“You’re sure it was him?” she says breathlessly.
“I’m certain.”
“Then—why hasn’t there been a broadcast? Why did they just let us go to the academy and walk around the city while there’s a murderer running free?”
“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I didn’t ask many questions. He said he’d kill me if I followed him.”
“He didn’t seem so big,” Pen says. “We’ll kill him first if he tries.”
“I didn’t believe him. I don’t think he killed Daphne,” I say. “I know it doesn’t make much sense, but I’d much like to think I’d know a murderer if he was standing right in front of me.”
“Well, we’d all like to think that,” she says. She leans back against the rock wall, smirking. “You had a tryst with a murderer, you wicked thing.”
“It wasn’t a tryst!” My heated cheeks only fuel her delight. “And I don’t think he did it. He was so … unassuming.”
“He had you pinned to a tree.”
“For a few seconds.”
“Maybe he’s still here,” she says excitedly. “Maybe he’s watching us.”
I know it’s absurd, but I’ve felt as though he’s been watching me since we parted ways that night. “Of course he isn’t,” I say.
Pen grabs a pebble from the ground and scrapes it against one of the larger rocks, spelling out the words: “Are you a murderer?”
“There,” she says. “When he comes back, he might answer us.” She sets the pebble in the dirt with finality.
“Assuming he returns.”
“He’ll return,” she says. “Internment is only as big as the king’s fist. If you’re going to hide, you have to circle the same places over and over again.”
I wonder what makes her such an expert on hiding.
My mother is sitting by the window when I come home. She’s wrapped in Lex’s blanket, working on her sampler.
“I was starting to worry,” she says, squinting as she pokes the needle through the fabric. “You’re home late.”
“I was helping Pen look for an assignment she lost at the academy,” I say. “We missed the shuttle and walked home instead.” The lie has me averting my eyes, but she isn’t looking at me anyway. Instead she asks me to warm the kettle and check on the bread she’s got baking in the oven. The loaf, stuffed with roasted vegetables, is enough to feed a dozen. Half of it will probably go upstairs to Alice and Lex. My mother feeds them so often that Alice hardly bothers to cook anymore.
“It gets dark earlier now,” my mother says. “Maybe it would be best if you didn’t dawdle so much.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, pouring the tea and bringing it to her. She sets down her needlework. She works from her own patterns, and this one is of a cloud, and coming from the cloud is a peculiar flash of what I presume to be light. I run my finger along the strip of yellow.
I envy her talent for inventing strange and beautiful things the rest of us can’t see. But I don’t ask her about it; I think my questions frustrate her. Or, my lack of understanding frustrates her. She has one like-minded child, and he’s on the verge of being declared irrational. Maybe he would have been by now, if Alice weren’t so patient.
“The bread looks done,” I say.
“Bring half upstairs for your brother and Alice. Tell her to be sure he eats something. He’s getting too thin.”
I don’t know how she knows this; my brother lives right upstairs, but they never visit each other. The sight of him in this state is too much for her. Instead I’m their messenger, and most of my mother’s messages are simply food.
Dutifully, I wrap half of the bread in a cloth.
My brother’s door is locked again, and when I knock, it takes a long time for Alice to answer. She’s still in her work clothes and her shoulders are drooping with exhaustion. She sees the bundle in my hands and gives a weary smile. “Come on in,” she says, “but try to be quiet. He had a rough night and today isn’t very much better.”
On the kitchen table is the bag with the hospital logo that gets delivered to my brother every third week. It’s still glued shut. He even opposes the headache elixirs our mother is so fond of, notwithstanding the fact that she began taking them after his incident.
“Again?” I frown. It’s been several weeks since he had an episode, and I hoped they were going away for good.
“I wish he’d stop being so rock-headed,” Alice says in a low voice. “I was up with him at dawn and he won’t take a thing to ease the pain.” She takes the bread from my hands and breathes deep the warm aroma as she unwraps it.
“Where is he?” I say.
“His office. The door’s open. Step lightly and enter if you dare.”
She’s already slicing the bread. I doubt she’s eaten today; when Lex is having a rough time, everything else fades away from her unless she’s reminded.
I find my brother hunched on the floor in a corner of his dark office, wrapped in a blanket and shivering.
“What are you doing here, Little Sister?”
Worrying is what I’m doing.
“Can I come in?” I say.
“If you don’t touch anything.”
The transcriber is off; its rolls of paper stream out into a cavernous world of things he has imagined each night as I’ve slept in the room below. The smell of ink and the smoke of overheated wires are still in the air.
I step over and around his latest novel and kneel in front of him. The clock at his feet has a faulty second hand that goes forward and then back, and it is always twelve fifteen. He just likes the sound it makes; he carries it all around the apartment. If it’s silent he begins to feel as though he’s disappearing.
I put my hand over his fist. His knuckles are white with strain, his skin dry and cold. He drops his forehead to his knees. “Where does it hurt?” I say.
“Deep within the bones, there’s marrow,” he says. “And it’s like the marrow has begun to expand, and my skeleton is splintering slowly from the pressure.”
I want to wrap my arms around him. I want to give him my warmth and soften the marrow and make him better.
But he would push me away, remind me that I don’t understand. I suppose it’s hard for him to believe I’ll ever be more than a child. The last time he saw me, I was thirteen years old.
All I can do is be still and not ask too many questions, not tell him how he scares me, never bring up all his years as a runner when he was so alive, and especially not talk about the medicine on the table. He’ll die before he lets another elixir or tonic pass between his lips or get shot into his veins. Not that the pharmacy knows that; it’s part of the king’s policy that jumpers take the required medication in order to be considered nonthreatening to society. Alice will eventually pour them down the drain and report back to the pharmacy that she administered them to her husband in the correct order.
“Mom was working on an interesting sampler,” I tell him. “It was”—I pause, trying to think of the right way to describe it—“color shooting out of a cloud. Sort of in a zigzag.”
He’s got his eyes squeezed shut. “A zigzag?”
I draw the shape on the back of his hand with my finger and repeat it several times. “It was strange. I wonder if she saw something in the clouds.”
“She probably just thought it up.”
“How do you do that?” I say. “How do you know something that doesn’t exist to be known?”
Alice knocks on the doorframe. The smell of baked bread and warm vegetables permeates from the plate in her hand. “You need to put something in your stomach, love,” she says. “You can argue if you like, but your sister
