“What is it?” he asked, throwing the words at her as a challenge, even as the others kept laughing at Tynan, pointing at the paint smears on his clothes and arms.
“I need you up here, right now!” Kayah called.
The whoops were predictable. One boy patted Quinney on the back, and a dark skinned girl started to swear, obviously staking her claim on her boyfriend.
“Shut up and listen!” Kayah shouted. “I’ve gotta get my mom to the Emergency. I think she’s having a heart attack, but I can’t get her down the stairs by myself.”
“And you expect us to carry her down?” one of the other boys sneered. “It’s gonna be dark soon.”
Quinney slapped the back of the boy’s head hard enough that he went sprawling to the ground. Then Quinney looked up at Kayah again.
“You know I’m not your friend,” he said, looking up at Kayah.
She wanted to scream. Her hands were shaking and the chill of fear made it feel like her blood had turned to ice in her veins. Was this death approaching? Did she even know if her mother was still alive, back in her bedroom?
“She made the blanket your mother wrapped you in when you were born,” Kayah pleaded. “Without help—”
“Kid ain’t wrong. Nightfall’s coming. You want help, and I want a kiss,” Quinney said.
No whooping accompanied the words this time. The girl who’d thought Quinney her boyfriend glared at him. The others grinned or stared in surprise. Tynan whistled in appreciation of the bold callousness of it.
“You son of a—” Kayah began.
“One kiss!” Quinney said, grinning, arms spread wide, as if she were the one being unreasonable.
Kayah glanced up at the eastern horizon, where the deep indigo of dusk had already begun to settle in.
“If she lives,” she said.
“Done!” Quinney declared.
He turned and started barking orders, grabbed Tynan and practically flung him from the alley, and in moments, all but two of the skids—one boy and one girl—had vanished from sight. Kayah could hear them shouting at one another as they raced around the front of the building, could hear Quinney’s voice as he instructed Tynan to find them a vehicle to beg, steal, or borrow.
A dreadful numbness had started to envelop Kayah. Help was coming, but somehow their imminent arrival made it all the more real. She ought to return to her mother’s side; she knew that. But it terrified her to think what she might find. Her mother had been in so much pain that she had vomited next to the sprawl of clean laundry; this woman, always so proper, had lost control of her body. And it was killing her.
Kayah stared down at the boy and girl in the alley, him with curly hair and nearly black eyes, her with that dark skin and a knotted ponytail. Quinney’s girlfriend. Kayah expected to see hate in her eyes, but instead she saw pity. Strange that with all of the assaults upon her emotions in the past handful of minutes, this would be what made her cry. But the tears started then.
Shaking, she turned back toward her bedroom, thinking, Mom. Thinking, Don’t go, please don’t die. Thinking, She shouldn’t be alone. Then Quinney was banging on the apartment door. He’d made it up the stairs impossibly fast, or so it seemed. Suddenly time was playing tricks on Kayah.
Like ice shattering, she broke. The world sped up around her. She heard noises outside her apartment, the sounds of people hurrying to prepare for nightfall. She felt the cool breeze and heard her name called from out in the hall, and she moved. Her mother would not die tonight.
Kayah sprinted to the door, threw the lock, hauled it open. Quinney’s playful swagger had been replaced by an intensity she had never seen in him before, though they’d lived on the same apartment block all their lives.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
Kayah led the way, Quinney keeping pace with her. As she hurried into her bedroom, she saw that her mother had slid to the floor after all. Naira lay on her side, skin paled to gray, beads of sweat on her face. She still breathed in quick gasps, as though each sip of air pained her, and as Kayah knelt by her again, Naira shuddered in despair.
“Stavros, grab the blanket,” Quinney said.
Kayah glanced up at the skids moving around her. She knew them all. Delmar lived on nine block, but had been hanging around with Quinney and the dark, silent Stavros for years. The scrawny, tattooed girl who’d come up with them was Priya, but she looked skittish, like she’d bolt the second something went wrong.
“Get it together, Kayah,” Quinney said. “We’ve gotta move fast.”
