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Madeleine found herself shivering, even in the warm sun. She wrapped her arms around her body and found herself clenching up in an instinctive protective pose. “Well, I’m more upset to learn they lied to me,” she said. “And—what does it mean that her throat was cut? Did she do it to herself? Or—did someone do ittoher?”
Reese looked grave. “It wouldn’t be my own choice for suicide. But she did have at least one knife on her when she attacked you, so maybe she had two. And maybe she had decided that, one way or the other, someone was going to die by a blade that night.” Madeleine’s face must have looked wretched, because his own creased with remorse. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you. I should have let the fiction stand.”
“No,” she said sharply. “Whatever else passes between us, don’t you lie to me. I couldn’t bear it.”
He nodded and touched his hand to his heart. “Thank you,” he said. “It means a lot to me that you trust me with the truth.”
“It means a lot to me to know you will tell it to me.”
They disembarked without incident, though Madeleine found her legs were somewhat unsteady once she was on solid ground. Jayla strode confidently up the hill, but Madeleine swayed uncertainly as she took her first few steps up the rocky slope. That meant Reese had to take her hand, which meant she hung on to him for the whole short ascent. Naturally, they sat a few inches apart in the cart on the way back to the stable, and even farther apart once they were in the gridcar. But in some strange way, Madeleine felt as if she was still clinging to Reese, still leaning on him for support.
They were about a mile from her house, inching along in a slow line of heavy traffic, when the ground shook beneath them and tumbled them around the interior of the car. Madeleine cried out in alarm and heard an answering cacophony all around her—metal wheels shrieking across the pavement, overhead wires hissing and sparking, passengers in the nearby vehicles shouting and cursing. She felt Reese clutch her arm and yank her out of the car just as a second tremor rumbled beneath them. She tripped to the ground, breaking her fall with her outstretched hands, rolling aside in time to see Reese haul Jayla to safety. As Madeleine scrambled to her feet, he charged forward and grabbed her hand. The three of them raced to the side of the road to crouch against the spiked-metal fence surrounding the nearest property. All around them, riders from other cars did the same.
They huddled there for ten minutes, hands over their heads, feeling the ground shake and steady, shake and steady, each time less violently, until the last little shimmy was so slight Madeleine thought she might have imagined it. She saw their fellow travelers rise cautiously to their feet and look around, calling out to each other to check on their condition.
Madeleine allowed Reese to tug her upright and then turned instantly to Jayla. “Are you all right?”
The guard nodded and brushed dirt off her knees. “Yes. You?”
“Yes.” Madeleine glanced around. The square house behind them looked relatively unharmed, though a decorative statue had toppled onto its side. The state of the road was a different story altogether. The knot of gridcars had been knocked into each other, creating a big untidy mess. Two of them were facing the wrong way and one was lying on its side, its connector pole bent in half.
“Thatwill take some time to clear up,” Madeleine observed.
The strangers nearby had reached the same conclusion, because they were starting to mill around the crashed vehicles, pointing and lamenting and strategizing.
“Yes, but at least the power lines appear to be intact,” Reese said. “A bad enough quake could rip them down, and then the city would come to a standstill.”
“Then we’ve been lucky!” Madeleine exclaimed.
Reese took her arm. “Come on. I’ll walk you home and then I’ll come back here and see what I can do.”
Madeleine shook her head and pulled away. “Nonsense. It’s less than a mile home, and I have Jayla with me. I’ll be fine.”
“All right. But be careful.”
“I will. Thank you, Reese, for a most wonderful day.”
“Wonderful until this happened, anyway,” he said.
She squeezed his arm and quickly dropped her hand. “Wonderful without qualifications,” she corrected. “I appreciate it so much.”
Before he could say anything else, she turned and began walking down the street in the direction of her own house. Jayla fell in step beside her, glancing around continuously to make sure trouble didn’t come pouncing from one of the gated lawns. The guard didn’t seem interested in talking, for which Madeleine was grateful. She had too much on her mind to be able to make rational conversation.
They passed dozens of gridcars out of commission, either spun out of alignment or ripped from the overhead wire or flipped onto their sides. Around each knot of upended vehicles were clusters of drivers and passengers, working together to try to restore order. A few people were yelling, and several were crying, but for the most part, strangers appeared to be working together to solve the crisis. Madeleine assumed that city maintenance workers would also be dispatched to help clear the roads and get traffic moving again.
By the time they arrived home twenty minutes later, Madeleine was sticky from the heat and shaky from the accumulated shocks of the day. She had never been so grateful to step inside the cool, quiet calm of the atrium. The stairwell looked almost insurmountable, but she took the steps slowly and ultimately made it to the top. Another few moments and she was in her own room, safe, alone, with time and space to think.
She had hardly been surprised when the quake came ripping down the boulevard; at first it hadn’t even registered with her. Her mind was in such tumult already that she thought maybe the heaving ground was just a matter of her own perception, an outward manifestation of her inner turmoil.
It was the best day she had had in ten years. And the worst.
She might be in love with Reese Curval. And she had no idea what to do about it.
Two days later over breakfast, everything got worse.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Madeleine’s father said. “You should get married now.”
Madeleine was so surprised she choked on her morning juice and coughed for a full minute. The two of them had been sitting at the table for half an hour, and these were the first words either one had spoken.
