CHAPTER ONE
MARA
The Office Tower floor holds until it doesn't.
I test every tile before I give it my weight. Toe first. Then heel. Then the rest of me. The tower has been coming down for thirty-seven years and it comes down a little more every winter.
Eleven floors up. The stairwell is gone past nine, so I climbed the outside, where the front of the building peeled away and left a ladder of rebar and ledge. My palms are cut. I don't look at them.
Gray light through the missing wall. Wind with it. The street below runs out flat and pale in every direction and nothing on it moves. I watch it anyway. Door, ceiling, floor, street. My eyes do the circuit without asking me.
Desks. Rows of them, every chair turned a different way, like the people who sat in them stood up together and went to see something. Dust lies on the carpet thick as snow. My boots leave prints.
I work the room the way you work any room. Left side first, knife hand free. Drawers. Cabinets. Anything with wire in it. Anything that rings when I drop it.
The first six desks give me a fistful of paper clips and a phone with no face.
The seventh gives me a pump bottle. Hand sanitizer, a third full. I unscrew the cap and smell it and my eyes water. Alcohol. Real. Doc Teller will give me two cans for it and think he got the better end. He'll be right. I take it anyway.
The corner office has a door still on its hinges and a glass wall cracked into a star. The door sticks, then lets go. The sound runs through the floor. I stand still for a few seconds waiting for the sound to subside, then I go in.
A big desk. A leather chair split open, the stuffing gone to gray. The bottom drawer is jammed. I put the knife in the seam and lean. Wood cracks. The drawer comes.
A shoe.
One shoe. A child's. It was pink once. The hook-and-loop strap has gone dark at the edge where a thumb pulled it every morning. The sole is almost clean. Whoever wore it never walked far.
I look for the other one. I take everything out. A stapler. Folders gone to felt. A picture in a frame, facedown. I don't turn the picture over. No second shoe.
Somebody brought a child to work. On a day they thought would be normal. Nobody knew which day would be the last one.
I weigh the shoe in my hand. It weighs nothing. It's worth nothing. Nobody trades for one shoe.
I put it in my coat pocket and button the flap.
I don't know why.
The coat catches on rebar twice on the way down. It's a dead man's coat, too big in every direction, the sleeves rolled three times. It was the only one I could find that came past my hips. It keeps the wind off.
Six blocks to the garage. I go the long way, along the walls, never down the middle of a street. A bus on its side. A tree growing out of a bank. I used to know what everything was for. Now I only know which things will fall.
The ramp. A man with a pipe looks at my hands, then my face, then my hands again, and nods me down. I go down. The air changes. Smoke and wet concrete and fifty people breathing. Second level, past the tarp rooms, past the woman who sells boiled roots, behind the fourth pillar from the ramp.
Eli is sitting up. The blanket is pulled to his chin. It used to be blue. His eyes find me before the rest of him does. They're too big for his face. Sunken and hollow, like two gaping holes into absolute nothingness.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
"Find anything?"
I hold up the bottle.
"Doc'll like that."
"Yeah he will."
The corner of his mouth twitches. He tries to smile, but the sickness has made him weak.
Then the cough takes him.
I count. I always count. Eleven. It's a wet sound, deep, like cloth tearing under water. He folds over the blanket and his shoulders shake. I'm on my knees on the concrete. My hand is in my pocket, around the shoe. I squeeze it in an attempt to ground myself and calm my nerves.
He lifts his face.
Blood on his lips. Dark and murky. Like mud infused with red paint.
He reaches for the blanket. I get there first. I take the sleeve of the dead man's coat and press it to his mouth and wipe. Once. Again. He pulls his head back.
"I'm fine."
"I know."
"It's nothing, Mara."
"I know."
In truth I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.
I pour water from the jug into the tin cup and hold it while he drinks. The well water tastes like a coin held under the tongue. Bitter and metallic. We don't have a choice. Choices are for people with options. There isn't another kind.
He sleeps in pieces. I sit with my back to the pillar and my knife in my lap and watch the ramp. Door, ceiling, floor, ramp.
Later I take the coat off. The cuff has gone stiff. Brown at the edge, dark in the weave.
There's a bucket. There's water. There's lye soap, two bars, hard to get.
I don't wash the sleeve.
I don't waste resources washing dried blood off of a dead man's coat.
