“Maybe the people who rescue us will have food,” she says.
I remember smelling something…my dad cooking dinner. Some kind of meat, maybe? My mouth waters and my stomach rumbles louder.
“Bread,” Bello says, her eyes all dreamy. “Hot bread, with butter and cinnamon. All crunchy on the outside and soft inside.”
“A sandwich,” O’Malley says. “With mustard and pickles and big, fat, salty slices of cold chicken.”
Pork chops…that’s what my dad was roasting. How can I know that and not know his face?
“Cupcakes,” Aramovsky says. “Chocolate, with chocolate icing as high as the cupcake itself. And lots of sprinkles.”
My mouth waters so badly I almost drool.
“Pasta,” Yong says. “With tomato sauce, and so much cheese on top you have to take like three bites before you can even find the pasta beneath.”
“I don’t care what they bring,” Spingate says. “As long as it’s hot. And more of it than I can even eat. But for dessert, I’m definitely going for one of Aramovsky’s cupcakes.”
“Me too,” O’Malley says.
Bello shakes her head. She’s still walking backward. Her eyes sparkle, she stands straight and tall—as tall as she can be, anyway. She’s happy: she looks like a completely different person from the sniffling girl I met back in the coffin room.
“You’re all wrong,” she says. She taps her temple. “You’re obviously not a thinker like me. Aramovsky’s right about chocolate with chocolate icing, but it needs to be a birthday cake. With twelve candles!”
Aramovsky laughs. “You’re right, Bello, but are there still sprinkles? There better be sprinkles.”
Bello rolls her eyes in mock annoyance. “Of course there are. It’s your birthday, so you get sprinkles. We all get sprinkles.”
Everyone agrees that this is a splendid way to finish our rescue meal.
Smiles, nods, yummy noises…it’s an almost perfect moment. For a brief instant, we’re not in our grownup bodies with too-small clothes and no shoes, we’re not surrounded by dust that used to be people, and we’re not lost and alone—we’re six friends walking together, on our way to a birthday party. There will be cake, there will be games, there will be presents. There will be parents who love us and protect us.
Still moving down the hall, Bello spins in slow circles, letting momentum swing her arms wide.
“I bet our parents are coming to get us,” she says. “They have to be looking for us, right?”
“Mine are,” Yong says instantly.
Bello nods. “So are mine. But…I can’t remember them. Yong, do you remember your parents? What they look like?”
He makes that pfft noise again. “Of course I remember them.”
We all know he’s lying. He knows it, too, but no one challenges him, because it’s a nice lie, one we’d all like to believe.
Bello’s spin slows. The excitement drains from her face—fear owns her.
She stops. So do the rest of us.
There are tears in her eyes. Crying again? Bello is really starting to bother me.
“Our parents,” she says. “What if our parents are the ones who put us in the coffins?”
I wondered the same thing. I’m ashamed I considered it, even for a second. I see the others looking down, looking away—we’ve all had that thought, but Bello is the first to voice it out loud.
No one answers her. She seems to shrink, hunching over a bit, elbows pulling tight to her ribs, hands wringing left over right, right over left. Bello stands still, lets the group pass her by, then she falls in at the rear.
We return to walking in silence. We hear only the sounds of our breathing and our shuffling feet.
And our growling stomachs.
Maybe another hour passes. Maybe two. We keep going because we don’t have a choice.
Then, far up ahead, that ever-present meeting of ceiling and floor changes: another hallway, crossing ours. It’s something different, which is enough to make us pick up the pace despite our exhaustion.
We reach the intersection. The new hallway leads off to our right for a long ways, but the light from the ceiling is dim. Farther in, it looks like there is no light at all. Maybe a hundred steps away, I see a single archway door in the dimness. It’s wide open. Maybe there are more beyond it, but it’s too dark to tell.
To our left, the hallway goes a few feet before it stops at a wall, a wall that looks like black liquid frozen in mid-splash—as if it melted, then cooled. Maybe it used to be a door, very different from the other doors we’ve seen so far.
Spingate steps a few feet into the hallway on the right. She stares down it, tilting her head slightly as if that might let her see a bit farther.
“We’ve been in the same hall for a long time,” she says. “We haven’t found anything. So far, I mean. Should we try this new one?”
No one else speaks. Are they waiting for me to decide?
Yong walks to stand next to Spingate. He stares down the new hall just as she did, even tilts his head the same. Then he looks back at me.