The City Series (Book 3): Instauration

by Lyons Fleming, Sarah

A quick peek out the person-sized door confirms an empty street, and we zip out of the garage before that changes. Jorge drives, Eric sits shotgun, and Paul and I squish Leo between us while he takes in the scenery, half terrified and half enthralled.

  Indy rests her chin on my shoulder from behind. “What do you think, little man?”

  “It’s big,” he says with a worried smile.

  “We won’t let anything happen to you.” Indy taps his nose with her gloved finger. “You’re the president and we’re the Secret Service.”

  “Okay.”

  I take in his rounded cheeks and baby-soft skin. His eyes shine with a pure faith that grownups will protect him. Maybe, between all of us, we can. I will it to be so with a desperate sort of prayer to everything and nothing. Paul, judging by the unrest in his eyes, is doing the same. For the first time, I notice they’re Leo’s eyes down to the lashes.

  “So, President Leo,” Indy says, “do you want strawberry or grape?”

  “Strawberry or grape what?” Leo’s fingers wiggle with eagerness. That question can only mean one thing: candy.

  Indy’s head disappears, followed by the sound of a zipper, and then her hands come over the back of the seat, each holding a Blow Pop.

  “Ooh,” I say. “Which is mine?”

  Indy whacks me with one. “Neither. He gets one on the way there and one on the way back.”

  Her face is animated while Leo deliberates. She nods at his comment that they’re both delicious and commiserates that it’s a tough decision. I think she planned this distraction in advance, and I want to kiss her for thinking of it.

  Finally, grape wins, but only because strawberry will be the final taste in his mouth. Indy presents him with the lollipop. “Enjoy, my good man.” Her cheek is mere inches away, and I plant a kiss on it. “You’re not getting a lollipop.”

  “That was a thank you, dumbass,” I say. “Though you know how much I love candy. It wouldn’t have killed you to get me a Blow Pop.”

  “Thanks,” Paul says. He holds Indy’s gaze for a long moment and then resumes his watch out the window.

  “Sure,” Indy says. Her voice doesn’t give away how she stares at the back of his head for an extra beat or how she seems flustered by his simple, heartfelt gratitude. I see it, though, and think that if only he’d been as nice to her for the past year as he’s been in the past weeks, Indy would be all over him. I refuse to let this dream die—they spend too much time looking for a reason to argue to deny they don’t enjoy each other’s company.

  “Landon gave them to me,” she says. “You should thank him. I was out of credits and he got them for Leo. Wasn’t that nice?”

  Paul nods, and I smother my sigh. I can’t say anything bad about Landon because he hasn’t done anything overtly wrong. He does nice things like give kids lollipops, and I won’t deny he’s hot or charming. But I highly doubt Indy doesn’t notice how his eyes rove over every female that passes, and it’s only because of Indy’s gorgeousness that they return to rest on her.

  She’s thrown herself into this relationship in a manic way, as though sitting still or being alone would kill her. And maybe it would—she doesn’t mention Eli, doesn’t speak about Sunset Park, and is attempting to act her way out of her feelings. It takes one feeling-denier to know one.

  “Super nice,” I say. “Use your feminine wiles to get me something next time.”

  To avoid Union Square, Jorge cuts to 13th Street, which is empty minus the occasional loiterer. By Seventh Avenue, I’m certain we’ll make the High Line without dying. Sure enough, a few minutes later, we’re heading up the staircase to the park.

  Though I don’t know the High Line overly well, I recognize this wider part. Especially since, on top of the Chelsea Market building, there sits a billboard for Essentials. I turn in the opposite direction, hoping everyone will blindly follow me to the Whitney Museum.

  “Hey,” Paul says. “Essentials. Is that one of yours?”

  I nod. On the billboard, a guy slouches in an easy chair. He wears nice jeans, cool boots, and projects that air of the guy-next-door, but the one most girls wouldn’t kick out of bed. You can’t see his face due to the generic girlie magazine that he holds open to a centerfold, though it’s more of an old pin-up girl theme than triple-X. Beside that, it reads: We can make his body clean.