She nodded. Who the hell was he to tell her? It was her mother, gasping and shuddering on the floor. And night was coming.
“Give me that,” she said, reaching for the blanket as Stavros tried to find its corner. Kayah snatched it from his hand, snapped it open, and spread it on the floor. “Delmar, take her arms.”
The burly kid glanced at Quinney, uncomfortable with someone else giving him orders.
“Move it, Del,” Quinney snapped. “Lady’s dying.”
Kayah gripped her mother’s ankles, nodded to Delmar, and together she and the skids lifted her onto the blanket. The numbness inside Kayah echoed Quinney’s words. Lady’s dying. Oh, spirits, no. The lady’s dying.
“Can I—” Priya began.
“Back up, Pri,” Delmar said. “You ain’t got the muscle.”
The girl scooted backward, moving out of the way so Stavros could move in beside Kayah. Delmar and Quinney each grabbed a top corner while Kayah and Stavros took the bottom edges. At Quinney’s signal they hoisted Naira off the floor. To Kayah, her mother felt impossibly, alarmingly light, as though her life had already begun to ebb, leaving her almost hollow.
“Priya,” Kayah said. “My little sister’s upstairs at Mimi’s—”
“I’m gone,” the girl snapped, and darted back the way she’d come, understanding immediately.
Joli would have to stay with Mimi for tonight. If they got to the hospital before the Cloaks came for them, they would be fools to do anything but spend the night there. In the morning, if all went well, Kayah would come back and take Joli off the old woman’s hands.
If things went poorly . . . Mimi would be looking after Joli for a lot longer than one night.
“Quickly, now,” Delmar said, and Kayah wanted to hit him. What a stupid thing to say. Did he honestly think she needed that prodding?
Quinney caught her eye, and Kayah saw that he understood. It stilled her frantic heart long enough for her to focus on the moment, and on her mother. Kayah stared down at Naira as they hustled her through the living room, maneuvered her through the apartment door, and started down the stairs. A hundred thoughts flitted through Kayah’s mind like bits of shattered crystal, each one jagged with another facet of her fear. Was it too hot, wrapped in that blanket? Would it make it harder for her mother to breathe? Would the pain of being carried down the stairs worsen her condition?
She’d seen a body wrapped in a blanket before, an old man named Antonio from down the hall. His apartment had always reeked of garlic and sickness and the smoke from clove cigarettes. But by the time Antonio had come to be wrapped in a blanket, he’d been a corpse, slung over the shoulder of his huge, slow-witted grandson.
The grandson had left Antonio at the curb with an array of metal trash cans that lined the block on rubbish day, still wrapped in his blanket. The thought made fresh tears spring to Kayah’s eyes, but she bit her lip and forced them to cease. Her mother was still alive, and Kayah would die herself before she would let Naira be tossed out and forgotten like garbage. Die . . . or kill, if she had to.
As horrible as that had been—that body left at the curb, rolled in a blanket—there were worse ways to die. She refused to think about that. Come nightfall, she would have no choice, but there was still light in the sky.
Soft grunts and whimpers issued from Naira’s lips as they bundled her down the stairs, turning at the landings. Stavros seemed not to care, but Quinney and Delmar both wore deep frowns of c
oncern, and more than once Kayah saw them wince when they thought they had hurt Naira.
“Watch it, Stavros,” Quinney snapped as they reached the first floor and Stavros backed through the door into the building’s dingy lobby.
“I can do fast or I can do gentle,” Stavros muttered. “Kinda hard to do both.”
Quinney shot him a hard look. “Try harder.”
A wave of gratitude flooded through Kayah. It felt ridiculous—Quinney had stuck up for her mother, not saved her life; that was yet to come—but it was something. It said Quinney didn’t think her death was a given, that he believed there was a chance to save her. That meant everything.
Priya came rushing down the stairs behind them. “Mimi’s got your sister, but we’re losing daylight fast!”
Down below, Tynan popped his head through the building’s entrance.
“We’ve got a truck!” he shouted before turning to bolt out the door again. “Come on!”
