told me, smiling into my eyes with his whole face, brown eyes and firm mouth and eye-crinkles and all, “have got some guts. Some ticker. I’m meant to be tough. I think I just met my match.”
Stunned silence from the back seat. Oh. I’d forgotten them, and they were the whole point. But now, suddenly, all of this felt completely different. Not like a dramatic almost-tragedy at all. It felt like an adventure. Like a survival, where all you wanted to do was shout with joy and relief.
I twisted in my seat. They were clutching each other, as I’d expected, Fruitful’s arm protective around Obedience, both of them staring at me as if their absent sister actually had become the Whore of Babylon. I told Gray, “And I thought jeans were a rebellion.” Then I said, “Girls, this is Gray. Gray … something. I met him tonight when he pushed my car into the river and me with it, and now he’s helped me rescue you. And I’m not Chastity Worthy anymore. I’m Daisy Nabhitha Kittredge, at your service. Got it on my driving license and all. If my driving license wasn’t at the bottom of the Clutha, that is.”
Gray said in a wondering tone, “Chastity Worthy. You are joking.”
“Yeh, well,” I said, not looking at him, “I didn’t choose it.”
“You can’t change your name, though,” Obedience said. “Your name is revealed to the Prophet by God.”
“No,” I said. “The Prophet—who’s a man, that’s all—makes up the name to remind you of your place. And that isn’t my place anymore. My name is Daisy.”
“Daisy … what, again?” Gray asked.
This was the oddest conversation I’d ever had in my life, except for all the other conversations I’d had with him tonight. I was sitting half-naked in a strange man’s ute with my cap-and-apron-clad sisters in the back, both of them feeling about as out of place as Neanderthals set down in the midst of New York City, talking about names. But names were as good a place to start as any, I reckoned. Names were your identity, so I said, “Daisy Nabhitha Kittredge. Nabhitha’s Indian, like me. Like us. Half of us, anyway. It means ‘fearless.’ That’s why I chose it.”
“Ah,” Gray said. “Well, that works.”
“No,” I said, “because I was terrified tonight. It’s an aspirational name.”
He was grinning again. “Aspirational, eh. Like I said. It works. What about the other two names?”
“Kittredge, because Dorian and I chose it off a list. “Our new family name. It means ‘cauldron of power,’ and the coat of arms is a gold lion on a black shield. Seemed good. Strong.”
Fruitful said, “It sounds like a witch’s name.” Not in the way Obedience would have said it, with fear. With fascination instead.
“Well,” I said, “that’s what I thought. The very last thing from ‘Worthy.’ I’ll be a witch, thank you very much. And ‘Daisy’ is just because I liked it. Daisies are straight, they’re simple, and they’re cheerful and easy. And that was going to be me. That is me.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘easy’ was your defining quality,” Gray said. He stuck out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Daisy Nabhitha Kittredge. Grayson Loto Tamatoa here.”
“Samoan,” I said.
“Samoan,” he agreed gravely. “My mum is, anyway. I didn’t choose any of those names, and Loto, as my mum likes to remind me, doesn’t mean ‘fearless’ or ‘warrior,’ or anything like it. A bit embarrassing, really. As we’re on the subject.”
“Oh, yeh?” I felt much too cheerful for a woman who’d lost too many of her worldly possessions and been shocked by an electric fence all the way into next week. “Let’s hear it.”
He grinned. Ruefully. Absolutely irresistibly. “Heart. It means heart.”
“Oh, dear,” I said, and we both grinned like the fools we were.
“Come on,” he said. “Switch around. I’m driving. I’m the one with the license.”
I slid to the ground as he did the same, and did my best to pull the shirt and jacket down over my naughty bits both back and front as I passed him. I wasn’t very successful. He didn’t exactly look, but he didn’t exactly look away, either. The sky had some streaks of pink in it now, improving his view, and the air was springtime-chilly on my bare legs. When I’d climbed into the passenger seat, after doing my wholly inadequate best with the shirt again, and he’d pulled back onto the road and was driving toward Wanaka with the ghostly forms of foothills and mountains emerging with the dawn, I