Page 12 of Us in Ruins

Margot propped her phone up so that her flashlight beamed onto the statue. Reaching into her backpack, she grabbed one of the brushes Dr. Hunt had handed out that afternoon. Getting a closer look, that was all.

She started at his hand. With fingers flexed, he’d been carved like he wanted something—needed it—but could never reach it. For a moment, she felt his agony as if it were her own.

The sleeves of his buttoned shirt had been pushed up his forearms, carelessly creased. A holster of excavating tools had been etched against his right hip. No detail had been spared.

He was so real. Exactly like he’d been in the photographs. A jolt of electricity coursed through Margot’s veins.

She lifted onto her toes but barely reached the statue’s chin. Her brush ran the length of his shoulder, dusting across his jaw. Then, gingerly, she swept the bristles along the marble’s uncertain edge, right where the split had opened. Over his arched eyebrow, his nose, his cheeks. If she squinted, she would have sworn she saw freckles in the smooth white marble.

Her fingers trailed up his cool, stone arms, wrapping behind his neck, as she leveraged herself up to stare into his blank eyes. “Why are you here?” she asked the statue with little more than a breath.

And maybe it was the way her heart drummed in her chest, but she could almost feel his beating back.

With a fingertip, she traced the harsh lines of his face. Endless questions swam through her head, but there was no denying that this statue had been carved by someone to look just like him. Margot had half a mind to think it had been sculpted by Venus herself.

Beneath her hands, the marble quivered. A hairline fracture split off from the groove in his cheek. Margot flinched and swore. She staggered backward—had she caused that? Just like her, to touch a statue without thinking and destroy it with one breath.

Then another earthquake shuddered through the statue, slicing across the bridge of his stone nose. Fissures grew deeper, seams in the statue’s foundation. Marble chipped off his cheekbone, his shoulders.

A thread of yellow light coursed over the statue, filling in every gap in the stone, burning bright as daylight as Margot squinted, then shielded her eyes with a hand.

Through the haze of light, Margot watched as the cracks multiplied. A thousand faint lines trailed over the statue’s face, each spilling with gold. The whole thing would disintegrate. It’d be ruined. And it’d be her fault.

Now would have been a great time to find out this was all an elaborate practical joke. Something Astrid and the boys had planned to prove Margot didn’t know what she was doing and didn’t deserve to be here.

“No!” Margot gasped. Desperately, her hands grasped at the falling pieces. She pressed them back where they belonged, but the harder she tried, the more stone scattered.

The marble crumbled in a pool of molten light. Margot blinked away the spots in her vision as shadows reclaimed the space, and in the narrow beam of her phone flashlight, a set of too green eyes watched Margot right back.

Her heart thundered in her chest, drowning out every logical thought. But the stone shifted and shattered, revealing skin underneath.

With a groan of stone on stone, the statue shook off the last remnants of marble and stretched his arms out overhead, flexing them behind his head. A rattling breath shook out of lungs that apparently hadn’t been used for, like, a hundred years.

It wasn’t a statue of Van Keane.

It was Van Keane.

5

Margot screamed. Van screamed back.

And, look, it wasn’t like Margot was a devout realist. Every decision she’d ever made had come from the heart, not the head. She believed in fairy tales, in happy endings. Signs from the universe, Santa Claus, soulmates. In basically everything she could. What was life without a little storybook magic in it?

But this? In what universe did statues become people? Certainly not hers. Margot’s brain short-circuited. The longer she stared at him, the less she could believe it.

He looked exactly like he had in the photo—his tawny hair tousled like he couldn’t care less, a jawline she could cut a steak with, and suspenders stretched over the broadest shoulders Margot had ever seen.

He also looked... mad. At her, specifically.

“Why are you screaming?” she asked, shrill. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be screaming.”

Van tried to say something, sucking in a deep breath, but it triggered a hacking cough. All the dust would do that. He glared at her, his face turning red. But that was probably just the lack of oxygen.

Margot felt like she’d chugged forty ounces of Mountain Dew. Blood rushed through her head, dizzying. It made her daring. She stepped closer. “You’re really him, aren’t you? Van Keane?”

Hard eyes cut up at her. “Who,” he finally choked out, “even are you?”

“I’m Margot Rhodes.” She smiled and stuck out her hand for him to shake.