by Carter Roy
“That looks like a house over there.” I pointed to the tiny cottage. “Maybe whoever lives there can help.”
She stood in the water beside me, shading her eyes, and said, “That place looks like it hasn’t been lived in since the Great Depression.”
I squinted. Now I could make out the gaping black holes of the windows. “Okay, so that wasn’t the best idea.”
“Why don’t we take that canoe? Those people from the truck stop won’t know where we went.” Greta was dripping wet and shivering, her hair a soggy knot behind her head. She looked like a little kid, skinny and vulnerable.
“You’re right,” I said. “The canoe. Good idea.”
“Duh, of course I’m right.” She punched me in the arm, and that whole vulnerable thing evaporated. “I’m smart, Ronan. One of us has to be.”
Aluminum canoes, despite being made of the same stuff as soda cans, are pretty heavy. It’s a wonder they even float. We gave up trying to carry the canoe and instead just flipped it over, threw the satchel and the only paddle inside, and dragged it to the water’s edge. Greta got in front while I held it against the dock, and then I let go, hopped in the back, and just like that we were floating.
The current caught the nose of the canoe and turned us downstream. I picked up the aluminum paddle and slowly steered us toward the middle of the river.
“Check it out,” Greta said, pulling a dinged old hubcap from where it had been wedged in the frame. “I wonder why this is here?” It was as big around as a chip bowl but shallow, a hubcap for a very old car—probably the same vintage as the abandoned house.
A trickle of water was filling the space in the bottom of the boat. “Probably for scooping out water—is this thing even seaworthy?”
Greta dipped the hubcap to the floor and raised it back up full of water. “You paddle and I’ll bail.”
The noise of an engine caught our attention. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but the car that turned into the rest stop had its headlights on. We were still a hundred yards upstream.
“Shhh,” Greta said. “Let’s just be quiet and drift past. Maybe they won’t see us.”
“You’d have to be blind not to see us,” I said.
“Shhh,” she repeated, tucking the hubcap under her arm and sliding down. “Maybe we can just lie inside and they’ll think no one’s in it?”
I scooched down, too—into the water that was slowly flooding the canoe. “I’m getting wet,” I said.
“You’re already wet. Be quiet!”
We peeked over the canoe’s edge as we drifted.
The car was a dark sedan with smoked-glass windows, like a million other cars. It circled the lot twice, finally pulling up beside the SUV. Doors opened, closed; I recognized the stiff gait of Mr. Four, and the woman with her helmet of blonde hair. They came around the SUV, touched the hood—still warm, I bet—and then walked toward the rest stop bathroom.
We were almost past when the hubcap slipped out of Greta’s grasp. It floated toward me in the shallow water in the canoe’s base, bouncing off the sides and making little metallic clonking noises the whole way, until it came to rest against my feet.
I looked up from the hubcap into Greta’s eyes. Her face had gone white.
“Evelyn Truelove!” the woman’s voice called from the shoreline. “Is that you and your friend in that canoe?” She didn’t sound angry at all; instead, her voice was concerned, like someone’s worried mom.
I didn’t want to answer, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t see us. And I needed to buy us time to drift farther away. “Don’t call me Evelyn!” I shouted, sitting up.
We were past the rest stop bathroom now, but not moving all that fast.
“Come back to shore,” the woman said, ignoring me. Mr. Four walked stiff-legged to the riverbank and fell to his knees in the shallows. He buried his hands and face in the water—drinking it? Washing up?
I heard a loud click across the water.
“Gun,” Greta whispered. “She just cocked the hammer of a pistol.”
“I don’t know what to call you,” I yelled to the woman. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
“You can call me Ms. Hand,” the woman said. “Now come back to shore and we won’t hurt you.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” I answered. “Why don’t you come to us—the water’s nice! Just ask Mr. Four.”
“Last warning, Evelyn.”
“I told you, I don’t like to be called—”
A bright flare of gunfire stopped me from finishing my sentence.
