Jolt Jinx's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Jolt came back to the windmill before sunrise. She expected new tags over her work, or a crew already climbing the sails to scrape her off. She had jars ready for both. Instead she found the hill quiet and one small pile of flowers on the grass under the wall. Yellow ones. Tied with brown string. She stopped on the path and did not step closer. A woman stood at the base of the mural. Older. Coat too thin for the hour. She was reading the names out loud, slow, like she was checking a list she had carried a long time. Rosa. Kai. Leo. Her voice was steady on the first two. On Kai it broke in the middle, the way a step breaks when you trust it. Jolt knew that break. She had made that sound once herself, into a bedroll that still smelled like him. Her hand went to the Scream jar at her belt and stayed there without opening it. She did not move. She wanted to run at the woman and grab her sleeve and ask every question at once. Instead she crouched in the weeds and made herself small. The woman touched the painted face. Just the cheek. One finger. "I thought no one remembered," she said. She was not talking to Jolt. She was talking to the wall, or to the boy, or to herself. Then she wiped her eyes with the flat of her hand, tucked the string tighter on the flowers, and walked back down the road the way she came. She did not look up. She did not look for a painter. Across the road, near the ditch, someone else was watching. Jolt saw the flower crown first. Willow sat cross-legged in the grass with her journal open on her knee and her pen still. She had seen the whole thing. She met Jolt's eyes and shook her head once. Do not chase her. Let her go. Jolt let her go. It was the hardest thing she had done since climbing the wall. When the road was empty, she crossed to the mural and picked up the flowers. Yellow petals, already bruised from the walk. She set them back down at the base of Kai's face, straighter this time. Under his name, in the last dry patch of stone, she used her thumb and the last smear of green from her glove to write one word. HERE. Willow came and stood beside her without speaking. Jolt kept her eyes on the paint. "She knew him," Jolt said. "She said his name right." "Then he wasn't nobody," Willow said. "Somebody took a somebody." Jolt nodded. The wall had answered her, finally. Not with the thing that took them. With proof the three had lived, and been loved, outside her crew. That meant other people were looking too. It meant she was not the only one owed a body. She wiped her hand on her thigh and started counting the flowers.