HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
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NO ONE WAS WAITING FOR US AT THE GATES. NOTHING SEEMED OFF. THE sounds of Survivors bustling around the city in their usual sing-song voices and conversations reverberated through my skull. God, no one had told them anything. Not about the threat of exposure. Not about Lizzie. Not about anything at all.
Everett took my hand when we walked in, and though my head was going to shrug him off, my hand decided to stay linked to him. It knew what I forgot, I guess: Anchor. I needed an anchor.
The walk to the square felt wrong. The sky was so merrily bright blue above. It was the most pleasant day I'd felt in the Survivors' City since before I left it for the first time. But to me, everything looked awful here. I knew too much, and it tainted everything. The sound of helicopters overhead really completed the effect.
I noticed that not a single elder was out on the lanes or in the square. Andrew's house had a fire lit inside of it, but the door was closed. Hannah's too. And Sarah's. Disconcertingly, Lizzie's house was dark, but the door hung slightly ajar, swaying in the wind. Where was she? I hadn't allowed my brain to picture her lifeless body so I hadn't stopped to think where they had put her.
We went straight to the Winters' house, where Adelaide, Mark, and Ginny were positioned around the kitchen table.
I couldn't handle homecoming hugs and kisses now, so when I walked in, all I said was, "Why did no one tell them?"
"About Lizzie?" Adelaide asked. "We're going to. We just have to figure out how."
"And the exposure?" I asked.
"The elders know," she said. "Many of them are in the apothecary now, trying to determine what charms that once protected this place from human sight have now been broken. But they're having a hard time." Her voice had a gentle lilt in it, coaxing me.
But I saw through it. "Because Lizzie was the one among them who knew the most," I said, understanding all too well the predicament we found ourselves in. "Why can't you help them?"
"I'm not a Survivor. It takes a Survivor's magic to protect the Survivor's land," she said. "Or at least it takes magic more powerful than mine to protect an entire city."
"And with Lizzie, our protection died," I said grimly. This same stupid line kept ringing through my head: How. Could. This. Have. Happened?
"So it seems," Adelaide said quietly.
"So every news outlet in the world could be at those gates in twenty-four hours, and we're going to what? Say "Surprise! We're kids from the Salem Witch Trials who survived! What up?'" I said. They all looked at me in that same way Everett had: part surprise, part confusion, part terror.
"She's a little out of it," Everett said, I'm sure, as gently as he could manage.
"That's an understatement!" I cried, clapping my hands. "Well, no time like the present, then," I said and bolted into the square.
