Chapter 23: Day Forty-Nine

Elias's POV

On April 21, at ten to two in the morning, the quad held more people than the stadium had ever seated.

Every one of them was holding a light.

I stood at the foot of the fire stair with Jo's hand in mine.

I hated what she had told me about the call.

"Corinna said not to catch them," Jo said quietly. "She said let them climb, and ask them at the top."

"And if they go over?"

"Then she wanted them to know what it cost."

"That isn't comfort."

"It isn't supposed to be," Jo said.

My parents stood at the edge of the crowd.

My father's cane was planted in the grass, and my mother wore her green coat.

Roxanne stood beside her own mother's wheelchair.

Brock and Dane and the lab partner had come up the steps at my back, without being asked.

The nurse was there.

So was the Inquirer's reporter, with a camera this time.

At 2:13 nobody spoke.

At 2:14 a door opened in the row of faculty houses.

A woman in a long nightgown walked out across the lawn.

It was the dean.

Her feet were bare and gray with dirt, and her eyes were open and blank.

From the other side of the quad came a tall bearded man in striped pajamas.

One of his socks was navy and the other gray.

The crowd parted for them in silence, and I heard my father draw a breath.

They walked up to the fire stair and began to climb.

The iron rang at every step.

"Now," Jo said.

We climbed after them, twelve feet back, with seven hundred lights tilting up along the stair below.

At the top, the roof was cold and the wind came hard off the quad.

The dean and the professor stood on the northeast wall, side by side, a foot from the edge.

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