Mara's fifth case died at Cut Bridge on a Wednesday, at ten past six in the evening.
She saw him from the top of the station stairs. The platform was packed with people going home, and he stood on the far side, across two sets of tracks, a man in a gray suit reading his phone.
[00:00:58]
The only way across was the crossing by the signal box, down through the crowd. She went.
"Excuse me. Sorry. Excuse me..."
People didn't move for sorry. A woman had stopped dead at the bottom of the stairs to fold a stroller, and everyone bunched up behind her. Mara squeezed past the wheels and ran straight into the ticket line, which stretched right across the platform.
[00:00:31]
"Sir! You in the suit!"
A tram announcement rolled over the top of her. He didn't look up.
[00:00:12]
She reached the front of the crowd just as a tram slid in between them, long and blue, its windows full of faces. The man was gone behind it, and so was his number. She counted the rest in her head. Eleven. Ten...
When the tram pulled out, a ring of people had opened on the far platform around a man in a gray suit lying on his side. His phone lay a meter from his hand. Somebody was already kneeling. There was no number above him at all.
She couldn't get to him. That was all she could write about him.
Case four, two days before, had been a boy outside the faculty. She'd held his bike by the saddle and talked nonsense about his brakes until a bus went by. Six and seven were alive, and she'd barely done anything: she asked a woman to wait for a tram with her, and warned a lifeguard at Theo's pool about the kid in lane three.
By the next Saturday, that made seven cases. Three dead and four alive. At the top of every page she wrote NOT ENOUGH DATA, and she went looking for a pattern anyway.
***
On Saturday, Mara took Theo to the bakery she said had proper bread.
It was a narrow place on a steep street, with flour on the floor tiles. They sat at a little table against the back wall. Theo held his sandwich up and turned it over like it had insulted his family.
"This isn't bread," he said. "This is a punishment shaped like bread."
She glanced up, smiling.
There it was, white numbers in the air over her brother's head.
[00:03:41]
For a second, it meant nothing at all. She'd seen seven of these, one of them three days ago at Cut Bridge. She sat there with half a smile on her face, reading it like a price tag.
Her whole body went cold, and she stood up.
"We're leaving."
"What? I haven't even..."
"Now. Theo. Now!"
Her chair fell over behind her. Whatever was on her face got him up.
She had one idea, and it was to get him out.
***
Outside, the rain was coming down hard, and the number showed over Theo's head in every wet window.
[00:03:12]
She did what she did on a building site. She read the street.
It ran steeply downhill. Across the road stood a building wrapped in scaffolding, its plastic sheets snapping in the wind. Thirty meters down was a crosswalk. Cars were parked along their side, with gaps between them.
Uphill, a delivery truck sat at the curb with its engine running. The driver was half out of the cab, one boot on the step, shouting into his phone.
'Engine on. Driver not in the seat. On a hill.'
'Too much. On a site I'd walk this for an hour. I've got three minutes!'
Overhead, metal rattled on metal.
Mara pulled him off the curb before she even looked up. Two steps into the road, she saw the traffic and dragged him back.
A man on the scaffolding shouted down. "It's all tied off, love! It's only the wind!"
[00:02:46]
She took them downhill, fast. Behind them, the truck's brakes let out a long hiss, and she spun around. It hadn't moved.
"Mara. You're hurting my arm. What's wrong?"
She'd dug her fingers in without knowing it. She made them open.
"Nothing."
"That's a lie."
"I know it is."
At the crosswalk, the red figure was lit.
[00:01:53]
A paper boat was spinning down the gutter on their side, riding the rainwater along the curb. Theo stepped toward it to watch it go.
Mara hauled him back so hard he stumbled.
"Seriously? It's a boat!"
All the rainwater ran along their curb, because the whole street tipped that way.
The figure turned green. People stepped out. Mara didn't.
The number didn't even slow down.
[00:01:08]
The scaffolding. The truck. A bus. A man on an electric bike, weaving between lanes. Theo's left shoelace, untied...
'I'm checking a shoelace. A shoelace! Once I start, everything on this street can kill him.'
"Mara. You're scaring me."
She stopped and really saw him, instead of the air above his head: twelve years old, hair stuck to his forehead, trying hard to look annoyed because being scared in the street would be embarrassing.
[00:00:52]
A hospital ceiling came into her head, white with a stain in one corner, and her own voice at eleven, asking where her mother was.
And Mara saw her whole mistake at once.
He'd been indoors, at a table, with a wall behind him, and she'd dragged him out past every moving thing on the hill.
'Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Go back. Go back!'
She turned them around, uphill, toward the bakery. Thirty meters.
A horn went off. A second horn joined it, and this one didn't stop.
The truck was moving.
Nobody was driving it. The driver had been twisted around to shout, and under him the truck had started to roll. He grabbed at the door, and the door swung him off his feet and dropped him in the road.
People ran. Theo froze and stared at the truck coming at him.
A truck with nobody steering would go where the water went. It was already drifting toward their curb, along the boat's line. Running uphill meant running into it. The only things heavy enough to stop it were the parked cars.
Two of them, a step behind her, with a gap between them the width of a person. The truck would have to go through a car to get to them.
Mara grabbed for his coat. He slipped and went down on one knee, and what she ended up holding was his hood.
So she dragged him by the hood, backward, toward the gap. Her shoes slid on the wet stone. Next to her face was a parked car, and in its window...
[00:00:09]
She felt for the curb with her heel, found it, and threw them both down over it, sideways, into the gap between the two parked cars.
The truck went past with a scream of metal. It ripped the side mirror off the car by her head.
Mara lay on top of her brother with her arms over his head and her eyes shut. When she opened them, a shop window showed the two of them in a heap on the wet stones.
There was nothing above Theo's head at all.
"Mara. I can't breathe."
She rolled off him. He sat up with grit down one side of his face and his pants torn at the knee.
"What the hell was that?"
Mara started laughing. It turned into crying, and back into laughing, because her crying clearly scared him more than the truck had.
She grabbed him and held on. He let her, for about four seconds.
"People are staring," he said, into her shoulder.
"I don't care."
"I do."
***
Theo told Dad at dinner. He did the truck with his hands.
Dad's face went gray, the color Mara had seen only once before, ten years ago. He put his hand on top of Theo's head.
"You were lucky," he said.
"We weren't lucky," Theo said. "She knew. She made us leave before anything happened. And she picked the gap, Dad. She didn't fall in it."
"I didn't like the scaffolding," Mara said. "It was loose."
Dad was an engineer too. He knew that wasn't the whole answer, but he let it go.
Theo was still watching her. She stood up and cleared the plates.
'He won't drop it. What do I tell him when he asks again?'
***
Later, Mara sat on her bedroom floor with the notebook on her knee. Rain ticked on the window.
CASE 08. Theo. Saturday. Seen directly at 00:03:41. Cause: delivery truck, parking brake, driver out of cab. Intervention: I moved him. I moved him four times. Outcome: alive.
Her hand shook on the last word, so she wrote it again.
Under that, she wrote: It can be beaten.
One more line went under it, pressed hard enough to dent the page beneath.
I will not lose him too.
She turned to the back of the book and ruled the last page into seven columns. A day at the top of each. The hours down the side.
Starting from Monday, she began to fill in where Theo would be.