  It took a long time to make it funny and cute, not sleazy, and it worked. Well, Focus on the Family hated it, but that news didn’t send shockwaves through the office.

  “What’s that mean?” Leo asks.

  “It means men like dirt,” Indy says. Leo nods at that indisputable fact.

  Kate snorts. “Clever. Did it sell a lot of products?”

  “They moved to number one, past Old Spice and Axe,” I say. “Target the women, and it’ll reach the men.”

  “Hannah bought those for me,” Paul says. “So it worked. But they smelled all right.”

  Jorge puts an arm around my shoulders. “I bought them for myself. You did good, mami.”

  “Thanks. Now can we stop staring at it?”

  Jorge spins me to walk south along the path. The long stretch of garden on the left has come to life in a profusion of green leaves and grasses. The path splits for another mass of green in the center of the walkway, where the concrete decking has been jaggedly removed to give the impression nature broke through on its own.

  The Standard Hotel, a building that stands almost twenty stories high and straddles the High Line, is all windows and white concrete. It was a trendy place to stay, especially since it had a popular club and great views.

  After a path bordered by young trees that form a canopy over our heads, we hit the end of the park, where it widens to meet with a glass-windowed building on the right. Silver letters read High Line Headquarters. The Whitney rises behind and to the left of the four-story building. On the right, it’s an upended rectangle of concrete and steel. To the left, it’s mainly glass on concrete levels connected by metal catwalks and terraces.

  Indy stands beside me, face upturned. “I could never decide if I liked this building. But the inside is cool, and the views are amazing. Are we going in?”

  Eric looks to Kate. “Lead the way.”

  We enter the High Line building through loading doors on the same level as the park, and Kate brings us through a garage area that contains work tricycles and golf carts. Off to the side, the walls are lined with garden tools and bags of gravel. “We took all the compost and compost tea this winter,” she says.

  The tricycles have a cargo box on the back, and I stop to inspect one in the murky light. “This is cool.”

  “Cassie would’ve loved that,” Eric says. His voice doesn’t break the way it sometimes does when he mentions his sister. “She couldn’t ride a bike.”

  “Really? Did she ever try?”

  “Yeah. She’d veer off the road by accident and then fall on purpose when she got scared.”

  “Kind of sounds like the way I live my life.”

  Eric takes my hand. “Not anymore.”

  “Not anymore,” I agree, and twine my fingers through his.

  18

  The roof of the High Line building is an outdoor space of the Whitney, and we exit from the small room that houses the heating and cooling systems onto a deck with an exhibit of several pink plexiglass boxes. They’re taller than me, in gradations of pink. Though I have no idea what the significance is, Leo thinks they’re incredible.

  “They turn the world pink,” he explains. It’s a good reason. Today is overcast, threatening rain, and the world is improved by the rosy hue.

  “Rose-colored boxes,” Eric says. “Glasses would be easier to carry.”

  I kiss his cheek. “Yours are contacts.”

  He’s been cheerful today, though now he seems on edge. He cocks an ear toward the water. “The wind changed direction. Listen.”

  I focus on the quiet city, listening to the wind rush by the buildings. Under that is a droning sound. “What is it
?”

  “I want to check it out first.”

  We head inside the glass doors of the museum’s fourth floor. The space farther in is shrouded in shadows, and we can’t see what hangs on the walls. Our footfalls echo on the wood floors as we move past the elevators for the back stairwell. Before we enter, I check on the Hudson through a large window. “Still a cesspool, in case anyone was wondering.”

  A few snickers come in reply. I thought the stairs would be dark, but the west-facing wall is entirely windows. We wind our way up the concrete stairs, stopping at each landing to view Jersey across the water.

  Indy sidles over to me. “Why is Paul being so nice?” she whispers.

  “I told him to a while ago,” I whisper back, then lift my brows suggestively. “But I don’t think that’s why he is now.” I didn’t mean he had to be this nice, and I certainly didn’t expect him to carry on for this long.

