Chapter 23: The Edge

The roof door was already open when I reached the top of the stairs.

Sunlight lay across the wet concrete, the first I had walked in for five years.

Finnegan was one step behind me, and behind him came a dozen neighbors with their shoes in their hands.

My sister stood at the far edge of the roof with her back to the city.

She had her arms wrapped around herself.

"Don't come closer," she said.

"I'm not going to," I said.

I stopped at the middle of the roof, across from her, on the same stretch of concrete where she had stood over me.

"This is where it happened," I said. "Wasn't it?"

She went rigid.

"I don't know what you mean."

"The morning the rain stopped. You came up here after me. Everything I had amplified for us was shrinking away, and you said I'd stolen your power."

"You did steal it!"

"I didn't. You picked Shrink and you hated it, and you couldn't live with that."

"Everyone was dying," she said. "Everyone but you."

"Everyone but you, because I fed you."

She had no answer for that.

She laughed, a high ugly laugh.

"You get everything," she said. "You always did. Everyone loved you for raising me. Everyone said what a good sister you were."

"I was twenty-two when I quit school to feed you."

"And I was a child, and you never let me forget it!"

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