The Color of Courage

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  I joined the others, who had almost uncovered the next person.

  “How many more?” Trace choked out.

  “Two.” I could tell definitely now, this close. Summer lifted the injured man in a fireman’s carry and flew out to the waiting paramedics. The rest of us worked furiously to free the others. The one closest had a strong though pain-filled aura, but the one furthest away was dimming and turning blue, the color of relief and peace. I sobbed as I tore at the concrete and glass and wood and fabric and everything else in our way. I barely heard Adam tell Trace to “get the others out,” and realized that wasn’t because my harsh breathing and pounding heart were loud in my ears, but because the structure around us was moaning.

  Hands closed around my shoulders. “Get out of here, Daley.” Adam. I ignored him at first, but he was stronger than me and pushed me behind him, taking over my efforts. Common sense reared up, and I followed Trace and Kirby back out to the open air.

  When I turned back, I was shocked to see the entire building seemed to be shaking. Police and workers shoved people back, away from the area. Not that anyone resisted.

  Shock hit me again when I saw three auras still in the cavern. I’d assumed they’d gotten the second-to-last person out. That aura had become blazing orange, a level of anxiety well above the usual fear. Adam’s green had flares of orange in it, but the blue was almost too dim to see.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” I muttered. It took everything I had not to run back in there.

  Then, with a thunder of sound both louder than imaginable and softer than expected, the rest of that corner of the building came down.

  And all three auras disappeared.

  Chapter 8

  Gray haze blanked out my vision, and sounds came to me muffled. I thought I heard screams, but all I could feel was my own intense, horrifying pain.

  Adam was dead.

  A breeze touched my face and my vision cleared. The dust from the collapse had fogged it out, not my inability to handle what was happening. The muffling must have been because of the loudness of the collapse.

  I climbed to my feet, realizing only then that I’d been knocked to the ground. Kirby next to me had as well, and we held each other for balance as we swayed.

  “Come on.” Trace plucked at my jacket sleeve and walked toward the new pile. Kirby followed silently, but I couldn’t let them have false hope.

  “There’s no use,” I tried to tell them, limping alongside. Summer had passed us all and was already moving stone again. None of the rescue workers tried to stop us, probably understanding our reaction and unwilling to confront us.

  “Of any of us, he’s the one most likely to survive this.” Trace reached the pile and went into robot mode, steadily and methodically reducing the pile from the point closest to where Adam had been.

  “He’s got impenetrable skin,” I argued, trying to block him. “Not uncrushable bones.”

  He ignored me. So did the others. I hesitated. I could tell them that his aura had snuffed out, but my throat seized up and I couldn’t get the words through. Besides, did it matter? We weren’t leaving without our friend, no matter his state.

  I joined the others, and soon we had a double chain formed. Rescue workers, firefighters, and cops silently lined up behind us to move the rubble to the back. No one spoke.

  After about an hour, we got to the first body. I could hear the shattered bones scraping together as they moved it. Nausea roiled, but I swallowed hard and kept going. It seemed like a full day before we got to Adam’s area, but had actually been less time than it took to get to the first person.

  And he wasn’t there.

  Neither was the other body.

  “Are you sure this is the right spot?” Kirby asked Trace. She hadn’t been all the way in the back of the cavern before the collapse.

  “Positive.” He hefted another piece of rock. “I was standing right here when he passed Daley to me.”

  “Maybe—” It came out a croak and I tried to clear my throat, which was clogged with dust and grief. “Maybe he started to come out before it collapsed.”

  Trace looked at the extent of the pile, defeat coming down over his face. But Kirby straightened.

  “Two teams. One go from this end. The rest of us, down there. We have no idea how far he got, so we’ll improve our odds.”

  We got into position, Trace and I where the opening had been, with a line behind us, and Kirby and Summer at the other end. A rhythm took over and helped still the thoughts that screamed in my head. If he were alive, I’d feel him. I’d see him. There was no possible way he was still alive.

  Lift. Heave. Pass. Bend. Lift. Over and over, we moved pieces, somehow not hitting anything too big to be moved without equipment. Then I drew a two-foot-wide chunk of concrete toward me, and saw his hand.

  And his fingers moved.

  Sure I’d imagined it, I started frantically flinging debris to the side. I uncovered his head, his shoulders, and realized the pieces I was removing weren’t all touching him. Weren’t crushing him. Trace saw what I was doing and came over to help. Adam was a good two feet below the pile. He’d wound up in a pocket, but how?

  Then we saw it. The support beam Trace and Summer had put up. It had broken, but formed an upside-down V over Adam’s body, blocking most of the heavy materials. Trace and I looked at each other. Hope shone in his eyes, but I was certain it just meant Adam wasn’t totally crushed. He couldn’t be alive.

  But Trace shouted, and people crowded around, and Adam coughed. That wasn’t imaginary. He really coughed. And tried to move. His left leg was pinned, and he didn’t have enough space to roll or get leverage to sit, but he was alive.

