“I’m sorry,” he whispers as I kneel beside him.
“For what?”
Why is there a tremor in my voice? He’s just drunk.
“I wanted so badly … to see your life. You and Julie.” He coughs, and a fine spray of wine speckles my shirt. “I wanted to be there.”
Why do my eyes sting? Why is my vision getting blurry?
“But I’m excited, too.” He stares up at the patches of night sky visible through holes in the ceiling. “I’ve wondered for so long what comes next.”
Drunk people say the strangest things. I squint my eyes shut and warm liquid seeps out of them.
“Oh,” he says, and his tone suddenly shifts. I open my eyes and find his wide with awe, his mouth slightly agape. “I can see it.”
“Stop.” I grip his shoulders. “Wait.”
His eyes focus on me with a feverish intensity. “We’re so close, R. Show them.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying!”
His eyes drift to the ceiling again. His body begins to slacken. “It’s beautiful,” he says in a faint release of breath. “It’s everything.”
I watch his face for a while. I burn the image into my memory. I have never seen an expression like this. It says things that no one could ever articulate, no matter how vast their vocabulary or how limber their tongue. And in a moment, it will be gone.
I dig through the rubble. A grenade, a chainsaw—no. Something elegant. Respectful. If there is any respectful way to do this. The most important thing is that I do it soon. There can be no third life for this man’s broken body, and I won’t let him suffer the indignity of becoming like me.
I hear a gunshot. I assume it’s another burning ammo crate and ignore it, but then I hear a small, frail sob, and I turn. Ella is kneeling in front of her husband, her hair singed and wild, the knees of her pants torn and bloody. A revolver dangles from her finger and falls to the floor.
Some soft, whispering instinct tells me to move toward her. As soon as I’m near enough, she sags against my chest and lets the dam break.
• • •
I hear Julie’s voice as we approach the tunnel’s exit. She’s calling the names of all the people who matter to her. Nora’s. Ella’s. Rosso’s. Mine. I wonder if any of us will be of any comfort to her. I help Ella over the last jagged heap of debris and we stumble out into the chaos of the streets. Security teams rush from house to house, trying to establish some kind of order, but Medical is the star of tonight’s show. I catch a glimpse of Nora holding one end of a stretcher bearing a blood-smeared mess that looks like Kenerly. I catch her eyes for one second before she disappears around a corner, and the reeling shock in them tells me just how bad things are. But right now, the pain of hundreds of strangers barely even registers. I’m focused on the old woman crying on my arm and the young one running toward me with eyes full of dread.
“What happened?” Julie shouts. “What the hell happened, what is happening?”
She grabs my wrists and sucks in a breath to ask more unanswerable questions. I wrap my arms around her and pull her close. Through the crook of my elbow, she sees Ella sinking down onto an apartment stoop, she sees the tears running through the woman’s laugh lines, she sees the smoking crater in the stadium wall. She understands.
“No,” she says. “No.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper into her hair.
“No!” she screams, and wriggles violently out of my arms. “This is not happening. It’s not happening. No!”
She stands back from me and Ella, alone in the middle of the street, clenching her fists and grinding her teeth. She lost her mother long before I met her. Her father left slowly over many years, but the dirt on his grave has barely sprouted grass. And now this. Now Lawrence “Rosy” Rosso, her next-to-last fragment of family.
Grief. Rage. Both are reasonable responses to the winking cruelty of the universe.
I move toward her and try to embrace her again, but she is nowhere near ready to be consoled. She shoves me back so hard I almost fall over and runs past me toward the Armoury.
“Julie, don’t,” Ella calls to her. “There’s nothing in there that will help.”
Julie stops at the edge of the rubble, staring into the dark hole and trembling, sucking in short, rapid breaths. These constrict into raspy wheezes and she fumbles in her pocket for her inhaler. She takes a shot but her breaths keep getting shorter. She clutches at her throat. “I can’t—I can’t—”
I rush to her side and try to lead her away from the wreckage, but she sags down onto the pavement, heaving hard against her bronchial tubes. I want to say something soothing, but what can I possibly say? My mouth is not accustomed to delivering comfort. The apparatus of my tongue and teeth has always been a weapon. How does one use it to heal?
In the silence of my uselessness, the medicine finally kicks in and her gasps begin to slow. She struggles to her feet and walks on rubbery legs to the stoop where Ella is sitting. She pulls in a deep breath, lets it out, then drops down next to Ella and buries her face in her hands, her small body shaking with quiet sobs.
I stay where I am, standing apart from them, waiting. I feel a cold sprinkle of rain and I look up. The sky is clear. The moon is bright. With the noise of twenty thousand people panicking, I didn’t even notice the helicopters overhead, spraying water onto the flames that surge from apartment rooftops.