Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  From Susan’s shoulders, Kate laughed giddily, and Susan looked around, swelling with the pleasure of it all. How had she missed this before? The buildings were so much taller than she’d thought! The crowd cheered and whistled. Why had she thought the city dirty? It sparkled in the sunlight. Even the people were smoother than she’d imagined. What had caused her so much grief? She’d been exaggerating — that’s what. Worrying for nothing. She turned to tell Max and found him squinting, openmouthed, at the polished bricks. She grinned and saw Nell blinking in confusion, her eyes darting from the buildings to the people to the Genius.

  Susan had never been in love, but she had read about it, and the thought struck her that this must be the way of it. She had been wrong, all wrong, about the man on the platform, about the city, about everything here, and now she could really see it for the first time. What was it about him? She couldn’t put her finger on it. And after a minute, she couldn’t puzzle it out anymore, because there was nothing, really, but that voice, those words, that powerful rightness that she could feel so strongly it made her want to shout.

  Her whole mind went to that voice. The man was beautiful. She wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. Everything was beautiful here.

  “You,” he was saying, “my useful ones. You can sense the change withering. You know it! You can feel the nearness of the final victory.”

  Victory! A sigh of eagerness wafted through the crowd, and like an electrical current, it snapped through Susan, connecting her to all the people in the square, all the wonderful, wonderful people and the glorious man on the platform. The crowd was a living thing now, a single mass, and she was part of it, and glad — so glad to be useful! The word glowed vibrantly. It was the best of words, the best she’d ever heard. What was anything compared to usefulness? Nothing at all. Susan looked up at the man and saw him pause, beaming down at them. Then he grew somber.

  “Yes, we’re close to victory. And because we are, because we stand upon our victories, we forget. We forget! We don’t see the danger lurking so close.”

  He shook his head, disappointed, and Susan’s heart sank. What was wrong? What danger? She would fix it!

  “You’ve let them lull you,” the Genius chided. “You’ve relaxed your guard. The forces that would destroy you are here! At your doors!”

  Susan looked around, appalled. Here! How could it be? Who would dare?

  “Susan, I want to come down now,” Kate said. The giddiness was gone from her voice, and Susan eased her to the ground.

  Heads were nodding in the crowd. Murmurs and shouts of “Tell us!” rang out. Kate took hold of Susan’s shirt.

  “They live to drag you down,” the Genius went on. “But you tolerate the sickness in your midst. You ignore the sleeping, the insane! The wasteful and the useless! Are they like you? Are they?”

  “No!” came a shout from the crowd. “No! Never!”

  When had it gotten so hot? There were too many people in the square. There shouldn’t be this many people. Susan couldn’t move.

  “Do you think you’re kind to let infection fester?” the Genius called.

  “No! No!”

  The square stank of sweat and dirt and sour breath. Susan wrinkled her nose.

  “But you do,” the Genius continued. “You must! Why else would you allow them to litter your streets as they do? You invite it! You offer your necks so they may suck the life from you!”

  The crowd shifted, nodding, murmuring. At the end of the square, Susan saw the people draw back. There, slumped in the gutter, were three sleepers. Two filthy children crouched beside them, trying to drag the prone figures into the shelter of doorways.

  At the sudden attention, the two increased their efforts, tugging at one limp-bodied woman until they’d pulled her over the curb and beneath the overhang of a building. The sleeper children looked out at the crowd, eyes wide in the shadows.

  The people rumbled with discontent. The last of the good feeling drained away.

  “Wait, what’s happening?” Nell asked.

  “Shh!” Susan barked. Why did everything always go wrong? She’d thought —

  “A nest of rats!” the Genius called. “And you spare them! You coddle them! You feed them!”

  Everything grated now. Susan shrugged Kate’s hand off her.

  “He’s no different,” Jean said from Max’s shoulders. “I thought he was different.”

  Susan turned back to the man on the platform. He was red. There was an animal sharpness to him she hadn’t seen before.

  “The useless devour!” the Genius called.

