The Dreamers

50.

As the newspapers will later report, arson is suspected. Matches are found in the basement, the torn pages of books used for kindling. The setter of the fire is never found.

But many of the sleepers survive. Most are carried out in their sleep.

The big news, though, is this: fourteen of them wake up and walk out.

It’s amazing, everyone agrees, miraculous, even. There is a great appetite for the miraculous. Among these survivors is a husband and wife, the Romeo and Juliet of Santa Lora, as several news outlets soon take to calling them in place of their real names: Ben and Annie.

Another survivor is an eleven-year-old girl, who, as the media widely reports, was carried out by her own father, himself only recently recovered, who rushed to the building when he saw the smoke, calling her name until he found her: Libby.

The media pays less attention to the sleepers who do not survive. There are nine of them. The cause of death is smoke inhalation, the gradual dissipation of oxygen from the blood, which, once, was thought to cause unusually vivid dreams.

Among these dead are two nurses, a CDC specialist in infectious disease, and the dean of the College of the Arts and Sciences.

Also on the list is a Santa Lora College freshman from San Diego: Mei Liu, age eighteen.

Her body is found too late by firefighters in a far corner of the smoky reading room of the library, still prone in her cot, curled beneath a blanket, saline still draining into the main vein of her swiftly whitening arm. She slept right through it, her parents are assured. She passed away peacefully, they say, in her sleep.

In the days after the fire, one story is circulated more than any other—people love when a crisis brings out the goodness in others: as smoke filled the library, one student, a college freshman and heir to the Baker & Baker pharmaceutical family, Matthew Baker, rushed inside and saved a baby from the fire. The story is shared again and again, how he grabbed the very youngest of the sick, the one who had the most life left: an infant, nine weeks old, wrapped in blankets, who went on sleeping all the while.

This story stands above the rest, this hero of Santa Lora, as proof of what human beings are capable of—who among us does not love a simple song?