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Lex, sitting across the table, still has his hand over ht vaporize into nothing if he doesn’t hold tight Sometimes he hides in the darkness of his blindness, and other times he fears it will s everyone up and leave him alone

Alice dabs the cold cloth to my forehead and then drapes it across the back ofthat I’m too red

"Tho to reassure her "He said the flower shop still uses flame lanterns and it was probably an accident"

"There will be a broadcast tonight for sure," she says "Thank goodness you’re safe We heard the fire was near the theater and we’ve just been all over the place about it"

Lex is squeezingto pretend that I’ to understand what itany of it, not knohere anyone is, if they’re safe

I can see the red ofIt isn’t si in that chaos--without the sound of my voice, to him I’d disappeared into that darkness entirely I could have fallen over the edge of Internment

"I’m sorry I made you worry," I say I lean over the table so that I’m closer "I’ll never disappear I promise that every ti back wouldn’t be the worst thing," he says "For any of us"

"None of that talk," Alice says "You’re going to scare her"

"She should be scared," Lex says

"I’ to be fine," Alice says "We’ll know oes up And if there is no broadcast, then it can’t be too serious, now, can it?" She’s handingLex andasleep under the unfinished blanket, as Lex works skillfully at its edges Some distant part of htened, but it’s safe and war up the sary sweet She asks h I don’t hear her I nod assent, and in the next ently unclasping the wooden barrettes in my hair

When I was small, my brother would let me follow him on the train for entire afternoons without a destination We would ride until ere hungry or had to find a water room The train would always be crowded and I’d stay so close to him that I could hear his murmurs as he wrote on scraps of paper He never spoke toby But it didn’tbeen invited We were two parts of the saht that washed over us through the glass, both of us silent and blue-eyed in the bustling crowd On these trips I began to feel ere the same I would catch our reflection in theand fancy myself a perfect miniature version of him

The train that circles Internh My brother, the peripatetic, the sage, was too restless to stay in one place, but one place is all we’re given The only one who could quell this restlessness was Alice, always Alice, ears she was born already in love with hi fell apart and they lost themselves for a while

The train speeds past the apart it infor ers, and I wonder who’s waiting for theates through the night I dream about the murderer, out there somewhere, and wonder where he is when the train passes him by

6

Break the sky Look up Look down Beyond what is familiar If you’ve never been afraid, you haven’t had your ible Gods," Daphne Leander, Year Ten

IN THE MORNING, I AWAKEN WITH STIFFBut it isn’t until I realize I’m still on the couch, Lex’s unfinished quilt replaced with the heavy blanket fro, love,"down her sampler when she sees that ht hoht She was at the ht "When did you get home?"

"There was a broadcast," she says by way of an answer "Your father wanted me to wake you for it, but you seee of the couch now, srew too old for her affections, she lavished me with double, and to make up for his absence I’ve alelcomed them

"What did the broadcast say?" I ask

"The king’s investigators are looking into the cause of the fire He just wanted to reassure us that everything will be fine" Whileto introduce me to ato coddle ators?" I say "I didn’t know the king had investigators"

"He does For incidents like this"

I don’t like that word, "incident" Three years ago I was pulled from my classrooht to see him at the hospital, where he lay unconscious and within a sliver of his life