig, who laughed a cold, miserable laugh, close and beery in his ear, and maybe because of the booze, it was sort of funny, the way he looked lit up in red and gold. It was sort of funny, their usual boyish wrestling, until the blade stung Bolt’s wrist.

  Bolt snapped his wrist back. “Put that away.”

  The fireworks had brought a change over everyone around them, a strange electricity flowing. Above them, artificial thunder crashed, and cheers soared from the water. One of the Pickle sisters stooped, cupping her hands to gather the light-filled lake water and draw it to her face. Something in Woody’s expression and the way, as one, he and Rig both suddenly lunged turned the game sour. Bolt and Sammy—with the instinct of a startled flock—retreated down the deck in a drunken skitter, Bolt stumbling against a foam noodle.

  “Come on.” Woody snorted, ducking in and back, watching Sammy’s every twitch. A green firework crackled over his face. “Lighten up, bitches.”

  “Go to hell. You’re such stupid assholes,” Sammy panted, her eyes darting. She feinted, then leaped onto the deck of the cruiser, hooking her legs into its rails to hoist herself up. Woody made a grab for her ankle, a move that could’ve ended in a split skull for Sammy if he’d caught her.

  Bolt vaulted over the rail after her—Rig snagged his shorts, and Bolt twisted back to glare. There were adults everywhere, people he knew everywhere. Why did no one do anything? But all eyes were fixed overhead, on the dazzle above them. With the fireworks erupting in the sky, they were as good as alone.

  “Careful.” Rig’s eyes flashed gold in the light, and he bared his teeth. Metal flashed—hot pain as the knife nicked across his knee. He kicked Rig’s shoulder, launching over the rail and dashing after Sammy’s dark hair. He caught up at the edge of the boat, glancing back to see Rig scrambling up after them. Eyes flashing, Rig mimed dragging the knife across his throat. No one noticed them, not a single head turned as the fireworks captivated every eye beyond their chase.

  “Come on,” Bolt said, heart thrumming in his ears. Sammy and Bolt pushed through a crowd of retirees until they could spring across the gap to the next boat amid adults, one of whom chuckled indulgently. A champagne cork soared past Bolt’s ear, the party cheering as foam hit the deck. Rig was right there, just a few bodies away—there was a sharp scream from a bystander as his blade grazed flesh. A plastic champagne flute hit the deck and bounced.

  In the chaos, Bolt pushed the houseboat’s sliding back door open, and Sammy darted past him inside.

  “Lost his damn mind,” she panted as they crept through the dim interior. It was a thawing icebox, a boat usually kept freezing cold by an air conditioner and now, away from the dock, reached summer temperatures. The fireworks were more a feeling in here, a hard rumble in the pit of their stomachs as they slid over hardwood, past a faded leather couch, the unwashed dishes from lasagna, a strawberry shortcake melting in its dish on the table. Picture frames hung askew on the walls. “Him and everybody else on this lake. Should we just hide in—”

  “Get down,” Bolt whispered as the door opened a second time, the noise of the night pouring in. They hit the deck, covered by the kitchen island. Some patriotic country music anthem pounded along with the show.

  “Nice place.” Rig snorted, flipping his knife. He picked up an ashtray resting beside the captain’s wheel and turned it idly in his hands.

  Sammy glanced at Bolt, her face ashen. Her eyes skittered down the houseboat. They had to keep moving, or he’d find them there.

  Rig whistled a note or two, hefting the ashtray. It was a heavy geode, irregularly shaped, purple crystals sprouting from dark rock. “Let’s see. Maybe…” He hurled it, and the ashtray skidded across the island and gashed Sammy’s shoulder on the way to the floor, inches from her skull. She gasped, crumpling in pain.

  Rig threw himself through the space between them, the knife glinting, and some animal instinct inside Bolt snapped awake. He kicked a barstool out, and it clattered on the kitchen tiles. Rig tripped and stumbled, his face in a horrible twist, his curses lost in the words of the radio and the explosions above, and Sammy was already up, grimacing, as they sprinted through the dock.

  “My dad loves you. Should hear how he talks you up to me all the damn time.” A vase of blue glass shattered against the wall, tiny splinters spitting at Bolt as they ripped the door out of the way and ran back into the night.

