Realizing there was no way out of it, he swallowed hard, closed his eyes for a second, then turned and pointed to a house behind us. “That one.”
“Why that one?” I asked.
“Because you made me choose!” Horace said angrily.
That would have to do.
* * *
The front door was locked. No problem: Bronwyn wrenched off the knob and tossed it into the street, and the door creaked open on its own. We filed into a dark hallway lined with family photos, the faces impossible to make out. Bronwyn closed the door and blocked it with a table she found in the hall.
“Who’s there?” came a voice from further inside the house.
“I’m going to hit you very hard,” Horace muttered.
There was no time to switch houses. We’d have to introduce ourselves to whoever was here and hope they were friendly.
“
“We aren’t thieves or Germans or anything like that!” Emma said. “Just here to take cover!”
No response.
“Stay here,” Emma told the others, and then she pulled me after her down the hall. “We’re coming to say hello!” she called out, loud and friendly. “Don’t shoot us, please!”
We walked to the end of the hall and rounded a corner, and there, standing in a doorway, was a girl. She held a wicked-down lantern in one hand and a letter opener in the other, and her hard, black eyes flicked nervously between Emma and me. “There’s nothing of value here!” she said. “This house has been looted already.”
“I told you, we’re not thieves!” Emma said, offended.
“And I told you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll scream and … and my father will come running with his … guns and things!”
The girl looked at once childish and prematurely adult. She had her hair in a short bob and wore a little girl’s dress with big white buttons trailing down the front, but something in her stony expression made her seem older, world-weary at twelve or thirteen.
“Please don’t scream,” I said, thinking not about her probably fictitious father but about what other things