I couldn’t see the bullet, of course, but I saw the muzzle flash, the upward snap of her wrist. She had aimed at Greta.
Something in my head took over, and the paddle twirled in my hand.
There was a clang, the deafening sound of a ricochet, and a numbing impact that I felt all the way up my arms.
Without knowing how, I’d pivoted the paddle and deflected the bullet. Like I’d seen my mom do at the park earlier today.
From beside me, Greta whispered, “When did you learn to do that?”
I stared at the paddle with its puckered crater. “Never,” I whispered. “I never learned to do that.” I worked my fingers to make the numbness go away.
Ms. Hand pointed to Mr. Four and said, “Mr. Four, use the sacrifice you’ve been given. I command you! Bend the water to your will!”
We couldn’t see what Mr. Four was doing, but we could hear him: He was singing—chanting almost—at the river’s edge. His voice was low and unsettling.
“Ronan,” Greta said, her voice shaky, “something’s happening.”
“But we’re almost away.” It was true—we were past the entire rest stop now; there was no way they could catch us.
As Mr. Four knelt and sang, his hands in the river, the water began to churn and splash and steam, as if he were holding something red-hot under the surface. Within moments, heaving waves began rolling underneath us, shouldering past our canoe as the water level dropped.
The water was dropping upriver, too—boiling back away from where Mr. Four was now on his knees in the mud, his arms held wide apart, his hands burning with red light. He almost seemed to be willing the water upstream and downstream away from the riverbed, clearing a widening strip of muddy river bottom that stretched all the way from one bank to the other.
The waters parted farther and farther until, with a wet slurp, our canoe came to rest in the mud. A few yards away, a fish gasped and flopped. Thirty feet downstream, a wall of water seethed against an invisible barrier. Upstream from Mr. Four and Ms. Hand was another wall of frothing water, this one twelve feet high and rising, dammed up by whatever magic Mr. Four was working.
Kicking off her high-heeled shoes, Ms. Hand walked out into the mud. She carried what looked like a long sliver of moonlight—a wide silver sword. Strange runes flickered on the blade, like those on the swords the guys on the train had wielded.
“I told you to come back,” Ms. Hand growled between clenched teeth. “This has gone on long enough.”
Behind her, Mr. Four stayed as he was, kneeling, singing, continuing his whole Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea trick.
I looked at my paddle. I didn’t like my odds against that sword. Meanwhile, Greta started to climb out of the canoe.
“Get back in,” I said, standing up, feeling the canoe teeter beneath me. “It’s Mr. Four who’s making this happen. We have to stop him.” My foot came down on the hubcap.
I picked it up and thought of Dawkins with the tray in the dining car. A Blood Guard finds weapons in whatever he has at hand. I held the metal disk and felt an echo of a long-ago summer Frisbee league seize my brain.
I clenched my fingers along the metal rim of the disk in what Ultimate players call a power grip, cocked my wrist back, and pivoted my arm behind me.
“Hold tight,” I warned Greta.
She got down and wedged her hands and feet against the aluminum ribs of the canoe.
The moment she was secure, I snapped my wri
st forward.
The hubcap flew straight and true, a long glimmering streak. Ms. Hand swung as it passed, but missed, and then the hubcap connected with Mr. Four’s head. There was a sound like a big bell dropping to the ground, and he crumpled face forward into the mud.
With a roar Ms. Hand charged toward us, lifting the sword over her shoulder for a mighty chop, trying to reach us before—
The river came back.
It hit with a huge whomp, water rushing in all around us.
Ms. Hand was swallowed up completely.
At the same moment, the river flung our canoe into the air. The water flipped the canoe’s back end straight up, right against me. Wedged tightly into the prow, Greta watched, her mouth wide in a soundless scream, as another wall of water smashed into us, straightening the canoe and slamming it back down so hard that it bounced.
I bounced with it, banging into the benches and struts, desperately clinging to the sides so that I wouldn’t fall out.
