Return Once More (12 page)

Today's observation would be a distraction, though not a happy one. We'd drawn Rachel Turing as our overseer at the Triangle since a male overseer would be harder to blend into the crowd. There were men in the building, and some would even perish in a few short hours, but they were, for the most part, too recognizable. On a positive note, Rachel treated us as adults in a way Maude could never manage, and had left all of today's horrible research in our hands.

Though the overseers had witnessed this event multiple times, it was new to Analeigh, Sarah, Peyton, and I, and the shortcut research we'd tried to split hadn't been enough once Rachel had been assigned. We'd all spent hours determining which worktables had empty seats, how many of us needed to roam the room passing out buttons, ribbons, and thread, and the exact spot that would be consumed last by fire and smoke, allowing us to remain until the final moments.

Our work had been accurate so far—the five of us had spent the day sewing and basting, hauling material and finished products. Even though the guidance spewing into my brain from the tattoo made my hands fairly certain at the unfamiliar work, I'd poked so many holes in my fingers they resembled Swiss cheese. The real kind.

Tables and chairs, baskets of discarded strips of cloth and trimmings littered every square inch of workspace. There wasn't much room to even walk; I couldn't imagine the scene when these girls started to panic. As the end of the day drew near, grasshoppers banged around in my stomach. Even though the five of us wouldn't perish in this fire, the idea of watching it happen to everyone else sloshed bile into my throat.

We were on the eighth floor, where the fire would start in approximately—I glanced at the clock on the wall—fifteen minutes. Restless and unwilling to sit still, I traded places with Analeigh, who had been up, handing out trimmings to the girls at the worktables.

Quitting time inched closer. Foreladies wandered the rows, passing out pay envelopes but not allowing anyone to move from their stations until five. Up and down the rows, I stared into the doomed faces, checking for the one that matched the photo of Rosie Shapiro in my protected file.

When I saw her, it surprised me. She wasn't sitting at her sewing machine like I'd expected, but coming out of the coatroom, shrugging into a tattered wool cloak and securing a scarf over her shining curls. My glasses displayed her file, the one that promised she perished on the same day and time printed on Jonah's True card, but she's leaving. Now.

She wasn't supposed to do that.

Her brown eyes were warm and soft, but as they met mine, the horror in them karate-chopped my throat.
She knew what was coming
. That everyone in this room was about to die. She had been warned, and only a Historian could have done it.

Jonah.

I thought about Caesarion, and how I wished I could save him. Now, right in front of me, stood proof that Jonah had struggled with the same feelings. No one else obsessed over their True or broke a gabillion rules to meet them. The others got their card, laughed, maybe read the person's history, and then stuck it in a digital archive of their life.

But not my brother. Not me.

I wanted to ask Rosie where she was going a half hour early, but even though I'd broken the rules with Caesarion the other day, now Rachel's watchful gaze made speaking with Rosie impossible. The overseer's dark eyes latched onto me, probably wondering why this particular girl had drawn my interest, already preparing her lecture about my scattered attention. Instead of asking Rosie anything, I wandered after her as she made her way to the stairwell, dropping trimmings on the workstations along the way.

A gray-haired forelady frowned, eyes sweeping Rosie's outerwear. “It's not quitting time.”

“I know. I'm feeling quite ill.” As though to prove her point, Rosie swayed on her feet, then leaned over and retched at the woman's feet.

The forelady didn't even flinch as vomit splashed onto the scraps on the floor, splattering bits onto her shoes. “I'll have to dock your pay.”

“I understand,” Rosie replied, her hands shaking as she wiped her lips. All of the color had drained from her face; she looked like a ghost. She looked like she wanted to scream warnings, or maybe wished that she'd never been here at all.

The forelady heaved a sigh. “You'll have to take the elevator. The doors are locked until five.”

Locked from the outside, she meant. So no one could sneak away.

Rosie nodded, then spun and headed toward the freight elevators that would ferry a precious few of these girls out of this deathtrap before it stopped working. With one final glance around the room, her eyes filled with tears and a sob scratching from her throat, Rosie Shapiro disappeared.

