I tried to dredge up a memory, a picture of when Joseph left me. The visions were muddy and blurred. Being dead must do that to you. Reviving your brain confused it.

In my dripping-with-mud memory, Joseph said, “What did you do?” with fear and disappointment. His face dissolved in front of me, his hair swirling into a golden haze, and then he was gone. I couldn’t fill in those missing moments because I didn’t exist in them. And if I was somewhere while I was dead, the door to those recollections had been slammed and locked.

I flushed the toilet again for good measure. The stall door banging into my forearm woke me up a little.

These guards were rougher. Much more annoyed at the inconvenience of me than the ones I’d dealt with so far.

One of them leaned his knee against the door and pummeled me with it repeatedly. “Hurry up!” he snapped. “Grant wants you escorted to his compound immediately.” He shoved the door anxiously, until another guard pointed out that I couldn’t get out until he stopped.

“Well, what’s she doing in there anyway? Powdering her pointy nose?” he retorted, to cover his embarrassment.

The other guard just sighed. I touched my finger to my nose, the movement fresh and fast. My senses were heightened, the smell of bleach stronger than before.

Boots retreated and I un-wedged myself from between the toilet bowl and the wall, pulling the velvet curtain, heavy with dried blood, around my shoulders. Reality hit me hard, my naked body shaking like charged bones in a bag. I was alone.

Snake-like, yellow-green eyes searched me up and down as I stood in front of them.

“Let’s go,” the guard said, bringing his arm behind my back and nudging me as if I were a cow heading for the slaughter.

“Can I have some clothes first?” I asked uncertainly, pulling the velvet a little tighter around my slim body. I was drowning in scungy fabric, all its grandeur replaced with leftovers of violence and pain, flaking blood and tears.

They exchanged glances, and then one shook his head almost apologetically.

“We don’t have time.” His bluish eyes were cast down like he really was sorry. I took it as kindness and let myself relax a tiny bit, only to have the other one grab me by the back of my neck and shove me forward.

I pitched into the hall.

“Walk,” he ordered. I wanted to salute him, but I couldn’t give up my grip on my curtain dress.

The hall was now lit up end to end, a corridor of warm light swarming with people scrubbing, vacuuming, and carrying clumps of bloodied fabric. Stretchers were burdened with the bodies of men, their boots sticking out past the loose sheets covering them. I shook my head from side to side like the sad elephant in the zoo. Everyone was alive when I’d died. There was a big part of the puzzle missing. I dragged the twelve-foot-long curtain behind me like a nightmarish train, stepping aside to make way for the dead. My eyes trained on the shoes. No sneakers, no leather shoes, just soldiers boots. It reinforced my feeling that Joseph and Deshi were alive, and they were far away from here.

Someone stepped on the cloth behind me and I snagged, the curtain dropping down my back. I clung to it, trying to gather the fabric up and sweep it around me. I turned to see who was standing on it. Two men were carrying a stretcher behind me and appeared very anxious at being held up. Two pointy, patent red heels stuck up right in my face like sharpened poppies. I expected them to twitch, the body to squeal. My face drained of color. Este was dead.

I stood frozen, the atmosphere of absolute stress curling around me and poking me with sharp fingernails. I knew I should move and was surprised when instead of smacking me with their gun or shoving me again, one of the guards sighed loudly and began removing his jacket. He threw it at my gaping mouth.

“Here!” he said impatiently.

Thick, canvas cotton scratched my face. I grabbed the jacket and put it on as quickly as possible. It went down to my knees.

The guard bundled up the curtain with a look of disgust and plonked it on one of the passing stretchers without even checking to see if he’d put it on a body.

I blinked up at him. “Thank you,” I muttered.

He rolled his eyes. “Just walk.”

I cast my gaze down to the rich and colorful rug, mashed and scuffed from boot prints, and moved forward. My bare legs and feet jutted out like matchsticks.

As we left the chaos of the hall behind, I wondered, What happened while I was dead? Everything was unraveling like a ball of string tied to a bird-in-flight’s leg. A Superior had been murdered! It was unsurprising these people seemed exasperated rather than mournful.

For no reason I could understand, the guards would sporadically shove my shoulder, sending me sprawling forward. It was like violence was just part of their job description, and they had to pepper it in every now and then to earn their titles. I shivered in my loaned jacket and scowled at them. It only seemed to amuse them further. The guard in shirtsleeves seemed to be regretting his choice and, in between shoving me, he kept his arms hugged tightly around his chest.

“Are w-we w-walking the whole way?” I asked through chattering teeth. My voice was so loud, it sounded like I had a megaphone pressed to my lips, another side effect of the healer. Cool air battered my legs, swirling under the loose jacket, and my feet pricked with the sharpness of the gravel.

The snake-like guard’s eyes lowered to me as I jerked and shuddered in the cold. “We’re on lockdown, thanks to you and your friends, so yes, we have to walk,” he sneered.

We marched down Este’s driveway towards two immense, ornate gates. The guards stopped and jumped in unison. Then, one of them laughed.

“She’s not watching us anymore,” he said, knocking the other one’s shoulder lightly. “We don’t have to do all that crap now.” They laughed heartily at the demise of their loopy Superior and undid the padlock to the gate, pushing it open. I expected it to creak, but it opened gracefully.

“Zoo?” the jacket-less guard asked the other.

“Nah. Let’s go around. I can’t handle the stink tonight,” the snake-like guard hissed, his eyes perching over me like I was a bad enough smell.

My eyes followed the disturbed path, the footprints, smudged lightly into the stones. One of those could have been Joseph’s, Deshi’s… I bent down to touch it without thinking and got a boot in the back.

The one in shirtsleeves, his voice calmer, humor hiding somewhere in there, pulled the other guard back. I turned to look in his eyes, the garden lights leaving them steel colored, almost grey.

“Leave her alone,” he said quietly but forcefully. I started to hope maybe they weren’t all bad, that they hadn’t had all the humanity sucked out of them through their Guardian training. But then he laughed and said, “She’s going to suffer plenty once Grant has her!” My heart tumbled into the sharpened ground and was punctured by the small rocks’ tiny teeth.

Snake eyes chuckled. “That’s for sure!”

At least they stopped kicking and shoving me as we made our way towards Grant’s compound.

We arrived at the outer fence of the zoo, ten feet high and grazed with barbed and electrified wire. We followed the fence’s perfect curve, the guards’ boots crunching down on pure white stones the color and feel of giant rock salt, edged in by neatly cut, one-foot-high stone walls. My bare, aching feet made little sound.

The Indian elephant’s sad, lamenting trumpet sailed over the walls. I clasped my hands together and tried to face forward. The hours between Joseph and me lay in front of me like giant planks of wood. A barrier. What had I got myself into?

As we left Este’s quarter, things changed dramatically. A neat line and gate defined the transition from one segment of the pie to the next. A single-bulb lamp hung overhead. The white gravel changed to a brick path, with round halos of light built into the bricks. The gardens changed to spiky grasses and architectural plants, pointless trees with no purpose other than to look imposing. They leaned over the path, their branchy fingers almost touching, forming a low, lit tunnel.