“Lovely, girls, what are you making?”
“The world,” Annevi said. “The world is mostly water, so it probably looks blue from far away.”
“That’s insightful, Annevi. Mathilde, have you drawn where you’re from?”
“Sort of.” I shook my head, still unused to the lightness of shorter, freer hair.
“It’s lunchtime,” the woman said.
Annevi disappeared at once.
The proctor continued to look at me kindly, and seemed quite interested in my painting. “Is it finished?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Wonderful! There we go!” She pinned my painting to the otherwise bare wall of the art room.
“Why haven’t you hung up anyone else’s artwork?”
“Theirs tends not to be…flat.” She looked over at Annevi’s abandoned world.
Flat would not have been a good word in the art room back at school. Flat things lacked depth. Did she think my picture was boring? It was just a landscape, not even a real place.
But she’d hung it up and was studying it as if it was very interesting.
I looked at it more closely.
In the center of the trees was a gap. A gap where two girls belonged. Two girls, holding hands, one leading the other.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked me.
“Just hungry, I guess.”
—
Lunch was in a large dining hall with long tables. Each place was set with a sandwich on a plate and a glass of milk. Kids elbowed and bumped into each other as friends looked for seats together and swapped plates for reasons I couldn’t understand yet.
I sat in front of an untouched plate and realized I hadn’t eaten since the train, which seemed like a time from another life. The sandwich was chopped egg; I devoured it and gulped down the milk.
The girl across from me stared at me as I wiped my mouth on my sleeve.
“Don’t worry,” said the girl next to me. “We were all hungry when we got here. But you’ll get plenty now, it’s not like back home. I’m Caelyn.”
“Mathilde.”
“I’m Brid,” said the girl across from me.
“So…what happens here?” I asked.
“Just what you see happen,” Caelyn said carefully.
“Annevi solved some kind of puzzle and they called the answer downstairs.”
“Oh, did she solve it?” Caelyn asked. “She’s been on that one all week, no one could figure out what had become of those dybnauts, they weren’t showing up on any scans.”
“Dybnauts?”
“Deep, undersea boats.”
“Tommy said they’d know in eight hours.”
“She rarely misses,” Caelyn said. “She’s probably right.”
I peered down the table at Annevi, who had taken her sandwich apart and was eating it from the inside out, laughing as she talked with some boys.
“What’s…downstairs?”
“Grown-ups,” Brid said. “They get the incoming calls and place the outgoing ones, and they have the…you know.”
I shook my head.
Brid and Caelyn looked at each other, and then back at me. “Big decoding machines,” Caelyn whispered. “Downstairs is also where we go if bombers fly over. It’s under three layers of concrete and steel.”
“Do we go down there a lot?”
“Never,” Caelyn said, neatly biting her sandwich. “But I’ve heard there’s enough food stored for us all to live on for three years.”
“Three years?”
“Yeah. So if Tyssia comes we can stay here, pretending to be a school, and keep doing our work. Bring them down from the inside.”
My sandwich must have gotten stuck in my throat. I wished I had more milk.
“What have they asked you to do?” Brid asked.
“Nothing, yet.”
“Stick with Tommy,” Caelyn said. “You can learn a lot from him. He can do everything, and all at once.”
Tommy had been the center of a huge flurry of activity. Not really where I wanted to be.
When we went back upstairs, an extremely anxious Annevi was soothed with coordinates of new ships to set up. I sat across from her and watched her slide ships into their formations. Maybe if I saw the puzzle from the beginning I could solve it. But I didn’t understand this one any better than the last.
I followed Annevi and the others outside at playtime. Annevi marched over to a crowd huddled around one boy with a bag. The kids were all twisting away to reach blindly into the cloth sack, pulling out strips of fabric. Most of them exclaimed or groaned when they saw the colors of their bands, but started tying them around their arms.
The bands were either twisted black and orange, or white and aqua blue.
“What is this?” I asked Annevi, who was now tying a white and blue band around my arm.
“Tyssia Tag. Those other armbands used to be black. Caelyn made us new ones with orange after Tyssia joined with Erobern.”
And the blue and white was of our own, seafaring country.
“You have to get the other country’s armbands. The country who gets all the other armbands wins.”
“They make you play war games at playtime?”
“Make us?” Annevi looked mystified. “No! We made this up! Run, go!”
I ran.
We could run anywhere we wanted, as long as we stayed within the walls, but there was plenty of space and trees.
Running felt good, despite the cold; my heart and lungs worked to keep up with my feet. As I grew warmer and felt the air on my face and legs, summer wasn’t that far away, summer when Megs and I had run in the woods like this. I ran so fast no one claimed my armband, and I forgot about it.
I’d come to fight in the war; I was far from home and the people I loved. But it was so different from the war I knew: aerials and bombing, empty stomachs. The anxiety of what could happen at any time. Instead of being brought closer to the war, it seemed I had been brought farther away.
