"Wha—you?" Frank said. "But... you?"

"Frank," the man said, dipping his head in acknowledgement. "It is good to have a friend in this. And also," he lowered his voice, "to be standing next to the bravest girl that I have ever seen."

Ada sniffled, but stood a little taller.

"She kicked me in the nuts," Frank said, still looking at Elio Rivera, both because he was a little in shock and because it was just so hard not to.

Elio gasped. "I am surprised you are alive to say so."

"I didn't kick him," Ada whispered. "I did a knifehand strike to his groin."

"Impressive. Will you teach me? Not now, not now," Elio whispered when she turned toward him. "After all this bossy business."

"Okay."

"Do you go to school, Ada?" When she nodded, he said, "This is just like school, but with only mean teachers. We will behave now, okay?" he said, looking at Frank. "We won't get in trouble, and later we will figure out what to do."

"Shirts off! Single file. No talking."

Up and down the line, shirts came off. Ada held hers over her chest, tears welling up in her bewildered eyes. A smattering of fine black scales dotted her shoulders.

Frank hesitated before tapping the scaled back of a woman on the other side of him. She flinched and turned around.

"Ada," Frank whispered, "come stand over here."

"No talking!" a guard bellowed.

The woman took one look at Ada and nodded to Frank. Her arm around the girl, they shuffled at gunpoint through a pair of double doors and into a wide, dark hallway.

Inside the facility, officers quickly sorted the feverish and afflicted from the simple fence jumpers. Jumpers were ushered into what looked like an old-fashioned gymnasium. The rest of them were marched to the end of the hall, where guards beeped the group past security and through what could best be described as the gates of hell.

On either side of the hall were interrogation rooms sporting bulletproof glass windows. Inside each room meant for a handful of people were dozens of humans in varying stages of sickness, fear, and grief. The stench of their uncollected waste seeped out from under the doors and mingled with their low, incessant moans.

Ada covered her ears and started sobbing. "I'm scared!"

Frank put a hand on her shoulder. "Close your eyes, girl. I got you."

They took a right at the end of the hall, where Frank was relieved to see a few empty rooms. His relief horrified him. Even so, when a guard opened a door to an empty room, he led Ada into it without a shred of guilt.

Hours later, Frank refilled his flask from a water jug the officers had unceremoniously chucked into the room before lights out. He stepped over the sleeping bodies he could barely make out in the dark and took up his place at the window overlooking the hall. There wasn't much to see other than disengaged guards who paced the halls at random.

These were the quiet hours Frank had been dreading. Earlier, they had set up a makeshift bathroom by putting a waste bin in a corner and haphazardly concealing it with an overturned table. At lights out, vigorous scratching picked up among the afflicted who were at breakout stage, then eventually died down once exhaustion set it. Quiet crying gave way to silence and soft snoring. That's when Frank braced himself, expecting grief to set in.

Only, grief never came.

Instead, his mind kept going back to those final seconds in Brewerytown. What haunted him wasn't the image of Bianca at the moment of impact, shoulders hunching and chin falling forward as her body yielded to the impact. No, when he pictured B at the end, he mostly saw her fierce and fearless countenance. It was the same look of defiance she'd had the day he met her all those years ago; tiny, cornered Bianca, hissing and spitting at the neighborhood bullies. He had thought that version of B was dead and done, buried in the unmarked grave of their life on the street. Yet, there she was, staring down "the man" and going out of this world the same way she had come into it.

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What haunted Frank wasn't Foster's placid face as she raised the pistol to take his friend's life almost as an afterthought. It wasn't the bullet, either. Or his own anguished cry. Or the senselessness of it all.

What he kept replaying was the jarring discontinuity of those moments. The way there had been breathing space around them—an invisible cushion resisting the streaking bullet, an atmospheric bubble containing his spoken word. There had been enough space in time for him to observe each event, to see the wavering edges of their forms and energies. And when he observed them, he felt on the verge of… something.

So, what the fuck was that, right?