  Indy moistens her lips. For a split second, she seems ready to return my smile, then her shoulders tense and a muscle jumps in her cheek. “Well, tell him to stop.”

  I stare at her in bafflement. “Why?”

  “I don’t like it.” She turns for the next landing, a line between her brows. The more I get to know Indy, the more I question her judgment where men are concerned.

  Between the sixth and seventh floors, Eric pulls a pair of binoculars from his bag and scans the distant shore for a full minute. He sets them in my hand and leans his forehead against the glass. “Take a look.”

  The magnification is strong enough for me to see the streets in detail. Or it would be, if they weren’t full of zombies. The park across the way and the road that runs along the river are nothing but bodies. They’re on every pier. As I watch, two fall into the river with a splash.

  “It wasn’t this bad last year,” Eric says quietly.

  Every zombie in the continental United States could be standing on the opposite bank of the river. We’re not running anywhere, at least not until winter.

  “Did you know?” I ask.

  “Roger and I heard them, but I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for sure.”

  I pass the glasses to Jorge. “Let’s go up.”

  “I want to look another minute,” Eric says. “You go ahead.”

  He turns back to the glass, brow knitted, as I join the rest of our group. On the seventh floor, we switch on our flashlights to view the paintings. Many are bright and modernist, and Paul stops in front of a street scene. “Look at the light in this one,” he says. “I like it.”

  “Like you know anything about art,” Indy says.

  I doubt she intended for it to sound mean, but it does to my ears. And it must to Paul, who stands stock still for a moment and then walks off without a word.

  “You got your wish,” I say to Indy, and follow the others to the glass doors at the end of the building.

  Indy arrives a moment later. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “You know, Paul is a great person. I’d think you’d want him to be nice to you.”

  Indy raises an index finger to her mouth and nibbles the nail. “He knows I was joking.”

  “I hope so.”

  We pass through the doors onto a large terrace, where catwalk stairs descend to the sixth floor terrace and rise to the eighth. I hold tight to the railing and peer down at the High Line and tar paper roofs of lower buildings, then up at the taller buildings of Midtown, where the Empire State Building’s deco top and spire peek out over a mile away.

  “I thought we could get the fuck out of this city,” Eric says, the steel in his voice making me wince. “I thought you were right—if we left, we’d be done with this. But we can’t run away.”

  I take in his tight lips and flinty eyes, at a loss for words. I can’t tell if he’s going to cry or rage, but he heads for the catwalk stairs before I come to a conclusion. I watch him ascend, wondering if he truly meant to leave if it were possible.

  Brother David steps alongside the rail. “It’s beautiful.”

  The streets are littered with bodies and debris. Some buildings are burnt, some aren’t, but all look derelict and neglected. “I might choose a different word, but okay.”

  “What word would you choose?”

  “Beleaguered.” It’s more the word for me, for Eric, than the view.

  Eric’s boots clang on the metal above our heads. Brother David spares a glance that way. “He’s upset.”

  “He thought he saw a way out of this, but it was crammed with zombies.”

  “It’s not the only way out.” Brother David lifts a hand from the rail and taps a finger on his temple. “Sometimes our prisons are up here.”

  My hope that he had an actual way off this island hits the ground seven stories below. He doesn’t say any more, and I finally ask, “Are you trying to be all enigmatic, or are you going to expand on that thought?”

  Though he wears hipster clothes still, his expression is one-hundred-percent priestly. “You don’t need to leave in order to leave it behind. Do you know what’s harder than anger and holding on to injustices?”

  “The inability to murder the perpetrators?” I ask. Brother David lowers a brow. “Fine, I’ll play along. What’s harder?”

  “Mercy.”

  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord? Turn the other cheek? Don’t give me that. What about the people they killed? Why should they get to live after what they did and will most likely do again?”

  Brother David rests his elbows on the rail, nodding slowly. “It is a bit of a pickle.”

