THE HEIR THEY TRIED TO BURY

Burned

I didn't sleep. I spent the rest of the night moving from one dark doorway to the next, flinching at every pair of headlights, until the sky behind the buildings turned the color of dishwater. My knee had stiffened into a hot, swollen knot. I needed dry clothes, my spare cash taped under the bottom drawer, and the one place on earth where I could sit down and try to think. It was a bad plan, but it was the only one I had, so I walked home.

I smelled it three blocks away. Smoke, thick and bitter, with a chemical edge that made my eyes water. Then I turned the corner onto my street and the whole sky was orange.

Fire trucks blocked the road, their lights spinning red across the wet pavement. Water arced from the hoses into a building I had lived in for six years. My building. The windows on the third floor had blown out, and flames were pouring through them like something alive and hungry, curling up the brick toward the roof. My window was the second from the left. I knew exactly which one, because my mother had hung yellow curtains there, and I watched those curtains catch and curl into black ash.

I pushed through the crowd of neighbors in bathrobes and blankets. Old Mr. Petrov from the first floor was sitting on the curb with his cat in his arms, rocking back and forth. Mrs. Alvarez clutched a framed photograph to her chest and wept without making a sound. I grabbed the nearest firefighter by the sleeve, a young guy with soot on his cheek, and asked if anyone was inside.

"Everyone got out," he said. Alarm went off around two. Lucky, honestly. It went up fast, way too fast for a normal fire.

What do you mean?

"Looks like someone helped it along. Don't quote me." He peeled my hand off his jacket, not unkindly. Which unit are you?

"Three C."

Something passed over his face, and I hated it. I'm sorry, man. That's where it started.

I stood there and let the heat press against my skin from half a block away. My mother's dishes were in there. Her sewing box, her recipe cards written in her looping handwriting, the little ceramic bird I had made in third grade that she had kept on the windowsill for seventeen years. Every photograph of us. Every piece of proof that she had ever existed, gone in one night because someone had decided I was worth erasing.

Mr. Petrov looked up at me with wet, frightened eyes. Eli, there were men here, he said. Around one thirty. Two of them, in dark coats. They went up the stairs, and I thought they were the police. They came down a few minutes later in a hurry.

My stomach turned to ice. They had come here first. They had burned my home and then gone to wait for me at the hospital, which meant they had known exactly where my life was kept, and exactly when to take it apart. Someone had given them directions. Someone had handed them my address, my mother's shifts, the hospital, all of it.

I backed away from the crowd with my heart thudding and pulled out my phone. The screen was cracked from the fall in the parking lot, but it worked. There was exactly one person in my contacts I had not deleted yet, because I had been too much of a fool to do it.

It rang four times. I almost hung up. Then the line clicked, and I heard her breathing before I heard her voice.

"Eli? It's six in the morning."

"Mara." My throat closed up, and I had to force the words through. My mother died last night. And my apartment is on fire, and two men tried to grab me outside the hospital. I think they wanted to kill me. I don't have anywhere to go.

Silence stretched down the line. I listened to it, desperate, waiting for the gasp or the cry or the soft let me come to you that the girl I used to love would have said without a second thought. I had never needed anyone as badly as I needed her in that moment, and I hated her a little for being the only one I could call.

"Your mom," she said at last. Her voice was oddly flat. I'm sorry, Eli. I really am.

Can I come to you? Just for a few hours. I won't stay, I only need somewhere safe to think.

I can't do that.

Please. I'm not asking for anything else. I just need a door that locks.

"Eli." A rustle of fabric, the sound of her moving to another room, and then her voice dropped to a whisper. You can't come here. Julian would...

She stopped. The hesitation was small, but I had known her four years, and I could hear every crack in it. Something cold and sharp began to turn over in my mind.

Julian would what?

"Nothing. He just doesn't want you around. I told you, it's over."

"Two men knew my name at the hospital, Mara. They knew where I lived. They knew where my mom worked." I kept my voice level with enormous effort. Who else knew all of that? Who did you tell?

"I didn't tell anyone."

Then who?

She started crying. Quietly at first, then in short ragged breaths that she tried and failed to swallow. I closed my eyes. In the oldest part of me I already knew the answer, the way you know a tooth is rotten before the dentist says it.

"Two days ago," she whispered. He took a call in his study, and I wasn't supposed to hear. He was giving someone information about you. Where you worked, which hospital your mother went to, your building. He said there'd be payment for it. He said a man had been asking around for years, and that he'd finally found the person they wanted.

The street seemed to tilt. Behind me, a beam collapsed inside the building with a roar, and a gasp went through the crowd, but it sounded very far away.

"You knew," I said.

"I didn't know what they'd do. I thought it was money, something about a debt, I swear I thought..."

"You knew they were coming for me, and you let me walk around for two days."

I was scared of him! The words broke out of her in a sob. You don't know what he's like when he's crossed. I was going to warn you, I kept picking up the phone, and then you got fired and I thought if I just ended it cleanly, you'd be out of it. I thought it would be better for you if I wasn't there.

You stood in front of that whole loading dock and dumped me, with his car running behind you, and you told me it was kindness.

She didn't answer. I could hear her crying, and I felt nothing. I searched myself for anger and found only a flat, endless quiet, the kind that comes after a building finishes burning.

"I loved you," she said.

"I know," I answered. That's what makes it worse.

I ended the call and stood in the smoke with my dead mother's belongings in a plastic bag and my whole past turning to ash behind me. Julian Ashford had sold me for money. The girl I trusted most had stood by and watched. In a single night I had learned there was no one left, not one person, who would ever stand between me and the dark.