Did she smell like the woods in Lykkelig? Was that possible after a journey? I ran my fingers down each of her braids. “They’ll cut yours, too, you know. How is everyone? My family? Your family?”
“Everybody’s all right! Your parents brought us food baskets whenever they could. Now that I’m here, they won’t need to anymore. But…”
“But what?”
“They’re thinking of leaving. Everyone’s talking about how much longer the borders can hold. The trouble is, no one knows where to go.”
The only safe place I knew was Faetre.
“So what do you do here?” Megs asked.
“I…”
But Miss Ibsen opened the door again.
“Come on, Megs. It’s time to cut your hair. And then you can wash up, if you like.”
Megs got up and headed to the door. She must have felt the same nerves I had on my first day, wanting to start off on the right foot.
As Miss Ibsen led Megs away, I followed her as far as the hallway.
The Examiner was standing there.
I flung my arms around her.
She let me hug her, and when I pulled back, she placed her hand under my chin and tipped my face up toward hers.
“Ah, there it is. Some of the blue had gone out of your eyes. But it’s back.” She let go.
“But you said—before—that Megs—?”
“Megs will serve us well here, no need to think otherwise. Now, run along and join them, you look as though you’re in need of a trim. When Megs is ready, you can help her find something to do.”
HAIR CUT, MEGS WAS once again my opposite-twin. I led her by the hand to the living room. I just couldn’t let her go!
As Megs looked around, I remembered my first day and Annevi asking what I was good at.
Megs was good at learning things, so she could probably work anywhere.
Where would she most like to be?
I led her to Brid and Caelyn, who looked up at us.
“This is Megs. We’d like to help you.”
The girls nodded, and each slid over half a stack of papers and pushed extra pencils into the middle of the table. Brid explained to Megs what to look for. By the end of the hour and the call to dinner, Megs had found twice as many things to mark as I had.
But I was glad about that.
—
Changed into our nightclothes, we lay in my bed. I kept squeezing her feet, propped by my head on the pillow.
“I’m still here,” she said.
“I keep forgetting.”
“You’re not forgetting. You’re just having trouble believing.”
“Tell me about home.”
Megs thought. “Your father found a bicycle. A broken one, but he fixed it up. Kammi learned to ride it. Tye thinks she learned to ride it, but her feet don’t reach the pedals; your father makes the bike go.”
That sounded like Father.
We talked so late that we both fell asleep in my room.
For the first night in a long time, I didn’t have any nightmares.
—
We didn’t need coats for our morning walk. The trees were so green, leaves dancing. The air smelled so fresh.
The sky looked so blue.
I left Megs with Brid and Caelyn again, but it was still my job to go and see Rainer.
I stopped at the art room on the way, let myself into the cell, and sat down.
Rainer looked up.
“What has happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“You are…happy.”
“My friend is here!”
“Oh?”
“Megs. Megs, who I told you about.”
“Oh yes. Megs. You are glad she is well?”
“Very glad.” My smile faded as I looked into his sad face. “Do you…do you know where your friends are?”
Rainer tugged at his boot tongues. “Some of them went to battle with me. We signed up in groups, went in together. Some of them did not make it. The rest, I don’t know.”
“You had to sign up? You chose to or you had to?”
“There was no difference. Everything was about fighting for Tyssia, and if you said that you didn’t want to, you could be beat up, or sent away, or your property given away. Your family would starve. You had no choice, but it had to look like you chose.”
Like Father and street patrol.
I stood up and went to the fence. I passed the things from the art room through it. “Paint me something else.”
He collected the single sheet of paper, the paint tubes. “These are all blue.”
“I know. I want you to paint me something blue.”
Rainer shrugged and set to work. He took a lot longer with the blue paints, testing the shades, adding touches here and there. The image emerged slowly, upside down from where I watched.
An hour or so had passed by the time Rainer stopped painting.
“Can I see?” I asked.
He looked calmer than I’d ever seen him as he handed the paper to me through the fence.
Unlike Rainer’s other paintings of jagged slashes, the blue painting consisted of soft lines, hues blended together to make shapes with light, rather than darkness.
The center of the image was an open space surrounded by a river, buildings, and fields. There were people everywhere.
“Is this a real place?” I asked. “Are they real people?”
“It is the village where I grew up. Or it is meant to be. It is not easy to make what you imagine come out right in paints.”
“I know. What are all the people doing?”
“On the weekly day off, women did the washing in the river. Near the river were poles where the families would hang out their rugs and the children would beat them clean. The men would go around to each other’s houses and fix things, chairs and tables, doorframes and roof shingles. Everyone brought food to share and we’d have a picnic while the clothes dried on lines. Everyone helped everyone else.”
A lump grew in my throat. I couldn’t tell if it was because I was happy or sad.
“It looks like you grew up in a very nice place,” I managed to say.
