Free The Invisible by Amelia Kahaney

calm and Viviraxed, but her voice strong, her posture erect. “There’s been another video. Did you see it?”
    Oh god. My stomach recoils and all traces of my heavy sleep dissolve. They know it’s me. “I . . . uh, I saw some of it. I was half-asleep.”
    My mother nods. “Harris, come in here,” she calls out to my father, then stares at me anxiously as she perches lightly on the corner of my bed. She is in full makeup. Her injection sites have healed and the skin of her face is frozen and taut, her body Pilates-perfect, her blazer pressed. She is cloaked in the full Helene Fleet armor. I sit up in bed when my father comes in, balancing two espressos on a little tray.
    “From Lily,” he says, courtly as he bends to present us with the steaming china cups.
    “Thanks.” I take it, grateful for the caffeine.
    “Anthem. We don’t want you to be alarmed or scared. But you need to know that some strange things happened last night,” my mother says, her words breathy and careful as if she’s bracing herself for my reaction.
    I nod, trying my best to look like I don’t know what’s coming.
    “Martha has been killed,” my mother goes on, wincing at the awful words. “They shot her, execution style.”
    “What? That’s . . .” I shake my head, feigning disbelief. “No.”
    “It’s awful, I know. Unthinkable. What Manny and Belinda must be going through, well, it’s . . .” Her voice cracks. She’s been through a dead child. Before I was born, my sister, Regina, drowned in Lake Morass. They never figured out why. My mother squeezes my hand.
    I change the subject. “Where were they?”
    “Who?” My mother looks at me blankly.
    “Manny and Belinda,” I clear my throat, sitting up straighter. “Were they there when it happened?”
    “They were at a conference in West Exurbia, staying in a hotel,” my father cuts in. “And they’ll regret that conference for as long as they live.” My father’s voice cracks when he says this. His eyes are red and puffy, I notice. I’ve never seen him this emotional, not even at our yearly trips to the cemetery to visit Regina’s grave.
    “And the girl who was turning in all those criminals a few months ago? The one they were calling the New Hope? They believe she was involved somehow. All the surveillance at the mayor’s house was erased by the killers somehow. They can’t figure it out. But they have footage of some men running away, what looks like a girl coming later, moving very fast so it’s hard to see her. She was trying to stop it, by the sound of it, and going by what they said to her last night in their . . . what do they call it?”
    “Transmission,” I mutter, my voice husky and raw. “I think they call them transmissions.”
    “It’s awful, what’s happened to Martha,” my father says. “But what they’ve done to the museum shows us how much muscle they actually have.”
    “The art museum?” Have they done something else?
    My father nods. “They’ve . . .” His mouth squeezed into an angry knot, he can’t seem to get the words out.
    “What?”
    “Maybe we’d better just show you,” my mother says. She gets up and moves to my windows, pulling up my blinds. I follow her. When I reach the window and see, I gasp. Several blocks over, we have a perfect aerial view of the museum, and half of it is just . . . gone. Charred to a black crisp. Nothing but the burnt concrete foundations remain, metal rods extending from it like ganglia, like the frozen tentacles of sea anemones. Through a gray haze of smoke and pollution, half the dome sticks out, along with half the plaster wings. The other half—nothing but foundations—crawls with tiny people. Police, I assume.
    My father moves to join me at the window. “There are two museum guards still missing—suspects, I’m sure—but that’s it. Nobody saw a thing until the museum imploded. Think of all the art they destroyed. Irreplaceable.”
    I nod, my chest thrumming so fast