  Outside, the fireworks boomed without pause, a row of white flares shooting across the sky. Their light, erratic, flashing on the offbeats from every side, cast the whole scene into bizarre monochromatic animation. The boat, its crowd, their pursuit, might as well have been a theme park fun house ride, the people only automatons and the action only pretend. Bolt saw, briefly, something like a dragon outlined in smoke, a deadly, twisting shape that he didn’t believe.

  Sammy and Bolt wriggled through a pair of women, slipping on something spilled as they ran down the pitch-black path illuminated in short bursts, strobe light revelations. Bolt gripped Sammy’s hand, and they sprang to a speedboat that nearly capsized under them, bucking under their weight.

  “Watch it,” the captain griped under his Razorback cap, but they were already gone, hurtling onto the back deck of a houseboat. No sign of Rig, not anywhere.

  Far behind, Bolt could just hear Woody’s half-hysterical guffaw. “Y’all are sunk!”

  A line of blood from Sammy’s shoulder ran down to her wrist.

  “You okay?” Bolt panted.

  Sammy huffed, not quite an affirmative.

  He threw a glance back just as Woody, three boats back, shoved someone into the water in his rush. Bolt and Sammy bounded over a low back gate and through moldy deck furniture clustered around a tube, abandoned because the inhabitants were in the water. Nothing but empty beer cans watched the two of them scurry across the narrow deck, Woody disappearing from sight as they rounded another corner, past burgundy canvas toward the stairs—

  Rig waited around the corner, knife flashing violent orange. A firework screamed overhead, drowning out his words, but Bolt read them anyway. “Got you.”

  * * *

  It was exhilarating, June laughing in the face of fire, standing on that platform, daring sparks to rain down and burn her. The whole barge was covered in soot, a fine layer of Pompeii dust, and Jack had unending tricks to show her.

  All these were his little packages of chaos. How had he done it? How had he harnessed that thing, the mad whirling dervish inside, and found ways to channel it? He had wrapped living flames in paper, and it had held, until now, until he set them free. June thirsted for the answer. She could touch his works, even light them with nothing but her own skin, but she couldn’t understand how he had done it or how to do it herself.

  As if he could sense her longing, Jack smiled at her with ashy teeth and stroked two fingers along the back of a Black Cat firework. It charged into the sky in gleeful self-destruction.

  More. Then more. And more.

  June grabbed the fuse of a Roman candle, dug her thumbnail in, and jerked—the fuse caught, and the candle vaulted to the stars, lightning trailing behind.

  “Somebody’s gonna die tonight,” he mused. “Wonder who?”

  The words broke through the adrenaline so violently, at first, June must have misheard. But he still smiled at the sky, expectant and unbothered.

  “What?” she asked through numb lips.

  It was then, in the flash and bang of the Roman candle, that June first saw the little boat and its little passenger. At first, the animal part of her, mesmerized by firelight, didn’t even recognize her. But then, June swiped soot off her forehead and looked again. Lark was almost invisible in the choppy waves made by bigger hulls and fancier boats, just a cork on the tide.

  June hadn’t been looking for her, not in any conscious way. But at the sight of her, June felt cooled, sedated, brought down from the sky, aware of how sore and scorched her throat was, how her eyes burned from the smoke. What had she been doing? Where was Aunt Eliza—surely she would be looking for her?

  Yellow Jack had abandoned her, moved down the barge to attend to spiky black fireworks. They were horrible, unnerving vultures with shrouded wings and hooked beaks turned toward the gathered boats. They looked hungry, ripe for a grand finale. He crouched next to them, and for a flash, he could have been one of them, just as eager for destruction. He touched the first of the flock. June’s stomach heaved, bile and beer and cornbread clogging her chest. The firework was off with a burning glow, arcing so close to the boats, it could only have been intentional.

  June dropped to her knees, clutching the edge of the barge, and tried not to vomit.

  Boom. Crack. The explosion drowned out the cheers. The flash was as bright as daylight, laying them all bare, the boats, the faces. The water.

