Chapter 24: The Cell

Nobody moved to take me.

The enforcers looked at the mothers on the ramp.

The mothers looked back.

One of them had a boy on her hip who'd been gray to the lips at midnight.

He was pink now, and asleep, and drooling on her shoulder.

"Jarrett," Boyd said pleasantly. "Tell your boys."

Jarrett stood there with the basin in his hands.

He looked at me.

He opened his mouth.

Then he looked at Boyd, and I watched him shrink an inch, the way he'd shrunk in the basement when his uncle said his name.

"The law's the law," he said to the asphalt.

I stood up before anybody could put a hand on me.

"I'll walk," I said.

The holding room was under the Council office on Main Street.

It had been a bank vault once, back when Hollin Creek had silver money in it.

Concrete walls.

A cot.

A drain in the floor.

A steel door with a little window in it, and an enforcer on a folding chair on the other side.

I sat on the cot and looked at my hands.

They still smelled of saline and old pennies.

At eight o'clock I felt him.

A heartbeat coming down Main Street at a run.

It stopped right outside the wall behind my head.

I heard voices up on the street, through the little vent near the ceiling.

His, low.

The enforcers', nervous.

"Beta's orders, sir. Nobody goes in."

"I'm not asking to go in."

Then nothing.

Then his heartbeat, settling, right on the other side of the concrete.

I put my palm flat on the wall.

I didn't know if he could feel it.

Under my ribs, his heart went slow and even, once, twice.

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