Hollow City

Then Emma took my arm and yanked me away—down another hall—into a kitchen—out the back door—into an ash-dusted garden—down an alley where the others were running in a loose group. Then someone said “Look, look!” and, still running, I swiveled to see a great white bird fluttering high above the street. Enoch said, “Mine—it’s a mine!” and what had seemed like gossamer wings resolved suddenly and clearly into a parachute, the fat silver body hanging below it packed with explosives; an angel of death floating serenely toward earth.

The hollows burst outside. I could see them distantly, loping through the garden, tongues waving in the air.

The mine landed by the house with a gentle clink.

“Get down!” I screamed.

We never had a chance to run for cover. I’d only just hit the ground when there was a blinding flash and a sound like the earth ripping open and a shock wave of searing hot wind that knocked the air from my lungs. Then a black hail of debris whipped hard against my back and I hugged my knees to my chest, making myself as compact as I could.

After that, there was only wind and sirens and a ringing in my ears. I gasped for air and choked on the swirling dust. Pulling the collar of my sweater up over my nose and mouth to filter it, I slowly caught my breath.

I counted my limbs: two arms, two legs.

Good.

I sat up slowly and looked around. I couldn’t see much through the dust, but I heard my friends calling out for one another. There was Horace’s voice, and Bronwyn’s. Hugh’s. Millard’s.

Where was Emma?

I shouted her name. Tried to get up and fell back again. My legs were intact but shaking; they wouldn’t take my weight.

I shouted again. “Emma!”

“I’m here!”

My head snapped toward her voice. She materialized through the smoke.

“Jacob! Oh, God. Thank God.”

Both of us were shaking. I put my arms around her, running my hands over her body to make sure she was all there.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Yes. Are you?”

My ears hurt and my lungs ached and my back stung where I’d been pelted by debris, but the pain in my stomach was gone. The moment the blast went off, it was as if someone had flipped a switch inside me, and just like that, the Feeling had vanished.

The hollows had been vaporized.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

Aside from scrapes and cuts, so were the rest of us. We staggered together in a cluster and compared injuries. All were minor. “It’s some kind of miracle,” Emma said, shaking her head in disbelief.

It seemed even more so when we realized that everywhere around us were nails and bits of concrete and knifelike splinters of wood, many of them driven inches into the ground by the blast.

Enoch wobbled to a car parked nearby, its windows smashed, its frame so pocked with shrapnel that it looked like it had been sprayed by a machine gun. “We should be dead,” he marveled, poking his finger into one of the holes. “Why aren’t we full of holes?”

Hugh said, “Your shirt, mate,” then went to Enoch and plucked a crumpled nail from the back of his grit-encrusted sweater.

“And yours,” said Enoch, pulling a jagged spike of metal from

Hugh’s.

Then we all checked our sweaters. Embedded in each were long shards of glass and pieces of metal that should have passed right through our bodies—but hadn’t. Our itchy, ill-fitting, peculiar sweaters weren’t fireproof or waterproof, as the emu-raffe had guessed. They were bulletproof. And they had saved our lives.

“I never dreamed I’d owe my life to such an appalling article of clothing,” said Horace, testing the sweater’s wool between his fingers. “I wonder if I could make a tuxedo jacket out of it instead.”

Then Melina appeared, pigeon on her shoulder, blind brothers at her side. With their sonarlike senses, the brothers had discovered a low wall of reinforced concrete—it had sounded hard—and pulled Melina behind it just as the bomb exploded. That left only the two normal girls unaccounted for. But as the dust settled and their house came into view—or what was left of it—any hope of finding them alive seemed to fade. The upper floor had collapsed, pancaking down onto the lower. What remained was a skeletal wreck of exposed beams and smoking rubble.

Bronwyn took off running toward it anyway, shouting the sisters’ names. Numbly, I watched her go.

“We could’ve helped them and we didn’t,” Emma said miserably. “We left them to die.”

“It wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference,” Millard said. “Their deaths had been written into history. Even if we’d saved their lives today, something else would’ve taken them tomorrow. Another bomb. A bus crash. They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere.”

“Which is why you can’t go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening,” said Enoch. “History heals itself. Isn’t that interesting?”

“No,” Emma snapped, “and you’re a heartless bastard for talking about killing babies at a time like this. Or ever.”