The girl in Alec’s photograph had June’s face.
Mara saw the image before she saw the words. The phone lay on the office counter, connected to a borrowed cable. Its battery had revived enough to show a photograph of a paper notice taped to a bus shelter.
JUNE MERCER. ELEVEN YEARS OLD.
The picture beneath showed a girl looking impatiently past the camera, one eyebrow raised. Yellow sweatshirt. The same hair, though dry and brushed away from the face. Mara could imagine the person taking it asking her to look properly for half a second.
She enlarged it until the cracked screen cut across the girl’s cheek.
Alec sat behind her in the recliner, injured leg supported. He had found the photograph himself, scrolling slowly because his eyes had begun to blur from poor sleep.
“That’s her, isn’t it?”
Mara did not answer.
“You ought to call the number.”
They had tried. Three times. A telephone number beginning with a familiar area code, printed below the words IF YOU HAVE SEEN HER. The phone made no connection. Luis’s did the same.
Mara copied it carefully anyway. The last thing she wanted was to lose a chance because she had decided it would not work yet.
She held the phone nearer the window, hoping the network would return where there was less plaster around it. Beyond the glass, she noticed a dark rectangle beside the pickup’s front wheel.
The traveler’s wallet.
He had been holding it when he went down. She had looked past it every time she checked whether the parking court was empty.
Gideon watched the rear fence while she crossed the asphalt. She did not ask the register to protect a distance it had never claimed. Each step carried her farther from the lit office door.
The wallet lay open, wet paper protruding from its fold. She lifted it with a clean cloth. Something pale had smeared the rubber of the tire where the man’s fingers had gripped it. Not blood. Mara didn’t touch it.
She carried the wallet inside before opening it properly.
Evan Rusk, the license said. A familiar county address. Not a passing stranger from a place too distant to imagine; a man who might have bought groceries in the same shops she used.
There were cash notes, a library card and a photograph of a woman holding a ridiculous fish toward the camera. No contact labeled emergency. Mara looked for one anyway, turning every damp pocket without taking the money out.
A receipt had softened into pulp against a business card. She separated them carefully and left both on clean paper to dry.
She wrote EVAN RUSK — MISSING on an envelope. She did not write dead. There was no body and no certainty to give his family, if she ever found a number.
Then she put the wallet away instead of leaving it beneath the tire for someone else to discover.
Alec watched her return to his photograph.
“Somebody out there?” he asked.
“There was,” she said.
There was a second photograph in the notice’s corner, smaller and partly covered by reflected sky. A woman stood beside June with one hand behind the girl’s shoulder. The woman’s smile was broad enough to crease her eyes.
EVELYN MERCER, the caption said. MOTHER.
Mara turned the screen toward Luis.
He studied it without the certainty Alec had expected.
“Show her privately,” he said.
“She’s already heard the name.”
“That isn’t the same as everybody watching her answer.”
Mara unplugged the cable. She asked Alec if she could take the phone upstairs. He agreed, then asked whether she could bring it back before the battery died again.
In Seven, June was putting three colored receipts into order. Emmett had decided colors meant different kinds of tickets in the paper town they’d drawn. He was eating in One now, and June had kept working by herself.
The little warning light lay dim along the threshold. Mara sat inside it, close enough to the door that the girl could leave without crossing her knees.
“We found the picture the man took.”
June stopped moving the receipts.
“Can I see?”
Mara gave her the phone. The girl’s thumb rested against its broken corner, nowhere near the face on the screen.
She looked for so long that Mara checked the battery over her shoulder.
“Does it help?”
June lowered the phone a little.
“That’s my shirt.”
“And the girl?”
Her eyes moved from the picture to Mara’s face, then back.
“It looks like me.”
Mara slid to the second image. Evelyn’s hand, June’s raised eyebrow, an ordinary background of trees and a fence.
“Do you remember her?”
June’s breath caught.
For one moment Mara thought she had found it: the sharp arrival of recognition, mother and child joined again by a screen in a cheap room. Then June rubbed her face with both hands, and Mara realized she was trying to push an answer into place.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“I should know.”
“You can tell me what you do know.”
“She’s there.”
June pointed to the woman’s face.
“In a room?” Mara asked.
“There’s glass. I can’t hear through it.”
The trees in the photograph moved slightly in the draft from the window curtain, reflected against the screen. Mara felt cold along her arms.
“You remember glass?”
“And shoes.”
June held the phone out, as though she wanted Mara to take the picture away before it changed again.
“Orange shoes. Squeaky ones. There’s a long place with doors. The floor’s blue.”
Mara took the phone.
“A school?”
June shook her head.
“People lie down. A man keeps saying a number. I don’t like the light.”
She tucked the colored receipts beneath the pillow. Their game had ended.
Mara remained where she was, letting silence reach an ordinary size before speaking.
“Has anything else happened when you slept?”
“Voices.”
“Like outside?”
June looked at the warning strip. “Some. Not all.”
“You can wake me.”
The girl lowered her chin. “You’re always tired.”
Mara almost said it didn’t matter. It did matter. She could feel that truth in her aching hands and the way she had spent yesterday believing a dry surface proved a sound wall.
“We’ll work out who’s awake,” she said. “It doesn’t only have to be me.”
