“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
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
“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
