Stephenie Meyer: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner

“Add this to the list,” I said. “Agenda. As in, what is his?”

“Bull’s-eye. That’s exactly what we’ve got to find out. But first, another experiment.”

“That word makes me nervous.”

“Trust is an essential part of the whole secret club gig.”

He stood up into the extra ceiling space he’d just carved out and started digging again. In a second, his feet were dangling while he held himself up with one hand and excavated with the other.

“You better be digging for garlic,” I warned him, and backed up toward the tunnel that led to the sea.

“The stories aren’t real, Bree,” he called to me. He pulled himself higher into the hole he was making, and the dirt continued to rain down. He was going to fill in his hidey-hole at this rate. Or flood it with light, which would make it even more useless.

I slid most of the way into the escape channel, just my fingertips and eyes above the edge. The water only came up to my hips. It would take me just the smallest fraction of a second to disappear into the darkness below. I could spend a day not breathing.

I’d never been a fan of fire. This might have been because of some buried childhood memory, or maybe it was more recent. Becoming a vampire was enough fire to last me.

Diego had to be close to the surface. Once again, I struggled with the idea of losing my new and only friend.

“Please stop, Diego,” I whispered, knowing he would probably laugh, knowing he wouldn’t listen.

“Trust, Bree.”

I waited, unmoving.

“Almost…,” he muttered. “Okay.”

I tensed for the light, or the spark, or the explosion, but Diego dropped back down while it was still dark. In his hand he had a longer root, a thick snaky thing that was almost as tall as me. He gave me an I-told-you-so kind of look.

“I’m not a completely reckless person,” he said. He gestured to the root with his free hand. “See—precautions.”

With that, he stabbed the root upward into his new hole. There was a final avalanche of pebbles and sand as Diego dropped back onto his knees, getting out of the way. And then a beam of brilliant light—a ray about the thickness of one of Diego’s arms—pierced the darkness of the cave. The light made a pillar from the ceiling to the floor, shimmering as the drifting dirt sifted through it. I was icy-still, gripping the ledge, ready to drop.

Diego didn’t jerk away or cry out in pain. There was no smell of smoke. The cave was a hundred times lighter than it had been, but it didn’t seem to affect him. So maybe his story about shade trees was true. I watched him carefully as he knelt beside the pillar of sunlight, motionless, staring. He seemed fine, but there was a slight change to his skin. A kind of movement, maybe from the settling dust, that reflected the gleam. It looked almost like he was glowing a little.

Maybe it wasn’t the dust, maybe it was the burning. Maybe it didn’t hurt, and he’d realize it too late….

Seconds passed as we stared at the daylight, motionless.

Then, in a move that seemed both absolutely expected and also completely unthinkable, he held out his hand, palm up, and stretched his arm toward the beam.

I moved faster than I could think, which was pretty dang fast. Faster than I’d ever moved before.

I tackled Diego into the back wall of the dirt-filled little cave before he could reach that one last inch to put his skin in the light.

The room was filled with a sudden blaze, and I felt the warmth on my leg in the same instant that I realized there wasn’t enough room for me to pin Diego to the wall without some part of myself touching the sunlight.

“Bree!” he gasped.

I twisted away from him automatically, rolling myself tight against the wall. It took less than a second, and the whole time I was waiting for the pain to get me. For the flames to hit and then spread like the night I’d met her , only faster. The dazzling flash of light was gone. It was just the pillar of sun again.

I looked at Diego’s face—his eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open. He was totally still, a sure sign of alarm. I wanted to look down at my leg, but I was afraid to see what was left. This wasn’t like Jen ripping my arm off, though that had hurt more. I wasn’t going to be able to fix this.

Still no pain yet.

“Bree, did you see that ?”

I shook my head once quickly. “How bad is it?”

“Bad?”

“My leg,” I said through my teeth. “Just tell me what’s left.”

“Your leg looks fine to me.”

I glanced down quickly, and sure enough, there was my foot and my calf, just like before. I wiggled my toes. Fine.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

I pulled myself off the ground, onto my knees. “Not yet.”

“Did you see what happened? The light?”

I shook my head.

“Watch this,” he said, kneeling in front of the beam of sunshine again. “And don’t shove me out of the way this time. You already proved I’m right.” He put his hand out. It was almost as hard to watch this time, even if my leg felt normal.

The second his fingers entered the beam, the cave was filled with a million brilliant rainbow reflections. It was bright as noon in a glass room—light everywhere. I flinched and then shuddered. There was sunlight all over me.

“Unreal,” Diego whispered. He put the rest of his hand into the beam, and the cave somehow got even brighter. He rolled his hand over to look at the back, then turned it palm up again. The reflections danced like he was spinning a prism.

There was no smell of burning, and he clearly wasn’t in pain. I looked closely at his hand, and it seemed like there were a zillion tiny mirrors in the surface, too small to distinguish separately, all shining back the light with double the intensity of a regular mirror.

“Come here, Bree—you have to try this.”

I couldn’t think of a reason to refuse, and I was curious, but I was also still reluctant as I slid to his side.

“No burn?”

“None. Light doesn’t burn us, it just… reflects off of us. I guess that’s kind of an understatement.”

Slow as a human, I reluctantly stretched my fingers into the light. Immediately, reflections blazed away from my skin, making the room so bright that the day outside would look dark in comparison. They weren’t exactly reflections, though, because the light was bent and colored, more like crystal. I stuck my whole hand in, and the room got brighter.

“Do you think Riley knows?” I whispered.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Why wouldn’t he tell us if he did? What would be the point? So we’re walking disco balls.” I shrugged.

Diego laughed. “I can see where the stories come from. Imagine if you saw this when you were human. Wouldn’t you think that the guy over there just burst into flames?”

“If he didn’t hang around to chat. Maybe.”

“This is incredible,” Diego said. With one finger he traced a line across my glowing palm.

Then he jumped to his feet right under the sunbeam, and the room went crazy with light.

“C’mon, let’s get out of here.” He reached up and pulled himself toward the hole he’d cut to the surface.

You’d think I would have been over it, but I was still nervous to follow. Not wanting to seem like a total chicken, I stayed close on his heels, but I was cringing inside the whole way. Riley had really made his point about burning in the sun; in my mind it was linked to that horrific time of burning as I became a vampire, and I couldn’t escape the instinctive panic that filled me every time I thought of it.

Then Diego was out of the hole, and I was next to him half a second later. We stood on a small patch of wild grass, only a few feet from the trees that covered the island. Behind us, it was just a couple of yards to a low bluff, and then the water. Everything around us blazed in the color and light shining off of us.