The crowd has parted to make room for the medical vehicle, which has arrived too late.
Basil tugs my arm, and once again I hear the patrolmen shouting for us to get back. Someone crashes into me. “Amy,” I gasp, and finally she looks at me. There’s still that defiance in her eyes, but there’s fear too, because she’s a child and her parents don’t notice her absence and she needs someone. She needs somewhere to go. I grab her hand and she follows me as I follow Basil, and the boy holding on to Amy’s other hand follows too.
In the lobby of my apartment building, nobody knows what has happened yet. It’s a different world in here. We file into the stairwell and up the stairs. One step and then the next, I move, incapable of focusing on anything more. Breaths are hard to come by.
“The flower shop,” Amy blurts, stepping hard. “And Daphne.” Step. “And now Quince.”
“Stop,” the boy says. Amy breaks away from me and sits on a step and buries her forehead in her knees.
We all stop to look at her.
The boy sits beside her and asks if she needs her pill. She shakes her head.
“I need off,” she whispers, to no one in particular. “I need to get off this place.”
“You have to take one,” the boy says. He fumbles through her satchel until he finds the pharmacy bag of yellow pills. “You’ll have a fit.”
“Get Alice,” I whisper to Basil.
I sit next to Amy, and in resisting the pill the boy holds out, she looks at me. “One at a time,” she says. “He’s going to kill every last one of us. We’re all going to die and I’m one of the people to blame.”
She looks so breakable.
The boy grabs her chin, forces the pill into her mouth. She flails and struggles, but the pill goes down. She touches her throat and growls at him.
“You know I had to,” he says.
“It was a mistake bringing you anywhere with me,” she says. “You’re just like them. I can’t believe I’ll have to marry you; this year my request is going to be that Internment drops out of the sky before that day comes.”
“Go on then,” he says. “The way things are going, it may come true.” He hardly seems wounded. He’s done what the doctor has advised him to do. Jumpers need their medication.
Lex told me to stay away from Amy. Was he right? Does she have something to do with what I just saw? Does Judas? I hid him in the lake. I saved him from arrest. Am I involved in whatever this is?
One story up, the door bursts open and footsteps are pounding. Alice has taken off her heels and she runs barefooted down the steps. “Come on,” she’s saying, in that urgent way she uses when Lex crashes to the ground overcome with sudden pain. “Come on, it’s going to be okay. Let’s get you kids upstairs.”
She has to tug Amy up from under the arms and nudge her before she begins to move.
By the time I’ve made it to my brother’s and Alice’s apartment, something is happening to me. My mind is beginning to remember details, like the boy’s eyes that were staring at the stars, not blinking as patrolmen stepped over him. The flash of medic lights animating his shadow.
My knees are shaking and I sit in a kitchen chair before I fall instead. Basil stands behind me, holding my shoulders.
Alice leans on the table before me, tilts my chin so that our eyes meet. “Did you see the body?” she asks.
I nod.
“Oh. Oh, Morgan.”
I’m not ready for sympathy. I’m not ready to understand what I just saw, but the images persist.
Down the hall, Lex is calling for Alice because he’s heard footsteps and voices, and he doesn’t like people in his home unannounced. He won’t leave the safety of his office while they’re here.
Amy raises her head at the sound of his voice, but she doesn’t speak. “Look at me,” the boy says. “Do you feel dizzy? Does it feel like a fit is coming on?”
He touches her forehead, and she slaps him away. “I’m not an irrational, Wesley.”
Lex is calling for me now. “Sister,” he’s saying, hissing the way he would when I was young and I’d made him angry. “Morgan, get over here.”
I rise to my feet, pretending the floor isn’t tilting. I move methodically until I’m down the hall, in the doorway to Lex’s office.
Alice follows me and turns on the light for once; it’s strange to see all of my brother’s shadowy things colored orange by the glow. He’s standing with his clock in his hands. For a moment I envy his blindness. I want to curl up in that darkness and have the city disappear around me. I want to be in a place where awful things are never seen and never known, and there’s only the whirr of the transcriber as the paper fills with fiction.
“What did you see?” he asks.
“A body,” I say. “Dripping wet, although we weren’t near the lake. Patrolmen were holding us back.”
“What did it
“A university student in uniform. A boy,” I say. I remember the dark skin and the open eyes, and the name that Amy said in the stairwell. Quince. My voice is unsteady when I get to the end of the sentence.
Lex moves closer. I foolishly think he’s going to hug me, but instead he leans close and says, “Go downstairs. Pretend that none of this ever happened. Get into bed.”
“But—”
“Listen to me, Morgan. Dad will be hurrying home to check on you. You can’t let him know what you saw. You have to pretend you’ve been asleep.”
I look to Alice for reason, but she only gives me a sympathetic nod of assent.
“But Basil and the others,” I say.
“Take Basil with you. He’s been in your room doing homework. Neither of you have any idea what’s going on outside. I’ll take care of the others. Go. Don’t screw it up.”
He reaches for my hands, but hesitates and pushes me for the door instead.
In my bed, I close my eyes and try to be still while Basil pretends to study by the light of the lantern that swings over my desk. My bedroom has an overhead light, a luxury, as many of the less updated apartment buildings have electrical fixtures only in the main living areas. But I prefer the soft glow of the flame lantern anyway.
Basil turns a page.
“I keep seeing the body and then it becomes you, or Pen, or my family,” I say.
“I see it, too,” he says. “It could have been any of us.”
I open one eye and watch his shoulders move as he slouches over the textbook. Maybe he really is trying to study.
“Basil,” I say. “Internment isn’t very big. The person who did this could be anywhere. Could live in this building.”
“One person did this,” he says, “but there are dozens of patrolmen. The good outweighs the bad.” Still, he doesn’t sound so certain. He’s trying to be brave for my sake, but he’s scared too.
“Can you lie down with me for a little while?” I ask.
“Of course.”
I open the blanket to him, and when he gets beside me, I rest my head in the curve of his neck and I try to imagine a life without a betrothed. Try to imagine Judas breathing Daphne’s ashes as they’re released into the tributary.
Basil squeezes his arm around me.
“Do you really believe the good outweighs the bad?” I say.
“It has to.” He sees how little this consoles me, and he nudges my forehead with his chin. “I’ll always be here to make sure you’re safe.”
He’s strong; one of the most promising athletes in the academy. I’ve seen him lift weights half as heavy as I am, and he can climb a rope in record time. But what is all of that worth, really? Can it protect against something that steals you away and leaves your dead eyes gaping at the moon?
“I’ll always be here to make sure you’re safe, too,” I say. “Even if you are the one who’s stronger.”