Greta struggled to her knees while the canoe bucked and tossed, and then, a minute later, it was over. The river was back to normal, rolling along serenely like nothing had happened.
We huddled in the bottom of the canoe, staring at each other in disbelief, both of us soaking wet and panting. Greta swiped her dripping hair out of her eyes.
I raised my head and peeked over the canoe’s aluminum edge. The dammed-up water had rocketed us far downstream, and now the rest stop was just a dark spot on the horizon. There wasn’t a single sign of Ms. Hand or Mr. Four. Had they drowned? I stared for a while toward the place where they’d gone under, but I didn’t see anyone surface.
We’d lost the paddle. For a moment I worried we’d lost the satchel, too, but then I saw the strap over Greta’s shoulder.
“Ronan?” Greta said. “Ronan, are you okay?”
“I think so?” I said. I watched until the rest stop disappeared completely.
“What that guy was doing,” Greta began, “that was…magic, wasn’t it? And the way you blocked that bullet with the paddle? And threw that hubcap? This isn’t just a bunch of scary people with guns, right? This is something else.”
I remembered my mom, her legs a blur as she ran faster and leaped farther than any human should be able to do. The men who’d been pursuing us—first at the train station, and then at the truck stop—had done the same trick. And Mr. Four, the partner—or the servant?—of Ms. Hand, had parted the river, holding back a wall of water with just a song.
I turned to Greta and shivered in the darkness. “You’re right. This is definitely something else.”
CHAPTER 11:
WE GET TAKEN FOR A RIDE
We’d been drifting quietly for a half hour or so—long enough for the shadows to swallow up the road and the river and us with it. Back in the city, streetlamps and car headlights and all the buildings can make you forget about how dark the night can get, but out here, the darkness was so heavy that I could barely see Greta sitting in the prow of the canoe, her body a shadow against the stars that were coming out across the sky.
I heard what sounded like a sob.
“Are you crying?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Just shut your stupid mouth, Ronan Truelove.” But her voice had that giveaway full-of-snot-and-phlegm sound. “I’ve got allergies.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, we got away, right? So what’s to cry over?”
“Nothing I can think of,” I said.
The river ran beside the road for a while, but then it turned east across the fields. I couldn’t even see the traffic anymore, could only hear a faint roaring noise that I figured was the highway.
Greta sniffed. “It’s just…my parents split up and my mom is depressed, and I don’t even get to see my dad anymore unless I take the train to DC. It’s like I don’t even have a home anymore, Ronan.” Greta gestured as she talked, rocking the canoe, and the water in the bottom sloshed around our feet. Now that the hubcap was gone, the boat was filling up, slow but sure. “No offense, but I really wish I wasn’t stuck in this canoe with you.”
“No offense,” I replied, “but I wish I wasn’t stuck with you, either.” I wondered how my own parents were doing. Had Mom managed to escape Ms. Hand’s pals near the train station? “Actually, I’m sorry I got you mixed up in this.”
“It’s my own fault. If I hadn’t been so high and mighty on the train, I wouldn’t be involved.”
“No,” I said, “Dawkins had swiped that man’s wallet, and you were just trying to do the right thing.”
I heard a rustling, and then a scratching noise, and suddenly I could see Greta clearly: she’d struck a flame with the Zippo lighter. It cast a warm glow over her face. “Dawkins’ satchel is waterproof,” she said.
“Great,” I said and pictured Dawkins under the truck’s tires. I wished he were still with us. “What good is a lighter?”
“We could build a fire, maybe.”
“In a canoe? On a river?”
“Once we get out of the canoe, dummy.”
And then maybe the flame of the Zippo reminded her of something, because she asked, “So what happened to your family back in Brooklyn, anyway?”
“Our house burned down,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you know that.”
“Yeah, sorry about the arsonist comment earlier. I don’t really think you set your own house on fire.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Though you have to admit it was pretty freakish how the place caught fire with you at home.” She let the flame go out. “Do you think the fire had anything to do with why those people are after you?”
