“Marcus and Violet aren’t like that.”
Jenny looked up from under her black hair. “No?”
“They took me in,” I said. “Took you in too. They didn’t have to do that.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “They mean well, I know they do, it’s just… they only go so far. You know? They get right up to the edge and then back off.”
I thought of Marcus’s hand on Violet’s wrist, holding her back. Violet yielding.
“Like with the Krycheks.”
“Jackson told you about that? I’m surprised. It doesn’t exactly paint Mommy and Daddy in the best light. I don’t know. Maybe it’s as far as they can go. Maybe it’s safer to just keep things as they are.”
Jenny secured the bandage with a pin, then put the rest of the gauze away and snapped the med kit closed.
“Well, I think you’re all set. Should heal up in a few days.”
“So no amputation, then.”
“I’ll keep my eye on it.”
I took my hand back, a little sorry to see it leave the cradle of her palm. We sat there, silently, on the edge of her bed. I needed to go find a camp for the night, needed to search for supplies, but I didn’t move. An owl hooted outside. The candlelight flickered.
“How is he?” Jenny asked. “Your dad?”
Her question brought a wave that reared up over me again. My throat constricted and there was a burning in my eyes that I had to fight back. But then Jenny drew closer and laid the flat of her palm against my back. Every curve of it, warm and rough, spread across my ribs and spine. There was maybe an inch between my leg and the calloused plain of her bare foot. A pulse of heat came off her, carrying along with it the scent of pine and spicy earth.
Everything in me calmed. The heat and noise faded away.
“Ever since we got here, I’ve been saying, ‘when he wakes up,’ and ‘when he’s better.’ It’s like I’ve been trying to pretend that Violet didn’t say he might never wake up.”
“Violet can be wrong,” Jenny said. “She’s not perfect. I mean, there used to be, like, tests and instruments and things that told us what was going to happen to us, but not anymore. Right? Now we don’t know much of anything. The future just goes in whatever direction it wants.”
She was right. I thought of the churn of the river tearing through rock and dirt. Who knew where it would go? What it would wipe away? Who it would spare?
“Did you really mean that stuff you said in the note?” I asked. “The stuff about the world spinning?”
“Yeah,” Jenny said. “I did.”
“What do you do about it?”
Jenny stretched across the bed behind me, curling around my back, and dug into a bag on the other side. “What are you doing?”
When Jenny sat up, her hand was closed into a fist. “What I like to do in times like these. When the world’s got you down.”
“What?”
Jenny opened her hand into the candlelight. A pile of fat paper cylinders sat in her palm. There was a twisted white fuse attached to each one.
“If you thought punching people was good,” she said, “wait till you try blowing things up.”
Sitting there in the palm of her hand, the little explosives seemed distant, almost imaginary, but a tingling started through my whole body anyway, like that moment when my bat connected with the ball and I ran the bases.
“What did you have in mind?” I asked.
Jenny’s grin shone all the way to the corners of her lips.
TWENTY
Minutes later I was running through the woods behind Jenny. There was no path I could see, so I had to struggle to keep an eye on her as she ran, slick as a deer, in and out of the pools of moonlight that littered the forest floor.
She knew the woods better than I did and made a game out of staying ahead of me so that I could follow but never quite catch up. It wasn’t until we both had to slow down to scale the Settler’s Landing fence that I got anywhere near her. She dropped down into a crouch just behind a thick stand of trees. When I came up, Jenny put her finger to her lips and motioned for me to get down. Both of us were breathing heavily, pushing out thick plumes of white steam.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
Jenny motioned forward with her chin. “Take a look.”
In the clearing ahead was a house totally unlike all the others in Settler’s Landing. It was enormous, more of a mansion than a house, with towering white walls and columns flanking the front door like marble generals. Two windows in the upper stories glowed with yellow light and filled the yard with a flickering glow.
“Casa de Henry,” Jenny said. “What are we doing here?”
Just then the lights in the upper windows went out. “Come on. We have to go around back.”
Jenny took off deeper into the woods, heading to the rear of the house. As we moved around it, its size became even more overwhelming. The walls stretched back another hundred feet or so.
Behind the house there was a collection of fenced enclosures that looked recently built, homemade from scrap pieces of wood, split logs, and scavenged chicken wire. One held chickens, another pigs, and a third sheep.
“The horses and about twenty cows, mean suckers, are in different enclosures on the other side of the trees, but this’ll do,” Jenny told me.
“Do for what?”
Jenny wasn’t listening. She had started to dig around in her bag. “Take these.” She dropped a handful of the fused cylinders into my hand.
“You want me to blow up the sheep?”
Jenny slapped me on the side of the head. “No! We’re not gonna hurt them.”
“But—”
“Look, the word explosive, when applied to these things, is a little grand. They’re more like firecrackers.”
“Jenny, I don’t know. If we get caught—”
“What? We already tossed ourselves out of town. Right? Look, I swear to you, they’ll never know it’s us. Besides, what we are about to do is incredibly obnoxious but more or less harmless.”
“What are we about to do?”
She smiled a razory smile. “We are going to make sure Will Henry has a really, really crappy night. Now go around to the sheep pen, open the gates, and toss them in. Oh! Matches.”
Jenny shoved a cardboard box of matches in my hand and darted out from behind the tree to a spot between the pig and chicken enclosures. I made my way to the sheep’s pen, one eye always on the house in case a light came on. I ducked down by the gate. Most of the sheep were in a knot at the center of their pen and didn’t even raise their heads as I approached. I slipped the rope loop that held the gate closed up over a post. There was a sharp squeak from the hinge as I opened it that made my heart freeze. One sheep raised its head with mild curiosity but then lowered it again.
I shuffled the bundle of firecrackers in my palm. It was crazy. Utterly crazy. I peeked over the fence. Jenny was poised at the pig pen, firecrackers in hand. I swallowed hard and turned back to the sheep standing placidly in the mud. I saw Will Henry pushing Jenny to the ground. I saw his gold hair and his vicious smile.
I lit the fuse as Jenny struck hers, then tossed my bundle about five feet behind the biggest knot of sheep. One turned back toward the sparking pile of firecrackers.
“Baaaaa.”
The explosions were so much bigger than I thought they’d be — a fast procession of booms, sizzles, and cracks, followed by great showers of sparks, red and green and yellow, shooting up into the sky and exploding again, creating umbrellas of fire that lit up the yard like a new sun.