“Maybe it’s gone now,” Susan said. She made a place for herself between Kate’s feet and Jean’s. From the window over Liyla’s bed, the moon filtered in, just enough so she could make out Max’s worried face.
“How lucky do you feel?” he asked her.
She frowned at him. Max usually didn’t believe in luck.
“Not lucky at all,” she said to him. “Not even a little.”
“Me neither.”
Alone mockingbird whistled in the dark, and the chickens dreamed in the yard as Susan and Max woke the others. It didn’t take much to convince their sisters to leave. They pulled their shoes on wearily, and Jean shoved her Barbie back into her waistband.
“Where’s mine?” Kate asked, rummaging in the bed.
They told her. She raised her head unhappily.
“She’s a burglar?” She looked from Max to Susan.
Standing next to Kate, Jean puffed up with indignation.
“A monster burglar,” she said. “A witch burglar.” For half an hour before they had fallen asleep last night, Jean had argued with Kate over which nightmare figure Liyla’s mother fit best. Apparently, Susan thought, she had decided on both.
“Hush up, you,” Nell told Jean as she collected her blanket. “Can’t you see we’re in trouble?”
Susan peeked into the main room. All was quiet, and the bedroom door remained closed. Behind her, she heard whispering.
“I said hush!” Nell snapped at the girls.
“We weren’t talking!”
Susan turned to separate them and saw a shadow flick past the window. She climbed onto the bed to look out. Nothing. The chickens glowed whitely in the moonlight, and the mockingbird sighed somewhere near the well.
“Ready?” Max asked.
She nodded. One more check of the window, just in case. Maybe the shadow had only been a cloud rolling across the moon.
Inches from her face, two hooded figures peered through the glass.
“Ahh!” She flung herself backward, landing on Nell, who elbowed her reflexively.
“Hey!”
“Shush!” Susan sputtered, pointing. There was nothing there anymore, but now they could hear a rattling at the back door. Kate clutched at her.
“Fanatics!” Susan hissed. “They’re getting in!”
Max and Nell ran to put their shoulders to the door. It shook against them a second before stopping. Susan looked out the window. The figures stood conferring in the yard.
“Can they open it?” Jean asked her, quivering.
“No, no, they can’t,” Susan told her. “Everything’s locked.”
She watched as one of the hooded figures leaned toward the other, shaking its head. They paused another second and turned their hooded faces her way. The first tugged at the second. A minute later, they disappeared into darkness.
“How do they do that?” Kate asked. “Disappear like that?”
“They’re fast,” Susan said. “That’s what Liyla’s mother said.”
“What do they want?” Nell asked. She and Max had returned from the door.
“What everybody seems to want,” Max said shakily. “Us.”
Unable to go and afraid to stay, they sat and argued as the night waned.
“Wish we had a knife,” Max said. “I wouldn’t mind one like Liyla’s.”
Nell suggested he take it, in trade for the Barbie.
“And what are you going to do with it?” Susan asked him. “Stick Liyla’s mother?”
He shrugged. “Maybe her father. This is kind of like a war, isn’t it?”
Susan looked at Kate and Jean. She sighed. “Yeah, and we’re your army. I don’t think a straight-on attack’s going to work.”
“Besides,” Kate said, “that’s yuck.”
“Yuck will be what happens if they send us to whatever those workshops are,” Max told her. “Don’t you remember Liyla asking if they had to cut us?”
Kate looked dismayed. She picked at the sagging edge of the mattress and sniffed. Outside, the window had begun to lighten, and gray, unhappy light seeped into the room.
“Can’t we push her into the oven or something?” Jean asked.
Nell snorted. “She’s not a witch! How many times do we have to tell you?”
Max ignored them both and began explaining how he planned to slip into the bedroom, steal the knife, and get them out of there.
But Susan had another idea.
“She’s not a witch,” she agreed. “But you know what she is? A crocodile.”
Even Max stopped when she said this. They all looked at her like she’d lost her marbles.
So she told them the story of the monkey and the crocodile, in which the crocodile, hungry for monkey’s heart, tempts the monkey onto her back and tries to drown him in the river. The monkey saves himself by convincing the crocodile he’s left his heart in a tree back home.
“Don’t you see? We’re the monkey. They don’t want us; they want whatever makes us look this way. You heard Liyla, didn’t you, when she called those people sleeping in the shed change-bringers? And her mother said Jean looked like an old painting! They think they used to look like us! And that we used to look like them until whatever happens in those workshops. So what if they thought we were changing back? What would they do then?”
Nell turned on her in horror.
“What do you mean, ‘back’?” she asked her. “We can’t look like them, can we?”
Susan prayed it was true when she said, “No, we can’t. But they don’t know that, do they?”
By the time the light turned from gray to pink, they had it settled. Susan got up, stretched, and peered outside. She shuddered. The strangers were gone, but their footprints still covered the chicken yard. Kate sat on the bed, legs pulled tight to her chest, her chin resting on her knees. There were dark circles under her eyes. Lack of sleep would be better than makeup, Susan thought.
“Now, don’t overdo it, right?” she said, mostly to Nell but a little to Max, too. He had just returned from the fireplace with two fistfuls of ash. “Just enough to convince them
