Lucy was wondering how long the musicians could keep playing when someone tapped her on the shoulder. Her stomach flipped.
Oh no! She turned, expecting to see Henry’s eager face. It was Aidan.
“Truce?” he said, holding out his hand.
“Sure,” she said, shaking it. He didn’t let go. His fingers tightened their grip on her own. He pulled her to her feet. She looked up into his face. His green eyes glinted.
“You can’t just sit there like a miserable lump.”
“I’m not miserable. I was thinking.”
“Well, think later.” Aidan drew her toward him.
“Oh no, you’re kidding!” She dug her heels in.
“Come on. Come with me!”
“I can’t dance. I failed dancing in ninth grade. My partner couldn’t walk for two weeks afterward.”
“I think I can survive it.”
“I practically hamstrung the poor guy.”
“This isn’t really dancing. This is just moving around with another person. You can pretend we’re sparring. I’m wearing my motorcycle boots,” he added, pointing to his feet.
Lucy hesitated. She could tell that her face was red, but she hoped it was dark enough to disguise the fact.
“Maybe I’ll let you take a swing at me later,” Aidan said.
She relaxed and let him pull her into the crowd.
The guitarist was playing even faster, a galloping tune, a wild jumble of chords, and the violin soared above it, a high, sweet note. Aidan took both her hands in his and whirled her around, swinging her until it seemed her feet left the ground. Then he brought her closer, one hand clasping her own and the other around her waist. She put her hand on his shoulder, lightly, but she could feel the heat of his body, and they were moving together in a line, up one side of the fire and down the other, and her feet stumbled, but it didn’t matter because he was holding her up. Lucy stared at the neck of his sweatshirt, too shy to raise her eyes any higher, conscious of the tickle of her hair against the wet nape of her neck and the sweat sticking her T-shirt to her back, and the drum of his heart. She was out of breath and she couldn’t stop laughing.
They whirled and turned, and people’s faces came out of the shadows, lit by flickering firelight and tinted by red flames. She caught glimpses as she spun by. The masked S’ans at their table painted a surreal picture, like a photograph of a Venetian carnival Lucy remembered seeing once long ago. The kids were hysterical, exaggerated in their every movement, heads thrown back, bursting with the giggles. Lucy closed her eyes, feeling giddy. Aidan bent his head to her ear. She felt his warm breath against her cheek. “Lucy,” he murmured, “you are so—”
The music stilled. It was abrupt and jolting; the last upstroke of bow on violin sounded harsh and grating. Aidan stopped moving. His hands let go. Lucy stood trying to catch her breath, scraping back the curls clinging to her sweaty face, unsteady on her feet now that the earth had stopped spinning.
From the direction of the road, a figure appeared out of the shadows.
Her face fell into the narrow shaft of light thrown by a lantern.
Lucy recognized the sleek black hair and the silver bangles on tanned arms.
It was Del.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BUNNY HUNTING
The tough stalks of grass tickled Lucy’s chin. She shifted, earning herself a glare from Aidan. He put a finger to his lips. She scowled back. I get it! Be silent! But they’d been lying there on the ridge for over an hour watching the clearing, and nothing had moved in all that time. Her neck was cramped from holding her head at an awkward angle, she had to pee, and the ground was hard and still damp from the morning rain. Plus, she was lying on her knife and it dug into her hip bone.
The sun beat down. Del lay between them, head lowered, her long black hair tied back in a thick ponytail. She’d taken off the silver bangles she normally wore five inches deep on both arms. No jangling allowed. Lucy studied Del under the cover of her eyelashes. She looked like she was brooding. Even now, three days after she had appeared out of the darkness, she still seemed shaken up and not really present. She didn’t say much about what had happened, just a few words at the supper meeting called for the day after the dance. She told them that she’d managed to break out of the waiting room the Sweepers had put her in, but she hadn’t been able to provide much detail. The room had been white-walled and stark, and the maze of corridors leading to it were dark and lit only by bare bulbs. A long spiraling stairway rose up the middle of the tower. Del had somehow found a door to the outside, and then, after hours of stumbling around in the pitch-black, she’d been able to orient herself and make her way off the island. She didn’t have any idea what had happened to Leo and the others. She’d been separated from them early on, but she did know that Leo had still been unconscious. The Sweepers had had to drag him from the van. At this point she’d started sobbing, and Grammalie Rose had ended the discussion, folded Del in her arms, and taken her from the square.
Aidan had even tried to ask her privately, hoping she could offer some details about the tower, the hospital, ways on and off the island, but she just shook her head and pressed her lips together. “It was dark. I was scared,” she’d said, rubbing at her wrists. And the next day, when a bunch of them had been put to work in the pouring rain, shoring up the dikes along the canals with bags full of rubble and old masonry, Del had been even quieter. She’d responded to Aidan’s questions and to Henry’s flirtation with silence and the smallest of smiles. Only when she’d glanced at Lucy did something flit across her face. It had almost looked like fear.
Lucy had taken her cues from Aidan, and he was definitely concerned. He could barely take his eyes off Del. Lucy thought back to how he’d dropped her hand during the dance and stepped away abruptly. How stricken his face had been, as if he’d woken up and discovered that the girl he’d been dreaming about was not the girl he was with. She got the sense that there was a history between Aidan and Del, but she couldn’t figure out if it went beyond friendship.
“The dynamic duo,” Henry called them. “Inseparable.” Lucy hadn’t been completely successful in squashing a twinge of jealousy. She wondered again what Aidan had been about to say to her during the dance. “Lucy, you are so—” he’d whispered.
So what? So strange-looking? So awkward? So annoying? Or maybe, so amazing? It was conceivable, but it didn’t seem likely.
And Del hadn’t helped matters, either. She’d been distracted, even less friendly than usual (if that was possible), and full of mean looks. Like early this morning, when they were out picking tomatoes and snap peas for their lunch she’d barely said a word, but she seemed annoyed that they were all together again. Lucy had decided to ignore her and focus on her first hunting experience.
Now something stirred in the large thorny bush in front of her. She raised her bow. Aidan’s bow, actually. A crescent of smooth red oak rubbed with olive oil until it shone. Aidan put up his hand.
Bird, he mouthed, and motioned downward. That’s right. She wasn’t to draw on a bird. They were too hard to hit, many of them were sickly, and they couldn’t afford to lose arrows. Same went for deer if they were lucky enough to spot one. Just the thought of a whole deer made Lucy’s mouth water. She cradled her chin on her arm and watched a column of ants carry tiny white eggs from one hole to another. She stifled a yawn.
When they had first hiked up to the ridge, Aidan had sat beside her on the grass. He’d strung the bow for her, shown her how to check the straightness of her arrows. She had eight slender lengths of springy ash, the tips needle-sharp and hardened in fire, the fletching cut from pliable plastic containers. Lucy had enjoyed Aidan’s closeness, liked watching his deft brown fingers and the slight frown that ruffled his forehead as he explained something to her. There was a lot of physics involved in shooting a bow, apparently.