Chapter 19: The Morning It Stopped

We stood at the window until the clouds broke.

The first light in five years came through the glass, and I stood on Finnegan's shoulder and held his collar.

"It's over," he said.

"It's not."

"What?"

"The Event just ended," I said. "Everything my sister made is changing back."

He understood before I finished.

He took out his phone, and I leaned over the screen with him.

The pea-sized lens over Declan's door showed the thirty-first floor in the gray morning.

Britt's line had formed as it did every dawn, and she stood at the head of it with a crate of supermarket loaves and two guards behind her.

She touched the first loaf.

Nothing happened.

She touched it again.

The loaf stayed an ordinary loaf, and the neighbors stared at it.

Then every giant loaf already in their hands began to shrink.

They shriveled in front of the whole floor, enormous, then big, then ordinary, and finally to a handful of crumbs and a tiny heel here and there.

People stared at their palms.

A woman began to cry.

A child asked, "Where did the rest go?"

"It's gone back," Finnegan said, low. "All of it. The whole building's store."

"Not mine," I said.

I looked down at the shelf, where my coop and my cornfield stood exactly as small as I had left them.

"Mine stays," I said. "That's the difference between the two systems. Hers had an end, and mine doesn't."

He said nothing, and his hand came up under my feet so I would not slide.

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