“No,” I said. “Because you wouldn’t ask me to. Not again. It’s too dangerous.”
She didn’t respond. I took the flashlight from her hands and turned it on toward her face. I saw how she watched the water, warily, as if expecting a serpent thing to come coil a tentacle around her leg. Yet her eyes sparkled at the same time, and her bare leg was out and waiting, as if daring it to grab her, taunting it to try.
She gave me a nudge. “Move back, Chlo. You could fall in.”
I climbed off the rock to the one next to it, farther away from the water.
After a while, she called for me.
“Chlo?” She was only one rock away, but she sounded distant. “What time is it? How long have they been gone?”
I pulled out my cell phone to check the time. Maybe a half hour had passed since Owen and London had left, I wasn’t sure. I told her the time.
She concentrated for a moment on this, and then her eyes shot closed. She sunk down on the hard, cold rock, spent.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t feel so good,” she said. “I’m very, very tired.”
I knew she’d been trying to do something right then, a psychic burst of energy to warp the world her way. But it looked like the strain of it would kill her first.
“Ruby, stop. Sit up.”
She pulled herself up slowly, as if it took great effort.
“Look at my eyes, Chlo. I think I’m getting lines. Can you get wrinkles when you’re only twenty-one? Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
She aimed the flashlight beam at her face. It washed her out, bright as it was, but there were visible lines I hadn’t noticed before. She’d never looked this tired.
“What’s going on?”
“Balance, Chlo . . . Give and take. Push and pull. You for her, her for you. I think they’re mad that I tried to have it both ways—to keep you alive and her, too.”
“But what’re they going to do?” I said, getting scared now.
“Do I have to chop off my own arm and hand it over?” she said, speaking nonsense. “Because I’d do that, I would. If you could keep yours.”
“Okay,” I said. “But what are you talking about?”
She lifted her arm slowly, the arm still attached to her shoulder, and pointed out at the trees in the distance. “Look,” she said. “It’s too late to take back.”
She was the one to notice it first, but then, all at once, everyone noticed, and they were running toward it, and shouting. Ruby stayed put. I hesitated for a second, and then I, too, started running. We were all converging on a figure in a bright white shirt.
She looked ghostly as she emerged from the trees, her body birch-white, her short hair almost the same color as her clothes, as if she’d rolled around in baby powder to give us a good scare. The palms of her hands were up in the air, waving.
London had come back—alone.
She was a blinding bright spot against a backdrop of dark trees and then she was surrounded. By the time I reached her, there was a small crowd. A friend was propping her up. You could see bits of gravel on London’s hands and blackened skid marks on her knees as if she’d crawled down the road and through the woods to reach us.
Questions were thrown at her: “What happened?” “How’d you get here?” “Where’s O?” “Omigod are you hurt?”
London took a step away from the crowd, it seemed toward me.
“I must’ve blacked out again,” she said.
I glanced back at Ruby, but she hadn’t left her spot at the edge of the water. From this distance, she looked like any other brown-haired girl sitting on a rock under the stars. All that sky overhead made her look small.
“I think there was an accident,” London said. “I think. I mean, I don’t remember. Where’s my parents’ car?”