“You okay?” I asked.
She pressed the back of her wrist to her nose, laughed once through her throat at her own tears, and nodded. “They’re all here,” she said, and the words had moth wings.
Behind her shoulder, a phone screen glowed. A stranger—business-suit man turned human anchor—looked down at it and frowned. “Hey,” he said to no one in particular. “Someone posted that ‘bikers swarmed a school bus during storm—officials intervened.’”
His face asked a question the room hadn’t earned the right to answer. June didn’t turn; she kept moving kids. Luke heard it and didn’t flinch. Doc put a hot pack on a child’s back and said, “Truth travels slower. It holds longer.”
The radio barked: “Surge now.”
At the bridge, the river lowered its jaw and showed us a new tooth. The floating room had gone on; in its place came a low raft of fence panels and wheelbarrows, benign-looking until it found the angle it liked. It pressed the bus sideways, and the cable gave a warning that had no translation but urgency.
