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tremble a little, and a tear of frustration welled up in my eye. My emotional
response shocked me into action.
I stepped out into the hallway. When the door at the far end of the hallway
opened, I nearly ducked back into my cell, but the door had locked behind me.
The man who came toward me was dressed in black, but it was not the uniform of
an Inquisitor. Instead he wore the clothes of an Orthodox Jew. I could see the
knotted tassels of a prayer shawl hanging out of his vest. He was young, with
a trim black beard and thick curly hair. When he noticed me staring at him, he
smiled brightly and waved.
"This way," he said.
I hesitated. Since the Dreyfus Affair, there weren't a whole lot of Jews in
France.
"Come on, come on," he said. "We don't have a lot of time, and you want to
help Thistle, don't you?"
Fine, I told myself; follow the hallucination, Rebeckah. What could it hurt? I
rushed up to where he stood holding the hallway door open. As I approached, I
noticed the intensity of his eyes and the thin features of his face. "Do I
know you?" I asked him in a whisper.
"I'm looking a little younger," he admitted with a fond smile sparkling with
mischief.
"Elijah?"
"You wouldn't follow an angel, so They sent me. Now come. We're wasting time."
"If God really wanted me to follow, He'd send a cute lesbian."
"So She's a little short-staffed. Anyway, shouldn't we be thinking of
Thistle?" Thus chided, I let my hallucination lead me through another empty
hallway and down a flight of stairs.
We found Thistle and the others in the basement in the morgue. Their bodies
lay on stainless-steel countertops, still draped with white sheets. The IV
units standing beside each body were the only sign that they were still alive.
"How long can they keep them like this?" I asked.
"Who knows? What I want to know is what you think you're going to do with
them."
It was a good question. The alarm was still blaring, but I doubted we had much
longer to formulate a plan. At the end of the morgue was a double door where
they brought the bodies in from ambulances and out to hearses or other
transport. Thistle's table was on wheels, and I started awkwardly maneuvering
it toward the exit. "We'll commandeer an ambulance."
"Steal," Elijah corrected, helping with the IV. "And then what? What do you do
when this" he tapped the bag of fluid "runs out?"
"I don't fucking know. But I can't leave her here."
"So you'd rather she died?"
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I stopped my progress toward the door. "No."
Elijah looked at the floor. "Then maybe you should think about leaving her."
Yesterday's Rebeckah would have, but something had changed for me. I thought
about that Palestinian girl again and looked at Thistle's outline under her
sheet. To leave her here was to sentence her to a kind of death as well. "Is
that what God wants? For me to abandon her? All of them?"
Just then the alarm cut off. My heart sank, and I thought perhaps God had just
answered my question in the affirmative. In the silence I heard muffled
pounding coming from the ventilation system.
"What the hell is that?" I said, moving toward the sound. On the floor,
underneath a countertop, I found a grate. Bits of hair stuck out of it. An
animal? Whatever it was, it rhythmically butted up against the metal over and
over and over. For all the world it sounded like someone banging their head.
"Hello?" I said, touching the hair.
"Oh, shit," a voice said from the other side, retreating into shadows. "Are
you a cop?"
"No. Are you stuck?" I asked.
"Yeah, good point. It doesn't really matter if you're a cop or not. I really
need to get out of here. I mean, what the hell? This always works in the vids.
But they never show how the guy gets the screws off the other grate from the
inside."
I quickly found a scalpel on one of the tables and used it to undo the screws.
With him pushing and me pulling, the grate came off. Then out crawled a dusty,
dark-haired boy & or, I decided when I saw the stubble on his chin, and very
short young man. His skin was the color of almonds, and I thought he might be
Indian. He wore a button-down shirt that was once white, but was now streaked
with black smudges. One arm was wrapped in a dirty bandage, and his jeans were
torn. A fresh bruise colored one of his cheekbones purplish. He looked like
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