Free Jill Jackson - 04 - Watch the World Burn by Leah Giarratano

a possibility,’ said Scotty, ‘but it’s gotta be unlikely. If she did this to herself, how did she ignite the fire? Why is there no evidence of it?’
    ‘Very strange. You want some breakfast?’ Jill asked, standing, and walking towards the door.
    ‘Yes, I’m starving,’ said Scotty, opening the shower and pulling her in, towel and all.

12
    Saturday, 27 November, 10.12am
    ‘Would you cut it out!’ Troy heard Lucy yell from her bedroom.
    He walked to her doorway. Laughed. A beach ball-sized lump rolled around under a half-tucked sheet on Lucy’s bed.
    ‘It takes me half a day to make my bed,’ she complained.
    ‘I keep my door closed when I’m making mine.’
    ‘Shrek, get out of there, you idiot!’ Lucy tried to push-roll the lump to the edge of the bed. A fat paw swiped from under the sheet and the lump contorted again. Shrek made his happy noise while at war with the sheet monster.
    ‘I’m going for a run, Luce,’ said Troy. ‘I’ll be back around lunchtime. Will you be here?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘Studying?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘I’ll bring back some ham and rolls.’
    ‘Shrek!’
    The pavement on Botany Road was not the most picturesque place to jog, but Troy wasn’t interested in scenery. He had so much shit going through his head that he wouldn’t have noticed if he was running through the Botanical Gardens. He couldn’t sit still while his thoughts were churning. He kept re playing the scene at Incendie. Moving through the restaurant as he always did, watching customers, directing staff to a table when a diner was trying to signal for attention. He’d been right next to Miriam Caine when she screamed, but he’d been facing the view rather than her table. The customers closest to the windows were usually regulars, VIPs or groups, all of whom were worth more money than the customers closest to the centre of the restaurant.
    Miriam Caine. Standing, arms flailing. Face and chest on fire. Troy drove his legs harder, trying to outrun the image. He could still feel her body writhing underneath him as he smothered the flames. For the last two days the sensation had plagued him periodically, usually morphing into Jonno’s body in his lap, Jonno’s warm blood saturating his crotch, his pulverised hand a useless lump impeding his attempts to stop the blood draining from the exit wound in Jonno’s gut.
    Troy’s missing fingers burned and ached as he ran.
    He understood what had happened that day with Jonno. He didn’t like it, he didn’t know why it had to happen that way, he wished it all could have run differently. But it made sense – from start to finish, what had happened was explainable. It could be told as a series of events, spoken as a story, written out.
    But what had happened to the Caine woman at Incendie – that didn’t make a story. There was no introduction, no main body, just a horrible conclusion.
    The video replay about the day Jonno died kicked in, and he knew better by now than to try to stop it. Fucking thing would play, no matter what he did. He and Jonno responding to a mid-morning call about someone talking to himself in Prince Alfred Park. If you got all the poor bastards together who talked to themselves in Prince Alfred Park, he knew there’d have been enough for a good-sized party, especially if all the hallucinated friends and foes were also invited. So the call-out had been standard, and they probably wouldn’t have responded at all, except that the caller had said that the language being used was particularly profane.
    They’d pulled up in a bus zone and a white-faced woman near the kiosk had pointed them towards the toilet block. Troy had wondered ever since that day whether she’d seen the gun – and if she had, why she hadn’t warned them. He saw her face again now – she’d disappeared after the shooting, but he’d never forget her. Why hadn’t they asked her what she’d seen? Why hadn’t they paid more attention to how pale and frightened she was?