Till Human Voices Wake Us by Rebecca Roque

Author:Rebecca Roque [Roque, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

I don’t know where the tears come from, or who they’re for, but they don’t want to stop. A mother with a face of starlight and smoke, who loved me enough to throw me out a window but not enough to challenge her madman husband or her suffocating faith and give her children a chance at a normal life? My sisters, ash outlines on the floor of a bedroom in which not a single charred toy or doll was found?

Myself?

Dad’s shirt is damp when I finally leave the comfortable space he’s made for me between his shoulder and his beefy chest.

“¿Estás bien, mija?”

I nod, shifting away from him. Putting distance between us because I’m afraid if I can still feel the warmth of him, still smell his foresty Dad smell, I’ll chicken out and the questions still festering in my heart will remain unasked.

“Yeah.” I wipe my eyes, careful to use my left hand so as not to call attention to the Ace wrap on my other wrist. Ms. Fletcher’s mala rattles gently, the prayer beads I’ve worn every day since she gave them to me. I could use some serenity right now, but it’s a futile thought, because here I sit in my glass house of secrets, about to throw one hell of a stone.

“It was a horrible thing that happened, Silencia. One of the worst I’ve ever seen. For you to even survive, to be ours and to thrive as you have, is a miracle. Nothing less.”

I try to smile for him, but the truth is so much worse than I’d imagined, and my face has no filter. I choose my words carefully. “Dad, there’s something else I want to ask you about.”

“What is it?”

“Amy Cheung.”

Crack, goes the glass, but it doesn’t shatter as his expression slips from concerned to neutral. “Who?”

“Jordan Conway,” I say. “Rohit Shah.”

Crack.

Crack.

“Should I know these people?”

“They’re all kids that went missing. Kids that later died in fires you investigated.”

Dad’s face tightens. “I’ve been with the fire department for almost twenty years, Silencia. I’ve investigated a lot of fires. People got caught in too many of them. What are you getting at?”

“There are more. Mauricio Benitez. Adeline Wong. Teresa Schmidt.”

Dad is shaking his head. “What are you asking me, Silencia?”

“Kids go missing in Summerset more than they do other places. And things burn down in Summerset more than they do other places—a lot more. But nobody talks about it. And some of those kids, kind of a lot of them, showed up dead in fires you investigated. What did you find out in those investigations, Dad? What happened to them?”

Dad’s eyes narrow. “They were probably drug addicts, Silencia. You probably don’t remember a time before bonedust hit the streets, but I do, and this town was turned inside out overnight. We were finding bodies in the streets, in school bathrooms, in movie theaters. The places they were living weren’t safe to begin with, and they were either cooking drugs or falling asleep while smoking

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