“Let us help,” the girl said, trotting to keep up in her heeled sandals. “Father said—”
“A lot of things, probably,” Johnny cut her off, glancing up at a street sign. “Helen talked to him, eh? And he talked to you. ‘Oh, if they need help, do what you can.’ And by a huge coincidence, we were tracked by the y’tan, we needed help.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, more loudly than I had meant.
Sofia glared at me, then caught up to Johnny, panting. “Listen, the Fes chapter—all right, Father said there have been questions about them for a long time now, about their loyalty, because of what the city was built upon. But we’re not like that here.”
“Cool. Especially that Louis didn’t want to tell me about these, uh, questions.”
“Joanna, they were rumours, no one knew for sure, and there would have been... splits in the group, people wouldn’t have liked it.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Johnny finally stopped, out of breath, and turned to the girl. It struck me as deeply weird that they were probably the same age, maybe to within just a few months of each other, and yet Johnny seemed like an adult and Sofia a child. Maybe that said more about me, about the company I kept. “Go home. Don’t get in our way. This warding spell isn’t enough to protect all three of us—especially now that you’ve been casting shit.”
“You called us for help!” Sofia protested, voice breaking.
“Yeah, and then I changed my mind,” Johnny snapped. “Like I told them in Fes.”
“Johnny, wait a minute,” I said. “You did say we needed the help. You said we needed as many people as we could get, and that no one would help. Well, now she’s saying that they will. And it’s kinda ungrateful to—”
“Yeah, thanks but no thanks,” she said. “That kind of help we can do without. Come on.”
You don’t get a vote, is what she was really saying, and I slunk after her as she briskly kept going, Sofia falling behind us in the dark, just the shine of her earrings and sandals fading into the blackness, and then she was gone.
“What will happen now?” I whispered.
“Did we just make an enemy, you mean? I don’t know. But we don’t have time to play nice.”
“Afterwards, though.”
“I’ll fix it if it needs fixing. With any luck I’ll never speak to them again.” She hesitated, and glanced up at me. I stopped too, in the shade of a drooping tree, like looking out of the mouth of a cave, while she dug in her bag for water.
After a minute, I said, “Remember when we first met?”
“Of course.”
“They separated us from the adults. And the adults let it happen because they thought it would be better, that we’d get hurt. Remember that. Remember that they couldn’t do anything, that they did what they were told, that no one tried to be a hero. Not even for us. Their children. Their most precious things. No one even tried. Because that’s not what they do. They just wanted to negotiate, beg, try to ‘appeal’ to the humanity of the people who had locked us in that closet. And that’s the way it always goes. It’s up to us to do something else. I understand what you’re doing now. And what you’re saying by doing it.”
She looked at me appraisingly, and smiled. “Attaboy.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE STOPPED AT a big, nondescript house, white brick and red tile just like its neighbours, with its own rooftop garden—swaying green leaves, black against the indigo sky, with stars visible through the drifting fronds. Calling to me, the stars. A dog whistle, nothing Johnny could hear. I gritted my teeth against the noise. She warned me they would pull. It seemed stronger now, impossibly so: like a string attached to my head, dragging me up, cutting in.
Contamination, I thought again. She carried with her the pure heat that would burn the infection from the world. I carried something else. I was sure of it. The stars said: You are the infection now. Whatever that meant. I wondered that she could not see or sense it. But where had I gotten that idea?
The air smelled of roses and the old, sweet scent of books. There was no sign saying Library; in fact, there were no signs at all, just a locked metal gate leading to a courtyard in front of the house. The house was dark except for small lamps on either side of the big, arched door, gleaming off