“It was nice, once.”
If Tyssia was so nice, why had they wanted to start a war?
I stood up to leave. “Thank you…for your painting. And for telling me about your home.” I started toward the door.
“Mathilde?”
I turned back.
“Have fun with your friend.”
His eyes bored through me.
Sincere.
“Thanks.”
—
When I joined the others in the main room before lunch, they were all gathered around one table, except for a few children, who were at the telephones, furiously jotting things down.
This would be either very good news, or very bad news.
One of the boys from the telephones read out new numbers, and a girl added pins to the table.
It was a map of Sofarende. The pins stuck out of several sites at odd angles.
“What happened?” I asked Gunnar.
“They’re bombing our aerstrips.”
“In the daytime?”
He nodded. The other kids were still, waiting.
The proctors hovered on the outskirts of the group. They looked anxious, arms folded or hands to their faces as if in thought, but they didn’t interrupt us or make suggestions.
As if they wanted to see what we could do, on our own.
“But why didn’t someone see the aerials coming? Aren’t there telephones out there, to pass the messages, so the next aerstrips could get ready?” a girl asked. It sounded like she had already asked. Like she couldn’t believe it.
“Maybe they were warned but Tyssia’s getting through anyway,” Annevi said.
“We know their flight patterns,” Hamlin said. “They always have fighters and then the bombers right behind. We should be ready for that.”
Megs bit her lower lip. She caught my eye, and I n
odded to her.
“Last week…” She paused, not expecting anyone to listen.
But everyone was. They all looked at her, waiting.
“Last week, the formation looked…different. It looked more like a V.”
“How do you know?” Hamlin asked.
“She watched the aerials at night,” I whispered. “Over Lykkelig.”
Without me there, had she stopped bothering to go down to the basement at all?
A few people looked at me, but most of them looked quickly back at Megs. Hamlin, who had gone a bit pale, marched over to one of the free telephones.
“Megs,” Hamlin said after a minute, extending the earpiece to her. “Tell them. They’ll listen.”
Megs took the telephone and spoke into it quietly. They must have been asking her questions, because she would pause sometimes before speaking again.
“Can someone mark the other aerstrips, the ones that haven’t been hit yet?” Megs called to the group.
Gunnar and the other boys who did bombing predictions grabbed black pins and pushed them into the board, scattered over the country, but mostly near Tyssia’s border.
“They want to know where you think they’ll go next.”
Gunnar and the others all talked and pointed at once. Much faster than usual, they decided a color code of pins and pushed them in, reaching over and across one another to label the aerfields for their strategic advantages. In a few minutes, the smattering of pins had clumped around some aerfields more than others.
Gunnar ran to Megs at the telephone. She stepped aside as he breathlessly recited their guesses at the next five targets.
We were not called to lunch. Trays of sandwiches were brought in, and pitchers of water, so we could help ourselves while we marked updates on the map, coming up with strategies and ideas, reporting downstairs.
But playtime was not optional. As always. There was a lot of grumbling as the Examiner came in to insist that we go outside.
There was no Tyssia Tag. No chasing. Nobody wanted to play.
Nobody wanted to be chased.
I linked arms with Megs and we marched through the trees and came back around to the main clearing. We didn’t speak, our minds on things that were far away. Other kids looked up at the sky, as if expecting aerials to emerge at any moment. Some drew in the dirt with sticks, plotting new strategies, only to scuff them out and start over.
Finally we were called back inside, but there still wasn’t anything to do but wait. People tried to get back to their usual tasks, but nobody could focus.
Just before dinner, a uniformed officer came upstairs to speak with us.
“I want to thank you for your help today. While they hit eight of our aerstrips, and dozens of our aerials, we managed to prevent bombings at three more targeted aerfields and chased them on their retreat. They failed to land and take any of our aerstrips, and we shot down all of their remaining craft. None of them made it back over the border.”
Hamlin cheered first. Many people joined in and clapped. Kids were giving Megs light punches on her arms and shoulders. Biscuits appeared from somewhere, and colored paper for making hats and chains.
I stayed put in the armchair I’d been in before the announcement.
A while later, Gunnar plopped into the chair across from mine.
“I made you…a hat!” He pulled it out from behind his back. It had great plumes of blue and green, reminding me of the wave-crest symbol for Sofarende.
My favorite color, with Rainer’s.
I took the hat and twisted it round and round in my hands.
“Young people fly the aerials. They’re just like—”
“Like…?”
“…and none of them made it home.”
Someone had found a music player and turned on a recording.
“Dance?”
I shook my head.
“At least put on your hat.” He took it back from me and set it on my head. “I crown you queen of Sofarende.”
“We don’t have a queen.”
“Exactly. There was an opening. Now, what shall we call you? Queen Mathilde the Kind?”
I kept shaking my head.