  The heat from all the bodies pressed against her. Susan choked on the smell of them.

  “The useless devour!” someone shouted from the crowd. Others took up the chant. “The useless devour! The useless devour!”

  There was so much noise! The people pounded their feet to the words, and the rhythm of it shook the ground. The useless devour! The call squeezed Susan’s lungs and jolted her bones.

  Shrill in her ears, the boy to her right screamed, “The useless devour! The useless devour!” his voice like a bee swarm. She shoved him away, repulsed.

  “Hey!” he snarled. A second ago, he’d been smooth. Now fine hairs sprouted across his forehead. He drew back his lips in a wild grin like a hyena’s. Then he spat “The useless devour” into her face.

  Fury splashed through Susan so suddenly, she was lunging at him before she could think. She’d rip the hairs from his head! She’d squeeze the shout from his throat!

  Midleap, someone yanked her back. Bellowing, she swung around and knocked her attacker to the ground. She pulled back, eager to let fly again, but someone else had her arm now, and she struggled, enraged.

  “Get off! Get off me!”

  Blood throbbed in her ears.

  “Susan! Susan, stop it!”

  She heard her name as if from far away and fought another second before it came to her that it was Nell calling, beneath the still-pounding chant of the crowd. Abruptly she stopped and saw Kate on the ground beside her, a red mark vivid on her cheek.

  Hot shame rushed into her throat.

  “Kate! I —”

  But the crowd took the words. It had begun to move as those near the edges turned to spring on the sleepers. A small group reached one prone figure and set upon him, kicking his limp body until one of the soldiers came to drag him to the waiting cart. When the red cloaks threw him into it, the people cheered. The crowd broke wide open then, rushing the sleepers and chasing their children, who scattered.

  Susan stood alone in the midst of it, staring at the mark on Kate’s face. Bewildered, she looked at her hand as if it belonged to someone else.

  “It was an accident! Kate! I’m sorry!”

  Her hand was shaking. Kate took it.

  “It’s okay,” Kate said. “It’s okay.”

  But nobody was okay. Susan looked over at Max, who stared at her, openmouthed, and then at Jean, sitting thunderstruck on his shoulders. She couldn’t meet their eyes. She looked past them through the moving crowd to the man on the platform. She could see him plainly now.

  He had stopped chanting. Beneath him, the crowd seethed, and he stood smiling, his hand on the black dog’s head, nodding at the cries of triumph as another sleeper was thrown onto the cart. How had she not seen it before? He was as craggy and blotch faced as the rest of them, scrubbed and plucked and misshapen, despite his embroidered red cloak and his rich voice.

  She was so struck by the change that it took a moment to realize he was looking their way in surprise, staring directly at Jean, who sat on Max’s shoulders, bobbing above the sea of heads.

  Susan’s breath caught.

  “Get down! Jean! Get down! He’s seen us!”

  Jean slid to the ground, but it was too late. The man had snapped his fingers, pointing, and red cloaks were leaping from the bandstand into the square, muskets up, breaking a path through the crush of bodies.

  “Come on!” Max shouted, yanking Jean
by the arm. “Now!”

  “Susan!” Nell yelled. “Snap out of it! Run!”

  Kate’s hand was still in hers, and together they dashed after the others, smashing through knots of people, burrowing under adults’ waving arms, and ducking around frenzied chanters as the soldiers plunged after them.

  They sprinted for the side streets. The crowd screamed and cheered, and now they could hear soldiers shouting “Make way!” as they charged through the mob in pursuit.

  “Stop them!” someone shrieked, and Susan snatched Kate from beneath a grasping hand and kicked at the pursuer as they lurched free of the crowd and leaped for the curb. “Get them! Stop them!”

  A man stepped into their path, and Max mowed him down, hauling Jean behind him. They veered round a corner, past a shuttered store where the windows had been smashed. Glass crunched beneath their feet, and they turned again only to find themselves rushing headlong toward another part of the mob, which had now surged into the side streets, hunting sleepers.

