April’s eyes passed briefly to Pete—so briefly that Gemma almost missed it. Almost.
“I’m sorry,” April said, and reached out, as if she wanted to touch Gemma’s shoulder, or maybe pat Gemma on the head.
Gemma took a step backward, out of reach. All at once it was as if she was the torch: she was burning with rage, combusting. “You’re sorry?” As if that was it, end of story, too bad. As if Gemma’s favorite toy had just been stolen. “You know what this means, don’t you? You remember how they cleaned up Jake Witz?”
“Keep your voice down,” Pete said, although it hardly mattered. Everyone was so drunk she could have been shouting.
Gemma spun around, stumbling a little on the grass, too furious to look at either of her friends. But April and Pete caught up to her almost immediately. Pete tried to take her elbow, but Gemma shook him off.
“Gemma, please,” Pete said again. “Can you just . . . I mean, can we all stop and think?”
But she couldn’t stop. There was no time. She closed her eyes and saw Jake Witz, the geometric perfection of his smile, the way he neatened his silverware, the intense stillness of his gaze, as if his eyes were a gravity trying to hold you in place. Already, her memories of him were fading. Too often, she saw him now as she did in her nightmares: half alive, half dead, lisping details about the constellations with a swollen tongue.
She kept stumbling on the grass, and nearly twisted her ankle when her wedge drove down into a soft bit of soil. She kicked off her shoes and didn’t bother picking them up. She didn’t have a plan, she didn’t know what she would do now that Fortner had a head start, but she knew she had to keep moving, she had to go fast, she had to outrun Jake and her nightmare vision of his face and the sly orbit of Lyra’s and Caelum’s faces, moving eclipse-like to hang in his place. Pete and April could easily outpace her, but she was first to the narrow path that interlinked the front and back yards, and that was so hemmed in by growth they had no choice but to fall back. They were maybe a step behind her, but she heard them the way she heard the distant twitter of birds in the morning—all noise, all background.
“Christ, Gemma, will you wait for a second?”
“Can someone please just tell me what the fuck happened?”
She broke free of the tangle of azaleas. The cars in the driveway looked like a freeze-frame of a collision about to happen. But before she was halfway to the driveway, Pete had his hand on her arm.
“Jesus spitballs.” He was practically shouting. She’d never seen him mad before, not like this, and a small, distant flare of love went up through the smog of her own pain: you could count on Pete to make up a curse like Jesus spitballs. “Will you talk to us for a minute? Will you actually listen?”
That word, us, extinguished the flare right away. April and Pete were on the same side, which meant Gemma was left out. Alone.
“What?” she said. “You want me to listen? So go on. Spit it out,” she prompted, when he said nothing. A floodlight came on automatically, triggered by their movement. In its light, Pete looked hollow and exhausted, and for just a moment, she felt guilty. Then she remembered: it was two against one. All her life she’d felt as if she was trying to play a game from outside the stadium, trying to intuit the rules from brief and distant snapshots. But at least April had been with her, and Pete.
By learning the truth, she’d gone somewhere they couldn’t follow. And that was just a fact.
April rocketed out of the growth looking as though she’d done personal battle with every inch of it. There were leaves in her hair, on her shirt, clinging to the wet of her shoes. “I won’t,” she panted, “ask”—more panting—“again.” But she did anyway. “What. The. Hell. Happened?”
Pete still wouldn’t meet Gemma’s eyes, and for some reason that alone made her queasy: it meant for sure he had something to say that she wouldn’t want to hear.
“Lyra and Caelum are in trouble,” she said, keeping her voice as measured as she could. “I have to help. It’s my fault, don’t you get it? I walked them into this. I hand-fed them to my dad. If anything happens to them—” She broke off, suddenly overwhelmed.
In her dreams, Jake spoke to her even with the rope around his neck, puckering the skin around it. In her dreams, they were back on the marshes, and sometimes when he opened his mouth, he had beetles on his tongue.
Would he still be alive if she hadn’t shown up to ask for his help?
“It isn’t your fault,” April said. “You couldn’t have known.”
“Let’s hope I get a big E for effort, then,” she said.
Pete looked at her then, and she wished he hadn’t. His mouth was like a zipper stuck hard in a bad position. “If the military is going after Lyra and Caelum, like you said, you can’t stop it. You’re in danger, too.”
“I don’t have to stop it,” Gemma said. “But I can warn them. I can give them a head start.”
“How?” Pete’s tone sharpened. “You don’t even have a car.” Bang, bang, bang. Little shrapnel words.
“You can’t even drive,” April added. This felt like a low blow. Her parents wouldn’t let her learn to drive: another way they kept her bubbled off in glass, like one of those dumb ballerinas at the center of a snow globe.
“I’ll take the bus,” she said, and turned around again, so Pete and April had to jog to keep up with her.
“You don’t know where you’re going,” Pete pointed out. “It’s almost eleven. It isn’t safe for you to travel on your own. Besides, I doubt they have all-night service to Rococo.”
“Ronchowoa. So I’ll hitchhike. Or I’ll take a bike. I’ll take a horse.” But Gemma’s throat was all knotted up. She turned away, swiping her eyes with her wrist.
“Jesus, Gemma. Will you listen to yourself? You aren’t thinking.” He wasn’t shouting—not even close, not compared to what Gemma’s dad could do—but still, Gemma pulled up as if she’d reached an unexpected cliff. “If the military or the feds or whatever are trying to do a cover-up job—if they’re willing to kill people to make sure the truth never leaks—you’re a target. You were a target before, but you’ll be a bigger target now. I won’t—” His voice broke. “I’m not going to risk you again, okay? Not for Lyra. Not for Caelum. Not for any fucking person on the planet. I won’t do it.”
She started to cry, obviously. Trying not to cry was like trying to hold on to water by squeezing it. She cried until she gasped. “Don’t you see? I have to do something. I have to help them. They’re my people. They’re like me. . . .”