That wasn't supposed to happen. She was meant to die.

The thought of what else she would change when she walked out that door, what pieces of history were forever moved or forgotten or dragged into the darkness, closes the room in around me. It's hard to breathe among the clothes and all of these poor, doomed girls, but when Rachel's penetrating gaze finds mine, asking what's wrong, I shake my head.

Get it together, Kaia. This is Jonah's secret, it has to be. Trust him.

Ten minutes later, a girl near the windows that faced Greene Street shrieked, “Fire!” If I believed in hell the way my mother did, the way Analeigh's parents did, it would look like this. The five of us moved quickly to the small space at the front corner of the room, the one we'd determined would allow us to stay and watch the longest.

Most of the girls nearest the windows, where the fire had broken out, were frozen in place, half consumed by flames before they moved from their chairs. Fire spread faster than I could have imagined; the piles of scraps incinerated in seconds, the flames passing quickly to the wooden tables, the walls, and the girls running frantically in every direction.

The doors were still locked. No one opened them, despite the workers beating their fists bloody against the thick metal. The girls closest to the doors were crushed against the stubborn barriers, slumping to the floor as the rest moved on to the elevators. Smoke choked the room. It burned my eyes and clogged my lungs. Analeigh, Pey, Sarah, Rachel, and I lay flat on our stomachs, but even being farthest from the fire and near a window, where at least a little fresh air attempted to enter the inferno, breathing was difficult. We were supposed to stay until the last girl jumped from this floor, but I wondered how we would stand it.

The elevator stopped working. A few of the braver girls grabbed onto the cables, sliding downward and crashing onto the elevator's roof. I knew from my research that the ones that went first would be crushed by the bodies of those who jumped second and third. They would all suffer broken limbs and severe burns to their hands, but a handful would survive.

Then the elevator was gone. It wouldn't come back.

Screams echoed in my ears, loud and unceasing from the girls around me, muffled from the floor above, where the fire had spread. The girls that would survive took the stairs up to the roof. The rusted fire escape outside the windows broke and fell away, taking more girls to their deaths, and the workers that remained on this floor would burn, asphyxiate, or jump.

I squinted through the frames of my glasses, through eyes that felt as though they were on fire themselves, trying to record clear visions of these girls' faces. Terror rolled their eyes back into their heads, tear tracks cut through soot-smudged skin. Fire singed the hems of their dresses and more than one girl slapped uselessly at flames eating away her hair. Farther from the windows, they started to drop, crawling weakly forward but eventually collapsing until the fire ate what was left of them. The acrid smell of burning flesh spilled into the room, mingling with smoke.

Sirens wailed in the distance, then grew closer and finally stopped. Shouted orders and exclamations of disbelief, distant and hard to decipher, lifted from the street. The female workers perched in the windows, looking down at the street with mixtures of desperation, wild fear, and resignation flashing across their young features.

The oldest girl at the windows couldn't be past twenty, and there were a couple even younger than me. The manifest in the Archives listed two fourteen-year-old girls among today's victims, but they were both on the ninth floor.

If the doors had been unlocked, most of them would have lived. Maybe all.

The men who ran the factory ordered the doors be kept locked so that the girls' purses could be checked on their way out, to prevent the theft of their cheap material. Neither of the owners would be held responsible for a single one of the 146 deaths taking place at this very moment.

Two girls at the window grasped hands and jumped. More took their places. Some jumped alone, others together, but in the end everyone died alone. It was the one universal truth.

It was a strange moment of peace inside the chaos, the choice the girls had in the manner of their deaths even if they couldn't choose to live. It wasn't what the Elders wanted us to see but it was a lesson there for the taking, though small, and I grabbed onto it with both hands.

Choices. We always, always have them.

I started to cough, bloody phlegm hitting the floor in front of my face. Analeigh's face turned beet red as she hacked away, and the fire crept closer—we would be five additional victims in less than a minute if Rachel didn't get us the hell out of here. But she'd made this trip before, and the timing had been tested. Thirty seconds later she lowered her lips to the cuff ringing her wrist, the shaking blue haze surrounded us, and the horror disappeared.

