Etta had to hand it to them; they were calm. They seemed almost resigned to this, like it was one great bother, instead of a terrible way to die.
“All right, we’ll wait. We can be patient.” If Nicholas was aware of the eyes that were tracking their progress along the platform, he didn’t show it. They navigated through the crowd until they found an empty space near the end of the platform, under a sign advertising the Paramount Theatre’s showing of something called I Was an Adventuress staring someone named Zorina.
Nicholas took off the bag and his jacket as Etta lowered herself down onto the patch of concrete, leaning back against the curved wall. She drew her legs up to her chest and hugged them there, hard enough for her knees to crack.
Calm down, she thought, calm down.
But the bombing hadn’t stopped, and Etta could almost see how, if one was dropped in just the wrong place overhead, it would mean game over. Not just for her and Nicholas, but for the hundreds of people packed around them like sleeves of wafers.
Nicholas rummaged through the bag, producing their lone apple. Etta wasn’t hungry, though she hadn’t eaten since they’d left New York. Her stomach had turned to stone, throbbing in time with the muscles that still burned from the run.
Nicholas glanced at her, concern dragging down the corners of his mouth. “I should have found us water. I’m sorry, Etta.”
“We’ll be fine,” she whispered. They’d find some once they went through the next passage.
“I have to say,” he muttered, leaning back, “I am harboring some incredible ill will toward this mother of yours.”
Etta wasn’t feeling so fond of her at that precise moment either, even as she was terrified for her; her mind was constantly looping back to that photograph, the way she’d been tied up, the kind of men that were holding her.
“Well,” Etta said weakly, “she’s always told me a good challenge builds character.”
“Then we’ll have an excess of it,” he said dryly.
Conditions on the platform were so tight that they sat shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, leg to leg. Etta was glad for the solid presence of him, that she could lean into him, now that her nerves seemed poised to sweep her into a full-blown panic attack. She crossed her legs, letting the cool cement press into the exposed skin. None of Oskar’s breathing tricks seemed to be working, not when all hell was raining down on the street above. The woman to her right quietly prayed.
How many hours would they have to sit down here, hoping? It was the twenty-second of September. That only left them with eight more days to find the astrolabe and get back, and they still had no idea how to decipher the other clues.
Her breath hitched as panic began to creep into her system. How was Nicholas so calm—so steady, like he’d been through this all before?
Maybe he had, in a way. The bombing didn’t sound all that different than the pounding cannonade from the ships, the small explosions of each gun. She wanted to ask him, but she couldn’t speak, afraid that admitting anything might open the floodgates in her. Everyone was holding it together. She could, too.
I wish I could play.
Etta craved the distraction, the absolute focus of playing. If she couldn’t feel the weight of the instrument in her hands, then she could at least imagine; she closed her eyes and called the music to her. The phantom press of strings against her fingers filled her, for the first time since Alice had died, with a sense of familiar joy—not the disgust and humiliation she’d felt when she thought about her performance, or the shattering anger and grief at wondering what had happened to Alice’s body—if she and her mother would even make it in time for the funeral.
For lack of anything better to use, she took her left forearm into her right hand, closing her eyes. She could pretend, just for a few seconds, that her wrist was the neck, her veins the strings. She imagined the bow gliding across her skin, focused on the movement of it.
Bach. Bach demanded her concentration. Bach would take her out of this moment.
“What are you doing?” Nicholas asked.
“Playing,” she said, not caring how ridiculous it must look and sound to him. “Distracting myself.”
A man, stretched out on his stomach in front of them, lifted his face up out of his book and glanced their way curiously.
It was perfectly strange timing that a high, clear note broke the odd spell of calm in the station just then. Down toward the center of the platform, an older man had brought out a violin and was working the instrument in slow, mellow song. She recognized it—it wasn’t a classical composition but something that had come scratching out of Oskar’s old record player.