PROLOGUE
Njal
Seven Years Ago…
The judge's mouth is moving, and the words are coming out in the wrong order.
I watch his lips make shapes, and the shapes turn into sound, and the sound travels across the courtroom too slow, like it has to wade through water to reach me.
Not guilty.
He says it once. He says it again. He says it a third time, one for each man, and each time the room makes a noise around me—a breath, a rustle, somewhere behind me a woman crying—and none of it makes me feel any better.
Not guilty.
I turn the words over, and they don't fit. They're the wrong size.
They belong to somebody else, some other man who didn't drive to that warehouse with the thing in his hand, some innocent man who'd feel the floor go soft under him with relief right about now.
I'm not him.
Iknowwhat I did.
I know it the way I know my own name, except my name's been feeling strange in my mouth for months too, so maybe that's not the surest thing to measure against.
But I know the warehouse. I know the dark of it, the smell of it, and the way the first one looked at me right before.
I know it the way you know a song you can't stop hearing, the one that plays under everything, that's been playing under everything since spring.
The jury couldn't know it. That's the difference.
They couldn't find the evidence that would've confirmed I murdered those men, because the gun is at the bottom of the kind of water that doesn't give things back.
Dag stood up in his good suit in this courtroom and saidcircumstantialabout forty times in three days.
Enough that the twelve of them went away, came back, and decided the State couldn't prove what I know in my bones.
So. I’m not guilty.
I should feel something. I keep waiting to feel something.
I check for it the way you pat your pockets for keys, and the pocket's empty, and I'm standing in a courtroom that's gone loud and bright around me, and there's nothing in me but the hum.
The hum that doesn't stop.
The hum that's been climbing for months, high and fine and electric.
It makes the lights too sharp, my own skin too tight, and my thoughts too fast to walk alongside.
Dag's hand is on my shoulder. He's saying my name. "Njal. Njal. Look at me, son."
I look at him. His face won't hold still.
It's not moving—I know it's not actually moving—but it won't hold still for me, the edges of it sliding when I try to fix on them.
"It's done," he says. "You hear me? You're free. You walk out of here a free man."
Free.