Cynthia Hand - Unearthly

And then I smell smoke.

The fire must be farther away this time. I don’t see it. I don’t see the boy. A hot gust of gritty wind sends my hair flying out of its ponytail. I cough and turn away from the blast, swiping hair out of my face.

That’s when I see the silver truck. I’m standing a few steps away from where it’s parked on the edge of a dirt road. AVALANCHE, it says in silver letters on the back.

It’s a huge truck with a short, covered bed. It’s the boy’s truck. Somehow I just know.

Look at the license plate, I tell myself. Focus on that.

The plate is a pretty one. It’s mostly blue: the sky, with clouds. The right side is dominated by a rocky, flat-topped mountain that looks vaguely familiar. On the left is the black silhouette of a cowboy astride a bucking horse, waving his hat in the air.

I’ve seen it before, but I don’t automatically know it. I try to read the numbers on the plate. At first all I can make out is the large number stacked on the left side: 22. And then the four digits on the other side of the cowboy: 99CX.

I expect to feel crazy happy then, excited to have such an enormously helpful piece of information handed to me as easily as that. But I’m still in the vision, and the vision is moving on. I turn away from the truck and walk quickly into the trees. Smoke drifts across the forest floor. Somewhere close by I hear a crack, like a branch falling.

Then I see the boy, exactly the same as he’s always been. His back turned. The fire suddenly licking the top of the ridge. The danger so obvious, so close.

The crushing sadness descends on me like a curtain dropping. My throat closes. I want to say his name. I step toward him.

“Clara? You okay?”

My dad’s voice. I float back to myself. I’m leaning against the refrigerator, staring out the kitchen window where a hummingbird hovers near my mom’s feeder, a blur of wings. It darts in, takes a sip, then flits away.

“Clara?”

He sounds alarmed. Still dazed, I lift the phone to my ear.

“Dad, I think I’m going to have to call you back.”

On the road to Wyoming, there are lots of signs. Most of them warn of some kind of danger: WATCH FOR DEER. WATCH FOR FALLING ROCK. TRUCKS, CHECK

YOUR BRAKES. TUNE IN FOR ROAD CLOSURES. ELK CROSSING NEXT 2

MILES. SNOW SLIDE AREA, NO PARKING OR STOPPING. I drive my car behind Mom’s the whole way from California with Jeffrey in the passenger seat, trying not to freak out about how all the signs point to the fact that we’re headed someplace wild and dangerous.

At the moment I’m driving through a forest made up entirely of lodgepole pines. Talk about surreal. I can’t get over the sight of all the Wyoming license plates on the cars speeding past, many with the fateful number 22 on the left side. That number has brought us a long way, through six short weeks of crazy preparation, selling our house, saying good-bye to the friends and neighbors I’ve known my entire life, and packing up and moving to a place where none of us knows a single solitary soul: Teton County, Wyoming, which according to Google is county number 22, population just over 20,000. That’s roughly five people per every square mile.

We’re moving to the boonies. All because of me.

I’ve never seen so much snow. It’s terrifying. My new Prius (courtesy of dear old Dad) is getting a real workout on the snowy mountain road. But there’s no turning back now. The guy at the gas station assured us that the pass through the mountains is perfectly safe, so long as a storm doesn’t come up. All I can do is clutch the steering wheel and try not to pay attention to the way the mountainside plunges off a few feet from the edge of the road.

I spot the WELCOME TO WYOMING sign.

“Hey,” I say to Jeffrey. “This is it.”

He doesn’t answer. He slumps in the passenger’s seat, angry music pounding from his iPod. The farther we get from California and his sports teams and his friends, the more sullen he becomes. After two days on the road, it’s getting old. I grab the wire and yank one of his earbuds out.

“What?” he says, glaring at me.

“We’re in Wyoming, doofus. We’re almost there.”

“Woo freaking hoo,” he says, and stuffs the earbud back in.

He’s going to hate me for a while.

Jeffrey was a pretty easygoing kid before he found out about the angel stuff. But I know how that goes. One minute you’re a happy fourteen-yearold — good at everything you try, popular, fun — the next you’re a freak with wings. It takes some adjustment. And it was only like a month after he got the news that I received my little mission from heaven. Now we’re dragging him off to Nowheresville, Wyoming, in January, no less, right smack in the middle of the school year.

When Mom announced the move, he yelled, “I’m not going!” with his fists clenched at his sides like he wanted to hit something.

“You are going,” Mom replied, looking up at him coolly. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if you find your purpose in Wyoming, too.”

“I don’t care,” he said. Then he turned and glared at me in a way that makes me cringe every time I remember it.

Mom, for her part, obviously digs Wyoming. She’s been back and forth a few times scouting for a house, enrolling Jeffrey and me in our new school, smoothing out the transition between her job at Apple in California and the work she’ll be doing for them from home after we move. She has chattered for hours about the beautiful scenery that will now be a part of our everyday lives, the fresh air, the wildlife, the weather, and how much we’ll love the winter snow.

That’s why Jeffrey is riding with me. He can’t stand to listen to Mom blather on about how great it’s all going to be. The first time we stopped for gas on the trip he got out of her car, grabbed his backpack, walked over to mine, and got in. No explanation. I guess he decided that he currently hates her more than he does me.

I grab the earbud again.

“It’s not like I wanted this, you know,” I tell him. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“Whatever.”

My cell rings. I dig around in my pocket and toss the phone to Jeffrey. He catches it, startled.

“Could you get that?” I ask sweetly. “I’m driving.”

He sighs, opens the phone, and puts it to his ear.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay. Yeah.”

He flips the phone closed.

“She says we’re about to come up on Teton Pass. She wants us to pull over at the lookout.”

Right on cue we come around a corner and the valley where we’ll be living opens up below a range of low hills and jagged blue-and-white mountains. It’s an amazing view, like a scene from a calendar or a postcard. Mom pulls into a turnoff for the

“scenic overlook” and I come to a careful stop next to her. She practically bounds out of the car.

“I think she wants us to get out,” I say to Jeffrey.

He just stares at the dashboard.

I open the door and swing out into the mountainy air. It’s like stepping into a freezer.

I tug my suddenly-much-too-thin Stanford hoodie over my head and jam my hands deep into the pockets. I can literally see my breath floating away from me every time I exhale.

Mom walks up to Jeffrey’s door and taps on the window.

“Get out of the car,” she commands in a voice that says she means business.

She waves me toward the ridge, where a large wooden sign shows a cartoon cowboy pointing into the valley below. HOWDY STRANGER, IT READS. YONDER

IS JACKSON HOLE. THE LAST OF THE OLD WEST. There’s a scattering of buildings on either side of a gleaming silver river. That’s Jackson, our new hometown.