Towering - By Alex Flinn Page 0,94

it, there was a girl standing halfway up. A woman, actually, about my mother’s age, with light blond hair.

“I thought . . . ,” she said, “I thought someone should come back to thank you . . . and to explain. You see I’m—”

“Suzie!” Mrs. Greenwood said. “Suzie Mills!”

“Suzie?” That had been the name of the old man’s daughter, the one who was missing.

“Of course I remember you, Suzie. You’re the one who brought my Rachel to me.”

“Yes,” she said. “I brought her to you, because, even though I was crazy, addicted, I knew it was wrong. They told me to kill the baby, and I couldn’t kill a baby. I just couldn’t. And, then, they told me this wasn’t just any baby . . .”

She started to cry.

“You did the right thing,” Mrs. Greenwood said. “There’s nothing to cry about.”

“But there is. I had a chance to escape then, but I didn’t. I could have gone home, but the drug, it had such a hold over me that I went back to it, back to them, instead of going home to—”

“Your father,” I said. She was so skinny, maybe eighty pounds, and she was much older. I wondered if he would even recognize her.

“Yeah,” she said. “My dad. We fought all the time when I was a teenager, but I know he was right. I was doing crazy things back then, and it made me an easy target. That’s what they did, chose kids who were easy targets, runaways, or kids like me who were already in trouble. And I made myself one with a lot of partying, but it was nothing like the rhapsody.”

“Won’t it be hard without it, even now?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. It’ll be hard, really hard. That’s why some of the workers there fought against you. They wanted it to stay the way it was, even if they had to be prisoners.”

“But you didn’t?” I said.

“No. I’ve seen how it is. People have been getting sick, they’ve been dying. The younger ones don’t know, but I do.” She sniffed.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. Greenwood said.

“I know. I’ll have to find the strength. We all will.”

“You will.” Mrs. Greenwood stroked her hair.

“I was just wondering . . . ?” Suzie said between sniffles.

“If we knew where your dad was?” I asked.

“Yeah. Is he alive still?”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw him, just yesterday.”

“Really?” she said. “So you can bring me there, to him?”

“I can. Or we can,” I said, starting up the stairs again. I turned back to Mrs. Greenwood and put my arm around her. “And, after that, we can go home and play Battleship and watch Star Trek—all three of us.”

All of us, Suzie first, then me and Mrs. Greenwood, with Rachel behind us, started up the stairs. It was a long walk, but considering what had been going on up until then, it wasn’t that difficult. When we reached the top of the stairs, we saw that it was daylight. I escorted Mrs. Greenwood to her own car, then, after I ascertained that she was okay to drive it, I took Rachel and Suzie to Josh’s old truck.

We drove east, into the sunrise.

Epilogue

Wyatt

In the week since Rachel destroyed the rhapsody and released the workers, a lot happened. That first day, we reunited Suzie and her father, with a lot of tears of happiness.

And then, the police brought charges against Carl and Henry. They weren’t able to bring drug charges against them, because there was no evidence at all that the rhapsody had ever existed or that it was a drug, but they brought over a hundred kidnapping and false imprisonment charges against them, including mine.

“I don’t think they’ll live much longer anyway,” Mrs. Greenwood said while we watched the news (which, conveniently, came right before Star Trek). “They were eighty if they were a day, even when I was a young girl. Obviously, they derived some sort of power from the rhapsody. It prolonged their lives.”

“And strength,” I said. “That old guy broke my arm.”

“Now that it’s gone, I suspect they will be too.”

I hoped so.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why I could communicate with Rachel. I mean, when she was in her tower. I heard her, and no one else could.” I remembered New Year’s Eve. Everyone else had been just as close to the tower as I was, but they were sure it was only a loon or maybe the wind. They didn’t hear anything.

“I’d thought about that myself.” Mrs.