June nodded, though Mara could not tell whether the answer comforted her.
She left the phone’s screen dark and went downstairs.
Alec wanted to know whether they had recognized the mother. Mara gave the phone back and said they were still trying. He looked disappointed, then glanced toward the stair.
“Don’t make her look again because I’m asking.”
“I won’t.”
He plugged the cable in himself.
Luis listened to the corridor description while wrapping used medical cloth for washing. He had worked in more buildings with beds and bright halls than Mara had ever seen.
“Could be a hospital,” he said. “Could be a place somebody made into one. Children remember bits.”
“She can’t tell me her mother’s name.”
“I couldn’t tell you everything I knew when I was hurt either.”
Mara looked at his uninjured hands. He noticed.
“Before tonight,” he said. “I wasn’t always the one carrying the bag.”
She wanted to ask what had happened. He tied the cloth bundle tightly, making it clear enough that he had offered an example, not his whole history.
Gideon heard the end of their conversation from the pantry.
“Show me.”
Mara put Alec’s phone on the counter. Gideon leaned over the missing-child notice.
His face changed at Evelyn’s photograph.
“You have her child. She doesn’t know the woman. The things outside wear voices they don’t own.”
“We don’t know what that’s telling us yet,” Luis said.
Gideon turned the phone back toward Mara. “You don’t have to wait until something happens to ask that question.”
“I’m asking it.”
“Not where anyone can hear.”
Mara glanced at the reception table. Carl and Omar were playing a quiet game with Nia’s puzzle pencil, making moves on a grid she’d drawn. Dana had shut her new door to rest. Children sat in One beyond the service passage. None of them needed Gideon’s conclusion thrown across the room before they knew what evidence they had.
“We can talk in the kitchen,” she said.
Gideon shook his head, not refusing the conversation but refusing to be reassured by its location. He walked back to the pantry and made room for Luis to pass.
Mara wrote the hospital description beside the copied phrase. Orange shoes. Blue floor. Glass between child and mother. She could not place it in Bellweather. The clinic she’d visited with a burned hand had cream tiles and green chairs, and she had never taken June there.
The child could have traveled. The child could have been ill. The child could have heard something from a television before any of this began.
Possibilities were not the same as comfort.
She went to Eight to borrow Nia’s charger. There was another cable in the lost-property drawer, but its frayed end warmed when Tessa tested it and they had stopped using it. Nia’s would fit the little radio Omar had carried from his room.
Nia answered before Mara knocked.
She held a phone against her chest. Her face was wet, but she did not look like someone who had just been crying. She looked like someone who had forgotten how.
“Can you read something?” she asked.
Mara stayed at the doorway. “Of course.”
Nia turned the screen toward her.
A photograph showed two young women beside a kitchen table covered with paper decorations. Nia was one of them. The other wore a dark green dress and held up a lopsided cake.
“That’s my sister,” Nia said.
“All right.”
“Look underneath.”
A caption said NATALIE FINALLY LET ME BAKE THE CAKE.
Mara read it aloud.
Nia repeated Natalie, slowly. Her voice broke on the last syllable.
“I know she’s my sister.”
Mara stepped inside, leaving room between them.
“What happened?”
“I slept. I got tired and Tessa said I should sleep. When I woke up, I wanted to call her. I knew the number. I knew why. Then I couldn’t—”
She pressed the phone so hard her thumb whitened.
“I’ve said her name all my life.”
Mara looked toward the two beds. One had a blanket kicked aside. Nia’s suitcase stood open under the desk, not scattered but finally unpacked.
On the dresser lay the paperback with the dragon on its cover. Nia had marked a place with a bus ticket. There were a dozen ordinary pieces of her life in the room now: a hairbrush, a packet of chewing gum, a sweater folded carefully because there was no drawer free.
She had finally believed she could put things down.
Mara could see that belief coming apart as Nia looked at the picture again.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
Nia laughed, a short, dreadful sound. “It’s not that.”
“I’m asking because we need to tell Luis everything.”
She sent Omar for him, keeping her voice ordinary so the request would not draw a crowd.
Nia sat on her bed with the photograph in her hands. Mara asked permission before sitting beside her. Their shoulders did not touch.
“Say it again,” Nia said.
“Natalie.”
Nia nodded, trying to catch something beyond the word.
“I can learn it again. I know that. But I can’t remember it being hers.”
Mara had no answer that did not make the room colder.
Luis came in and asked practical questions. Had she hit her head? Taken anything? Did the rest of her body feel strange? Nia answered, angry at the questions but grateful he kept asking rather than treating one impossible symptom as a complete explanation.
She could still remember her sister’s number, their old address, the argument about who would bake. The name’s familiar shape had vanished from between them.
Mara looked through Eight’s open door toward Seven. June’s small warning light glowed at its threshold. Both rooms had stayed charged. Neither had admitted anything from outside while they slept.
That did not tell her what had happened inside.
Nia held out the phone again. Mara took it because the girl’s hands were shaking.
“Don’t let it go dark,” Nia said.
Mara touched the screen before it dimmed. The picture brightened: two sisters, one cake, a room that had never needed a ward.
She kept it lit until Luis asked her to fetch water.