Page 169 of Cherish

Effort

Later, after Hudson has showered and remembered how to breathe, we head back down to the Curator’s office.

It’s close to ten in the morning, and we’ve only got a few hours before she should be back from her mini vacation. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t ready to hand all this back over to her. Well, maybe her and an assistant, because she definitely needs one, but still.

This is hard, brutal work, and I’m smart enough to know that I don’t have the emotional capacity to do it for any real length of time. I’m glad that there are people out there who can look in the face of human suffering and depravity and find a way through it to the goodness on the other side. I just don’t know if I’m that person.

We’re on the stairs when my phone vibrates with a text, and I look down to find only one word from Heather.Help.

“What does that mean?” Hudson asks when I hold it up for him to see. But he’s already fading down the stairs, and I’m flying after him, having shifted on the run.

We burst into the TV room about thirty seconds later, only to find Flint, Jaxon, Heather, Eden, and Macy all looking like they’ve been run over by a giant truck.

“Are you okay?” I ask, racing toward the center of the room, where they are draped over chairs and desks and the floor, pens dangling from their hands.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again,” Jaxon mumbles as he rolls over onto his back. “I don’t think anything will ever be okay again.”

“What happened?” I ask, turning to scan the screens for a nuclear explosion or some other cataclysmic event of existential proportions.

But the TVs all look pretty much how we left them. Awful and wonderful and brutal and beautiful and absolutely everything in between but still…normal. Still exactly how the world usually is.

“South America,” Flint finally whispers.

“Africa,” Jaxon says at the same time.

Macy shakes her head. “It was North and South America.”

“More like Europe.” Eden scoffs.

“I don’t know what they’re talking about,” Heather says as she covers her face with her hands. “ButAsiais what happened. Definitely all four point sevenbillionpeople in Asia.”

The others seem like they’re about to argue, but one look at Heather’s haunted eyes and the way her braids are practically sticking straight out from her head like she’s just spent the last three hours yanking on them has them all retreating again.

“Okay,” Eden finally says with a groan. “Maybe it was Asia.”

“No maybe about it,” Heather grumbles as she climbs to her feet, sighing like every bone in her body hurts.

I’m looking from one of my friends to the next, totally confused. But first things first… “How are you able to know anything happenedby continent?” I wave at the walls of screens. “The TVs aren’t organized by geography.”

“They are now,” Heather says like she regrets all of her life choices. “There’s a button next to the one that makes the desks spin that re-sorts the screens by all sorts of things.”

Eden groans. “We thought it would be easier to all just take different continents.”

“Big mistake,” Jaxon deadpans.

“O-kay. Well, what can we do to help?” I ask, conscious of the fact that the TV screens are still going and nobody is currently recording what’s happening.

“Were you not listening?” my bestie says in a voice that can only be described as a shriek and points to her right. “Asia. You can start with Asia!”

“Asia it is,” I tell her, swiping the notebook out of her hand and heading over to the wall of TVs that covers that continent. “What’s the last thing you wrote down?”

“I don’t know,” she answers as her eyes glaze over. “There was a trade summit that seemed really important and a K-pop festival that is supposed to have had the highest attendance in the world.”

“K-pop?” Flint grumbles. “I could have been recording amazing stuff about K-pop instead of an earthquake that killed nearly fifteen thousand people? That doesn’t seem fair.”

Heather narrows her eyes at him. “Don’t even start with me, Dragon Breath. If you’d wanted K-pop, you totally could have asked for—”

“Hey! Is that who I think it is?” I interrupt as I happen to catch a glimpse of the group taking the stage at a music festival in South Korea.

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