“How would you stop it?” the boy beside Cole asked. “There has to be some way to protect ourselves.”
Cole took a sip of his soup, ignoring the fact that it had grown cold and that there were soggy crumbs from Marco’s roll in it. “You can’t stop them,” he said. “They can come anytime and from anywhere. There are probably billions or trillions of the things roaming the universe since the time of Creation. They’re like cosmic cattle, grazing on everything.”
A new fear settled over the boys, quite stronger than the one Marco’s presence had brought. Cole looked to Marco to see the older boy beaming. He winked at Cole and stood up.
“You aced your assignment,” Marco said. He wiped his chin with his napkin, then threw it into his untouched bowl of soup. “Be sure to take up my tray as well, slumrat.”
And with that, Marco spun and hurried out of the dining hall as suddenly and swiftly as he’d arrived. Cole watched him go, the folds of the boy’s cloak swaying wide with his turn, then settling down all around him, the blackness swallowing him whole.
“Do you really expect this court to believe that?”
The lawyer in the black suit waved his arm out over the pews.
“Are you going to tell these families that their loved ones died because of an innocuous conversation that took place over some soup? Is that also what you’re going to tell those families in New Zealand? That this wasn’t the work of God, or some coincidence too extreme to trust, but the scheming of some homeless kids taking advantage of the hospitality and kindness of the Church?”
“I’m telling you what happened.” Cole looked up at the judge. “That’s what I swore to do.”
The judge squinted at Cole, as if looking for something difficult to discern.
“I move to have this case against my client dropped,” the lawyer said. He walked away from Cole and back toward his wide table, staffed plenty with suits. “If this is the extent of the evidence, the hearsay of one boy when the other isn’t here to provide his side of the story—”
“Denied,” the judge said. He held out a hand to calm down Cole’s lawyer, who had risen from her seat and seemed fit to explode. “And I’ll caution you, Counselor, not to employ theatrics for my jury’s benefit. Now, if you have no further questions—”
The lawyer spun away from his desk. “Oh, if we’re going to persist in this, I certainly have other questions.” He stalked toward Cole, his finger jabbing the air. “I’d like to probe into the charges that were dropped, the charges that prompted you to turn on the man who so kindly took you in. I think if there’s any real conspiracy here, that’s where we’ll find it.”
“My client doesn’t have to answer those questions,” Cole’s lawyer protested. She flipped through the papers spread across her desk. “It’s clear in the agreement he signed—”
“A boy is dead,” the other lawyer said, whirling on her. “Another boy is dead, and now his name is being besmirched without him here to clear it.”
“There is ample evidence—” the judge began, but the stirrings in the congregation-like crowd made it hard to hear. He reached for his gavel and banged the wooden puck on his dais so hard, it leapt up in the air.
“Order,” he demanded. “Settle down or I’ll clear every last one of you from my court.”
Cole watched the scene from the stand, his hands clasping the ledge before him as if the room itself might start spinning.
“The jury deserves an answer if they are to take this witness seriously,” the lawyer said. He approached the judge’s bench, his hands raised and his shoulders up by his neck.
The judge pointed the gavel at him. “I’ll allow you to proceed, but do so carefully.”
“Your honor—” Cole’s lawyer began.
“He may establish the witness’ reliability as long as he does not ask the boy to indict himself.”
The lawyer in the black suit grinned.
“Proceed,” the judge said.
The male lawyer cleared his throat. He walked up to the side of Cole’s witness box and rested his elbows on its ledge. He leaned toward Cole’s microphone and looked out over the audience and the jury box.
“Please tell us,” the lawyer said, his voice slow and amplified by the microphone. “Tell us why we should trust you, when you admitted to the cops that you killed this other boy, this Marco.”
“Objection, your Honor!”
The gavel rang out like a gunshot.
“Why did you kill him?” the lawyer shouted into the mic.
Another gunshot, the round gavel block leaping up like a spent cartridge.
“Order!”
Hundreds of simultaneous gasps seemed to suck the air from the room.
“Order!”
Another crack of wood. Grumblings turned to shouts.
“Order in this court!”
The only people sitting still were Father Picoult, his arms crossed over his chest, and poor Cole, his memory tumbling with awful answers to the question. To that question, and questions he was thankful nobody knew to ask—
9 · The Barrio · Two Weeks After the Blast
“Do you wanna do burritos?”
Joanna tugged Cole toward one of the open stalls lining the busy marketplace. A group of men stood by the ordering window eating wraps the size of soda cans.
“I don’t eat there,” Cole said, shaking his head.
Joanna looked from the large menu above the ordering window to Cole. “Why?”
“The owner’s name is Mendonça,” Cole said.
Joanna pointed to the man behind the counter with the stained white smock and cook’s hat. “That’s your father?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” Cole said. “I never knew my dad. My policy is to not do business with anyone named Mendonça, just to be sure.”
Joanna seemed deflated, then confused. “But that’s gotta be like, the second most common surname in the barrio.”
Cole shrugged. “There’s lots of places I don’t go.”
“So you really don’t know who he is? What about your mom? Or any siblings?”
“Jeez,” Cole said.
“I’m sorry.” Joanna stepped under the cover of an awning pasted with Chinese symbols. She stuck her head in the ordering window, then turned, smiling. “Definitely not a Mendonça,” she said. “Is Chinese okay?”
“Sure.” Cole raised his hands. “As long as you’re paying.”
“I told you I was.” She winked at him and smiled. Cole let her order for them both while he watched the busy street, everyone going about their business as if the Miracle two weeks ago hadn’t happened. Or maybe, the bustle and energy of the barrio had increased from the weeks before. It wasn’t as if nothing had happened to the barrio, but something… wonderful.
“Let’s sit over there.”
Cole took a carton of noodles with a pair of chopsticks sticking out the top from Joanna. She sat on one side of a rickety table and Cole quickly sat down on the other to balance her out. Joanna extracted her chopsticks, but didn’t dig into her noodles. She held them in the crook of her hand, her delicate fingers cradling them, the tips opening and closing like a butterfly’s wings. Cole shoved a mouthful of noodles in his mouth and watched her. The smile on Joanna’s face filled him with a warmth he thought he understood, but a dread he couldn’t quite place.