  “This way!” Nell yelled. She turned and they ran deeper into the city, searching for an empty path. But the soldiers had reached the streets, too, and in the gaps between buildings, Susan could see them fanning out along the main roadways on either side. One block, two, and there seemed no place to go. Her chest was bursting when she passed one of the dirty old buildings that loomed above the rest. She darted into the alley beside it, yelling for the others. They ran down the long passage, past clouded windows and heavy doors, as the shouts from the streets bounced muffled against the walls. Jean tripped and fell, sprawling. Kate slowed, panting.

  “Don’t stop!” Susan cried. “They’re coming!”

  But they had stopped. Max had his hands on his knees, and Nell stumbled.

  “Search that way!” someone yelled.

  Desperate, Susan scooped Jean from the ground and yanked her into one of the deep, recessed doorways in the side of the old building. She beckoned to the others. Kate scurried in and Max and Nell squeezed beside them, pressing their backs to the splintering wooden door.

  Susan heard the clatter of boots in the alley.

  “Oh, please,” she whispered. “Please.”

  And then she tumbled backward as the door opened. Someone grabbed them from behind, dragged them inside, and shut it, quickly, again.

  Susan stifled a shriek, jerked herself loose, and turned to find three sharp-faced sleepers’ children, two of whom still had her siblings by the collars.

  “Quiet!” one of them said, putting a finger to his lips. He had a chipped front tooth and blond hair clumpy with grime. With him stood a girl who’d wound her light hair in knots on top of her head and a small dark-eyed boy with protruding ears. None of them could have been more than ten years old, and the smallest looked like he might be younger than Jean.

  With a jerk of his head, the blond boy took off down the hall, moving silently through the once grand hallway, where the remains of a mosaic, pitted with missing stones, showed smooth-faced women harvesting apples on a green hill. Susan glanced at it as she followed the sleepers’ children down a corridor, through a set of double doors, and into a large room with a high ceiling and wide windows. A fat iron stove took up the center of the floor; garbage littered the rest — rags, half a broomstick, part of a rusty chain. Even the stone fireplace between the windows was stuffed with lengths of broken pipe. Three narrow closets lined the right wall. One of them, doorless, gaped like a lost tooth.

  Susan could hear the soldiers in the alley now, boots pounding on the paving stones.

  The smallest of the street children, the hollow-faced boy with dark eyes, shot a frightened glance toward the door. He ran to the stove, wrenched it open, and folded himself inside, pulling the door shut. The other two hustled the children toward the doorless closet.

  “In here,” the blond boy said, pointing to Susan. “You!”

  He reached down, pulled at an uneven edge in the wooden flooring, and lifted it to reveal a square pit like the one in Liyla’s house. He gave Susan a little shove toward it. “Get in,” he said. “And take these with you.”

  He meant Jean and Kate.

  Susan turned back for Max and Nell. “What about them?” she whispered.

  “We got other places!” the girl assured her. Nodding, the boy nudged her toward the pit again. Susan jumped into it. Unlike the cellar at Liyla’s, this place was warm and shallow. If she stood straight, her chest and shoulders cleared the floorboards and stuck up into the closet. But when she squatted in the darkness, Susan could stretch both arms and only touch the crumbling edge of the wall. She put her hands down and realized it was not dirt but wood she was touching, a floor beneath the floor. Kate and Jean hopped in beside her, and she pulled them to her, their bodies so close she could feel their hearts making frantic moth-wing flutters against her chest. The light-haired girl pressed the board into place, and a mildewy darkness descended, the floorboards overhead framed in pencil lines of light. Susan wrapped her arms around the younger girls and tried to master her shuddering lungs.

  The soldiers were pounding on the outer door. Above her, Susan could hear footsteps as the two remaining children hustled Max and Nell across the floor toward the wall full of windows.

  A moment later, the far door gave way, and soldiers clattered into the hall, then stomped overhead as they rushed into the empty room. The doors of the two intact closets slammed open. Boots moved to the outer wall, and Susan felt dizzy. But then one of them muttered, “Trash!” and moved across the floorboards. She heard a ringing, metallic kick — the stove — and a muffled, quickly suppressed yelp.

