“Go back to sleep,” Jillian said after her third attempt got the same error message. “I’ll wake you up if I get through.”
“I want to stay awake.”
“If I don’t get through before three, you’re going to have to take over trying to get through. We have to keep trying until midnight tomorrow.”
April had said that it was unlikely they would get through during the first few hours, but it was upsetting to think that three hours might go by without success.
It was still dark when Jillian woke Louise. “I didn’t get through. I never even got a connection.”
“April got to the border Saturday; she’ll get in,” Louise said with more confidence than she felt. She glanced at the clock. It was three-thirty. Jillian had let her sleep an extra half hour. They needed to be awake for school at five-thirty. Louise reset the alarm.
By failure number seven, Jillian was breathing deeply.
The world was strangely quiet as Louise sat dialing her phone. It seemed as if the whole world were holding its breath, just as afraid for her sister as she was.
At four twenty-three, the phone clicked instead of immediately giving Louise a recording. Her heart leaped up and then sunk down to her toes as it gave a standard busy signal. She hung up and redialed. It clicked, and after a moment of silence, gave a busy signal again. Her heart had done the same dizzying loop of up and down and back to rest.
“Oh, you do have a phone!” Iggy said when they met him at the subway platform shortly after eight. It had become a ritual at some point that Iggy walked with them to school from the subway station.
“Doh!” Jillian hit dial to try yet again. “Everyone has phones, even the Amish.”
“Isn’t that against their religion?” Iggy asked.
“I report it, not explain it,” Jillian stated.
Jillian’s phone suddenly connected, and a man spoke over her phone. “Hey, this is Oilcan. My life imploded, and I’m not going to be home until
They stared at Jillian’s phone for several heartbeats.
“Normally you leave a message after something like that.” Iggy pointed to the still connected phone.
“That’s not the right number.” Jillian disconnected the call.
“Ah, okay, I was wondering. Those sound like gang names. And headsets? Only bikers use those.”
Jillian glanced to Louise as she put her phone away. “I’ll have to look up the right number later.”
“So.” Iggy bounced in place. “Are you psyched?”
“Huh?” Louise said.
“Tomorrow you start flying!” Iggy meant for the play.
Jillian swore slightly as the twins traded glances. They had totally forgotten about the play again in the flood of other concerns. Because of the bombing, all the school activities had been pushed back a week, including the sixth-grade class play. They’d made up for lost time on stagecraft with after-school sessions. They hadn’t had access to the stage, however, until last week. It meant they spent the first few days moving pieces of the sets into place, assembling them, and testing their blocking.
Jillian and Iggy started to practice lines, which left Louise to consider Oilcan’s answering machine message. They still didn’t know if this man was their cousin, Orville. They’d scripted out a series of questions that they could have asked to establish his identity. If he wasn’t going to be home during the Shutdown window, then they could only leave a message. Should they without knowing if this was really Orville or not?
It was painful to feel exactly nine years old.
“We could just say ‘Alexander is in danger’ and not give any other information on her, not even her gender, and if it isn’t Orville, he’ll have no idea who we’re talking about.”
They’d hidden themselves in the girls’ restroom to discuss the problem before the homeroom bell rang.
“I don’t know. Two kids call and leave a message about elves kidnapping your cousin — who’s going to believe that? It’s going to sound like a joke.”
“We can have Tesla leave it.” Jillian dropped her pitch to the gravelly tone of Tesla’s original deep voice, before they changed it to sound like Christopher Robin.
“That could work, but do we say who is going to kidnap Alexander? Sparrow is a double agent working inside the Wind Clan. We don’t know whom she’s working for or why. It isn’t Windwolf; he’s a target, too. And Sparrow probably isn’t going to carry out the kidnapping herself.”
“I know! I know!” Jillian cried. “Okay. We’ll call Lain.”
“What? Lain?”
“She’s Alexander’s aunt.”
“But she might not know that. Esme didn’t want April to tell her about Alexander.”