—
After playtime, I pinned up my sisters’ handprints in my room.
The hardest thing about the distance from the war was not being able to tell Mother and Father that I was safe. Would they worry constantly? Or would they choose to believe that I was all right?
They probably would believe I was safe. That had been the whole point of sending me.
And, so far, it seemed true.
A pit formed in my stomach. Why should I be safe when the people I loved couldn’t be?
And I wasn’t anything like these kids. I wasn’t smart like they were. I didn’t really belong.
Megs had said there had to be something only I could do. She was usually right. So if she thought there was something I could do, maybe there was.
Father had said to help bring the war to an end, and then I could go home.
I wanted him to be proud of me.
I’d take Caelyn’s advice: stick with Tommy and see if I couldn’t be useful at something.
“HANS, WHAT’S IN BLOCK THREE-E?”
“Three-B?”
“E! Three-elephant!”
“Oh! Nothing!”
“Nothing?”
“It’s empty. E for empty.”
“There should be something there, should be something…” Tommy paced between four boards, where a dozen kids sat, considering possibilities, moving pieces.
He slammed into me.
For the fifth time.
The first four times, he had stepped to the side and ignored me. I kept opening my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. The last time, he stared into my face as if only then seeing me.
“Who are you?”
“Mathilde.”
“Can I help you?”
“I—I’m trying to figure out what to do.”
“Aren’t we all? Here.” He shoved a clipboard at me. The papers on it were incredibly crumpled from being flipped through so many times. “If anyone at these tables moves anything, mark the chan
ge on the paper, okay?”
“Okay.”
A page represented each table with a chart numbered to match the squares on the board. I stood at each table and confirmed that the Xs matched the pieces’ placements. But as soon as the kids started moving the pieces, I couldn’t keep up. I turned from one table to another, then back, and those first kids would have moved something again.
The clipboard was wrenched out of my hands.
I jumped.
Tommy studied my notes. “There is such order in it, and yet, it’s not without mystery.”
“What isn’t?”
“This. These plots. Math. Maybe I should make an equation showing the typical movements.”
But he was speaking to himself; he scribbled down some notes and thrust the clipboard back. “Keep up.”
I tried my best.
“Lykkelig.”
Someone had said the name of my city. I looked around.
I was supposed to be the only one chosen from there, so why would anyone be talking about it? Was someone talking about me?
I missed several more changes as I looked to see who had spoken.
And then they said it again—three boys on couches at a low table across the room.
As I got closer, I could hear that they were arguing about a lot of cities.
“No, that town got hit three nights in a row! They’re going to go somewhere else now! It’s too likely we have aerials ready for them! We’ve got to look for a new target.”
“But they just hit somewhere new last night; they’ve never introduced new sites so close together! If not there again, then somewhere else they’ve already hit.”
A third boy shouted, “I’ve been telling you, they’ve been accelerating the introduction of new towns!”
“All with—”
“Factories!”
“We don’t have factories,” I said.
“What?”
The boys looked up at me, surprised.
“We don’t have factories.”
“Of course we don’t have factories. Faetre’s just a manor house in the middle of nowhere.”
“I mean we, back home. In Lykkelig.”
One of the boys looked at me critically. He pulled out a book and flipped through it until he found a certain page and showed me the heading and the data below it.
“Fourteen,” he said. “Fourteen factories.”
Tommy yanked the clipboard out of my hands again, and ran back over to his tables.
I sat down. “I didn’t know that. Is that why they’ve been bombing?”
“Factories. Train stations. Morale,” one of the boys said, like he was reciting a school lesson. His tone made me assume his list was in order of importance.
The board before them—a map of Sofarende—was marked with a smattering of colored pegs.
“All the bombings from the past week. We’ve got to predict tonight’s. We send our predictions downstairs by dinner.”
“And what do they do with them?”
“Pass them along to the Aerial Department, if they want to.”
“Do you hear how often you’re right?”
“Every morning we get the information about who’s been bombed last night. Then we know.”
“How often are you right?”
“More often than not.”
I studied the pegs.
One of the boys followed my eyes, and explained, “Blue for last night, yellow for the night before that, red before that, green before that, black, then white…tomorrow we’ll shift the white ones to represent tonight’s, as last night’s.”
He rattled this off and my head spun, trying to sort it out.
“Where’s the board with overall bombings?”
Another boy smiled. He knew I was catching on.
“The next table. All red pins. Represents the number of times for each city.”
I glanced over. Lykkelig was completely covered with red pegs.
They started arguing again. Tossing out the names of towns coldly, compared to the flames licking at my heart. My hands tightened into fists. The sixth time that they mentioned Lykkelig that way, I yelled, “Haven’t your towns been bombed? Doesn’t it mean anything to you, to sit here and discuss which towns are next? What happens if you make a mistake?”
