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“I said, my brother’s sick!” Memphis yelled. He wanted to punch somebody and he wanted to cry, and he didn’t know which he wanted more.
“All right,” the policeman said kindly. “Let me help you get him outside.”
Isaiah’s eyes snapped open. He sat up. “Bomb. Bomb. There. They’re here. Warning us.” Isaiah pointed to the charred field. The tents and bodies were gone, but the ground still bore witness to the massacre. “Do you see them?”
Dead children lined up across the field.
“Do you see them? They’re telling us to go,” Isaiah said. “Now.”
“Say, now, what’s all this about a bomb?” the policeman asked.
“My brother, he’s special. A Diviner,” Memphis explained.
“Bomb! Bomb!” Isaiah screamed.
“Say, now, what’s he going on about?” The officer blew his whistle. “You stay right there!”
Across the grass, two men in dark suits were making their way from the Fitter Families tent toward Memphis, Theta, and Isaiah. Theta saw them approaching.
“Grab Isaiah and run,” Theta said.
“What? Why—”
“Just do it, Poet.”
Memphis scooped Isaiah up in his arms and staggered as quickly as he could toward the gates and out into the flat Queens field streaming with curious people making their way toward Jake Marlowe’s utopia. Several policemen had their nightsticks out, but it was the Shadow Men Theta feared.
Theta let the heat come. And then she blasted a strip of grass at her feet. A small fire blazed across the entrance to the exhibition. Already, the policemen ran for buckets of water. They’d have it out in no time. But it would be enough to get away, she hoped.
“It was that girl—that Diviner,” someone shouted behind her as she ran. “She did it!”
The song soared to the rafters inside the Grand Pavilion.
“Sweet land of liberty.”
It bubbled forth from the lips of the people and echoed through the radio playing on a table inside the Fitter Families tent under a poster touting the qualities of the perfect citizen.
“Of thee I sing.”
Its muffled but
familiar strains drifted down into the depths of the small room below the stage, where, with his last bit of strength, Arthur Brown dragged himself on his elbows toward Mabel, leaving behind a trail of blood.
“Arthur?” Mabel called softly.
“I’m here,” Arthur managed through teeth gritted in pain.
“It got so cold.”
“Yeah.” The bullet in Arthur’s thigh burned. His trousers leg was soaked red.
“Did…” Mabel wheezed. “Did we stop it?”
Arthur glanced in the direction of the still-ticking bomb. He moved his face closer to Mabel’s.
“Yeah. We did,” he answered, taking her hand in his.
“And do… do you really…?”