A truck. Kayah burned with hope and fear in equal measure, but now she felt a new rush of strength coursing through her. Getting to the hospital before dark would have been a fantasy without transport, but she had put her faith in these kids. If they knew how to do anything, it was improvise.
She adjusted her grip on her corner of the blanket and moved with the skids toward the front door. She had avoided looking at Naira’s face and now she glanced down, watching the pain moving her mother’s unconscious features, as if she were asleep in the grip of some endless nightmare.
Then they were outside, the wind blasting the neighborhood’s stink—a familiar odor of rust and sewage and cooking grease—full in her face. Far off, a siren blared, but she knew it wasn’t coming toward them. It would be too much to hope that someone in authority would come to their aid. As dusk neared, even the police went into lockdown. The Cloaks didn’t care much about badges.
“Where the hell is—” Delmar started.
A horn blared, and they all turned to see the battered, filthy white delivery truck that sat half on the curb and half in the street. The big door at the back had been rolled up, and Tynan stood behind it with a case of whiskey in his arms. He hurled the case to one side to make space in the truck, and Kayah heard bottles shatter. There were other cases there, dozens of them, and as the wind shifted she smelled the sweet, powerful aroma of alcohol. It ran in the gutter, sluicing into an ancient, cracked sewer grating.
“Let’s go!” Tynan said. “Almost ready.”
Kayah, Quinney, Delmar, and Stavros practically ran toward the rear of the liquor truck, despite their burden. Naira had ceased to cry out in pain, unconscious but still breathing for the moment.
A tall cinnamon girl called Song stood in the back of the truck. One by one, she chucked cases of vodka and rum and whiskey down to Tynan, who tossed them aside.
“That’s it!” Tynan said. “There’s enough room.”
Swift and careful, Kayah and the boys slid her mother into the truck. Naira’s face was bathed in sweat and her breath came in shuddering little gasps.
“Stop . . .” a voice groaned from around the other side of the truck. “You can’t . . .”
Kayah tore herself out of the cloud of her anguish long enough to glance around the corner of the truck. The last of Quinney’s little tribe—a wiry, cruel eyed, blond girl named Hope—had the heel of her boot pressed down on the skull of a bearded man in stained work clothes who could only have been the truck driver.
When the driver saw Kayah, his eyes lit up, as if he had mistaken her for someone who might rescue him. And another day he might not have been mistaken. She would have stepped in, driven the others away.
“He wouldn’t let us take the truck,” Hope explained.
“You can’t . . . ,” the driver said. “It’s gonna be dark—”
Hope kicked him in the back of the head. “So go inside. No one’s stopping you.”
The man cried out and curled himself into a protective ball. Kayah noticed that one side of his face had begun to swell, and his mouth was smeared with blood from the beating he’d already received. But her mother would die without transport, so sympathy and regret would have to wait for another day. And Hope was right—if he banged on doors, somebody would let him in . . . as long as there was still some light in the sky.
“Kayah!” Quinney called.
Delmar ran for the front of the truck as Quinney, Priya, and Tynan climbed into the back. Quinney and Tynan reached down and each took one of Kayah’s hands, hauling her up after them. Stavros stood in the road with Song, watching them as the truck’s engine growled to life. Hope had already begun going through the cast aside liquor cases, sorting through shattered glass to find the bottles that were unbroken. The three skids that were staying behind would go back inside, lock the building up, and have themselves a party.
With a final glance outside, Kayah felt hopelessness descend. The sky overhead bled indigo and the sun had already touched the western horizon. They would never make it. She thanked whatever god might be listening that the skids were crazy enough to try, as if running the gauntlet of dusk was an adventure that had always been waiting for them. All it had needed was the trigger, the dare that had come in the form of Naira Fallon’s heart attack.
“Stand back,” Kayah said, grasping the handle over her head and dragging the door down, even as the truck lurched into gear.
The door bounced upward a few inches, but Kayah forced it down again, and this time the latch clanked into place. She thought of Joli, back at Mimi’s place, and was just happy that her little sister had someone to look after her from now on.
