Summary
THE TRIAL...
Sephy and Minerva talk about going away to school (Minerva is also trying to leave), as well as Sephy’s drinking habit. The day of the trial, Callum can’t stop from yelling out to his dad not to plead guilty. When Ryan pleads “not guilty” on all counts, the onlookers become so rowdy that the judge orders everyone out of the public gallery. Later, Sephy is shocked to receive a subpoena to testify in the trial.
Callum testifies that Jude isn’t in the L.M. The prosecutor, Shaun Pingule, is especially hard on him, asking inflammatory questions and retracting them to color the jury’s opinions (the jury is made of all Crosses). Pingule shows a video, unseen by Adams and the rest of the defense, of Callum pulling Sephy out of the shopping center immediately before the explosion. Callum feels like he’s killed his father, but Adams manages to swing the questioning back around, allowing Callum to testify that he pulled Sephy out of the center because they had planned to meet and he didn’t want to run into Jasmine Hadley, who hates him.
Sephy is questioned by Pingule. He treats her gently, and the judge is very kind to her. She testifies that Callum pulled her from the shopping center because he wanted to show her something, even though Pingule reminds her that she is under oath.
Adams calls Leo Stoll, a Cross, to the stand. He is a retired police officer, and he confirms that on the day of the bombing, he was in the cafe in the shopping center. He personally confirmed with Sephy that Callum was a friend—as a retired officer, he was trained to observe and remember, and he specifically recalls Sephy telling him that Callum was taking her to show him something. Sephy and Callum's testimonies are corroborated. The court erupts in cheers, and Judge Anderson again has to clear the court.
Sephy follows the rest of the trial over the news. She cries when she sees coverage of Callum’s house burned to the ground. Callum struggles to write a letter to Sephy thanking her for paying their legal fees. He’s been having recurring nightmares of being trapped in a coffin. Callum doesn’t hear the verdict the first time it’s read, but the second time, he does.
Analysis
During the trial, Sephy is treated well, and Callum is treated poorly. Pingule is particularly cruel to him, the way he expects all Crosses to be cruel; but Sephy witnesses none of that, and actually finds both Pingule and Judge Anderson to be kind men. Callum's sense of responsibility is much greater in this section (he feels at one point that he personally killed his father in his testimony), but Sephy muses directly on what kind of truth is the truth. She knows that if she tells the jury the facts about what happened, it won't communicate the circumstances and history that make up the entire truth. She ultimately decides to protect Callum—though society tries to pull them apart, their deep bond brings them together again and again.
Though it's glossed over by Sephy watching it on the news, Callum's home is literally destroyed in this section, as his house burns to the ground. Though the opening section of the novel showed that Callum considered his house a "hovel" and was embarrassed to live there, he now has no space of his own, leaving him even more of a "drifter" than he was before. That drifting contributes to Callum choosing to find his purpose in the L.M. His nightmare of being trapped in a cardboard box, which eventually becomes a coffin, communicates his learned feeling of powerlessness.
This section ends on a cliffhanger. Callum hears his father's verdict, but the reader doesn't. The verdict is almost definite, but by ending on a cliffhanger here, Blackman creates hope that Ryan wasn't found guilty, even though everything indicates that he will be. In a novel largely about hope for a better future, ending on a cliffhanger that allows us to hope for a different outcome is an important narrative tool—though disappointment is inevitable, hope is still alive.