*

Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis–50 NE (New Era)

“Put the masks on, girls. Immediately.”

Rachel's voice reached through the haze and opened my eyes, which I'd pressed closed in an attempt to erase the images dancing behind them—terrified girls aflame, screaming, sobbing, jumping to their deaths. It was the worst event I'd recorded so far.

Oxygen masks hung from the air lock ceiling and I grabbed the nearest one, holding the clear plastic over my nose and mouth, and breathing the recycled air and cleansing chemicals deep into my lungs. Ten minutes passed before the five of us stopped coughing and our faces returned to normal, healthy colors. We pulled on the masks until the cords retracted into the ceiling, then stripped off our smoke-scented garments and dumped them in the drawers. The smell permeated our skin, our hair, and the sleek black undergarments, too, and we all headed for decontamination showers without being told.

Twenty minutes later we were cleaned and dressed in the fresh outfits waiting in the drawers. The comps cleared us, the doors swished open and, for once, the smell of canned air was such a welcome respite from the lingering smoke that I wanted to cry. None of us had spoken—not even Peyton, a notorious chatterbox—and we continued down the hall in silence. It was almost lunchtime, but none of us felt much like eating. Sarah sent Oz a wrist comm asking him to meet her for a walk around the gymnasium, while Analeigh and I returned to our room. We dropped on the couch, then both sighed at once. It broke the tension, somewhat, although my best friend, never one for letting issues grow old and smelly, quickly reminded me that today's horror wasn't the only thing we had to discuss.

“Where were you yesterday morning? And don't give me any crap about the gym because we both know your idea of exercising is to run back to the room to take a nap between sessions.” She pinned me with a serious gaze, her green eyes determined behind her glasses.

It was on the tip of my tongue to confess. I wanted to tell my best friend about meeting the boy born to love me—how he made me feel with a simple touch, the way I could almost sense my body and his making a complete whole, the rules I'd broken—but it would only put us both in bad positions. Not to mention that I didn't think she would understand.

The idea that I was becoming my brother closed my throat. For all of my promises that I wouldn't break my parents' hearts the way Jonah had, it hadn't taken much prodding to make me forget them. Just the lure of meeting my True Companion in the flesh.

Keeping such a huge thing from Analeigh pushed my tears past control, and she leaned over, pulling me into a hug that toppled me off balance. I put a hand out, bracing my weight on the wall so I didn't smash her, and felt Jonah's cuff slide from my elbow down to my wrist.

It was stupid to keep it on me, but it worried me more to leave it in the room. We shared clothes all the time since everything matched, and it would have been too easy for Analeigh or Sarah to stumble across it in a drawer.

Analeigh's eyes grew wide as she stared at the golden band, the symbol of certified Historian status glaringly out of place in our apprentice dorms. “Where did you get that?”

I paused for the briefest moment. “I found it in Jonah's room. On my birthday.”

“Why didn't you tell me? Why haven't you turned it in?”

“I don't know. I just … wanted something of his, I guess.”

I hadn't meant for her to know about the cuff, but relief at being able to set down one secret lifted a little weight from my shoulders. Still, telling her that I'd used the cuff to see Caesarion … I couldn't. “Did you see the girl that left about ten minutes before the fire started?”

Analeigh frowned, probably trying to keep up with my train of thought. “The one who said she was sick and threw up on the forelady?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I saw. Lucky girl.”

“What if she wasn't just a lucky girl? What if she knew what was about to happen? That if she didn't get out then she never would.”

Silence stretched between us as our eyes locked, Analeigh chewing on her bottom lip the way she always did while she was thinking. “How would she know?”

“Maybe someone told her.”

“Who would just tell that one girl, Kaia? If someone knew about the fire—and no one did, because none of the contemporary investigations or any of our reflections on the time period have revealed any indication of arson—but if they
did
, why wouldn't they warn everyone?”