A week after we go into town with Miss Lilly and then come home without her, Ava goes back into work. She takes Bayan with her, he drives her in to the office in the mornings, and she tells me that he still is not talking very much. He is helping her, it has been his job for fifteen years to help her and so he is helping her, but she sits in the front of the car with him and tries to talk to him and he does not answer. He only talks to Penny, and even still, not very much.

No one speaks about Miss Lilly anymore, except Abigala. Ava said that Abigala should have taken over Lilly’s role, she was her assistant after all, but she was only her personal assistant. Abigala wants to keep working in the role, but she does not want to be Ava’s assistant. She wants to at least be equal to her, to take on some of the work that Ava has been struggling with, but Ava does not want to include her. Abigala keeps asking me to talk to her, and I don’t know what to do, because I don’t think that I want Abigala working with her. Ava knows some people who worked with her mother and who were more sympathetic than Lilly was, and is trying to team up with them to start looking into the way the agencies were run around the country. But it simply is all moving too fast. The people even higher up in the government are skeptical that Ava can even take over for her mother, she’s right, she’s only twenty years old, she has some people on her side but they are the people that the higher-ups does not like very much anyway, can she stay in the role, will they oust her from the role, Ava does not know, and she is more stressed than ever. I thought she was stressed before, the last time we were in this stupid house, but now, she is constantly in her mother’s office or in the city in her mother’s other office or pacing in her bedroom or talking on the phone or glued to her laptop typing furiously, I don’t know if she can read well enough yet but she certainly seems to be able to type out an email. And I don’t know what she’s doing, because she does not talk to me about it. She only talks to Bayan about it, but he doesn’t answer, but he still helps her.

Nua tries to talk to her too, but she does not want to talk to anyone else about it. She says she has some people who she trusts at work, who she talks to on the phone a lot, and she does not want us to worry. Go back to normal, she tells us, go swimming and go to the library and go sit outside by the fountain, but we cannot go back to normal, Nua and I cannot go back to normal, not without Lilly, and not without Keol, either.

The first time I manage to talk to her for real after her mother has died is when I find her one weekend sitting curled up on one of the chairs on the porch. I look at her through the window for a moment, and then I see some people in the backyard, some people I do not recognize, but Ava is just watching them. I go out to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “Who’re they?”

She sighs, putting her hand on mine. “They’re taking down the fence.”

“Oh,” I say with a smile, and she smiles a little too, and then looks up at me. “Should we get people?”

I furrow my eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“Everyone in Tent City,” she says, moving her hand and putting her head on my fingers. “We got Sloan, and the baby, but there are so many people still down there.”

“Where would we put them?” I ask, and she shrugs. I touch her chin with my thumb, and she says, “I don’t know. But the sick people, and the old people. And Jimmy.”

“Yeah,” I murmur. “I mean, we should, we should ask. Some of them might want to stay, but if we could get something safe set up maybe we could start to get them.”

“We could send Sloan to talk to Shan,” says Ava quietly, looking back at the people in the backyard. “See if we can get something planned. I think Nerev’s sister might be able to help.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“What happened to Nerev?” I say softly, and she smiles a little. “He’s come up again. He’s with her, his sister, and Julian.”

“What about Marissa?”

She sighs, and then stands, and shrugs. “I don’t know.”

She does know, but she does not want to talk about it, and I don’t want to press. She rubs her eyes, and then goes back inside. I follow. “How’s Bayan?”

“I don’t know,” she says again, closing the sliding door behind me when I come inside to the dining room. “I can’t tell if him not talking is the normal kind or the having-someone-die-in-your-arms trauma kind.”

“Yeah,” I say softly. She takes a deep breath as she goes into the kitchen, Bayan is usually here but he is not now, he is probably with Penny. I sit down at the table, and say, “What about Penny?”

“He’s fine, I think,” she says with a slight smile. “I’ve been looking into finding someone to help him annul. I don’t know how it would work, but I’d obviously have to get his wife to agree too, and I don’t know exactly how that will work out.”

“Has he seen her, in…” I trail off, and she smiles slightly, and shakes her head. “Three years, almost, now. The fact that I’m keeping him here, even.”

“What, you should give him back?”

“Technically, yeah,” she says with a scoff, and then Taymer comes into the kitchen. He freezes when he sees us, and then says softly, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” says Ava with a slight smile, sitting down at the table. Then she gets up and goes to the fridge, and says, “Where did she get you, Taymer?”

Taymer looks at me helplessly, and I smile a bit as well. He takes a breath as Ava closes the door, and says, “An agency.”

“Yeah,” she mutters, opening a beer, and takes a sip. “From the mouth of the beast right into the belly.”

He doesn’t answer, and she asks, “Do you have a home? A family?”

He looks at me again, and then says after a moment, “I have a brother.”

“Hm,” says Ava. “Me too.”

He manages a smile too. “He’s six. Seven, now, I think. I don’t know what she did with him.”

“What’s his name?” I ask, and he takes a breath, and then says, “Caleb.”

It’s quiet for a moment, and then Ava nods, taking a sip of her beer. “We’ll find him.”

She leaves, and Taymer stares after her, and then looks at me. “Will she?”

“She’ll look,” I say. “She’ll try. She’s already looking for my parents, my mom and dad.”

“Is she really dead?” asks Taymer, and I look at him. He’s not talking about Ava. “Yeah,” I answer. “She is.”

“So she’s in charge now,” he says, and now he is talking about Ava. I smile, standing up, and go into the fridge too. There’s a six pack minus one of her beers in there, and a whole bunch of strawberries. I take one. “I guess. Don’t say that to her, though, she won’t like it. She is in charge of the agencies, though. And she’s not going to do what her mother did.”

Taymer doesn’t answer. He looks about Jimmy’s age. This is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with him, the longest time I’ve ever even looked at him, and after a moment I say, “Have you spoken to Bayan?”

“My predecessor?” he asks with a slight smile. “Yes. He came to talk to me.”

“Count yourself lucky, he doesn’t talk to many people.”

“Did you want to marry her?” he asks me suddenly, and I smile, throwing away the top of the strawberry. “That’s a complicated question, Taymer.”

He doesn’t answer again. I look back at him, and sigh, and smile a bit. “No.”

“She-”

“She took care of us,” I say. “Her name’s Ava. You can say it.”

But he doesn’t say anything. I leave him alone.