Chapter 3

The funeral drains the last of Kira's strength.

As promised, the whole town came out. They don't fit in the one hall, but when they attend the grave they spill across the yard.

It fades out into the woods. Many tombs stand above the ground in tradition. There are no graveyards like this in the city, or Starlight.

Kira wears the dress suit she keeps only for funerals, and she accepts every bow and every word as the last remaining person in her family's line.

Some of the older townspeople tell her stories in whispers. One narrates the time his father and some of his friends broke into the school at night to release fireworks from the back field.

Another excitedly tells her all the tales, the rumors, of a teenage life and love, the kind that reminds Kira that every old person was young once.

She smiles stiffly and pretends like she cares for their stories about a man she hated.

Her night of sleep in the inn was restless and disturbed. Each time that she closed her eyes, the wind howled against the windows, and each time that she opened them it quietened again.

Close to three in the morning, she realized that she had forgotten to take her medicine, and she spilled out of bed, padding barefoot across the cold floor to find her bag.

The last thing she needed was to have another of her strange episodes while there in an unfamiliar place.

Will was asleep in the morning, the first time that Kira stumbled back to their shared apartment.

After waking up in an alley a mile away.

She had walked back to campus with bleeding bare feet. Scratches littered her face.

Will was horrified, sure that his new housemate was participating in some kind of bizarre brand of street-fighting.

Kira laughed weakly that she had problems with sleep-walking. Those problems began soon after she moved to the city of Nexusburg.

If she walked for a mile here, she would end up in the middle of the woods.

They stand all around her, reaching out branches like a reminder that she is far from civilization. Clouds cover the sky.

The graveyard is shadowed by the trees. So many people watch that Kira thinks her father must have once led some kind of hidden celebrity life.

Strangers talk to her like they've known her for years.

And they all stare. They stare and stare. Kira wishes they would at least pretend to hide their intrigue for the sake of some funerary propriety.

The guys that she met yesterday are here. Noel, Chris, Frank and Ezra, and Jayden.

Jayden stands at the front of the group, arms crossed, in a crisp white shirt and black tie, most unlike the clothes he wore to the dining hall.

He looks different with his tattoos and his muscles hidden. Like the rest of them, he watches, eyes on Kira the whole time rather than on the grave, the coffin, as if the dead man isn't the one they're interested in.

Why would they be interested? His father must have left town before most of them were born. Never in his life had Kira felt more unsettled.

"You should say some words," says the director who has taken them through the rights, Mr Griffin.

"Oh – I really don't -" Kira took a step back.

"It isn't customary."

"It's customary here," says Mr Griffin.

"Your father meant a lot to this town. They want to hear his daughter speak."

Kira thinks of the version of her father that must exist in their heads. A noble son, perhaps, who left the town to pursue a new, bright life in the city. One who got out. Their reminiscing reeks of nostalgia, like each of them recalls the person they were before he left and their memory of their youthful self bleeds into the way they remember him.

None of them have to remember him the way Kira does.

She doubts any one of them has to remember the weight of a glass window pane, complete with a lead-pipe, smashed across their face by him in a rage.

The scar threading Kira's hairline doesn't let her forget.

"Well thank you," she says, putting on the voice she has trained for a law court.

Inside, she pushes her real self away. The memories can stay locked away in their box. She can conduct herself the way her audience demands;

She is well-trained.

"Thank you all for coming today. I know that it would have meant a lot to my father. He was -" A good man, she tells herself, just say he was a good man. It's what everyone says when forced to make a eulogy.

No one ever says that the dead person was a cruel person, a thief or fraudster, a monster. They sing praises, no matter the truth about the life now resting between those coffin panels. Kira wouldn't be the first person to have lied at a funeral.

But she couldn't force her mouth to write the words.

"He was always committed to his work." And the bottles he took. "And his – and his family." The lie leaves an unpleasant taste at the back of her mouth, but it seems to be enough for the community, who bow their heads in respect, and Kira crosses her arms across her body as she steps away.

The one assurance that keeps her upright is the fact that she will never have to come back to this place again. She has no intention of ever visiting her father's grave ever again; he can rot for all she cares.

Her mother's ashes are kept outside Starlight where her ashes are kept. She would take her flowers and his love there.

"Are you okay?" asks Noel.

Kira hadn't noticed she drifted in the direction of the group.

"I'm fine."

Every funeral that Kira has ever attended has featured a visible outpouring of grief. Not a tear has fallen here today.

Her own face was stony and blank. Allowing herself to access any emotions puts her at risk of exposing something she shouldn't.

She wasn't glad, wasn't relieved when she found out that her father had died, but she wasn't sad either, she was just numb.

Like everything else in her life, it was happening. Kira stores her experiences in filing cabinets in her mind, a long list of happenings.

"Come back to the dining hall with us," says Noel.

"There will be lots of food."

Jayden takes a step forward, and they all fall silent.

Kira, too, suddenly feels incapable of speech. The world balances on a knife's edge when Jayden is about to speak, like the slightest disturbance will cut the very folds of the surrounding air.

"Forget food, she needs a drink. Come to the bar."

Without even contemplating a refusal, she nods. She puts it down to her own fatigue. She is even immune to the restorative properties of a strong whiskey, though she rarely drinks, cautious of the risks in her genes, she doesn't want to end up like the man in the box.

As if caught up in the same magnetism as the rest of the gang, she falls into step with them behind Jayden, watching the back of his head.

Jayden's hair is thick and wavy, and Kira gets the impression that he cuts it with his own scissors because the lines are choppy and uneven. At the top of his spine, just peeking out past the collar of his shirt, is another tattoo, something geometric and angular that he cannot figure out without seeing the picture in full.

They leave the funeral party behind, and no one questions them.

Kira has the strange feeling that no one here questions Jayden at all.