Return Once More

Get it together, Kaia. This is Jonah’s secret, it has to be. Trust him.

Ten minutes later, a girl near the windows that faced Greene Street shrieked, “Fire!” If I believed in hell the way my mother did, the way Analeigh’s parents did, it would look like this. The five of us moved quickly to the small space at the front corner of the room, the one we’d determined would allow us to stay and watch the longest.

Most of the girls nearest the windows, where the fire had broken out, were frozen in place, half consumed by flames before they moved from their chairs. Fire spread faster than I could have imagined; the piles of scraps incinerated in seconds, the flames passing quickly to the wooden tables, the walls, and the girls ru

The doors were still locked. No one opened them, despite the workers beating their fists bloody against the thick metal. The girls closest to the doors were crushed against the stubborn barriers, slumping to the floor as the rest moved on to the elevators. Smoke choked the room. It burned my eyes and clogged my lungs. Analeigh, Pey, Sarah, Rachel, and I lay flat on our stomachs, but even being farthest from the fire and near a window, where at least a little fresh air attempted to enter the inferno, breathing was difficult. We were supposed to stay until the last girl jumped from this floor, but I wondered how we would stand it.

The elevator stopped working. A few of the braver girls grabbed onto the cables, sliding downward and crashing onto the elevator’s roof. I knew from my research that the ones that went first would be crushed by the bodies of those who jumped second and third. They would all suffer broken limbs and severe burns to their hands, but a handful would survive.

Then the elevator was gone. It wouldn’t come back.

Screams echoed in my ears, loud and unceasing from the girls around me, muffled from the floor above, where the fire had spread. The girls that would survive took the stairs up to the roof. The rusted fire escape outside the windows broke and fell away, taking more girls to their deaths, and the workers that remained on this floor would burn, asphyxiate, or jump.

I squinted through the frames of my glasses, through eyes that felt as though they were on fire themselves, trying to record clear visions of these girls’ faces. Terror rolled their eyes back into their heads, tear tracks cut through soot-smudged skin. Fire singed the hems of their dresses and more than one girl slapped uselessly at flames eating away her hair. Farther from the windows, they started to drop, crawling weakly forward but eventually collapsing until the fire ate what was left of them. The acrid smell of burning flesh spilled into the room, mingling with smoke.

Sirens wailed in the distance, then grew closer and finally stopped. Shouted orders and exclamations of disbelief, distant and hard to decipher, lifted from the street. The female workers perched in the windows, looking down at the street with mixtures of desperation, wild fear, and resignation flashing across their young features.

The oldest girl at the windows couldn’t be past twenty, and there were a couple even younger than me. The manifest in the Archives listed two fourteen-year-old girls among today’s victims, but they were both on the ninth floor.

If the doors had been unlocked, most of them would have lived. Maybe all.

The men who ran the factory ordered the doors be kept locked so that the girls’ purses could be checked on their way out, to prevent the theft of their cheap material. Neither of the owners would be held responsible for a single one of the 146 deaths taking place at this very moment.

Two girls at the window grasped hands and jumped. More took their places. Some jumped alone, others together, but in the end everyone died alone. It was the one universal truth.

It was a strange moment of peace inside the chaos, the choice the girls had in the ma

Choices. We always, always have them.

I started to cough, bloody phlegm hitting the floor in front of my face. Analeigh’s face turned beet red as she hacked away, and the fire crept closer—we would be five additional victims in less than a minute if Rachel didn’t get us the hell out of here. But she’d made this trip before, and the timing had been tested. Thirty seconds later she lowered her lips to the cuff ringing her wrist, the shaking blue haze surrounded us, and the horror disappeared.

*

Sanchi, Amalgam of Genesis–50 NE (New Era)

“Put the masks on, girls. Immediately.”

Rachel’s voice reached through the haze and opened my eyes, which I’d pressed closed in an attempt to erase the images dancing behind them—terrified girls aflame, screaming, sobbing, jumping to their deaths. It was the worst event I’d recorded so far.

Oxygen masks hung from the air lock ceiling and I grabbed the nearest one, holding the clear plastic over my nose and mouth, and breathing the recycled air and cleansing chemicals deep into my lungs. Ten minutes passed before the five of us stopped coughing and our faces returned to normal, healthy colors. We pulled on the masks until the cords retracted into the ceiling, then stripped off our smoke-scented garments and dumped them in the drawers. The smell permeated our skin, our hair, and the sleek black undergarments, too, and we all headed for decontamination showers without being told.

Twenty minutes later we were cleaned and dressed in the fresh outfits waiting in the drawers. The comps cleared us, the doors swished open and, for once, the smell of ca

“Where were you yesterday morning? And don’t give me any crap about the gym because we both know your idea of exercising is to run back to the room to take a nap between sessions.” She pi

It was on the tip of my tongue to confess. I wanted to tell my best friend about meeting the boy born to love me—how he made me feel with a simple touch, the way I could almost sense my body and his making a complete whole, the rules I’d broken—but it would only put us both in bad positions. Not to mention that I didn’t think she would understand.

The idea that I was becoming my brother closed my throat. For all of my promises that I wouldn’t break my parents’ hearts the way Jonah had, it hadn’t taken much prodding to make me forget them. Just the lure of meeting my True Companion in the flesh.

Keeping such a huge thing from Analeigh pushed my tears past control, and she leaned over, pulling me into a hug that toppled me off balance. I put a hand out, bracing my weight on the wall so I didn’t smash her, and felt Jonah’s cuff slide from my elbow down to my wrist.

It was stupid to keep it on me, but it worried me more to leave it in the room. We shared clothes all the time since everything matched, and it would have been too easy for Analeigh or Sarah to stumble across it in a drawer.

Analeigh’s eyes grew wide as she stared at the golden band, the symbol of certified Historian status glaringly out of place in our apprentice dorms. “Where did you get that?”