They rode in near darkness, listening to her mother’s ragged, shallow breathing and soft moans of agony. Five people, jammed in among stacked cases of wine and liquor, forced into a closeness Kayah had never shared with anyone. Touching their skin. Breathing their air. Smelling their scents. Physical intimacy, yes, but something more. Mortal intimacy. The knowledge that death waited just a breath away.
She’d never been so close to anyone, and she had never felt so alone.
Kayah held her mother’s hand, searching Naira’s face for signs of consciousness. The truck swayed back and forth, and when Delmar took a hard turn they all had to brace themselves. Naira lay atop a rumpled mess of unfolded blanket, unmoving except when Delmar’s driving made her head loll to one side or the other, her face pale in the sliver of light that came through the small gap beneath the door.
“Is she still breathing?” Quinney asked, his voice gentler than Kayah had ever heard it.
Kayah gave a single, curt nod, but her mother’s breathing was so shallow that she held on to Naira’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. It was there, but faint.
“I wouldn’t take any bets,” Priya muttered.
Quinney hissed at her to be silent, but Kayah paid her no attention. Quinney and his crew watched one another’s backs because none of them—not a one—had anyone else to look out for them. Tynan and Quinney had no parents, while Priya had parents who didn’t give a shit. Delmar lived with his junkie older sister. Kayah had always felt sorry for the skids. Though she and Naira fought plenty, she knew how fortunate she was to have a mother to go home to, someone who would never shut her out and who would love her no matter what mistakes she made. The rest of them might envy her that love, but they could never understand how much Kayah truly cherished it, or how much she feared losing it.
Tires screeched as Delmar took another sharp turn, and the truck canted dangerously to one side.
Tynan banged on the wall, screaming for Delmar to be more careful. “Getting us to the Emergency’s no good if you kill us on the way!”
“You want us to slow down?” Priya asked. “You saw the skyline.”
“Dead’s dead either way,” Tynan said. He drew back his jacket to display the gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans. “We get caught outside, we got a chance, but he plows us into a storefront, we don’t live to see the sun come up.”
Kayah caught his eye,
and he grinned at her. Tynan had a skittish, manic energy and a talent for saying the wrong thing, but she knew he meant well. She mustered a wan smile, then focused again on her mother. Kayah pushed Naira’s hair out of her face. Her clammy skin had turned cool and seemed even paler now, though that could have been Kayah’s imagination.
The stink of gas and chemicals filled the back of the truck, overcoming the stale, sweet smell of old whiskey that had soaked into the floor and the crates. Kayah pulled up her shirt to cover her mouth, but kept her other hand firmly on her mother’s wrist, feeling the thready flutter of her pulse.
“God, the smell,” Tynan groaned.
“Gotta be the refinery,” Quinney said. “Means we’re only a few blocks from the Emergency.”
He glanced at Kayah as he said this last bit, trying to reassure her. But she barely saw him, staring instead at the narrow gap at the bottom of the truck’s rear door. There had been a hint of light there before—but now there was only darkness.
Nightfall.
Kayah slumped back against liquor boxes. Hollow, utterly empty inside, she glanced up at Quinney as if this pale, roughhewn, ginger boy might be able to remake the world, to spin it backward to a time before darkness meant death.
The truck rocked to one side, the engine roared as Delmar gunned it, and then just as abruptly they came to a juddering halt. Quinney ratcheted the latch back and hauled the door open. Tynan jumped out into the parking lot, shouting for help.
“Quiet, idiot!” Priya barked as she followed him out.
Into the dark.
Time had seemed to flicker past while they drove, but Kayah saw that long minutes had gone by, and a blue-gray filter had fallen across the city. In the parking lot, cars shone in the wan yellow light of the rising moon.
“Go,” Quinney breathed.
The word snapped her back to reality. Kayah leaped out the back of the truck, dropped to the pavement, and turned to grab the edge of the blanket. Quinney and Priya slid her mother to the edge, and Kayah grabbed hold as Priya jumped down to help her. Naira’s face had gone slack and her chest seemed to have stilled.