I stopped us in the road.
“What are you doing?” Emma said, puffing to catch her breath.
“Are you mad?”
“Maybe,” I said, and then I grabbed Horace, swept my hand toward the row of houses, and said, “Choose.”
“What?” he said. “Why me?”
“Because I trust your random guesses more than my own.”
“But I never dreamed about this!” he protested.
“Maybe you did and don’t remember,” I said. “Choose.”
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.
Damn. We weren’t alone. “You were supposed to pick an empty house,” I said to Horace.
“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.
“Who is there!” the voice demanded.
“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 might come running.
Then a small voice piped up behind her, through the doorway she’d been conspicuously blocking. “Who’s there, Sam?”
The girl’s face pinched in frustration. “Only some children,” she said. “I asked you to keep quiet, Esme.”
“Are they nice? I want to meet them!”
“They were just leaving.”
“There are lots of us and two of you,” Emma said matter-of-factly. “We’re staying here for a bit, and that’s that. You’re not going to scream, either, and we’re not going to steal anything.”
The girl’s eyes flashed with anger, then dulled. She knew she’d lost. “All right,” she said, “but try anything and I’ll scream and bury this in your belly.” She brandished the letter opener weakly, then lowered it to her waist.
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Sam?” said the little voice. “What’s happening now?”
The girl—Sam—stepped reluctantly aside, revealing a bathroom that danced with the flickering light of candles. There was a sink and a toilet and a bathtub, and in the bathtub a little girl of perhaps five. She peeped curiously at us over the rim. “This is my sister, Esme,” Sam said.
“Hullo!” said Esme, waggling a rubber duck at us. “Bombs can’t get you when you’re in the bath, did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” Emma replied.
“It’s her safe place,” Sam whispered. “We spend every raid in here.”
“Wouldn’t you be safer in a shelter?” I said.
“Those are awful places,” Sam said.
The others had tired of waiting and began coming down the hall. Bronwyn leaned through the doorway and waved hello.
“Come in!” Esme said, delighted.
“You’re too trusting,” Sam scolded her. “One day you’re going to meet a bad person and then you’ll be sorry.”
“They aren’t bad,” said Esme.
“You can’t tell just by looking.”
Then Hugh and Horace pressed their faces through the doorway, curious to see whom we’d met, and Olive scooted between their legs and sat in the middle of the floor, and pretty soon all of us were squeezed into the bathroom together, even Melina and the blind brothers, who stood creepily facing the corner. Seeing so many people, Sam’s legs shook and she sat down heavily on the toilet, overwhelmed—but her sister was thrilled, asking everyone’s name as they came in.
“Where are your parents?” Bronwyn asked.
“Father’s shooting bad people in the war,” Esme said proudly. She mimed holding a rifle and shouted, “Bang!”
Emma looked at Sam. “You said your father was upstairs,” she said flatly.
“You broke into our house,” Sam replied.
“True.”
“And your mother?” said Bronwyn. “Where is she?”
“A long time dead,” Sam said with no apparent feeling. “So when Father went to war they tried shipping us off to family elsewhere—and because Father’s sister in Devon is terribly mean and would only take one of us, they tried shipping Esme and me off to different places. But we jumped off the train and came back.”
“We won’t be split up,” Esme declared. “We’re sisters.”
“And you’re afraid if you go to a shelter they’ll find you?” Emma said. “Send you away?”
Sam nodded. “I won’t let that happen.”
“It’s safe in the tub,” said Esme. “Maybe you should get in, too. That way we’d all be safe.”
Bronwyn touched her hand to her heart. “Thank you, love, but we’d never fit!”