I stared at her in surprise. Was she right? Was the fire because of the Blood Guard? Had my mom moved us to keep the family safe? Was the person my mother had been assigned to watch over—one of the thirty-six Pure Dawkins had talked about—one of our neighbors in Brooklyn?
“I’ll ask my mom. If I ever see her again.” I reached down and splashed my fingers in the dirty water in the bottom of the canoe. “We’ve taken on a lot of water. We should probably get to shore before we sink.”
“Good idea.” Greta craned her head around, looking at the dark banks rolling past. “Let’s beach the canoe on the left up there,” she said, “where it—wait! Ronan, look.”
A shallow wall stretched across the entire width of the river up ahead. “What is it?”
“A dam,” Greta said. She pointed to a patch of shoreline that was a smidge lighter than the surrounding night. “And I think that’s a boat ramp over there.”
“How do we get there?” I asked. It looked impossibly far away.
“We swim for it,” Greta said. “It’s not like we can get any wetter.” She zipped up the pouches on Dawkins’ bag. “On three?”
She counted out loud, and together we flipped ourselves into the freezing river. We swam to shore and climbed out onto a concrete apron that dipped down into the shallows.
The concrete was still warm from the afternoon sun. We stretched out on it and lay there panting, letting our bodies soak up the heat.
“So if Mr. Four and Ms. Hand got out of the river okay…” I said.
“Then they’ll be really peeved.”
We both laughed. But I was forcing it a little, worried again about how they’d parted the waters like that. Did any of us have a chance against people who could bend nature to their will?
“Seriously, though,” Greta said. “If they did, they’d follow the river and check out every place we might stop.”
“But the river stopped following the highway, like, an hour ago,” I said, and got up. “They’d have to off-road it.”
The dam wasn’t much as dams go, just a long thick concrete wall about twelve feet high that curved gently from one shore to the other. On the other side of it was a large reservoir that shone silver in the moonlight, and on its far edge, an empty parking lot. We had to climb a rusty chain-link fence to get to the top, and when we did, there wasn’t a sign of life
anywhere.
“Why’s a lake need a parking lot?” I asked, pointing.
Greta looked at me like I was stupid and said, “Don’t you ever go camping?”
“In a parking lot? No. In a tent, in the woods? Totally.”
“If you’re in an RV, you don’t camp in the woods. You go to places like this. See? There are trailer hookups and a shower block over there.”
“That’s not camping,” I said. “That’s…parking.”
Two bright beams cut through the darkness.
“Car,” Greta whispered.
There was a big green metal utility box at the edge of the dam, and we crouched behind it, watching as the headlights roamed around the lot before pulling to a halt right in the center.
I peeked over the utility box. It wasn’t the red SUV or the woman’s car from the rest stop. It was just a long tan RV, towing a small trailer that held a couple of motorcycles. As soon as it was parked, its running lights and headlamps went off, and the curtained windows along its length brightened with a warm yellow glow. “It’s just a stupid motor home,” I said.
Greta stood up. “Come on. Maybe whoever’s in it has a phone.”
We were thirty feet away when the side door of the RV banged open. We flattened ourselves in the shadows and watched as a set of metal stairs extended from the side of the vehicle, and an overweight gray-haired man in neon bright shorts and flip-flops staggered out, two folded lawn chairs in his arms. “Won’t take but a minute to set up,” he called to someone inside.
He set the chairs out and then stared at the distant line of the dam for a long minute, hands on his hips. “It’s a nice night!” he said.
A woman came down the steps, holding two cans of soda. She looked almost exactly like the man—older, overweight, with neon shorts and sandals, even what looked like the same haircut. “I brought you a pop, Henry,” she said.
“Thank you kindly, Izzy,” he said, taking it from her, cracking the top, and settling his bulk into a lawn chair. She took the other chair, and the two of them quietly sipped their drinks and stared out at the reservoir.
Beside me, Greta whispered, “They’re just a couple of grandparents.”
