“Come here, Clay.”
He remembered.
“Use your teeth. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt me.”
He remembered how at just past three a.m. they left, and at home, Clay lay awake, then headed for Central Station.
Back to the bridge and Silver.
Carey, of course, went to trackwork, where in the dawn, the old stager, War of the Roses, returned from the inside training track—but returned without his rider.
She’d fallen on the back straight.
The sun was cold and pallid.
The sky of the city was quiet.
The girl lay face turned sideways, and everyone started running.
* * *
—
At the Amahnu, in Silver, when I told him, Clay broke wildly away. He ran raggedly up the river.
God, the light here was so long, and I watched him clear to the tree line, till he vanished into the stones.
My father looked at me numbly; so sad but also lovingly.
When he attempted to follow, I touched him.
I touched and I held his arm.
“No,” I said, “we should trust him.”
The Murderer became the Murdered. “What if—”
“No.”
I didn’t know all I needed to know, but with Clay I was sure of his choices; right now he would choose to suffer.
We agreed we should wait an hour.
* * *
—
In the trees up high in the riverbed, he kneeled against its steepness—his lungs two treasure chests of death.
He wept there, uncontrollably.
That thing he heard outside himself, at last, he could tell, was his voice.
The trees, those stones, the insects:
Everything slowed, then stopped.
He thought of McAndrew, and Catherine. Trackwork Ted. He knew he would have to tell them. He’d confess it was all his fault—because girls just didn’t disappear like this, they didn’t fail without someone making them. Carey Novacs didn’t just die, it was boys like him who made them.