Trapped

So the Ring of Knives gashed its way around the planet. Rival gangs fought back without mercy: dons and capos and czars would stop at nothing to see Elizabeth Tzekich dead. All this time, Rosalind stayed with her mother; but after a close call with a bomb spraying OldTech neurotoxins, the girl had been sent away for her own protection, to a boarding school in Nankeen.

Then to Alice Springs.

Then Quito.

Then Brazzaville.

Then Port-au-Prince.

Now it was Feliss. Where the girl was expected to last another month or two before being hustled off in the dead of night, moved to another school on another continent to keep ahead of her mother's enemies. Rosalind's clothes were worn and threadbare because she'd been living out of suitcases since she was thirteen; her soul was worn and threadbare for the same reason.

As far as I knew, Rosalind had never tried to make friends at our school-why bother when she might be dragged away at any moment? She did her homework as a way to keep busy, but mostly she passed her time staring out the window. In the middle of class I'd glance in Rosalind's direction and she'd be gazing out at bare trees against the winter sky. Perhaps she was wondering if she'd stay long enough to see leaves on those trees; or perhaps she didn't ask such questions anymore: she just disengaged her mind and let minutes or hours roll by. I was glad to hear she had a passion for music… glad she cared about anything. Rosalind had struck me as a girl who might do nothing but stare out the window her entire life.

"We should check on her," I told A

"Mine," A

A

She ducked her head and lifted off the necklace, squeezing the chain in her fist as she stepped to the door. I rose to follow. A

By the time we knocked on Rosalind's door, tousle-haired heads had appeared up and down the hall. I suppose they'd been wakened a few minutes earlier, by my babbling in A

Without looking at anyone in particular, A

This particular way was effective. All along the corridor, doors closed immediately.

Rosalind didn't answer our first knock. A

Not a sound from inside. No light through the peephole.

"Of course," A

"In that case," I said, "she may try to shoot us through the door."

A

Quietly, A

Seconds passed. A

Still no response. A

Neither she nor I tried to peek around the door frame-just in case Rosalind really did have a shotgun or some other violent reception for unwelcome visitors. Three seconds later, I knew we didn't have to look… because a terrible smell of meat and excrement oozed into my nostrils.

I hadn't seen death all that often-I wasn't a surgeon, soldier, or in any other profession that regularly produced cadavers-but I came from a family where generations lived and died together in the same house.

When I was very young, I clutched my mother's leg as she and my great-grandfather washed the wrinkled skin of his just-dead wife, carefully preparing the old woman for burial. Several years later, that same great-grandfather died right in front of me; he was withering away from a cancerous mass in his belly, and toward the end, everyone in the house took turns reading him the Koran, around the clock, twenty-four hours a day. (For some, it was the first time we'd read the Book: Great-Granddad was the only genuine Believer in our family. The generation after his had all become adamant atheists for reasons they never discussed, and those of us born later were brought up in bland secularity… idly curious about the old ways, but never to the point where we considered prostrating ourselves when the muezzin called.) I was waiting my turn to take over the reading from Aunt Rahel when the breath slipped out of the old man and the smell of his loosened bowels filled the room. (My aunt immediately turned to the Opening, Al-Fatiha, and read, "In the name of Most Merciful Compassionate God: Praise be to God, the Lord of all Being; All-Merciful, All-Compassionate, the Master of the day of judgment. Thee only do we worship and of thee do we beg assistance. Guide us in the straight path, the way of the blessed-not of those who have earned Your wrath or those who have wandered astray." Only then did she look up and say, "He's gone.") And there were other deaths through the years, great-uncles and elderly cousins, a maid who drank poison (no one knew why), a gateman stabbed by a thief, the thief himself brought down by guard dogs and shot in cold blood by my grandma Khadija, a peasant boy who'd climbed our wall and was found floating in the fish pond (probably chased there by the dogs)… perhaps two or three dozen dead in all. Not a lot of corpses by many people's standards, but enough that I recognized the smell of a room where life had vanished.

Rosalind's room had that smell.

I glanced across at A

It's hard to describe how I felt at that moment-not calm, certainly, but neither was I falling apart. I'd already had my breakdown. And the smell from Rosalind's room wasn't a surprise… just the confirmation of something I'd suspected ever since I heard that harp.