Burning Paradise

Maybe not… but Cassie had been trained for this moment since the death of her parents, not least by Aunt Ris herself, and she couldn’t bring herself to break protocol. Pack, warn and run, that was the rule. Packing was simple. Like her aunt, like her little brother, Cassie kept a fully-loaded suitcase in her bedroom at all times. She hurried there now and yanked the suitcase from under the bed. It had been inspected and repacked just last month, to make sure she hadn’t outgrown any of the clothes in it. Cassie put the case on the bed and quickly dressed herself, keeping in mind that it was cold outside and winter was coming. She double-layered two shirts and covered them with an old woolen sweater. She caught a glimpse of herself in the vanity mirror—pale, lumpy and terrified, but who cared how she looked?

Aunt Ris had left a number where she could be reached in an emergency—and this was surely an emergency—but Cassie didn’t even consider calling it. That was another rule: no telephone calls. Under the circumstances, anything important had to be said face-to-face or not at all. Even an i

She could leave a note, of course, but even then she would have to be careful what she said.

She took her knapsack from the closet in the hallway and filled it with simple food from the kitchen cupboard: a half-dozen trail-mix bars, apple juice in single-serving boxes, a foil bag of mixed nuts and raisins. On impulse she grabbed a book from the shelf in the hallway and tucked it into a side pocket. It was a book her uncle had written: The Fisherman and the Spider, a tattered paperback edition Cassie had read twice before.

Time was passing. She strapped her watch to her wrist and saw that almost twenty minutes had slipped by since the death of the sim. The police were in the street now. Whirling red lights blinked through the window blinds. She guessed the police officers would be bewildered by the corpse of the victim—as much of it as hadn’t already evaporated into the night air. And the city coroner, tasked with analyzing the remains, might end up questioning his own sanity. But no report would be published in the morning papers. The sobbing, drunken driver would never come to trial. That was a foregone conclusion.

Cassie took a pen and a sheet of paper into the kitchen and controlled the trembling of her hand long enough to write,

Aunt Ris,

Gotta run—you know why.

Just wanted to say thanks (for everything). I will take good care of Thomas.

Love to you always,

It would have been dangerous to say more, and her aunt would understand the shorthand—“gotta run” was their personal Code Red. But it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t nearly enough. How could it be? For seven years Aunt Ris had looked after Cassie and Thomas with kindness, patience and—well, if not love, at least something like love. It was Aunt Ris who had calmed Cassie’s night terrors after the death of her parents, Aunt Ris who had gently introduced her to the truth about the Correspondence Society. And if she had been a little more protective than Cassie would have liked, Aunt Ris had also helped her strike a balance between the world as it appeared and the world as it really was—between the world as Cassie had loved it and the world she had come to dread.

“Thanks” was hardly adequate. She hesitated, wanting to say more. But if she tried to do so she would have to fight back tears, and that wasn’t helpful right now. So she taped the note, unaltered and inelegant as it was, to the refrigerator door, and forced her attention to the necessities of the moment.

Finally, she tiptoed into Thomas’s room and woke him with a hand on his shoulder.

She envied her younger brother’s aptitude for sleep. Thomas slept deeply, silently and reliably. His small bedroom was tidy at the moment. Thomas’s toys sat neatly on a wooden shelf, his clothes hung freshly-laundered in the closet. Thomas himself lay on his back with the comforter up to his chin, as if he hadn’t moved since Cassie tucked him in a few hours ago. Maybe he hadn’t. Twelve years old, but his face had kept its childhood roundness; his blond hair, even in disarray, made him look like a fat angel in yellow jammies. He woke as if he were returning to his body after a long absence. “Cassie,” he croaked, blinking at her. “What’s wrong?”

She told him to get dressed and get his suitcase from under the bed. They had to leave, she said. Now.

Dazed as he was, the implication wasn’t lost on him. “Aunt Ris—” he began.

“She’s not home. We have to leave without her.”

She hated the anxiety that surged from his eyes and felt reproached by it. She wanted to say, It’s not my fault! Don’t blame me—I don’t have a choice!

Worse, perhaps, was the look of frightened resignation that followed. Thomas was too young to remember much about the murder of their parents. But what he did remember, he remembered with his body as much as his mind. He sat up and steadied himself with a hand on the edge of the mattress. “Where are we going?”

“To see Leo Beck. After that—we’ll figure it out. Now get dressed. Hurry! You know the drill. And dress warm, okay?”

He nodded and stood up straight, like a soldier at reveille. The sight of him made her want to cry.

The high window at the end of the hallway opened onto a wooden fire escape bolted to the building’s sooty brickwork. The stairs descended into the alley behind the building, which meant that Cassie and Thomas, climbing down, would be invisible to the police, who in any case were probably too busy sorting out the events on Liberty Street to worry about what was happening in a vacant back lane.

As she raised the window Cassie caught a reflection of herself in the dusty glass. A young woman, dowdy in an oversized sweater, wary eyes peering out from under a black woolen watch cap—mouth too big, eyebrows too darkly generous, unattractive in what Cassie considered the best sense: she would never be stared at for her looks, which suited her fine.

In high school she had been considered not just odd-looking but personally odd. She had heard boys calling her “dead fish” behind her back. And it was true that she had become expert at concealing her feelings. That was part of what it meant to be a Society kid. There were truths you could never acknowledge, feelings that had to stay hidden. So it was okay to be a dead fish, to stand outside the hallway alliances and weekend social circles, to be looked at sidelong as you walked from class to class. Even to be sneered at, if you couldn’t avoid it. Her slightly geeky looks were helpful in that respect, a useful barrier between herself and others. She knew how to fly under the radar: never volunteer an answer, never expect or demand real friendship, do your work well but not conspicuously well.

In the presence of other Society offspring she could let her hair down a little. But she had never really enjoyed the company of that crowd, either. Society brats tended to be gnarly, cliquish, complexly screwed-up. Herself most certainly included.

She bit her lip and took a deep breath. Then she clambered over the low sill onto the wooden stairs, lifted out her suitcase and Thomas’s, and helped Thomas climb out behind her. The weather-worn wooden platform lurched under their combined weight. The alley below was a brick-lined asphalt corridor, empty of everything but a solitary Dumpster and the fitful November wind. That suited her, too.

She tried not to think about what she was leaving behind. When they reached ground level she gripped Thomas’s hand in hers (“Ow,” he said) and led him through the alley to the corner where it opened onto Pippin Street. Then she turned left, heading for the home of the disagreeable Leo Beck and a future she was afraid even to imagine.