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?”
The questions were so Analeigh. She saw everything, remembered everything, and analyzed it quicker than any other Historian in our class, or any class, for that matter.
“That girl? Her name was Rosie Shapiro. She’s Jonah’s True.” I paused, running my fingers over the dials on his cuff. “I think he warned her.”
Chapter Ten
“What?” Analeigh gasped, her mouth falling open.
“I saw it in her eyes. She knew.”
My best friend wasted no time grabbing her personal comp and punching up the archived files on the Triangle Fire. The holo-files could only be accessed from the Archives, along with all of the stored reflection, but everything else could be viewed remotely.
“It says here that Rosie Shapiro died in the fire. That she jumped out the window on the eighth floor and was claimed by her family two days later.”
I nod. “I know. I saw it before we left, when I was looking her up.”
Analeigh kept scrolling, her eyebrows drawn into a sharp point across the bridge of her nose. “Wait. Oh my stars, look at this.”
Her face went white as she shoved her comp in my face. I grabbed it, scanning the list containing details on over a hundred dead girls without seeing anything worth freaking out over. “What?”
“There are two records for Rosie Shapiro.” She leaned over and stabbed her finger at the screen, rolling it back up until she found the entry that caught her eye. “There.”
Her breathless wheezing infected my own nerves. I peered at the screen, my heart catching in my chest when I saw what she’d seen a moment ago: another Rosie Shapiro. She had the same date of birth as the one on Jonah’s little blue card, but her date of death was different. According to this second archive, Rosie Shapiro had escaped the Triangle factory via the roof and died in Chicago, Illinois at the age of eighty-seven.
“Impossible,” I breathed, unwilling to admit that my brother had changed history even after seeing her leave the building with my own two eyes.
“Well, something happened, because according to our archives, Rosie Shapiro both survived and perished in that fire we saw today.” Analeigh paused. “She survived. Somehow. Even though in those original victim rosters, she definitely didn’t.”
“It was Jonah.” My heart settled a little with the admission, making room for the slightest bit of wonder. The tiniest sliver of jealousy that Jonah had been able to save the girl he loved.