The First to Die at the End (Death-Cast #0)(72)

We hang up, and I feel more at ease, like I’ve got one less hand gripping my heart as I get ready to hit Ground Zero.

I rejoin Valentino. “Dalma says hi.”

“Tell her I say hi back next time you speak to her. Is she okay?”

“All good.” I look down the street, knowing that when we turn the corner, everything I’ve been avoiding for years will come into view. “You still want to do this? Legit zero offense if there’s somewhere else you want to go.”

“I’m still in. Are you?”

“I am,” I say.

Half-lie, half-truth.

I take the first step, aka the most important one. The rest follow. I don’t turn back at the last second. I keep moving forward into this strangely chilling ghost town. This is supposed to be the city that never sleeps, but it’s almost noon, and it’s quiet and dark, the sun blocked by the high-rise buildings. I immediately think about writing a story about a boy who follows the sound of footprints left by invisible spirits, and when they step into the sunlight, they’re revealed to be his parents, giving him the chance to finally say goodbye. I have a small, stupid envy for that fictitious kid who gets closure.

The deeper I go into the darkness, the eerier it becomes.

“I’m starting to feel like you shouldn’t be here,” I say.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Valentino says.

If he dies here, not only am I never returning to this spot, I’m getting the hell out of this city.

Another minute in, things start feeling less like a graveyard but still alarming. This is the construction site where they’ve been building the memorial for the past few years, and it’s heavily guarded. There are steel barricades and blue wooden barriers and chain fences and cinder blocks and police officers standing outside their cop cars. No one is getting through. Security is going strong, as if someone might launch another attack during the construction of the memorial; it reminds me of making sandcastles at the beach when you have to dig moats if you don’t want the waves destroying everything you’ve built. I can’t even see any of the memorial-in-the-making yet, I’d have to climb up one of those cranes to get a bird’s-eye view. But I already know what’s there—and what’s not there. It’s a hole in the world where the Twin Towers once stood, and I feel like it’s sucking me in, like a whirlpool.

As a family member of the fallen, I’ve gotten occasional updates about all the ways they want to memorialize the victims. There will be twin waterfall pools where the towers were. This Survivor Tree that was in the area, and, well the name kind of tells you the rest. Some stone monoliths studded with Trade Center steel they recovered during cleanup. And, of course, inscribing the names of everyone who died, from those in the planes and towers and the Pentagon to the first responders and recovery workers. But I’m not going to be able to see any of it until next fall for the tenth anniversary; if I even make it to then.

I toy around with the idea of asking a cop if there’s somewhere we can go where we might be able to glimpse what construction is looking like, but things have been too intense in this neighborhood. It’s been almost nine years and the fact that cops are still hanging around shows that the city means business. I’ve heard stories of residents who couldn’t even get back into their own buildings because they didn’t have IDs updated with their current addresses. I don’t want to get kicked out of here, or risk something worse going down, especially with a Decker by my side.

Something feels off.

Nah, not something.

Someone.

That someone is me.

I feel off, like my heart’s switch has been flipped.

“I thought I would cry.”

“Is it because I’m here? I could give you some privacy.”

“No, I want you here.”

“Okay. Then what is it?”

“Ground Zero’s emptiness reminds me of the funeral.” I keep staring at the hidden memorial, waiting to feel something. “I didn’t even want to throw a funeral because that meant accepting my parents were dead instead of holding on to hope that they were going to be recovered. No body, no proof. Kind of like how if you don’t see a character die on the page or on TV, you wait for that plot twist to blow your mind. I was thinking wild shit, like how my mom and dad were never at the towers that morning and instead assumed new identities and lived happily ever after somewhere else. And of course they had to leave me behind to protect me, like classic dead-but-not-really parents.”

Valentino is trying to read my mind. “Thinking your parents abandoned you didn’t actually comfort you, did it?”

“Telling myself that story helped me get my first full night’s sleep back then.” I still remember waking up that morning, so rested that I wasn’t even thrown off by waking up in Team Young’s guest room. I just thought it was one of our many sleepovers. That was a win for everyone in the house, since I had spent the other nights screaming; poor Dahlia had to go stay over at her abuela’s house because she wasn’t getting any sleep. “I got to a point where I stopped telling those stories, even though no remains were ever found.”

Valentino stares at the construction site. “I’m sorry to say it, but I think your parents died in the towers. Maybe it’s because I’m not a storyteller like you, but I can’t imagine them living different lives and not coming back for you by now. I’ve only known you for twelve hours, and I couldn’t even abandon you in this dark, cold corner of the city that’s heavily patrolled. You’re too special, Orion.”