Laura put an arm around her and waited.
“… The fire leaped off Tammy—whoosh up the wall, her bed was on fire, and fire was spreading across the floor, the rug was burning …”
Laura remembered how Tammy had sung with them on Christmas and had thereafter been calmer day by day, as if gradually finding inner peace. Now it was obvious that the peace she’d found had been based on the determination to end her torment.
“Tammy’s bed was nearest the door, the door was on fire, so I broke the window over my bed. I called to Ruth, she … s-she said she was coming, there was smoke, I couldn’t see, then Heather Doming, who was bunking in your old bed, she came to the window, so I helped her get out, and the smoke was sucked out of the window, so the room cleared a little, which was when I saw Ruth was trying to throw her own blanket over Tammy to s-smother the flames, but that blanket had caught f-fire, too, and I saw Ruth . . . Ruth . . . Ruth on fire . . .”
Outside, the last purple light melted into darkness.
The shadows in the corners of the room deepened.
The lingering burnt odor seemed to grow stronger.
“… and I would’ve gone to her, I would’ve gone, but just then the f-fire exploded, it was everywhere in the room, and the smoke was black and so thick, and I couldn’t see Ruth any more or anything . . . then I heard sirens, loud and close, sirens, so I tried to tell myself they’d get there in time to help Ruth, which was a 1-1-lie, a lie I told myself and wanted to believe, and … I left her there, Shane. Oh, God, I went out the window and left Ruthie on f-f-fire, burning …”
“You couldn’t do anything else,” Laura assured her.
“I left Ruthie burning.”
“There was nothing you could do.”
“I left Ruthie.”
“There was no point in you dying too.”
“I left Ruthie burning.”
In May, after her thirteenth birthday, Thelma was transferred to Caswell and assigned to a room with Laura. The social workers agreed to that arrangement because Thelma was suffering from depression and was not responding to therapy. Maybe she would find the succor she needed in her friendship with Laura.
For months Laura despaired of reversing Thelma’s decline. At night Thelma was plagued by dreams, and by day she stewed in self-recrimination. Eventually, time healed her, though her wounds never entirely closed. Her sense of humor gradually returned, and her wit became as sharp as ever, but there was a new melancholy in her.
They shared a room at Caswell Hall for five years, until they left the custody of the state and embarked on lives under no one’s control but their own. They shared many laughs during those years. Life was good again but never the same as it had been before the fire.
In the main lab of the institute, the dominant object was the gate through which one could step into other ages. It was a huge, barrel-shaped device, twelve feet long and eight feet in diameter, of highly polished steel on the outside, lined with polished copper on the inside. It rested on copper blocks that held it eighteen inches off the floor. Thick electrical cables trailed from it, and within the barrel strange currents made the air shimmer as if it were water.
Kokoschka returned through time to the gate, materializing inside that enormous cylinder. He had made several trips that day, shadowing Stefan in far times and places, and at last he had learned why the traitor was obsessed with reshaping the life of Laura Shane. He hurried to the mouth of the gate and stepped down onto the lab floor, where two scientists and three of his own men were waiting for him.
“The girl has nothing to do with the bastard’s plots against the government, nothing to do with his attempts to destroy the time-travel project,” Kokoschka said. “She’s an entirely separate matter, just a personal crusade of his.”
“So now we know everything he’s done and why,” said one of the scientists, “and you can eliminate him.”