“Jacob! Oh, God. Thank God.”
Both of us were shaking. I put my arms around her, running my hands over her body to make sure she was all there.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“Yes. Are you?”
My ears hurt and my lungs ached and my back stung where I’d been pelted by debris, but the pain in my stomach was gone. The moment the blast went off, it was as if someone had flipped a switch inside me, and just like that, the Feeling had vanished.
The hollows had been vaporized.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”
Aside from scrapes and cuts, so were the rest of us. We staggered together in a cluster and compared injuries. All were minor. “It’s some kind of miracle,” Emma said, shaking her head in disbelief.
It seemed even more so when we realized that everywhere around us were nails and bits of concrete and knifelike splinters of wood, many of them driven inches into the ground by the blast.
Enoch wobbled to a car parked nearby, its windows smashed, its frame so pocked with shrapnel that it looked like it had been sprayed by a machine gun. “We should be dead,” he marveled, poking his finger into one of the holes. “Why aren’t we full of holes?”
Hugh said, “Your shirt, mate,” then went to Enoch and plucked a crumpled nail from the back of his grit-encrusted sweater.
“And yours,” said Enoch, pulling a jagged spike of metal from
Hugh’s.
Then we all checked our sweaters. Embedded in each were long shards of glass and pieces of metal that should have passed right through our bodies—but hadn’t. Our itchy, ill-fitting, peculiar sweaters weren’t fireproof or waterproof, as the emu-raffe had guessed. They were bulletproof. And they had saved our lives.
“I never dreamed I’d owe my life to such an appalling article of clothing,” said Horace, testing the sweater’s wool between his fingers. “I wonder if I could make a tuxedo jacket out of it instead.”
Then Melina appeared, pigeon on her shoulder, blind brothers at her side. With their sonarlike senses, the brothers had discovered a low wall of reinforced concrete—it had sounded hard—and pulled Melina behind it just as the bomb exploded. That left only the two normal girls unaccounted for. But as the dust settled and their house came into view—or what was left of it—any hope of finding them alive seemed to fade. The upper floor had collapsed, pancaking down onto the lower. What remained was a skeletal wreck of exposed beams and smoking rubble.
Bronwyn took off running toward it anyway, shouting the sisters’ names. Numbly, I watched her go.
“We could’ve helped them and we didn’t,” Emma said miserably. “We left them to die.”
“It wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference,” Millard said. “Their deaths had been written into history. Even if we’d saved their lives today, something else would’ve taken them tomorrow. Another bomb. A bus crash. They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere.”
“Which is why you can’t go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening,” said Enoch. “History heals itself. Isn’t that interesting?”
“No,” Emma snapped, “and you’re a heartless bastard for talking about killing babies at a time like this. Or ever.”
“Baby Hitler,” said Enoch. “And talking loop theory is better than going into pointless hysterics.” He was looking at Bronwyn, who was climbing the rubble, digging in the wreckage, flinging debris this way and that.
She turned and waved her arms at us. “Over here!” she cried.
Enoch shook his head. “Someone please retrieve her. We’ve got an ymbryne to find.”
“Over here!” Bronwyn shouted, louder this time. “I can hear one of them!”
Emma looked at me. “Wait. What did she say?”
And then we were all running to meet her.
* * *
We found the little girl beneath a slab of broken ceiling. It had fallen across the bathtub, which was wrecked but had not entirely collapsed. Cowering inside was Esme—wet, filthy, and traumatized—but alive. The tub had protected her, just like her sister promised it would.
Bronwyn lifted the slab enough for Emma to reach in and pull Esme out. She clung to Emma, trembling and weeping. “Where’s my sister?” she said. “Where’s Sam?”
“Hush, baby, hush,” Emma said, rocking her back and forth.
“We’re going to get you to a hospital. Sam will be along later.” That was a lie, of course, and I could see Emma’s heart breaking as she told it. That we had survived and the little girl had also were two miracles in one night. To expect a third seemed greedy.
But then a third miracle did happen, or something like one: her sister answered.
“I’m here, Esme!” came a voice from above.
“Sam!” the little girl shouted, and we all looked up.
Sam was dangling from a wooden beam in the rafters. The beam was broken and hung down at a forty-five-degree angle. Sam was near the low end, but still too high for any of us to reach.
“Let go!” Emma said. “We’ll catch you!”
“I can’t!”
Then I looked more closely and saw why she couldn’t, and I nearly fainted.
Sam’s arms and legs were dangling free. She wasn’t hanging onto the beam, but from it. She’d been impaled through the center of her body. And yet her eyes were open, and she was blinking alertly in our direction.
“I appear to be stuck,” she said calmly.
I was sure Sam would die at any moment. She was in shock, so she felt no pain, but pretty soon the adrenaline pumping through her system would dissipate, and she’d fade, and be gone.
“Someone get my sister down!” Esme cried.
Bronwyn went after her. She climbed a crumbling staircase to the ruined ceiling, then reached out to grab onto the beam. She pulled and pulled, and with her great strength was able to angle the beam downward until the broken end was nearly touching the rubble below. This allowed Enoch and Hugh to reach Sam’s dangling legs and, very gently, slide her forward until she came free with a soft ploop! and landed on her feet.
Sam regarded the hole in her chest dully. It was nearly six inches in diameter and perfectly round, like the beam she’d been impaled on, and yet it didn’t seem to concern her much.
Esme broke away from Emma and ran to her sister. “Sam!” she cried, throwing her arms around the injured girl’s waist. “Thank Heaven you’re all right!”