The hose was dripping on the mop station where Gabriel had showered Arius. The twenty-two-year-old walked over to it quickly and tried the faucet knob.
“It always drips,” Rosa announced behind him. Arms drawn across her chest, she glanced over the washer and dryer.
“Oh.” Gabriel stepped away from the mop station.
“There are people searching for your friend,” Rosa spoke up grimly. She was giving him a steady look, and that stare met Gabriel straight in the eyes. “I’m sure you know, as they have put papers everywhere.”
Gabriel’s jaw slipped a little. A small thrill of adrenaline reached his heart, and he watched Rosa’s expression cautiously. She knew. Then what…did that mean, exactly?
“They came by my shop in the morning, asking if I had seen a fine-faced Korean boy with a tattoo on his neck.” She raised a finger and lightly touched the side of her neck demonstratively.
“They…They stopped by?” Gabriel’s voice was deadpan, his heart quietly racing.
“They will not stop until they find him.” Her lips pressed into a tight line for a moment. “Anyone who escapes their lab will be relentlessly hunted.”
There it was again, mention of the lab. It was the tattoo that had tipped off the police officer. It was, perhaps, the tattoo again that triggered the same assumption from Rosa. That strange, numerical tattoo that Arius had had all his life and no one could explain. But Arius had not come from a lab. He had never had anything to do with the large, secretive research portion of Arouras. Had he…? “I—I know they’re determined—” Gabriel began falteringly, but Rosa raised her hand.
“Get out of the city. Get as far away from here as you can. You cannot stay another day. Do you understand?”
Gabriel nodded stiffly. Then, the desperate question breaking helplessly from his lips, “The—The lab…I don’t understand…What is it, exactly? Arouras…specializes in rare diseases, they—they study them. The research section—”
“These are not ordinary diseases,” Rosa spoke in a hushed voice. Her composure became tense. A foreboding feeling settled in the air. “The people in the lab are not normal.”
There it was again: that word. “Normal.” Like it bore a significant weight. Like to not comply with this “normal” was to be hardly human at all. “I see,” was all Gabriel responded. This woman, the man at the grocery store, even Manny as well, perhaps—they were all strange. There was a tone in the way they spoke, a feeling contained in the words they chose. Like sailors watching a storm crawl up on the horizon. Like they saw the danger from afar but could only stand and watch as it closed in. They were superstitious, maybe. This was not Cincinnati.
“Get out of the city,” Rosa repeated before turning away. “You two may stay here for the night. But know that there is no cash kept in the register overnight, and I take all the valuable jewelry pieces with me when I close.” She gave Gabriel a warning glare. “If you steal from me, I will tell Arouras you were here.”
Arius had lips almost in the shape of a heart.
Absently wondering why he was just now noticing, Gabriel finished carefully coating the cut on Arius’s lip with an antibacterial gel Manny had provided for the specific purpose. All while Gabriel gently smoothed the protective gel over the oozing injury, Arius had been leaning away as if Gabriel held a dissection knife. Finally finished, the older boy released his firm grip on Arius’s chin. “Your lips are heart-shaped,” he murmured to the unwilling patient.
Arius immediately put a safe distance between them, and his face drew into a wary frown. “What?”
Gabriel blinked, suddenly unsure why he had said that. There was a little dried blood on the underside of Arius’s lip that he wanted to wipe off. But taking a breath and deciding not to, he turned away. “They just are,” he muttered.
Arius’s eyes narrowed. Those heart-shaped lips shifted slightly, perhaps considering a response. But Arius remained silent.
“Well, you should get some sleep,” Gabriel told him mildly. “We have a bus to catch tomorrow.”
Gabriel and Arius had been given three more things before Manny and his aunt left the thrift shop for the night. The first was exact change to catch a bus leaving Tulippi at 6 A.M. The second was a small pile of stainless-steel jewelry which Manny had explained away with, “Just in case any of his piercings are fresh. So they don’t close and trap an infection in them.” And the fourth was a final piece of advice from Rosa: “Do not contact anyone Arouras may know about. The first thing they will do is monitor your friends and family.”
She’s paranoid and a little crazy, Gabriel found himself musing as he watched Arius settle into the blanket Manny had provided. He wasn’t sure what Rosa intended him to do with a bus fare if not to use it to go home to Cincinnati.
“All lips are heart-shaped.” Arius’s voice rose unexpectedly out of the dim, quiet atmosphere. His eyes were already closed, as if to signal to Gabriel that he did not care for a rebuttal.
All lips. Unsure why, Gabriel found himself certain that Arius was thinking of one particular pair of lips. Joshua Mickelson’s, from Arius’s eleventh grade.
Feeling a mixture of anger and envy crawl up his back like it walked on spider feet, Gabriel switched off the light and lay down on the floor.
“Gabriel?” Arius’s voice came again in the darkness.
Gabriel lifted his arm across his face. “Yeah.”
“We’re going to find them, right?”
Gabriel’s arm shifted away from his eyes, and he blinked up at the darkened ceiling. It sent a small pang through his side, the way he immediately knew who Arius was talking about. The way they had probably both been shoving aside that question, pushing it to the back of their minds. “We’re going back to Cincinnati tomorrow.” And that was the best he could offer.
Rain cast meandering shadows across the wall, silhouetted against the yellow light of the street outside. Gabriel turned onto his side and slipped his arm under his head. In the dim glow from the window, he could see Arius.
He was strangely beautiful, that boy. That cute, flawless face of his. Those perfect dark eyebrows, riveting black eyelashes. His soft lips, so gentle in appearance. His illicitly pierced ears. That stud in his nostril. The curve of his neck. Soft texture of his skin. The delicate shape of that beautiful place where his collarbones met. How his hair slipped over his forehead and trailed across his eyes, crawled over his cheekbone almost to his jawline.
But when Gabriel’s eyes settled on the shadow of the numeral, “21” on the side of Arius’s neck, warm contemplation of the boy’s resting face faded from his mind. Was the bruising on Arius’s abdomen the result of his disease going untreated for barely thirty-six hours? The nightmarish quality of such a possibility made Gabriel immediately turn to denial. They needed to find their family. Dr. Lauren Aeirsah had always taken care of Arius. She would know how to fix this.
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