They stared at me. So did several of the children nearby.
One of the boys said, “We have to be objective.”
Another said, “That’s how we’ll help them!”
And the third, the one who had smiled at me earlier, said, “Of course it does.”
His companions stared at him.
“We aren’t there anymore,” the first boy said as he turned back to the board. “We’re safe here.”
“But aren’t your families still there?”
“Who knows.”
The third boy pointed to a town marked with two colored pegs. “My family’s there. Or they were when I left. I worry about them.”
He held my eyes. I felt a little better.
“We have half an hour left to decide, and if we don’t, we won’t be helping anyone.” The second boy glanced at the clock.
“I’ll let you get on with it, then,” I said. The Examiner had entered the room; she was watching me. Having failed at helping Tommy, I didn’t want to be seen ruining this task, too. I started to get up.
“Wait,” the third boy said. “I’m Gunnar.”
“Mathilde.” I sat back down.
I stayed with them until their call downstairs, though I kept quiet, even when they came to the conclusion that we should expect another air raid over Lykkelig that night.
—
After a dinner of chicken soup and bread, I was so tired, but desperately wanted to take a bath. To wash off the train’s smoke and the itchy feel of the haircut from my neck.
The guilt that I would be safe tonight, and my family would not. Could you rinse away guilt?
Miss Ibsen showed me where to find the towels, and handed me a new bar of soap and a comb that were to be my own.
“Do you have a bathrobe?” she asked. I shook my head. She found me a new navy boy’s robe and wrote MJ on the inner label with a marking pen. “You can wear it to and from your room.”
I nodded.
After I’d changed, I set my towel on the stool next to a tub and worked out the taps and the drain plug. While I waited for the tub to fill, the door opened and Annevi came in, wearing a robe and carrying her soap. She got a towel and turned on the water in the next tub.
“Did they send you, too?” she asked.
“Send me? No.”
“They’ll send you to take a bath every couple days.”
“Oh.”
I turned off my taps, pulled the curtain around my bathtub, and got into the tub. I went under to wet my head, and then I just sat. Annevi turned off her taps and pulled her curtain.
One of my taps dripped: Splink. Splink. Splink.
“Did you find your new set of ships?” I asked.
“No.”
Splink. Splink. Splink.
“They’re…dybnauts?”
“Sometimes.”
“Whose are they?”
“Ours. Or Eilean’s. Or Tyssia’s.”
Splink. Splink. Splink.
I sat up straighter. “Tyssia doesn’t have access to the sea.”
“Of course they do.”
“But I thought—”
“Just because something’s not in the newspaper doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”
“But—Tyssia is landlocked—how?”
“Some of the southern states must have secretly given them port access. They’re out there.”
I went still. Tyssia had sea access? Could they reach our ports?
Water swished in Annevi’s tub.
“What happens to the ships you find?”
“Well, if they’re ours, and they’re still okay, we’ll tell them where to go. If they’re Tyssia’s: ker-POW!”
A death bot
h fiery and watery. Screaming in pain only to get a lungful of water.
“Does that…bother you?”
“It’s a war. That’s what happens.”
The bombed streets at home. The people wandering, looking for their families. That was what happened. The Tyssians made it happen.
I remembered my soap and tried to wash my hair.
Annevi pulled the plug of her tub. She toweled off and pulled back her curtain.
I ducked underwater to rinse. When I sat up, Annevi was standing outside my tub.
She said, very quietly, “They don’t tell me whether I’m looking for ours or theirs. I have to find them. Do you see?”
“I do. Good night, Annevi.”
“Good night.”
After she left, I sat, hair dripping into the cooling water.
I had come farther away from the fighting. But being here would require a different sort of fight, a different sort of bravery.
AT MORNING WORK THE next day, I decided to stick with Brid and Caelyn. Annevi didn’t need or want help finding her ships. And I did not want to sit with the bombing-predicting boys and their cold calculations.
But as I walked in, Gunnar caught my eye. He shook his head ever so slightly.
They hadn’t bombed Lykkelig!
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
Everyone was safe for another day.
“Thank you,” I mouthed.
He nodded.
But—had his home been bombed?
I didn’t want to go ask in front of the other boys. They might make fun of him for worrying. It would have to wait.
Because they had predicted Lykkelig, did that mean somewhere else went unprotected? Did Tyssia manipulate our predictions on purpose, create a pattern and then break it?
Of course they did. The boys would have to learn to be three steps ahead of them.
I climbed up onto one of the high chairs at the table Brid and Caelyn had picked. They both had stacks of papers with gibberish printed on them.
Brid split her stack and passed me half of it.
“Look through for things that repeat, and circle them. You can use different colors for each different repeating set.”
I took up the red pencil she slid across to me, and scanned the rows and rows of letters. At first I didn’t see anything repeat. I wasn’t even sure if it would be repeats of three letters or five or whole strings of them.