Page 115 of Chaos

“I’m here,” I shout near her ear.

She nods, face tight.

A soldier throws things out of Ephie’s closet in a pile. Shoes. A pillow. A blanket. All while the surging crowd looks on, one comes out with a bottle of lighter fluid.

Ephie immediately turns beat red, her gaze sweeping the crowd and settling on Duane who’s been trying to stop this. “You had that. Not me. That isn’t mine!”

He makes awho mesort of face and shouts, “Let her go! She’s sixteen, man.” He throws his weight around, shouldering into the nearest soldiers, but not to stop it, just to agitate. The soldiers around him jostle into others and the waves of motion in the crowd get faster. “Let her go. She’s just a kid.”

Rey’s still doing nothing to stop it. In fact, she shifts and suddenly she’s closer to me, close enough I can see she’s watching it with a degree of strange calculation on her face mingled with sadness.

“Do something,” I shout at her. “You have to stop this.”

“Let’s put her in a holding cell,” she finally says, glancing at her watch, and I only hear her because I’m staring at her as she says it to the soldiers nearest to us. She shouts it louder. “Take her to the basement!”

Soldiers drag a terrified, shouting Ephie out of the room. It’s horrible to see. She digs in her bare heels, and I see a flash of white underpants as she tries to kick at one of them. She’s so young, far too young to be caught in a mob, and it feels so much like when Ben dragged me by my hair, and threw me into the cellar, it has my stomach curdling.

She sees me as they drag her past, and her face alights with something like hope. “It was Duane,” she shouts, the sound nearly lost in the mob around us. “He’s trying to get Ben out.”

“How?” I shout back. How would having Ephie locked up help Duane get Ben?

She gestures helplessly, and the soldiers yank her away from me.

The crowd follows through the lobby and down the steps that run down toward the basement interrogation cells, and Shasta and I follow.

Sound echoes louder in this hall, the same one where Yorke found out about Maybe.

As soon as Ephie is locked away, her face pressed against the circular glass window in the door, Rey turns on the crowd, barking at her shoulders, and orders fill the space. “Disperse! Move on people. Go back to your jobs.”

Duane joins the noise, shouting, “You heard her people, move along. Move along,” like he suddenly now wants to help.

Something isn’t right.

I catch Mitsy glaring across the way.

“Come on.” I wrap my fingers around Shasta’s hand tightly. “Let’s go find Collee—”

The horn blares.

My first thought isYorke and the army are coming backso fast!but it’s quashed when a second horn blares, and then dread settles in, because a third comes.

Once means friend.

Two means stranger.

Three means danger.

Rey scrubs a hand over her face, muttering a rapid release of fucks on repeat.

Someone else shouts, “Smoke!”

That’s why the lights are blurry.

Everything else flees my mind instantly, and all I can think about is Auden in the ballroom with Gus and May who will already be gathering them and trying to decide what to do and where to go.

I need to get to him. We need to gather the kids in the basement, prepare them to evacuate. There’s a fire … but there’s also an enemy at the gate.

Rey starts to turn away but I snatch her by the arm. “Who is it?” I ask desperately. “How long do we have?”

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