London Hayes.
She was down here with me. She’d swum the length of the pool to share the deep end with me, far enough away from Ruby so she couldn’t see. London skimmed the bottom of the pool closer to me. There were her thin legs drifting. Her skin so pale as if rubbed in blocks of ice. I noticed that she had a small scar on one knee. I watched the short, bleached strands of her hair reach with electric intensity for the surface. Her eyes blinking and on me.
She stayed still, limbs floating, mouth pressed closed.
Were we seeing who could stay under the longest?
I held my breath, held it till my lungs burned. I kept my hand locked to the filter, not letting myself up though all the rest of me begged me to go. I forced myself to believe in it, in my sister, to stay down at the bottom, to stay.
I didn’t want it to be me, but my body wouldn’t listen. My lungs were about to burst with the effort—I had to break free to the surface. I needed air.
It was here, before my all-too-human body took over and flung me upward, gasping and spluttering and spitting up chlorine, that London opened her mouth. She breathed without struggle. She stayed under like she could, easily, for years.
She let me see her do it. She wanted me to know.
What is she? my mind screamed, needing answers, but then I was up, unable to think anything more, up in the air choking on the edge of the pool, and she was still down at the bottom.
She didn’t come up for air for the longest time.
CHAPTER TEN
I COULDN’T FORGET
I couldn’t forget what I saw in the pool. Ruby and I were in her car not too much later, driving back to the house, and all I could picture was London opening her mouth underwater and letting me see her breathe. Ruby had misled me when I’d asked if London was alive again.
She was more than alive. She might outlive us all.
Ruby, though, hadn’t seen London in the deep end. She’d run over in a panic when I’d emerged, choking, at the edge of the pool, and she was still admonishing me over it.
“Why’d you scare me like that!” she shrieked as she skidded through a red light and narrowly avoided a four-car collision. “How could you do that, Chlo!” She was more frightened by the idea of me holding my breath in the pool than she should be. She was acting like I’d taken a running leap off a cliff.
Then she said the strangest thing. “How do you think I felt, having them pull you under like that? When I was too far away to get to you? When I couldn’t even barely see!”
“Wait,” I said. “Them who?”
She shook her head as if shaking herself from a trance. “There were too many people in the pool, Chloe. I couldn’t see past them. Don’t pull a stunt like that again.”
We’d turned onto the road that led to Jonah’s house when Ruby slammed the brakes without warning. I lurched forward and was kept from flying through the windshield by the seat belt, which I had absolutely no memory of putting on.
“What the—!” I cried. I checked to make sure she was okay—she was—and checked to make sure I was okay—I was—and checked to see if we’d hit anything, like another car or an animal, and that’s when I saw her, standing in the road with her thumb out, having stumbled directly into traffic as if she were begging to be run over.
Ruby threw up her hands and said to the car’s ceiling, “Hitchhiking?! Sometimes I wonder if certain people are just meant to die.”
Before I could ask what that was supposed to mean, she’d leaped from the car and was dragging the girl out of the road. Just in time, too. Ruby moved her out of the way seconds before a truck took the blind turn and barreled straight over the spot she’d been standing in. It was so sudden, I didn’t know what to make of it.
All I knew is it looked like my sister had saved London’s life.
Again.