Chapter 2

Hanah's POV

Countdown: fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds.

The voice didn't come from the room. It came from inside my head.

The coffee table was an arm's length away, and the phone on it was a four-year-old model with a crack in one corner of the screen, the only thing in that room I could have reached without having to decide anything. I grabbed it.

Ding — one phone detected. Original purchase price: four hundred ninety-nine dollars. Reward: three cubic meters.

Something unfolded inside my head, empty, three meters cubic, quiet the way held breath is quiet.

The phone disappeared out of my hand between one thought and the next; I thought the word phone and it was back in my palm, still warm from my own grip, still cracked in the same corner.

My hands shook for two seconds, because the rule was already clear to me: it doesn't look at what a thing is worth today, only at what it cost when it was bought, and wear doesn't count, age doesn't count, prying it off and carrying it away doesn't count either.

This hour I wasn't clearing out a home. I was eating one.

The first ten minutes were pure noise, a long string of prices I hadn't asked for flooding into my head.

Gold jewelry, my mother's, fifty-eight thousand dollars, fifty-eight cubic meters — I didn't let that chain sit in my palm long enough to tell if it was yellow gold or white.

Drinking glass, thirty-nine. Wall calendar, ten.

The small desk by the window, three hundred sixty-nine dollars, four cubic meters — my mother bought it for me to do my homework on.

The solid oak dining set, table and four chairs, twenty-five thousand dollars, twenty-five cubic meters; that set had been delivered on a truck the year I turned seven, and one breath later it was gone.

Trash can, fifteen.

From there I stopped picking and started clearing.

Shoes, hats, clothes, pots and pans, paper and pens and cups, storage jars, the photo album, the nail clippers — anything with weight on it and a price on it went in.

Tables, chairs, both beds, the dressers, the big cabinet by the entry, one after another, walking into nothing in front of my eyes.

Ten minutes, maybe twelve, and my mother's home had nothing left in it but the things I couldn't lift.

I moved on to the kitchen counter, where the bag of apples Linda's family had brought that morning was still sitting.

Ding — five pounds of rotten apples detected. Original purchase price: two dollars and fifty cents.

Two-fifty. Fifty cents a pound. For one bag of that, they'd told a living room full of people it was imported, with the same mouths that were open for a three-million-dollar condo.

I spat on the floor.I was about to tear out from under my own feet, and then I took the apples anyway; a mosquito is still meat, and meat is cubic meters, and that wasn't worth the anger.

With the movable things cleared out, the room looked like the place had been repossessed, so I went after the house itself.

Ding — one toilet detected. Original purchase price: one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars.

I got both hands under the base and pulled, and the wax ring let go with a wet sound and the whole unit came off the flange, bowl and seat and tank together. I stood there with the pipe wrench in my hand and my breath coming a little rough.

In the life before this one I'd carried a full fuel can in each hand for two miles and taken a truck bumper off with a pry bar.

This body is too weak. Looks like I'll need to train hard for the time ahead.

Dresser, $699. Range hood, $2,599. Stove, $489. Security door, $1,589.

I stripped the door frame and bolts, unscrewing them one by one.

That building wouldn't leave a single screw for anyone.

Glass windows, $400 each, pried off the tracks and stacked in the empty lot.

Flooring, $15 per square foot, creaking under the bar.

I was down on my knees under a long tongue of oak with the pry bar braced in my hands. I stopped for half a second. Then I put the bar under the next board and brought up everything that was left in one run, and after that there was no floor left to be sentimental on.

Three seconds on the countdown.

Three seconds, standing inside a shell that had nothing left but walls, and it came to me — the light outside my own door in the hallway, ten watts, still burning because nobody in that building had turned the hall lights off in forty years.

I stepped through the doorway that wasn't there anymore, put a foot up on the stair rail, and twisted the bulb out.

Ding — one ten-watt bulb detected. Original purchase price: five dollars.

Time's up. Total: two hundred eighty-nine cubic meters.

Two hundred eighty-nine cubic meters, one empty condo, fifteen days. "Summer," I said. "We're going."

She came running up the landing, her nails ticking on the terrazzo.

At the corner I heard car doors and a woman laughing.

I should have kept walking to the next cross street, but the east unit on the third floor had no door anymore and no glass in the frames either, and an empty building is a megaphone.

I backed under the awning of the dry cleaner's with one hand on Summer's collar and waited to hear what .

The footsteps came up, three or four of them, five, and Trevor's voice arrived latter , loud and loose, doing a guided tour.

"This is our place — downtown, best school district in the city, over a thousand square feet. Two units to a floor and nobody next door yet, so we use the whole hallway.

Look at the light in here. Best layout in the building, and you're a hundred yards from work. And listen, you can move in today. Furniture and appliances all included, my mom already worked it out with her."

Then nothing. The quiet on the third floor stretched long enough to be a sound of its own.

Then Trevor's fiancée, quick and hard: "Huh! So this is the plan — a bare shell, and my family pays for the renovation. Let me be clear about it. This place doesn't get finished, there's no wedding. And my name goes on the deed — before anything gets torn out or put in, my name goes on the deed."

Up on the third-floor landing somebody was breathing like a kettle coming to a boil.

Martha. She got out her phone to call, and I watched the shape of her through the empty window frame, holding it up, and the phone at my hip buzzed once and I let it ring, and it buzzed again and I put my thumb on the button and shut it off.

She tried a few more times after that. I could tell by the way she was holding it.

They had never meant to leave me a single thing; that part was honest enough — Trevor had told me to my face that morning that he was buying all of it new.

What none of them could work out was how I'd taken the floor, the windows, the door, and the hallway light with me.

I turned Summer toward the next street and didn't look back at the building I grew up in, because there was nothing left inside it worth looking at.

Then we went to a tunnel air-raid shelter in the suburbs.