“Fine. Queen Mathilde the Resolute it is.”
I finally smiled. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. The other day.”
“That’s okay.” Gunnar dropped his voice. “I do understand, you know.”
“I know.”
—
Megs came to my room again that night, bathed and in her nightclothes, still flushed happy pink. She flopped onto my bed opposite me, mirroring my position, staring up at the ceiling.
“Good job today,” I told her.
“Thanks. Who was that…boy…you were with?”
“Gunnar. It’s not like that.”
“No?”
“Don’t you think I would have told you?”
“I don’t know. There seem to be a lot of things you haven’t told me.”
“What are you talking about?”
She propped herself on her elbow to face me. “Like where were you today? When everything started happening?”
“I was…working on my assignment. Like everyone else.”
“Well—where? What is your assignment?”
“I go upstairs and…I…”
“See?” She lay back down. “I could help you.”
Would she do a better job at it than me? Probably, but they obviously needed her in the main room.
“Fine, have secrets.”
“You had them first.”
“I didn’t!”
“You did! Like why you were always late to the Hellers’, watching the aerials. And that you were going to take the test.”
“You can’t pretend you didn’t know that, if you had wanted to admit it. And it all worked out anyway, didn’t it? I promised I would be with you, and I am now. So let me be with you.”
I bit my lip. “I would like to tell you. I’ll see if I can.”
IN THE MORNING, I went to the Examiner’s office.
“Come in, Mathilde. What did you want to see me about?”
“I have some questions. About Rainer.”
“Ah. Sit down.”
I sat.
“Is Rainer…a secret?”
“From whom?”
“The…others.”
“The other children, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I expect you to be discreet, but if you want to tell someone, I’m sure that you will do so in the right way, and for the right reasons.”
I nodded. “And also…I’m still not sure why you’ve assigned me to Rainer.”
“I had wanted to see if the two of you could relate to each other. If he would tell someone like you more than he would tell someone like me. And he has. You’ve gotten a picture of his mind. You’ve found his beliefs and hopes, their strengths and gaps. We can use things like that on him and other soldiers to win them over. Or break them.”
It was like Annevi’s ships. Or Brid and Caelyn’s codes. Or shooting down aerials. I’d hand over what I knew and let the grown-ups decide what to do with it.
“You mean you might use it to hurt people. Rainer, or other people like him.” My cheeks grew hot. “You’re using us. You use all of us.”
The Examiner spoke gently. “You have every right to be angry.”
While I seethed, she went on. “We hope you will all see your work as part of our goals of keeping you safe, helping you survive the war.”
“But you only take kids you think will be useful to you! If you really wanted to save children, you would help everyone, whether they passed your stupid test or not!”
“If I could hide every child in Sofarende here, I would. If I could send you all to live in safety on an island far away, I would. Children have no place in war.”
“But I thought—but you’ve asked us to—”
She smiled. “Some of us here thought, what if that idea could play out the opposite way? What if we could get c
hildren out of the war by giving them a place in it? We don’t have the resources to save everyone, Mathilde. I wish we did. For every single one of you that we take, we have to justify the choice. Your gifts have saved you, and we hope you can help us save others. We take those of you we think will be the most help to Sofarende, to everyone.”
Was this that objective thinking the way Gunnar had meant it? Or was this protecting one’s own all over again, just making excuses for it?
“But you still choose to protect some people over others, for your own reasons. There were people like that at home, too; there were people like—”
“Like you?” Her eyes flashed, narrowing in on me.
The words hit the center of my chest like a punch. It hurt to breathe.
“When you begged me to let someone else take your place to come here, you asked that a specific, single person take your place. You did not ask that I take everyone, or just anyone. You were protecting the person who meant the most to you. You behaved selflessly—you almost missed the test to comfort your sister; you left the test to comfort your friend—but your sister and your best friend are not just anyone, are they?”
My heart swelled with love for Kammi and Megs, and my mind struggled to defend it as hot shame flooded my chest.
Was I as guilty as the others, the ones I’d talked to Mother about? The ones who’d shut us out when we’d needed kindness?
A tear escaped.
Could tears burn you?
Miss Markusen came around to my side of the desk. She knelt and gently wiped away the tear, and the ones that came splashing after it, with a clean, soft, baby-blue handkerchief.
“That is the best start, Mathilde, to learn to love. It will help you see that every person matters, that everyone is someone’s loved one.”
Gunnar had said that to me. He was better at this than I was.
“The truth is, you already do. You think so carefully about how things affect people. That’s why our work here is so hard for you. And it’s why we need you.
“We all have to make difficult choices. If we make the right ones, hopefully they will allow others to make more right ones, and, one day, things will get better.”
When I finally looked back up at the Examiner, she said, “We are trying to make the world a safe place. You have to trust us, Mathilde. We trust you.”