Katia smirked at us again, then turned and left the boathouse, slamming the door shut behind her. Deah started pulling on her chain again, even harder than before.
I sighed. “Maybe we should talk about being cousins—”
“Shut it,” Deah snapped, still pulling and pulling on her chain. “The only thing I’m concerned about right now is getting out of here. And you should be too.”
She was right. Escape first, talk later. Still, her tone annoyed me.
“Well, that’s not going to work, unless you have some strength magic that I don’t know about,” I said.
“Well, do you have a better idea?” she snapped.
“Maybe.”
I held up my arm and looked at the shackle on my wrist. The shackle was old and thick, too thick for me to have any chance of breaking it, but Katia had snapped a tiny metal padlock through the loops to secure the two halves of the shackle together. A nice, new, shiny padlock that wasn’t nearly as sturdy as it appeared to be. The sort of padlock that I’d picked open a hundred times before. I grinned. We were as good as out of here.
I reached up into my ponytail—but my chopstick lock picks were gone.
No picks meant no opening the padlock and no chance of escape. Panic welled up in me, but I forced it down and looked around the boathouse, hoping that the chopsticks had just fallen out of my hair and were somewhere in here.
A few seconds later, I spotted the two shiny black sticks lying on the floor—on the far side of Deah, well beyond my reach.
I cursed, and Deah stopped pulling on her chain to see what I was staring at.
“You want your hair sticks?” she sniped. “Really?”
“They’re not just for my hair,” I sniped back. “They’re lock picks. You know, something that might actually help us get out of these.” I held up my shackled arm. “Unless you have a better idea?”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t think so. So can you grab them and hand them over to me . . . please?” I had to choke out the last word, but there was no way I could reach the chopsticks, so I decided to be nice.
“And why would I want to do that?” She crossed her arms over her chest at the snarky tone in my voice.
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, I don’t know. So we can get out of here and away from the evil girl who wants to cut us up and take our magic.”
Deah kept glaring at me. I sighed.
“Look, I don’t like it any more than you do, us being related and everything that means, but working together is the only way we’re getting out of here alive. Unless you want to be gutted like a fish and have your magic torn out of you just so Katia can win some tournaments?”
Deah sighed. “Fine. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Or you. Or especially that secret you just dropped on me, cousin.”
“I wouldn’t dream that you ever would, cousin,” I sniped back.
She glanced at the closed door, then slid to her left, moving slowly so as not to make her chain clank-clank-clank any more than necessary.
“Hurry up!” I hissed.
She gave me a withering look, but she increased her pace. Deah reached the end of her chain, then dropped to her knees and stretched her hand out as far as she could.
Short—she was three feet too short.
Deah stretched and stretched, but no matter how hard or far she clawed, she just couldn’t reach the chopsticks. After about two minutes of heaving, she gave up, panting hard and trying to get her breath back.
“It’s no use,” she said. “I can’t reach them. Now what?”
Instead of answering, I looked around the boathouse again, searching for anything that would let her bridge those final three feet and reach the chopsticks. But there was nothing. Our swords were out of reach on the table, and the only things Katia had left on us were our clothes and shoes. Even if they were closer to us, the splintered oars and busted boat were useless. The one thing that might have helped us was a fishing pole, but I didn’t see any sort of fishing gear—
Wait a second. Fishing poles. I didn’t have one of those, but maybe I didn’t need one. Maybe I could just make my own.
I thought about things, working out the problem in my mind, then bent down, yanked off my sneakers, and stripped the laces out of them.
“What are you doing?” Deah asked. “How is taking off your shoes going to help anything?”
I tied the laces together, then threaded one of the ends through the eyelets on my right sneaker, tying it off into a tight knot. Now I had a sneaker with more than three feet of string dangling from it.
“Here,” I said, passing the shoe over to her. “Think of it as a fishing pole.”
Deah stared at the shoe, then me. “You are either the craziest person I’ve ever met or the smartest.”
“Let’s hope it’s the smartest. Now, come on. Katia could come back any second.”
Deah nodded and turned toward the chopsticks. She let out a breath, then threw out the shoe, careful to hold on to the lace on the end, so she wouldn’t lose it.