“I don’t know.” But I gave it a try, climbing to my feet, using Cris’s shoulder for balance. Across the yard, Sam got up, too, and started toward me, leaving Stef to trail after him. “Thank you for helping me.” I was always too slow with politeness, but at least I’d remembered this time.
“Of course.” Cris smiled. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, you especially. I can’t let you go around with smoky lungs when market day is so close.”
Lights shone in a mobile medical vehicle. Geral was probably in there. “I hope she and the baby are okay.”
“They have a chance because of you.”
I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to make me feel. Good? Proud? Mostly I felt overwhelmed and exhausted.
“Ana.” Sam’s deep voice filled me, sweeter than smoke, sweeter than the burst of fresh air from the mask. Soot and ash stained his face and clothes.
I stepped forward into his arms, relieved just to touch him. Warm. Solid. Real. Neither of us had gotten burned up.
He swayed, but stayed upright as my weight settled against him. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” he murmured into my hair. “I lost track of you in the smoke. I was worried.” Hands pressed hard on the small of my back.
“Any idea what caused the explosion?” Cris asked behind me. I’d forgotten he was here.
Sam shook his head. “Let’s not bother Geral about it, but Orrin is over there. We can ask if they were doing anything unusual.”
“Should I walk Ana back to your house, Sam?” That was Stef. I’d forgotten she was here, too. “No need to burden her with this, and she looks like she could use some rest.”
I peeled myself off Sam. “I’m fine. Besides, Stef, I’m sure your scientific mind will be more useful here than taking me home.”
She looked ready to argue—probably that I was so young and shouldn’t be exposed to such horrors—but just then light bloomed on the far side of the city. The ground trembled.
“Was that—” she started, but seemed incapable of completing the thought. Like it was too terrible to comprehend.
The words were ash in my mouth. “Another one.”
This was not an accident.
21
SMOKE
THERE WERE THREE more explosions, each an hour after the one before. Stef tried to send me home every time, but I refused. Sam and Cris never backed her up, and her annoyance devolved into a glower.
“She shouldn’t be here,” she told Whit. “She’s too young. This will traumatize her.”
I turned to watch flames die under the fire-suppressant mist. Floodlights burned across the city, and smoke billowed into the sky, so completely veiling the stars they might not exist anymore except in memory. I’d grown used to geyser steam rising at all hours, but this was nothing like that. Smoke plumed dark and angry, evidence of destruction and hatred.
We waited for the sixth explosion. Everyone wore tight faces and worry, but we stood there by the smoldering ruins of the fifth house and nothing happened.
I stared at the white shell of the house—now streaked with cinders and dust, but whole—and hated Janan. I hated him for what he did to newsouls, how he’d deceived everyone for so long, and that he’d never let anything happen to his precious white city as long as he was awake.
My hand found my knife inside my coat pocket, the cool rosewood handle smooth under my soot-darkened fingers. As I had in Menehem’s laboratory, I wished for a weapon against Janan. Something that would hurt him.
But even if it were possible, Janan reincarnated souls who meant everything to me; I wouldn’t be able to do it.
That made me hate him more.
Sam drew me homeward, into his own white shell of a house. I could sometimes forget about the exterior walls with all the parlor instruments, the honeycomb shelves, and the perfume of roses.
At some point I must have showered, because when I realized I was sitting on the sofa, tense and waiting for another explosion, my clothes were clean and my hair wet. I no longer stank of smoke and ash. A glass of juice sat on a table beside me, half drunk.
Unnerving.
Sam came downstairs, wearing nightclothes the colors of winter forests. Hollows darkened under his eyes, and he carried weariness like chains. “It will be dawn in a couple hours.”
Would the sun even shine through all that smoke? “I can’t sleep. Maybe ever again.”
Birdsong skittered outside, hesitant. Sam sat at the piano like he’d play accompaniment, but his hands rested on his knees, unmoving. “I know. I keep thinking what if our house is next?”
Our house. I liked that he said that, though I wished our house were his cabin in the woods, or Purple Rose Cottage. “It won’t be.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not pregnant.”
“Oh.” His posture evaporated as he realized what I had: every one of the attacked homes had belonged to someone carrying.
Some had been no more than a month or two, so it wasn’t obvious like with Geral. Two women had died in the explosions, and a third had miscarried. The three babies might have been newsouls. If they were oldsouls, they’d be reborn none the wiser. But newsouls…