  And under the water. In that night-banishing light, June saw clear into the lake, past scattered schools of fish all the way to the bottom. Only it wasn’t just a muddy lake bed waiting for her.

  Without a spyglass, June saw the places the record player needle skipped on the scuffed old vinyl of Lake Prosper.

  There it was. It had been there all along. Its little streets, its community center, the rows of little houses: the drowned town of Prosper. The anchors from the boats on the surface had settled everywhere, hooked into chimneys and around the cavity in a church steeple, where once bells must have rung. More were buried in the silt, one broken entirely through the First Prosper Bank sign. The water was catfish slick and weedy, but through the churn, she saw the people, down under the water, their hair and clothes drifting in the currents.

  It was only an instant. But she saw them as clearly as the people in the boats. June swayed, clenching the edge of the barge. Like everyone else, their milky pearl-crusted eyes were fixed upon the show with gaunt terror on their jaundiced faces. But they had anchors too. Their ankles, under disintegrating clothing, were tied down, barnacled with strange milky growths. Pearls. The people floated in place but couldn’t rise more than a few feet toward the surface.

  Trapped on the barge, in the nightmare’s cruel engine, June screamed, but the next boom drowned it out. Behind her, the fireworks man was laughing. In front of her—Lark was still there, her face lit in the fireworks glow.

  Before she could fear it, she crawled into the water, craning to keep her head over the surface, and swam for her life toward the only refuge she could see, the only possible escape left to her, the little boat with its little passenger, bobbing alone on feverish, hungry water.

  * * *

  Rig should’ve been grinning, flushed with victory, the winner of a great jest. But his face was still and empty. He lounged in their path, half sprawled up on the stairs they were about to climb. Sammy screamed as she nearly collided with him. His knife was inches from her gut. The next volley of fireworks, a bouquet of blues and violets, exploded above them.

  “Is this the chaos you wanted?” Bolt challenged him, daring himself up the first couple of damp metal steps toward Rig. The taste of gunpowder spread down his throat.

  Rig closed his fist around the knife hilt and, quick as a cobra, punched Bolt. The world tilted dangerously, steps loose under his feet—but Sammy steadied him. Hot blood dribbled onto his lip.

  “Dickhead,” Rig muttered, tickling his knife over his own face like a shaving razor. “Y’all are such wastes. Wastes of skin. My dad was wrong to come here and try to save y’all.” He flipped the knife once between his fingers. “Oh, hey, Woody.”

  Woody had caught up, leering at them from behind. They were cornered.

  “You’ve got to stop,” Bolt snapped.

  “Oh.” Rig laughed shortly, and there was no lightness in his eyes anymore. They were flat as the smoke-choked sky. “Because you say so? We’re way past that.”

  Bolt shoved an arm in front of Sammy just as Rig snatched at them. Catching Bolt, he reeled him in until their knees banged together, Rig’s eyes bright and rabid. Bolt grabbed his wrist, pushing the moonlight flash of blade away from him. Rig felt stronger than he ever had before, sinewy and strange, nails digging into his skin, staring at Bolt with such focus. Then he snapped his head forward and sank his teeth into the muscle where Bolt’s shoulder met his neck. Bolt yanked him away by the hair, and Rig grinned, empty and miles wide, as the blade—the knife, he had forgotten the knife—sank into Bolt’s side.

  But just as quickly, metal hit his rib and grimaced to a shallow halt. They were locked there, holding each other eye to eye. It wasn’t heartbreak or pain that froze Bolt but dull disbelief: Rig had done it. He’d actually done it. For a splintered second, Rig looked just as shocked before he let out a soft huff and gifted Bolt a loose, fond smile. The first of warm blood trickled down his side.

  Woody yelped—Sammy had nailed him in the groin, and he hit the deck, moaning. Coming alive, Bolt shoved Rig so hard that his head banged against the door. Sammy grabbed Bolt’s hand in a sweaty vice. As one, they jumped over Woody and veered the only way left to them, off the front, where the gap was treacherous. They hurled themselves out over the darkness. The minuscule ski boat wobbled when they landed, nearly capsizing under their weight, and Bolt hit hard, landing shin first against the rail and then the floor.

  “Watch it!” someone spat at them.