He knew he hadn't just imagined it, mainly because he just wasn't that imaginative a guy. And anyway, how could you just make up something like that, in a moment like that? Then again, maybe it was the baton crack to his hardass skull. Or the boot. Or...

Absentmindedly, he reached up and touched the rough purple scales on his arm.

"I am sorry about your friend."

"Jesus H!" Frank startled, accidentally smacking his flask against the window.

"I did not—"

Frank held his hand up. "I can't take this shit right now."

"I apologize. Sincerely," Elio said, his voice low and seductive.

Frank put his hand to his heart and took a deep, steadying breath before looking at the inexplicably stealthy, phenomenally sexy man. Even in the low side lighting, Elio's bone structure was exquisite. As if flawless cheekbones and sculpted jawline weren't smokin’ hot enough, his broad shoulders filled out a loosely buttoned shirt in a way that left Frank longing to—

"Christ," Frank exhaled. "You're forgiven, okay? Can you just not do that?"

"Do...?" Elio said with a hint of confusion.

"Just," Frank said, gesturing at all of Elio, "that. I don't know. This just doesn't seem like the time or place."

"I am simply standing here."

"Yes! The way you're standing there like that? That's exactly what I'm talking about," Frank replied, keeping his voice low.

"This is how I stand, Frank."

"And that! Stop doing that. Stop saying my name like that."

Elio held up his hands in a gesture of innocence.

"I know, I know. This is just how I speak," Frank said in his best Elio impression.

They laughed, which relieved some of the tension, then fell silent. Elio stood at the window and looked both ways down the empty hall.

"What has happened, Frank?"

"You tell me."

Elio looked at Frank, then back out into the hall. "I was downtown when the rumors began. Do you know why?" He turned toward Frank and leaned against the glass, his hands in his pockets. "Because I help to run a restaurant, only nobody was there. Not the chefs, not the staff. So I went to check on my man, Gio. Head chef."

Elio removed something from his pocket, unwrapped it, and sucked on it in a way that made Frank roll his eyes and sigh. "This was last night, okay? Gio was in bed, delirious with fever. Clawing at his skin. It was no good. 'Selena,' he said. So I went to check on Selena."

He took a deep breath. "Selena is tough. Toughest woman I ever met. Survived X, lost everyone. Everyone. Lost a hand. Lost her wits, just a little," he said, making a so-so gesture with his hand. "Survived such things, you would not believe."

He paused. "Her door was unlocked. I called her name, but she did not answer. I found her in the bedroom. She—" he cleared his throat. "She had tried to cut the scales from her body."

"No," Frank whispered.

"Yes. Yes, she did, and she cut too far. Too deep. An accident, maybe."

"Jesus. I'm so sorry, man."

Elio straightened. "Yes, and I, as well. Our friends did not deserve such fates."

He turned to look at the sleeping bodies. "Do you know, I checked in on everyone. All sick, all frightened. I put up a sign in the restaurant window and went home. I walked through the gates, unaccosted. I said hello to my family. 'How are you, how was your day,' they said. They knew nothing. Nothing at all."

"I don't think a lot of us knew yet."

"But some of us did," he said. "Many of us did. Many, many, many, but not a single one from Brewerytown."

Frank cocked his head. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," Elio said, nodding toward the rest of the group, "that none of them are from the gated places. Not you, either. Why do you suppose that is?"

Frank furrowed his brows and shook his head. "I don't get it. You're from Brewerytown. You're here."

"Indeed. And yet, I have seen not one person from my neighborhood."

"Actually," Frank said, "how are you even here?"

Elio nodded. "No person in their right mind would arrest a Rivera in broad daylight, and in his own neighborhood."

"Right," Frank said. "Right, exactly."

Elio shrugged, almost imperceptibly. "Perhaps this was simply not my day."

Frank looked around the room, something nagging at him. Some forgotten thing. What was it? What was he not thinking of?

Whatever it was, it would have to wait, because the lights came on and all hell broke loose in the hall.