His voice changed.
I’d heard the soft-steel. I’d heard the wall come up. I had never heard this—a roar that was pure command and pure terror at once, a soldier’s voice, his brother’s voice, his father’s, fifteen years of the life in it.
“OUT—out, get OUT—”
His arm slammed across my chest, the whole length of his forearm, and he had me off my feet and turning, dragging me back from the door, the key flying out of my hand, Olimpo’s low sound breaking into a single sharp bark—
And the door swung.
I don’t know if it was the wind of him pulling me, or the latch I’d half-worked, or nothing at all. But it swung, and somewhere in the dark of my drowned shop there was a click—small, ordinary, the click of a thing closing a circuit, the click of a fridge motor kicking on or a timer or a spark where no spark on God’s earth should ever be in a room swimming in gas—
And the world turned to white.
White and a sound that wasn’t a sound, that was bigger than sound, that came up through the soles of my feet and the bones of my chest and the teeth in my head all at once, and a wall—a wall of heat, the heat of every oven I’d ever lit multiplied past sense, a hand the size of the building—and it lifted me off my feet.
I left the ground.
That’s the last thing I had in order. Tonio’s arm across my chest and the green letters and the white and the heat and the ground gone out from under me, the whole street tipping, the cold air full of fire and the deep green paint and a hundred years of my father’s dream coming apart in the air around me—
And then nothing.
Nothing but ringing.
A high, flat, endless ringing where the world’s noise used to be, the whole of hearing pressed down into one thin scream of tone, and under it, far down, muffled, like sound coming through deep water—something. A voice, maybe. My name, maybe.
The ground was against my cheek.
Cold and gritty and wrong, the sidewalk, my own sidewalk, the dead asphalt I’d swept a thousand times, and my eyes wouldn’t quite focus, the dark all gone orange and shuddering at the edges, heat on my back, and the ringing, and the smoke pouring across the ground low and thick into my open mouth.
Tonio.
Somewhere. The voice under the ringing was him, I knew the shape of it even broken, even drowned, even through the scream in my ears—Tonio, somewhere in the orange dark, shouting my name, Katerina, Katerina, the sound of a man crawling toward something he can’t reach—
And then hands.
Hands closed around my arms.
Not his. I knew it the way I know a wrong note in the dough, the way I know a man casing my room, the cold animal that had gone quiet all day coming up screaming too late—these hands were wrong, gloved, hard, gripping under my arms and hauling me up off my own sidewalk and back, away from the fire, away from the broken green letters, away from the voice still shouting my name in the smoke—
Hands that weren’t his, closing around me, dragging me into the dark.
Chapter 17
Tonio
Icameupoutofthe dark reaching.
Her name was in my mouth before I knew where I was. “Katerina.” It came out wrong—cracked, thin, a thing scraped off the bottom of me. I reached and my arm wouldn’t go where I sent it. Something tore white-hot from wrist to elbow and I heard something distant and painful.
The ringing was still there.
The high flat scream of it under everything, the world’s noise pressed down into one thin tone that wouldn’t stop. It was quieter now. But it was there. It would be there, I’d learn, for days.
The smell came next. Antiseptic. Bleach and something cold and clean over it, the smell of a hopsital. But this place wasn’t that, not really. A real hospital is loud. A real hospital has wheels in the hall and machines that complain and somebody’s family crying two doors down. This was too quiet. This was a private room with a too-good bed and a monitor turned down to nothingand a window with the blinds half-shut, and out in the hall, when I turned my head an inch and the world swam, two men standing who weren’t nurses.
A Caruso doctor’s setup, then. The one Dante and Marco call when a soldier needs to be fixed up.
My left arm was wrapped to the elbow, fat with gauze, and where the gauze met the skin at my fingers I could see the edge of it weeping, the burn under there sending up a deep slow throb with every beat of my heart. My ribs were taped so tight that breathing was a decision I had to make on purpose, in and out, each one a small private negotiation, and somewhere in the middle of one of them the rest of it landed.