  His answer is so unexpected that a laugh bursts from my heated chest. He tilts his head, a slight smile playing on his lips. “I don’t have the official answers, Sylvia. But I do believe mercy is first and foremost a gift to ourselves, not to the ones we show mercy. Let me ask you, what would Grace say if you told her you planned to head for Brooklyn with guns blazing?”

  I shrug, though I know she’d be close to tears, if not crying, while she begged me not to go. Even Maria, who didn’t put up with bullshit, would rather I be alive than dead from ill-fated revenge. She’d tell me to take care of everyone, like I promised. Yell at me, more like.

  “But how can we let them get away with this?”

  He straightens and rests a hand on my shoulder. “I did say it was harder. But violence won’t bring them back. How much more are you willing to lose in the name of vengeance? Eric? Leo? Jorge?”

  I shake my head, mouth dry. I’m willing to lose no one. Not a single person. But I can’t allow Walt to live while Maria decomposes in a borrowed mausoleum. I grip the metal wire below the topmost rail, let it dig into my fingers, so that the pain will overpower the urge to cry.

  “Our norm is to counter violence with violence,” Brother David says. “Redemptive violence has become our church, our God. But does violence redeem us?”

  “I’d like to find out.”

  A smile flits across his face before he restores his serious expression. “Imagine it doesn’t. What if we choose to offer clemency, to move on?”

  “That requires both sides agree, and I don’t see that happening.”

  He inclines his head. “Indeed. If they won’t, we have a right to defend ourselves. Maybe they do deserve punishment, but there’s nothing we can do about it now. And, in the meantime, hate is poor comfort compared to what you still have to comfort you. So, tell me, who’s being punished?”

  I know he’s right. After our initial punishment, we’ve continued to be punished. Indy may be the actress, but we’re all acting in our own way. I hate the Walt-shaped space that’s come between me and Eric, and I despise the red-hot anger that blazes unexpectedly. I know firsthand how anger consumes you, and I fear that Eric is discovering it as he stands above us, furious at himself and the world.

  Brother David throws his arms out to the side. “It’s food for thought, Sylvia, that’s all. But we should use this time to mend our hearts and our relationships. To paraphrase Goethe: Impotent hatred is the w
orst of all emotions; one should hate nobody whom one can’t destroy.”

  Maybe old Goethe didn’t mean it to be amusing, but I find myself laughing, both at the quote and the glimmer in Brother David’s eyes. There’s no way in hell I can fit Walt into my heart chakra, but I can deny him the victory of shutting it down.

  19

  Eric

  There was a café behind me once, and I don’t have to enter to know the food is gone; the empty packaging strewn on the floor behind the windows tells the story of intense hunger. I could’ve looked at the mess and thanked my lucky stars I’m well-fed—and I probably would’ve six months ago—but I don’t feel lucky.

  Sylvie’s footsteps ring on the metal stairs as she makes her way to where I stand. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her stop, chest rising, before she comes to my side. She holds the rail and faces me, easing back a few inches as though the wind might blow her overboard.

  “I fucking love you,” she says. “I can’t lose you, too. Especially not this way.”

  I expected reproach, a get your shit together, Eric, maybe a Golden Boy crack. But her eyes burn with determination and the soft skin of her throat moves when she swallows. Maria once said Sylvie loves fiercely. Sometimes that ferocity worries me. I’m not sure I can live up to who she thinks I am. Who I was.

  “Wha—” My voice is rusty, and I try again. “What way? You’re not losing me.”

  “I am. They took everything.” Her fingertips brush my coat by my heart. By her photograph. “And they took part of you.”

  I breathe through my nose and out my mouth, forcing down the rising flood of grief. I thought I had her fooled, but Sylvie was good at her job because she knows people—a lifetime of hypervigilance honed that skill to a razor’s edge. Maybe if she’d met Walt, none of this would have happened. Maybe she’d have seen through him the same way she never trusted Kearney or Emilio.

  “They have the rest of it.” Her lower lip trembles. She breathes in shakily. “Don’t let them take that, too.”

  She already knows; she might as well get the truth. “I don’t know how to get it back.”