  “Here!” a man’s voice called. Susan could hear the small boy squeak in protest as they pulled him out.

  “Useless!” she heard a soldier say. “Take him!”

  But a second voice intervened. “No time for that now,” he said. “We’re looking for those others. Leave him.”

  And then the boots were gone.

  Susan waited, crouching in the damp cotton darkness, her legs slowly cramping. She listened, but there was nothing to hear but her sisters’ shallow, quivering breaths.

  Paralyzed, she waited for what seemed like hours, staring into the black. Spots formed and disappeared before her eyes, and she could feel her shirt slowly grow wet where the girls pressed against her. She tried not to flinch when something small scuttled over her foot. Jean felt it and squeaked.

  “Shh,” Susan breathed in her ear.

  They held still, frozen, until Susan’s legs screamed in protest and the thick heat of the place felt like it had crawled down her throat and turned her stomach.

  At last she heard a scrape, followed by light footsteps. The square over her head creaked open, and her sisters flinched. Susan threw her hands up, dazzled by the light.

  The girl stared down at her, offering a hand.

  “Sorry,” she said, pulling the younger ones up. “Have to wait awhile before we know they’re really gone. Gets tight down there — I know.”

  Susan groaned to her feet and climbed up and out of the closet. Max and Nell, blinking and dusty, stood behind the girl. The boy from the stove sat hunched against the wall, head in hands. As they emerged, he looked up and sighed shakily. Ash clung to the fine coating of hair on his skinny face, and when he shook his head, soot sprayed from it like so much snow. It settled in small gray drifts along the gritty floorboards.

  “You guys okay?” Max asked Susan. She nodded.

  Her neck prickled, and she turned to find the older boy and girl staring at them intently. She met the girl’s eye.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m Susan. You saved us back there.”

  The girl continued to stare at her for a second, then blinked and turned to the small boy who sat by the stove.

  “Get Omet,” she said.

  The boy scurried from the room, and the other two continued to stare at the five of them with the same sober expression Susan had seen on Mrs. Grady’s dog when he sat by the table at suppertime. It
seemed to her that the silence gained a pound or so as it sat there between them, the other children gaping like that, and the five of them unsure which way to look or what to do with their hands.

  At last, Nell said, “What do they call you two?”

  One of the girl’s blond knots dipped toward her forehead, and she pushed it now with the heel of her hand. “Yali,” she said, and tilted toward the boy. “This is Modo.” All the time, she kept her eyes on Susan’s face.

  Not another word after that, but plenty of looking. A minute later, the sound of running feet broke the silence. Yali and Modo didn’t flinch, but to Susan it sounded like another rally, or maybe a riot approaching. Her heart, which had only now steadied after the terror of the soldiers, sped up again. She glanced sideways and saw Max slip his hand into the pocket that held the knife.

  Before she’d had a chance to decide what to do, a small crowd of maybe fifteen children burst through the door, followed by a tall, lean girl with straight black hair and equally dark eyes. She had jagged bangs that looked like they’d been cut with a knife, and the hair on her face cast a dull shadow over her gaunt cheeks. One vivid clear spot stood out on her jaw, and after a moment, Susan saw why. Every few minutes, the girl swiped at it with the back of her hand, as if there were still something to rub away.

  The other children made way for her as she came toward the five of them. She elbowed Yali and Modo aside, went for the side of her chin again, and nodded.

  “So it’s true, then. Espin was right. You’re not just rally real.”

  She had a surprisingly soft voice. The children crowded behind her, eyes fixed on the siblings.

  “Rally real?” Susan said. She thought suddenly of the fruit seller, asking Liyla if it was rally day.

  Omet shrugged. “When he told us what he’d seen yesterday, that’s what we thought. Get hungry enough, you see things even on a regular day. But of course, he did have those peaches. They were real enough.” She tipped her head. “Thanks for that. Takes something, to feed the useless.”