The first shell landed close enough that Lila felt it in her teeth before she heard it.
Marcus grabbed her arm and hauled her sideways, off the open field and down into a slit in the earth that turned out to be a trench — deeper than a hallway, walled in rotting timber, the bottom running with black water. She hit the mud on her hands and knees and didn’t get up.
“Down!” Marcus was already shouting it at the others. He’d grabbed her and taken charge before he’d even had time to be scared. But the trench zigzagged sharp to the left just past where they’d dropped in, and in the dark and the noise Lila lost track of who was where. She could hear Jack somewhere behind her, a high, thin sound that might have been words. She couldn’t see Emma or Tyler at all.
“Marcus—” she started.
Another shell hit, closer this time, and the timber props over her head groaned and let go. Earth came down in a heavy curtain, and when the dust cleared, the gap she and Marcus had come through had narrowed to a space barely wide enough for a shoulder.
“Marcus!”
“I’m okay!” His voice came from the other side, muffled, closer to the ground than it should have been. “I’m okay, I’m just — Lila, there’s someone down here.”
She didn’t decide to go. Her body just went, dropping to her knees and working herself through the gap before her brain caught up with what a terrible idea that was.
On the other side was a dugout no bigger than a closet, and in front of Marcus, half-buried in fallen timber, was a boy.
Not a soldier the way Lila had pictured soldiers — not a grown man. He couldn’t have been much older than Marcus. Maybe fifteen. His uniform was too big for him in the shoulders the way school uniforms were too big for sixth graders whose parents bought a size up to grow into. One of his legs was pinned under a beam, and his face had gone the particular gray of someone trying very hard not to make a sound.
He said something. Fast, urgent, his hand closing around Marcus’s sleeve. And Lila understood him.
Not translated-a-second-later understood him — understood him the way she understood her mother, immediate and whole, even though the shape of the words in the air was nothing like English. Get out, both of you, get out, they’re coming back down this line — and then a name, his brother’s maybe, or his own, she couldn’t tell which, before fear and the next shell swallowed the rest of it.
“He’s stuck,” Marcus said. He already had both hands on the beam. “Lila, help me, on three—”
She got her hands under it too, without thinking, the way you help before you’ve decided whether helping is possible. The wood didn’t so much as shift.
“Marcus, the watch—”
“I know what the watch says!” He didn’t look at her. He was still pulling. “One second. Give me one second.”
The beam didn’t move. The boy made a sound when Marcus tried again, a sound Lila was going to hear again whether she wanted to or not, and grabbed Marcus’s wrist hard enough to make him stop.
No,* he said, and this time Lila understood it so clearly it was almost worse than not understanding, *leave it, leave it, go —
Boots, out in the main trench. Not the panicked scramble of someone’s own side — measured, unhurried, a search rather than a retreat. A light swept the mud in short, deliberate arcs, and when it caught the edge of the dugout for half a second, Lila saw the shape of the helmet it came from. Not like the boy’s. Wrong silhouette, wrong angle at the brim.
They’d come up on the wrong side of the line.
“Marcus.” Lila’s voice came out smaller than she meant it to. “Marcus, they’re not his.”
“I’m not leaving him under a beam.”
“You can’t move it. I just tried. If that light finds us, it isn’t just us in trouble anymore, it’s him too —”
The boy said something else. Shorter this time. Not urgent — final, the way people sound when they’ve already decided something and are just waiting for everyone else to catch up. His grip on Marcus’s wrist loosened. With his free hand he fumbled at his own collar and pressed something small and hard into Marcus’s palm, closing Marcus’s fingers around it himself, like he didn’t trust Marcus to take it otherwise.
Go,* he said. *Please. If they find you here they’ll think you came with me. Go.
Marcus didn’t move. Lila had never once seen him not move when someone told him to.
The light swept closer.
She grabbed Marcus’s collar the way he’d grabbed her when they’d landed, and pulled, and for one terrible second she didn’t think it would work — and then it did, because some part of Marcus had already decided too, and he let her drag him back through the gap a half second before the light found the space where he’d been kneeling.
They didn’t stop moving until they hit the others. Jack grabbed Lila’s sleeve and didn’t let go. Emma was talking too fast about communication trenches and wrong turns, like naming the place could make it smaller, but Lila wasn’t really listening, because Marcus was standing there with his hand closed into a fist so tight she could see the shape of something small pressing white lines into his knuckles.
“Ten seconds!” Tyler called out, his wrist raised, the green colon flashing.
Nobody asked Marcus what happened. There wasn’t time, and something in his face said not to anyway.
“Five.”
Somewhere behind them, back down the trench, a voice shouted — too distant and distorted to make out, but sharp enough that its meaning didn’t matter. The countdown was faster than the boots behind them.
“Three.”
Marcus was still looking back the way they’d come. “One.”
The mud released her boots. The noise and the cold went with it, all at once, like a light switching off.
Lila hit the bleachers hard enough to knock the wind out of her.
The gym again — except it wasn’t quite the gym she’d left. The storm was still hammering the metal roof loud enough to swallow small sounds, and somehow they’d landed exactly where they’d been sitting, in the same six feet of bleacher, the same fold of shadow the emergency lights didn’t reach. Across the floor, her mother hadn’t turned around. No time had passed here worth turning around for.
Jack was shaking. Emma was staring at her ruined binder like it might explain something. Tyler slowly lowered his wrist.
Marcus hadn’t said a word since the trench.
“Marcus.” Lila reached for his arm and he flinched, just slightly, before he let her touch it. “Marcus, that boy — did he —”
“I don’t know.” Marcus wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at his own closed fist like he’d forgotten it was attached to him. “I don’t know what happened to him. We left.”
He opened his hand.
Sitting in his palm, small and carved and worn smooth at the edges from someone’s thumb running over it again and again, was a wooden horse no bigger than a house key.
“I left him,” Marcus said, and closed his fingers back around it, and didn’t say anything else.