Eventually, a news segment came up on the TV about when the President was going to show up. They had about a week to get the entire plan ready to go, so there wasn't any time to make a fancy show of it. They decided to simply throw a match into the fire and burn Downhill from the inside out. However, there were a few problems with that.
First: the furnace was in the basement. They had never been in the basement. The basement was where Sir stayed now; he never came up anymore and just expected the girls to continue doing what they were doing before. So, they had to find the furnace, blow up the house, and get out while completely blind at where anything was.
Second: there was no door leading directly out of the basement, so they would have to figure out some sort of delay on it so that they could survive and not get blown up too. They were limited on technology, so the best they could come up with was some sort of weird physics problem.
Third: there was no guarantee the explosion would be big enough to be seen over the mountain, where the President would be. So, they could be doing this entirely for nothing. That was Raelynn's biggest fear. Annalise was concerned with keeping everything running smoothly while Amarana worked out how to rig something to prevent them from dying. After three days of testing things over a bowl, she worked out a pulley system that relied on gravity pulling the match down slowly enough to give them two minutes to run back upstairs and run like hell.
Two days before the President was to be in town, Amarana started scaling up the model she had made. She kept it under the bathroom sink, hidden behind all the cleaning bottles. Even if sir decided to come upstairs, he never looked in there.
The day before the President was to be in town, Annalise started packing her bag. She stowed away what was left of the food in the house, for both the girls and Blu, some hygiene items, and a few items that they had been given from when they were younger.
When she came to pack up Amarana's keepsakes, the younger girl burst into tears. Since her house burnt to the ground, she had nothing from her childhood. So, Annalise pulled her into the kitchen and grabbed a notebook from one of the drawers, and some stickers she had stowed away from another.
"Raelynn and I have matching sticker notebooks, now you have one too."
Amarana looked up at her. "I'm part of you guys now?"
"We're all a family. Don't let anyone tell you different. Even her when she's being a brat."
Amarana smiled and started organizing the little happy faces in rows over the cover. It was a small semblance of happiness before the next day, and everything they had to do.