Our Missing Hearts (76)
In silence they tend the fire in turns—first Bird, then Sadie, then both together, breathing life into it—until the larger sticks catch, then the logs, and the flames grow steady and calm and hot.
Spirare, Bird hears his father say. To breathe. Con: together. So conspiracy literally means breathing together.
They make it sound so sinister, Sadie says, and only then does Bird realize he’s spoken aloud. But breathing together, breathing the same air—it’s actually kind of beautiful.
They sit for a moment, quiet, and Bird thinks back to the past days huddled with his mother around the coffee table. Piecing together her whispered story, both of them breathing in the same thick air. Sadie feeds a stick into the fire, nudging it closer to the little blaze until it begins to char and glow. Outside, the sun is falling but the night is still warm, and through the window they see the air ignite. Fireflies. In their excitement they have left the door open and a firefly drifts into the cabin, then another, green sparks shimmering in the red glow of the fire.
I used to hate her, Bird says suddenly.
But you don’t anymore.
A long silence. Around them, bright flecks swirl and dip.
No, he says, and realizes it is true. Not anymore.
For dinner they eat from the paper bag of food the Duchess has left them. Bird heats water, tips in a packet of angel hair. It’s good, Sadie says. You know my foster parents wouldn’t let me use the stove? Thought I was a risk. Like I might set the whole house on fire.
They scrape the last dregs of sauce from their bowls.
What do you think she’s doing right now? Bird says.
Sadie furrows her brow. She’s getting ready, she says. Ready to set them all off.
By them she means the hundreds of bottle caps scattered all over the city.
Do you think— Bird hesitates. Do you think she’s dangerous? I mean, she couldn’t hurt anyone. Could she?
A long pause as they both turn this over in their minds.
I think, Sadie says finally, that anyone could hurt someone, if there was a really good reason.
Bird thinks of his mother, tugging him into the shadows as the police car approached, the sharp-toothed animal that suddenly reared in her eyes. He thinks of his father, that day on the Common, standing over the man who’d pushed him. Of the blood on his fist. They’d been dangerous, he thought; they’d loved him so fiercely it had made them dangerous.
They go to bed early, taking turns in the bathroom, letting their hard-earned fire die down to coals. They are eager for tomorrow. They are full of plans, each building on the other’s like a tower of dominoes. Tomorrow, Domi and Margaret will bring them back to the city. Where everything will be different, they are sure, because of whatever Margaret is doing.
It’s happening, right now, Sadie says with glee. Bird, just think, it’s happening, and Bird has no reply.
At sundown, she begins.
She opens the old laptop, the one she’s scrounged together from parts found on the curb: all those late-night books she’d studied, late at night in all those libraries, put to good use. For the first time she turns on the wi-fi. It is a risk—signals that go out can be traced back. For so long she’s muffled her footsteps, muzzling herself. Now it is time to speak.
Her fingers tap the keyboard, running the program she’s rigged. She sends out the signal and waits, watching for them to connect. To prick up their ears for her commands. The bottle caps she has been making and planting, four weeks’ worth. Everything she’d planned so carefully before Bird had arrived.
She has done the math: one every two blocks, all the way down to the Financial District, nearly all the way up to Harlem. Weatherproof in their little plastic shells, small enough to be concealed in places where they won’t be disturbed for weeks. Even if one were spotted, it wouldn’t be looked at: just a worthless scrap, a piece of litter to be swept away. No one examined the things in the gutters, in the dustpans, in the street cleaner’s bins; those were the things people tried to ignore. By her count, she’s planted two thousand and eleven: how many of them have survived and are working, how many will connect and answer her call?
Ten at first, now fifteen. Twenty-five.
She hadn’t known, at first, what to do with the stories she’d collected. The first wisp of an idea had formed when one of the mothers clasped her hand, her voice trembling. Tell everyone what happened to my girl. Tell it to the world. Shout it from the skies if you can. Later it had crystallized, on a sunny morning in LA, when she looked up and saw it: a cell-phone tower, disguised as an unconvincing tree. Swathed in green leaf-print canvas, right-angled arms held mannequin-stiff. The wrong kind of tree for the climate, an evergreen towering over the palms, head and shoulders higher than the real trees, emitting a faint hum. What kind of messages was it beaming through the air? For a moment she’d closed her eyes and imagined it: all those invisible words made audible, a cacophony of voices crisscrossing the city like a net.
She thinks of it again as she watches the monitor, watching the bottle caps answer her call. Seventy, a hundred, two hundred.
Inside each, a tiny receiver tuned to the precise frequency her computer now emits. And also: a tiny speaker. Reception up to ten miles, Domi had promised her, crystal clear, and you’ll hear it from a block away, at least. Her father had made his fortune on this technology, though he’d surely never imagined it put to this use. One by one they wake, the counter ticking upward. Two hundred and fifty. Three hundred. Each a glowing pinprick on the map, spreading northward from the Battery, freckling Chinatown and Koreatown and Hell’s Kitchen, dotting Midtown to the Upper West Side and beyond. Over five hundred now, the counter still climbing. When it reaches nineteen hundred, it pauses, and she does a quick calculation. Nearly ninety-five percent, a solid A. Wouldn’t her parents be proud.