Chapter 18: Night Practical

On Tuesday evening, Dante told Javier the truth he could say.

He said it in the corridor outside the anatomy lab, ten minutes before the night practical.

"My cousin knows about the pier," he said. "He is going to try something this week. I don't know where."

"The man who took my picture."

"Yes."

"And you want me to stay home."

"No." Dante held his eyes. "I want you to know. Then you choose."

Javier looked at the lab door, and at the sixteen students already inside, bent over steel tables under white light.

"I'm sitting this practical," he said. "It's worth a fifth of the grade."

"Then I'll sit it beside you."

"And your mother's people?"

"I'd like them on the quad, in the dark, where you can't see them. Tell me no, and I'll call it off."

Javier thought about it.

He was a long time thinking, and Dante let him.

"Yes," Javier said at last. "On the quad. They don't come in, and they don't touch anyone. Unless it's a gun."

"Unless it's a gun."

They went in.

The practical was a long one.

Javier worked on the left arm of a cadaver with a scalpel in his hand.

He named every tendon under his breath.

Dante stood at the next table, and for once he did not watch the door.

He watched Javier's hands.

At ten past nine, a man with a mask and a black jacket came through the side door of the lab.

He had a pistol, and he did not shout.

He shot out the lights.

The room went black.

Someone screamed.

Dante heard it before he thought, the click of the safety, the scrape of a boot, a breath in the dark to his left.

He moved.

He did not grab Javier.

That was the hardest thing he did that night.

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