  “The water,” Bolt gasped. “We’re close enough to shore. We have to swim.” It would be darker in the water, away from the boat lights, the mad fire spinning in the air above them. “My Country ’Tis of Thee” rang out with a jukebox crackle from every radio.

  Sammy ran ahead of him, a blur of curly hair and long limbs diving into the water. Nose still gushing, side stinging, Bolt leaped after her. He soared, plummeted, dark water slapping against his cheek like an open hand, and he was submerged.

  Distantly, a firework boomed.

  “Everything’s okay,” Cassie had whispered the first time he remembered watching Grandad stutter into the lake through a rainstorm. Mom chased after him until both were locked together in the shallows. Lightning snapped in the sky, and the water was so rough, Bolt was convinced it was an ocean that would swallow them whole. But Cassie wrapped around him, her hair full of a scent as fragile as April rain. “He’s having a bad dream. Just hold on.”

  “Wait for me!” Grandad had screamed and sobbed as he was pulled away. “Wait, please!”

  Only it hadn’t been dementia, as Bolt had long assumed. It was the same trap closing around Bolt. He kicked up, toward the surface, but something cold and firm latched on to him. Hands. Hands tugged him down, toward the lake bed mud. He gasped. It was a rookie mistake; he knew to save his breath if he was ever caught underwater. Don’t panic, or you’ll drown faster—

  Bolt felt the glide of cold water moving as something slid over him on the surface, through refracted sunlight. Sunlight? Bolt thought desperately, turned around and confused. How could that be? It was a small rickety fishing boat propelled by old wooden oars. Desperate, Bolt reached for the oar passing over him, caught the edge, but it was already stopping, twisting in the water to pull the boat out of motion, into a sideways drift. Bolt clung on, digging his fingers into the rough wood grain.

  Everything’s okay, he heard Cassie’s voice as if she were there too, under the water. It’s just a bad dream.

  A young boy looked down over the side of the boat, water rippling between them. He was as knobbly as a crawdad, with a flop of muddy-brown hair. His skin was freckled. Just like Cassie’s. And Bolt knew him. He knew the young face of his own grandfather, peering into the water. Grandad’s face was tense with pain and old tear tracks. Lungs burning, Bolt pushed himself toward the surface just as Grandad tossed his arm down, and for a flash, Bolt thought he was reaching for him, and he stretched up to meet him. But Grandad grabbed a strand of thin white driftwood. He yanked it out of the mud, and with it, a box of woven wood—a funnel fish trap. There was something in it, three big dark bundles wrapped in cheesecloth. As Bolt kicked for the surface, feeling the water give way, Grandad began to heft them into his boat. One shifted. Out spilled a slim rainfall of small winking objects. They floated past Bolt’s nose, a series of white spheres, each a perfect, pea-sized star. Pearls.

  Bolt kicked until he broke the surface, but when he scrabbled for the boat, for the pearls, he met nothing but empty water.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The view from the top of Cassie’s RV wasn’t perfect, which made it, well, pretty damn perfect. The show was going on behind them—Cassie’s land and the Destiny were only a ridge away from the dam. Up on Cassie’s hill, then farther up on her RV, they were able to see most of the flashes lighting up blue, gold, or red. But mostly, they heard the great earthquake booms of rockets, the yellowish light they cast onto the growing smoke. Sparks flew over the treetops, seeming close enough to alight on the double-wide and burn the roof.

  Cassie’s nerves were still frayed after her run-in with Daley. She’d been wild and unspooled all day.

  And yet she was a woman who loved her own home, who wouldn’t be chased away from what was hers. Cassie had been resolutely against attending the fireworks show on the water, even with Daley unaccounted for. She knew where her refuge was, and she wouldn’t be talked away from it. So Mitch had, of course, gone back to her home with her.

  Cassie’s shotgun rested beside her on the RV roof, and every so often, they took turns shining an ancient spotlight at the spaces between the trees. Mitch had had to be careful as he climbed to sit on the rounded top of the RV; it wasn’t that much larger than he was and creaked crankily under his weight. Now he watched the light from the fireworks animate the freckles on her face. Their cans of Fresca sweated thick rings onto the RV top, but neither of them had remembered to take a drink.