“It’s nearly eleven already,” said Julia. “She would come back here if she couldn’t find them.”
Emmie tried not to sound as panicked as she felt. “Maybe we should go back for her.”
“No one’s going back. Army’s orders. If she’s still there, she’s probably bunked down at the hospital for the night,” said Dr. Baldwin dismissively as he moved toward the basin to wash his hands. “I wouldn’t worry.”
“No, of course,” lied Emmie. “If you’ll excuse me?”
Julia followed her out. “Where are you going?” she asked bluntly.
Emmie hesitated, knowing Julia would mock her. But she needed to confide in someone and there was no one else. “Kate would never just leave Anne and Nell. What if she went to the crossroads to look for them and the jitney broke down? It was making strange noises this morning—Kate said she’d have Alice look at it, but I don’t know if she did. We were all so busy. . . .”
Julia didn’t mock her. She said, “Who can we get to drive?”
“I can drive,” said Emmie, heading out the door. “Alice taught me. Wait, what are you doing?”
Julia had climbed up into the White. She sat there, ramrod straight, her medical bag in her lap. “Coming with you.”
“But they need you here.”
“Dr. Baldwin is back.” Julia shrugged, and then said, with deliberate provocation, “You need me more than he does. You’ve never been able to read a map. You got lost once in the garden of your own house.”
“It was a maze,” Emmie protested, knowing she should make Julia stay but selfishly relieved not to be going alone. The street was so dark, with no streetlights and all the windows blacked out. She would have to somehow navigate, in the dark, without headlights. “It was designed for people to get lost in.”
A gun boomed somewhere miles away, and Emmie felt the car swerve as she flinched. They’d been under fire so much, but it felt different being out at night, in the dark, at the wheel. The walls of the house weren’t much protection, but they were something.
Emmie took a deep breath. “You shouldn’t talk. You were the one who led me into the maze and left me.”
Julia balanced her medical bag on her knees. “I told you all you had to do was keep going left.”
“Yes, but you know I can’t tell my right from my left.”
There was an army camion coming straight her way, also without headlights. Emmie clung to the wheel, wrenching the White out of the way just in time, narrowly evading a collision with an ambulance. The road was busy with traffic, complicated by everyone having their lights off. All she could see were shapes in the dark.
“You never told on me,” said Julia unexpectedly as Emmie wrestled the truck back onto the road. “About leaving you in the maze. Why?”
“It was easier to let Nanny scold me for being silly than to have her punish you.” Nanny wouldn’t have punished the Van Alden children, but an unpleasant child who was dropped into her care without a by-your-leave was another matter entirely. Julia had been sentenced to cold baths; locked in dark rooms; and, when none of that had any effect, treated to the horrifying slap of birch against flesh. “It wasn’t hard. Nanny expected me to be silly.”
Not far away, a plane plummeted from the sky, flames billowing from its tail. The light momentarily lit the scene, the road, the trucks, the scrap of metal falling like Icarus. A cart horse neighed in panic, nearly oversetting the cart it was pulling.
“If I get through this,” Emmie said, her teeth chattering so hard she could barely get the words out, “Fifth Avenue won’t have any terrors for me.”
Julia looked at her hard but didn’t make fun. “There’s the crossroads. There’s a sentry on guard. I’ll ask him if he’s seen the jitney. Stay here.”
Emmie stayed, using the time to try to get her breathing under control. She could see Julia, a dim figure in her gray uniform, having a long conversation with the sentry, interrupted, from time to time, as the sentry paused to direct traffic or stop a truck. Emmie’s fingers were tingling with pins and needles. It seemed so silly to worry about pins and needles when the guns were rumbling and she could see the lights flashing in the sky that meant air battles, and where, oh, where, was Kate?
“She’s not here,” said Julia, hauling herself back into the White. “She went through here four hours ago, headed east.”
“East?” East was the front. East was the guns and the shells and explosions of gas that turned the air to poison.