Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

Rachel looked into Elsie’s bowl and attempted a meager smile. “Guess I’m not hungry. You had lookout last night, right? How’d it go?”

“Fine,” Elsie said. “I saw him. The Weirdo.”

“Get a better look?”

“Nah. He didn’t come close or anything. I think Michael’s right. He’s just some lost hobo.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing special,” said Elsie. “Couple explosions. Pretty far off.”

“Oh yeah?” This came from Carl Rehnquist, a boy about Elsie’s age, who’d come and joined them at the table. Steam rose from his bowl of breakfast. “What kind?”

“What do you mean, what kind?”

“Like, big explosions? Or little ones? What blew up?”

“I don’t know,” said Elsie. “Just some buildings. A ways off.”

“Cool,” said Carl.

Elsie shrugged an

d took another spoonful of gruel. “It’s just the Wastes, right? Seems like it’s just industrial . . . stuff.”

“Michael said that it’s happening more often, the explosions,” said Carl.

“Really? He didn’t say anything to me about that,” replied Elsie.

“I overheard him, just yesterday. He said that they’re happening a lot more. And they’re closer.”

“Yeah, don’t trust everything that kids tell you,” said Rachel.

Carl took a big bite of his breakfast. “Next thing you know, right here: boom!” Bits of wet, white oats flew from his lips; whether he did this on purpose for effect or accidentally, the girls couldn’t know. “Whole place goes up. Doesn’t matter to you guys, though. Aren’t you out of here in a bit? I mean, didn’t you say your parents would be back from their trip soon?”

The two sisters didn’t say anything. Rachel toyed with the strands of her hair; Elsie stirred her gruel in silence.

Carl sensed he had overstepped. “They are coming back, right?”

What Carl couldn’t know was that the two girls had received another postcard from their parents, the second since their adoptive orphanage had gone up in flames in the winter’s violent uprising. The first had arrived just after their discovery of the abandoned warehouse in this, the children’s new home in the Forgotten Place. It was postmarked February 20 from Igdir, Turkey: Their parents wished them well and reported briefly that their attempts to find their son, Curtis, in the slums of Istanbul had been a dead end; however, they now had actionable intelligence that the boy had been smuggled over the border into Armenia by a group of gypsy circus performers, and the elder Mehlbergs were likely to stay abroad for a further two weeks (a check, payable to the Joffrey Unthank Home for Wayward Youth, would be on its way, presently, to the orphanage’s address). The second postcard, received only the day before, had their intrepid parents now in the farthest-flung reaches of the Russian continent: a black-and-white photo of a ship frozen in thick, jagged ice, with their mother’s clean handwriting on the flip side saying, “Greetings from Archangel’sk! Ignore that bit about the Armenian circus; was a red herring. Good news: A young American boy was spotted near here, on an island off the north coast. Nearly the Arctic Circle! Brrrr! Back in two weeks, promise! Check en route to Mr. Unthank; tell him sorry for delay.” Rachel, the unofficial archivist of the two Mehlberg sisters, kept both cards folded neatly in the pocket of her jumper.

Elsie deftly changed the subject. “You know it’s Rachel’s birthday today?”

“Really?” Carl’s eyes had lit up. “No kidding?”

Rachel grumbled an affirmative.

“May ninth,” said Elsie. “Nineteen . . .”

“Ninety-eight,” finished Rachel. “Yup.”

“Well, we’ll have to have a party or something,” said Carl.

“That’s okay,” said Rachel.

“No, really,” continued the boy. “When Michael gets back, we’ll have to do something, you know, special.”

“Like what?” asked Rachel. “Fry up an oatcake? Pop the cork on some rat pee champagne?”