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!”
“I don’t think she is!” Olive said. “I don’t think she is at all!”
But Sam worried only for Esme, not for herself. Once she’d hugged the stuffing out of her, Sam knelt down and held the little girl at arm’s length, scanning for cuts and bruises. “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.
“My ears are ringy. I scraped my knees. And I got some dirt in my eye …”
Then Esme began to tremble and cry, the shock of what had happened overcoming her again. Sam hugged her close, saying, “There, there …”
It made no sense that Sam’s body was functioning in any capacity. Stranger still, her wound wasn’t even bleeding, and there was no gore or little bits of entrails hanging out of it, like I knew to expect from horror movies. Instead, Sam looked like a paper doll that had been attacked with a giant hole-punch.
Though everyone was dying for an explanation, we had elected to give the girls a moment to themselves, and stared in amazement from a respectful distance.
Enoch, however, paid them no such courtesy. “Excuse me,” he said, crowding into their personal space, “but could you please explain how it is that you’re alive?”
“It’s nothing serious,” Sam said. “Although my dress may not survive.”
“Nothing serious?!” said Enoch. “I can see clear through you!”
“It does smart a little,” she admitted, “but it’ll fill in in a day or so. Things like this always do.”
Enoch laughed dementedly. “Things like this?”
“In the name of all that’s peculiar,” Millard said quietly. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“She’s one of us,” I said.
* * *
We had questions. Lots of questions. As Esme’s tears began to fade, we worked up the courage to ask them.
Did Sam realize she was peculiar?
She knew she was different, she said, but had never heard the term peculiar.
Had she ever lived in a loop?
She had not (“A what?”), which meant she was just as old as she appeared to be. Twelve, she said.
Had no ymbryne ever come to find her?
“Someone came once,” she answered. “There were others like me, but to join them I would’ve had to leave Esme behind.”
“Esme can’t … do anything?” I asked.
“I can count backward from one hundred in a duck voice,” Esme volunteered through her sniffles, and then began to demonstrate, quacking: “One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight …”
Before she could get any further, Esme was interrupted by a siren, this one high-pitched and moving fast in our direction. An ambulance careened into the alley and raced toward us, its headlights blacked out so that only pinpricks of light shone through. It skidded to a stop nearby, cut its siren, and a driver leapt out.
“Is anyone hurt?” the driver said, rushing over to us. He wore a rumpled gray uniform and a dented metal hat, and though he was full of energy, his face looked haggard, like he hadn’t slept in days.