  As he regained consciousness, his aura returned, the colors much like the ones I’d been spotting all afternoon. He was hurt, and scared, but he’d be okay. He coughed again, blinked, and looked up. His eyes met mine, and the aura blinked out.

  Numb and confused, I stayed back while they loaded Adam into one last ambulance and headed for the hospital. When the rest of us got back to the van, I took Trace aside and told him my suspicions, that it seemed the whole event had been planned and that someone had been working against us.

  “It was obviously planned, Daley, buildings don’t just collapse.” He shook off my arm and reached for the driver’s door.

  “Wait.” I grabbed his arm again. “I think it was planned for us, Trace. It was too perfect. And the building shaking like that, and Kirby getting hit on the head. They wanted to kill us, and they almost succeeded.”

  “Who would want to do that?” Uncharacteristically—but understandably—impatient, Trace yanked open the door and climbed into the van. I didn’t move. Something flittered through my mind, something about that article in Today’s News, but I was too tired and overwrought and I couldn’t grab on to it.

  “It doesn’t matter right now, Daley.” He started the van and jerked his head toward the back. “Get in.”

  “No.” I backed away. “I’m going home. Adam’ll be okay. He doesn’t need—” My throat closed around remembered grief and sorrow, ghosts of what I’d felt when I thought him dead, but symbols of something I didn’t quite understand. I had to be alone right now. Trace met my eyes and his impatience faded. He nodded and put the van in gear.

  “I’ll keep you posted.”

  I was numb and confused through the night and into the next day. I’d be scrubbing the toilet or cleaning out the fridge and my throat would just close up, my heart slamming double time, air impossible to drag into my lungs for several horrible minutes. I recognized them as panic attacks and weathered each one, exhausted enough afterward to abandon whatever I was doing.

  While watching old game shows or trying to read, I’d find myself crying for no reason. As if I grieved. I had to remind myself repeatedly that Ada
m was alive. That he was okay. I knew if I went to see him for myself, all of this would ease. But I couldn’t do it. Going to the hospital was too much like handling napalm. I wasn’t steady enough to be ready for that.

  What happened yesterday had been far more than facing the possible loss of my mentor and friend. When I thought Adam was dead, I’d lost the potential for something deep and real that I was just beginning to consider. And that was the most frightening thing of all.

  I couldn’t wallow anymore. I had a consult with a child psychologist and one of his patients first thing, and my financial situation made canceling inadvisable. At least it would be a better distraction than Family Feud.

  Working with kids was probably the most pleasurable of my jobs. True, they were usually in pain, often because of harm, but helping them identify and analyze their emotions was even more rewarding than what I did for HQ. This part of my consulting work was building slowly by word of mouth as a couple of open-minded psychologists saw my results.

  So I blocked off the seething cauldron of my own emotions, suited up, and put on my professional face. By the time the receptionist showed me into a small, empty room containing only a low table and two comfortable chairs, I had tricked myself into thinking everything was normal—at least for now.

  Far from the distraction I’d anticipated the session to be, though, it became hell shortly after Josh was shown into the room. Labeling his emotions wasn’t the problem. Nor was helping him see the connections and ferret out the reasons things were the way they were.

  It was the mirror he held up to me.

  When I told him I didn’t recommend trying to figure everything out on his own, that having someone else to talk to helps lay out the path to decisions and actions, he asked if I talked about mine. I didn’t admit I’d been hiding in my apartment, avoiding doing just that. Then he asked, “What if your family or friends are the thing you need help with?”

  “That’s what Bob’s for.”

  I couldn’t imagine trying to talk to Bob myself, though. Trying to lay out why I was so frightened about Adam. Why it was easier to think about Evan despite his mystery and judgmental attitude than to admit that other things were changing.

  I forced all that aside and focused on helping Josh. Eventually, blue burst out of him and pushed all the roiling emotions to the perimeter of his aura. “You’re a fucking freak,” he said, so affectionately and thankfully that I laughed, despite the echoes, yet again, of insecurity.

  He sat and studied the chart for a long time. I watched him in silence, enjoying how his emotions sorted as he addressed them. He was eager now, probably to get back to Bob and talk about what he’d just discovered. He looked up eventually, and I expected him to thank me and rush out. But he surprised me.

  “Can you, like, change people’s emotions?”

  My moment of pleasure disappeared as I thought about the restaurant, and Gino, and Evan’s lecture on morality.

  “I can sometimes help calm a person.”

  “Can you make them stop being afraid or stop loving someone?”

  That was the most frightening thing anyone had ever asked me. A little bit because wanting those feelings to stop was often a precursor to self-harm, but it was also normal, and Josh wasn’t showing desperation. Much more because I knew, deep down, that I could. That it was a natural progression from what I was already beginning to do—and maybe that was why I didn’t want to do it. So I just said, “No. Those are too deep to be affected by my superficial ability.”

  “Can you show me the calming thing?”

