“Your elbow’s swollen.” His fingers trekked down to my wrist just as the train door let out a short squeal and slid open.
There was no brick station and no lupa, which meant we’d landed in another cell. Awesome. Just awesome. I couldn’t wait to see what this one had in store for us.
“So, do we have a welcoming committee? Rabid wolves? Mutant mice?” Remo asked.
The only thing in my line of sight was a red bench and the white corner of a big sign painted with block letters. I made out an A and N.
“Is the sky still white?”
Pain radiated up my forearm. I shot my gaze back to my hand, which Remo had twisted so that my palm faced up.
“So? Is it?”
My breaths came out in ragged spurts. “What?”
“The sky? Is it white?”
I glanced outside. “Yes, it’s—”
Remo thrust my hand toward my shoulder, and something popped. I screeched, snatching my arm out of his grasp. Breathing hard, I cradled my elbow against me. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“You should be able to move it now.” He dusted his hands together as though he’d just accomplished some filthy task and stepped off the train.
I sat there, stunned, and then I licked the sweat off my lips and eased my sore arm away from my chest. My range of movement had indeed returned, but Skies damn it, the pain was excruciating.
“You’re going to have to lay off it for a while. We don’t seem to heal as fast here.”
I finally got up and, on legs that felt devoid of bones, walked off the train that was bulbous, with a silver body and red stripes, sleek but not quite as modern as the last one we’d been on. “You healed awfully quickly for a dead person.”
Remo bobbed his head. “I suppose you could try to die and come back.”
“Wouldn’t you just love that? Especially if I didn’t come back.”
A sigh broadened his torso.
Before he could tell me again how he’d prefer bad company to no company, I read the word on the white sign out loud: “Rowan.”
My eyes snapped so wide so fast my lashes knocked into my eyebrows. I sidestepped Remo and then trundled down a few metal stairs, boots clanking. I speed-walked down the sidewalk lining the station and came to an abrupt halt at the apex of a street lined with squat trees budding with new leaves, white-picket fences, and wooden boxes on poles. Metal numbers adorned their sides as well as an articulated red arm. Were those mailboxes? Clearly we’d gone back a century, since, nowadays, mail was beamed.
“Is this supposed to be Morgan Street?” I hadn’t realized Remo was standing next to me until he spoke.
Morgan Street was Rowan’s main street. Although I’d visited my maternal family’s birthplace over the years, had fished in the Great Lakes with Pappy, and had wandered through my family’s graveyard with Nima, I’d never known it to look this way—alternating two-storied, pastel-painted houses and squat brick buildings—but perhaps, when Gregor and Linus established their prison, this was how Rowan had looked.
Shop awnings poked from the quaint buildings. One in particular caught my eye—BEE’S PLACE. Nima and Neenee Cass had talked so often about it that even though it no longer existed in today’s Rowan, it felt familiar.
Relief flooded me. Dread would’ve been more appropriate, because this town could be nothing like the real one I held dear to my heart and would tarnish its memory. Goose bumps sprouted over my skin even though it wasn’t cold here. At least there was that.
Hugging myself, I asked, “You think everything will be fake here again?”
“Only one way to find out.” He started walking.
The first building was made of red brick and read COUNTY JAIL. Remo pulled the door open, and we went in. There were desks, and behind them, a bulky metal door. Neat stacks of papers laid on the desks next to huge square gray things. I tried poking one but nothing happened. “What are these supposed to be?”
“Computers.”
I blinked back toward the enormous box made of plastic and black glass. “You mean, like Holo-Screens?”
Remo twisted the knob on the metal door, and it opened with a beep. “Yeah.” He stared into a dim corridor lined with metal grates.
“Jail cells?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Anyone in there?”
“Not that I can see.”
He let the door go, and it clanged shut, and then he walked to the desk and slid open a drawer. It rolled right out, and objects