side.
The men erupt, feet pounding the ground. Gunfire echoes over the shocked, furious screams of men, and as if a vortex has sucked everyone away, the street becomes dark and empty in a matter of seconds. Only the smells of smoke and sweat remain, and trash gently flutters to a stop in the street.
Bowen sags against me, his breath ragged. Where our shoulders press together, my T-shirt is sopping with frigid sweat.
“What is going on?” he whispers, his breath like frost against my ice-sweaty skin.
“I don’t know.” My voice is almost a sob. “Who was that man with the Inner Guard?”
“The governor. From inside the wall. The ruler. My brother’s employer,” he whispers, still sagging into me as if his bones have been removed.
“Who was the other one? The big guy?” I can still hear his gravelly voice in my head.
Bowen lifts his head and looks at me, wiping damp bangs from his forehead. “Remember the gangs I told you about? The raiders? There are two of them—two main gangs. He’s the leader of one of them. He’s the man who stole my mom.”
Chapter 22
My head throbs with tension that has me clenching every muscle in my body, and I don’t know if I can go much farther. I push sweat-crunchy bangs from my forehead and force my legs to continue forward.
The glass skyscrapers of downtown Denver reflect the brightening sky, glowing with the promise of a very near sunrise. In between the slender skyscrapers, a few blocks away, the wall looms—a muddle of stacked, rusty train cars and cinder-blocks.
Bowen pauses, and I almost walk into him before I realize he’s stopped moving. I halt, wanting to fall to the dusty sidewalk and sit, but stay standing.
“Where are we?” I whisper, wobbling on unsteady legs. My voice is out of place in the quiet morning. Bowen tilts his face toward the sky. I follow his gaze and blink at a massive, ornate glass skyscraper that seems to touch the blazing blue sky.
“Marriott,” Bowen states, sticking his head through the frame of a glassless revolving door in the building’s exact center.
“The hotel?” I ask, wondering if my sluggish brain heard him right.
“Yeah. You need rest. And sometimes there’s water in the toilet tanks, in case we run out. And if we are really lucky,” he says, looking at me with a gleam in his weary eyes, “we might find a room with a bed that hasn’t been destroyed. You can sleep in comfort.”
In spite of the terror of the night, I smile at the thought of sleeping in a real bed. Bowen smiles back, an expression that reaches his eyes and warms my exhausted body. A moment later his smile fades and he presses a finger to his lips. I cringe and twirl around, expecting attack. A hand softly squeezes my shoulder, and Bowen turns me back to face him.
“It’s okay. You’re safe. When the militia passed the order to shoot raiders on sight, the raiders stopped coming out in daylight.” He nods toward the remnants of the revolving door, presses his finger against his lips again, and tiptoes into the hotel.
Inside, sunlight glints off the glass-speckled marble floor—the glass from the revolving door—and I find myself in a ransacked lobby. Faded, once-red furniture has been pushed to the sides of the room. The stuffing is spilling out of most of the pieces, and I see a rat—a rat!—poke its head out of a hole in a sofa to watch us with beady eyes. Paintings hang crookedly on washed-out walls, and a layer of dust dulls everything.
In the lobby’s center sits something out of my dreams. A dusty black grand piano.
A slew of music fills my head, resonates in the ugly minuscule sounds of this dead world. It turns into a haunting melody of snow and ice. Christmas music. At Christmastime I would dress in scarlet velvet trimmed with white lace and play the piano. This piano.
Child prodigy.
That’s what my mother called me. That’s what my teachers called me. That’s the name my peers teased me with. That, and Fotard.
I can still hear my music theory teacher’s voice: With those fingers, she’s destined to be one of two things in this life. A surgeon or a musician. But who would want to be a surgeon?
My fingers could fly across the keys faster than human eyes could see, dancing to the music as they created it, brought it to life. If I wasn’t doing homework, or spying on the boy across the