  I managed a smile. “I can’t, Josh. You’re already calm.” It was true. His aura was mostly green. If I dug, like I had with Evan, I could find the tough emotions again. They didn’t go away. But he’d mastered his immediate feelings, which would enable him to address the deeper ones.

  I wished desperately that I could do the same.

  Dangerously deep in self-pity now, I gathered my things and left with Josh, waving as he headed back to Bob’s office and I caught a quick elevator. I headed straight home and changed into comfort clothes before I forced myself to check the missed call log on my phone.

  None were my mother, for once, as I’d called her from the site right after the others had left. She hadn’t caught wind of the situation yet, and my distraction at the time had kept her from haranguing me about the dangers of my job. She thanked me for calling and said she’d see me Friday night. My pre-empt had prevented the worst of it, I hoped. I wasn’t prepared to deal with more.

  Summer and Kirby had called twice each, not understanding why they couldn’t reach me. Those had been early calls, though. Trace seemed to understand. He took one look at me before he left this morning and said nothing but that he was going to visit Adam and take care of business with the authorities and rescue teams. I was sure he’d filled in Summer and Kirby on whatever he thought was going on in my head.

  Evan had also called twice. I didn’t call him back, but remembered that Kirby was supposed to have been checking him out. Still in avoidance mode, my brain zeroed in on that thought, and as the afternoon went on my need to know outweighed my need to be alone. I finally called her at HQ.

  “You okay?” she asked immediately.

  “I’m fine.” I almost blurted my question about Evan, but good manners and the memory of her clonk on the head stopped me. “You?”

  “Headache, but it responds to over-the-counter painkillers. I talked to Summer, she’s fine. And Trace says he’s okay. How did he seem this morning?”

  “Normal. Except for taking charge, that is.”

  She laughed. “You go see Adam yet?”

  I meant to say, “Not yet,” but my throat seized.

  “Daley?”

  “I can’t make it over today,” I managed. “I have an appointment.” Of course, I’d already finished it. Why had I started lying to my friends? I hurried on before she could respond. “I wanted to see if you’ve found anything out about Evan Forgeron.”

  “Oh, yeah! I never did get a chance to tell you.” I could hear rustling papers. “He was born in Illinois thirty-four years ago.”

  I waited. “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much. I found a picture of him with a high school football team that went to State, a graduation listing, stuff like that. Nothing since. Can’t find college records, technical training, nothing. No marriage records, either.”

  “Criminal record?”

  “Nothing.”

  I thanked her and hung up before she could ask why I wanted to know. I thought about him while I cleaned my dusty super-suit and reloaded my depleted duffle to take back to HQ. Kirby wasn’t a computer whiz, so it was possible she just couldn’t locate more. But the absence of information pointed to undercover work for some law enforcement agency, which was what I’d suspected from the beginning. So I was in no better position than before. Maybe worse.

  Around four o’clock, while I was cleaning the kitchen and trying to talk myself into going to the hospital before visiting hours ended, someone knocked on my door. I dropped the sponge in the sink and went to look through the peephole. Evan. He stood with one arm braced on the doorjamb above his head, his other hand in his jeans pocket. The dusty-blue T-shirt he wore fit his wide shoulders and flat abs like adhesive. I almost didn’t let him in. I had no business being attracted to him, knowing what I knew—even though it was next to nothing—and after what had happened yesterday.

  But he’d been at HQ to talk to Adam, presumably about the case he started to bring up at the dinner party, right before our jumper. He seemed to be drawn to me, and I wanted to know if it was for business or romantic reasons.

  I opened the door.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded. He waited. When I didn’t say anything else, he asked, “Can I come in and see
for myself?”

  Ambivalent, I shrugged, then turned and walked to the sofa. Despite the heat, I drew a chenille throw around my shoulders and gazed out the window instead of at Evan, who sat next to me.

  Don’t mention Adam. He wouldn’t be a very good distraction if he talked about yesterday. He didn’t. I could feel him watching me, but he didn’t say a word. I slowly relaxed against the cushion, though my updrawn knees and tightly wrapped blanket probably sent a pretty good hands-off message.

  “It was my father.”

  The words were incongruous enough to make me turn my head to look at him.

  “Who was?”

  “The person who died.”

  After several beats, I understood. “The grief I saw last Sunday.”

  “Yeah. He died a few weeks ago.”

  I rested the side of my head against my knees. I hadn’t slept the night before, and holding it up took too much effort. “I’m so sorry. But you don’t have to tell me. You were right. I violated your privacy.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  He drew one ankle up to rest on the opposite knee and spread his arm across the back of the sofa. His fingers were right next to my shoulder. I wanted to shrug my way under his hand, but kept still.

  “You’re right that seeing what you can see isn’t very different from what a private investigator does.”

  “Ah. I get it.”

  His eyes crinkled, though he didn’t smile. “You do?”

  “You’re an investigator and you violate privacy all the time.”