Then she waved and drove off.
I grabbed Rex’s arm and we started walking toward the door.
“Well, that wasn’t awkward at all,” Rex said sarcastically.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. And I’m glad you’re coming over, I just…I didn’t know. And I didn’t know she was, um…cool with it.”
“‘Cool with it’ might be an overstatement. But she’s getting there. I think the bigger issue right now is that she wants to take care of me.”
I felt sad saying it out loud, and I felt bad for Rex, not having a mom to worry about him. I mean, yeah it could be a pain, but it was also nice. He was taking his keys out of his pocket but he seemed to notice me looking at him. “What?”
“You okay?” I asked.
He laughed. “Me? Why do you ask?”
I shrugged, not wanting to bring it up if he wasn’t already thinking about it.
He kissed the top of my head. “I’m not the one who was abducted and almost blown up. If you’re okay, I’m okay.” He paused, serious again. “…Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I think so. It’s not like I knew Calkin or any of the others, really. But still.” I swallowed hard, trying not to picture Calkin lying dead at my feet. “I’m still processing it, I guess. All those people.”
“I know,” he said softly. Then he opened the door and we went inside.
SEVEN
Rex’s apartment was warm but not unbearable. He didn’t have an air conditioner, but it was essentially one room and the solar fans on the windows made a decent cross breeze.
He put the kettle on without asking if I wanted anything. I sat on the sofa and stared out the window, looking over the rooftops, in the direction of the Church of the Eternal Truth. It was the spiritual home to H4H. The pastor there, a guy named Kern, was the person who gave H4H’s hate-mongering a spiritual seal of approval, working hand in hand with Howard Wells to give all that toxic anti-chimera sentiment a veneer of respectability.
The open air I was looking out at had once been dominated, briefly, by a massive cross on top of the church. It had been controversial because any church that preaches hatred like that is controversial, but also because the center of the cross had been emblazoned with the H4H logo, which many in the religious community—including Reverend Calkin—said bordered on blasphemy.
Another local minister had caused a stir calling it a case of the tail wagging the god.
Rex and I had been sitting right there on that sofa just a few months earlier when the cross had come down. Part of a series of bombings committed by CLAD—the group’s first terrorist action, as far as anyone knew.
It had made things worse at the time, as violence usually did. But no one had been hurt in those bombings. Unlike today.
My vision clouded with tears as my mind returned to the vision of Reverend Calkin. Throughout the day, memories of what I had seen had been increasingly interspersed with imaginings of what it must have been like inside when CLAD’s bomb went off. By now, a cinematic loop was playing in my brain: a handful of young people, some of them chimeras, standing on one side of a long table, and Calkin and a bunch of older 4H4 types on the other side. As they all move to their seats, there’s a flash and a bang, and everything is turned to chaos and carnage and fire. I wince when it happens, trying to stop the film, trying to stop my imagination. But I can’t stop it, can’t look away. I see Calkin, burned and battered and covered in blood. Then the loop starts all over again, interspersed with images I really had seen.
I couldn’t make it stop until I felt Rex lifting me up off the sofa, and I realized only then that I had fallen asleep. I smiled at the sight of him looking down at me, as he crossed his tiny apartment in a few steps.
“Your mom was right,” he said softly, his voice a deep rumble I could feel through his chest as clearly as I could hear it. “You should be in bed.”
He lowered me onto the bedspread, but as he tried to take his hands away and step back, I hooked an arm around his neck. “You should be, too,” I said.
His smile widened as he eased himself down beside me. We lay facing each other for a moment and he rested his hand on my hip, sliding it up until it was cupping my face.
“You sure you don’t want to rest?” he said. I could see in his eyes the same longing that I felt.
“I’ve never been surer of anything,” I replied, kissing him. Then I put my hand on his face, too, and for a while at least, the thoughts and images of the day, horrors both real and imagined, were finally banished from my mind.
When I woke up again, the sun had moved, and the far end of the apartment was filled with orange light. I was tangled in sheets and Rex was sitting on the edge of the bed, his broad back turned to me, his silhouette clear against the light. He turned to look at me.
“You’re awake,” he said, brushing my hair from my forehead. “Hell of a day.”
“Yeah, it was,” I replied. I took Rex’s hand in mine, spreading my fingers wide to fit around his, and hefted it, lifting his arm so I could press my lips against the back of his hand. “Thanks for taking care of me.”
He smiled, and then the doorbell rang and I shot upright, pulling the sheet around me. “Are you expecting someone?”
He smiled and cocked an eyebrow. “Some thing. Round. Covered with cheese and sauce.”
I laughed. “Man, you are good.”
As Rex thumped downstairs to get the pizza, I pulled on one of his T-shirts that I had appropriated as mine. It came down to my knees and was pale blue and worn soft from age. On the front was a picture of planet Earth made into a vaguely sarcastic smiley face—with tiny people crowded on the top of it, like a head of hair—poking through a guillotine, with the blade suspended menacingly above. Underneath were the words HOW ABOUT LET’S NOT KILL THE PLANET AND EVERYTHING ON IT?
Rex never wore it—he said the sentiment was too dark—but I thought it was just about right. And it was really soft.
I reassembled the bed—not as precision-neat as Rex would make it, but close enough that he wouldn’t feel compelled to remake it, or to stare at it side-eyed trying to resist the urge to do so. As I flattened out the last major wrinkle in the bedspread, I felt the apartment shake with the vibration of his footsteps as he thumped back upstairs.
I smiled to myself, feeling bad for the neighbors. When Rex came in the door, carrying the pizza, he looked at me and said, “What?”
“Nothing,” I said. I kissed him on the cheek and got plates from the cupboard as he put the pizza on the coffee table. Then we both sat on the sofa and each took a piece.
Rex grabbed the remote and turned on the holovid. “Movie?”
I nodded as I took a giant bite. Romance time was over. I was ready for some brain candy. And dinner.
Unfortunately, before Rex could find anything suitably mindless, the holovid picture from a local station assembled in front of us: a three-dimensional talking head, Talia Chen, who had been on the local news since we were kids, and next to her, a two-dimensional aerial shot of the Seaport Museum. It looked like a police video that had been AI-enhanced.
Rex’s thumb jabbed the buttons on the remote, but before the holovid shifted to the free movie channel, I saw the words across the bottom of the screen: WIDESPREAD CONDEMNATION IN PRO-CHIMERA BOMBING.