“Oh. Good. That’s good.”

“So far, you don’t seem any different from any other lost person.” His voice is louder, less muffled. I turn my head. He’s left the closet and is standing next to my bed, silhouetted against the window. “You aren’t overwhelmingly clever or witty or funny or strong or fast or...”

“I get it. You don’t like me. Thanks for keeping me alive anyway.”

He shrugs. I see the movement of his shoulders, though I can’t see the expression on his face. “Claire likes you.”

“That’s because I gave her a rabbit.”

“You did do that.” He falls silent, and I don’t know what to say. I wonder how long he plans to stand there, looking down at me.

A few minutes pass.

A few more.

Strangely, I don’t feel afraid. In fact, I feel tired for the first time since I lay in bed. My limbs feel heavy, and my eyes feel thick. As weird and freaky as it is that a strange, overly handsome man is sleeping in my closet, I feel...oddly better that he’s here. I’m not alone, even if he doesn’t think much of me. I’m a tool, or at least a potential tool, in his personal vendetta. It helps that I now understand why he’s helping me. My muscles are finally unknotting. My eyelids feel like cement sealing shut. “Maybe that makes me like you more, too.” His voice is soft, and I’m not certain that I hear him correctly.

After a minute, the closet door opens and shuts.

I don’t dream this time.

Chapter Ten

The closet door is open when I wake.

I sit up and squint at the window. Blurred by the dirt and dust that streaks the panes, sunlight glares into the bedroom. Definitely morning. I feel caked in dust, and my lungs feel constricted and clogged. I know I slept, but still I ache in every muscle. My legs feel as though they’ve been stretched and pulled like dough.

There are voices outside my room, and I suddenly remember the thief. Pushing away my sheets, I creep to the door and press my ear against it. Peter and Claire. I can’t hear their words, but I think they’re in the dining room. From the tone, it sounds like an ordinary conversation. It should be okay if I shower before I face today.

I fetch the summer dress I found—it’s still in its dry cleaner plastic wrap, and it’s nearly my size. I also have fresh underwear and sandals, courtesy of a lost gym bag that Claire discovered in a junk heap. I carry them with me to the bathroom and drape the clothes over the towel racks next to a mismatched set of hotel towels that Peter found. As I turn on the shower and step in, I think that Mom would like the sandals.

It’s a casual thought, but it hits me with such force that I can’t breathe. I sag against the shower wall. I feel the slick soapy tile on my side. Home. Mom. Sinking to the floor of the shower, I let the water fall over me. It cascades down my face and off my chin. I can’t tell if I’m crying or not, but my shoulders are shaking, and I’m hiccupping in air and droplets as water sprays in my face.

After a while, I reach up and turn the water off. “Enough,” I say.

I say it again just to hear my voice. “Enough.”

Stepping out of the shower, I dry myself with the (nonmoldy) towel and dress in the (clean) summer dress and wish that I hadn’t spent the time hunting for either when I should have been finding my way home. Today, that will change. I drag a half-broken brush through my wet hair. Today, no lessons. No scavenging. It doesn’t help me to balance on a roof better or to learn to ignore a dead man on a couch.

I think about yesterday’s shower. I’d been so certain I’d find a way home quickly. I’d said my affirmations, like Mom—and I’d failed to come any closer to a way out.

I won’t fail today. But I also won’t delude myself. It might not be quick or easy to find a way home. So from now on, I will have only two goals: don’t die, and develop a plan to find a way home.

Squaring my shoulders, I walk into the dining room. Peter and Claire are both perched on chairs—one foot on the back of the chair, the other on the front of the seat. The chairs are tilted to balance on the back legs only. Whatever I was going to say dies in my throat.

“I’m not going to ask what you’re doing.” I walk to the backpacks. I carry mine over to the table, unzip it, and pull out a can of pineapple. “Knife?”

Claire hands me her knife. She doesn’t lose her balance.

I contemplate the can, the knife, the can again, and then I stab the top of the can with the knife. I twist it in a circle, widening the hole. I hand the knife back to Claire. She cleans and sheaths it as I tilt the can to my lips and drink. “Want some?” I hold it out to Claire.

She takes it, sips, and passes it to Peter. He widens the hole with his knife and plucks out a chunk of pineapple, and then he passes it back to me. We eat that way, the two of them perched, inexplicably balancing on chairs, until the can is empty and drained.

I hold up the can. “We need to find string. Or twine. Or an electrical cord. Or something. Plus more cans. We’ll string them together and put them where someone will have to trip over them if they want to reach the house. I want an alarm system.” First step to not dying: secure the little yellow house.

Claire’s chair tips down. Agile as a cat, she leaps onto the table before the chair crashes to the floor. “I’ll find string!”

Peter’s lips are twitching as if he wants to smile. “And what happens when someone or something sets off your high-tech alarm system?”

“Booby traps,” I say confidently and firmly.

Claire sighs. “I love her.”

I look in each of the backpacks. “Anyone keep any paper and— Never mind. Found it.” I pull out a pencil case and a notebook. Flipping the notebook open, I sit on one of the dining room chairs. I sketch the house, add in the windows, lightly catch the shadows around it as the sun hits in the dusk...

Claire peers over my shoulder. “Wow.”

I stop sketching. I didn’t mean to get carried away. Still, the roof needs a bit more texture. I add the hatching to indicate the shingles. “We need a way to lock the front door and secure the windows when we leave. And we need a way to discourage people from breaking in.” I make X’s where I think we need to add traps.

Leaving his precarious perch on a chair, Peter joins Claire and peers over my other shoulder. I’m suddenly self-conscious about my sketch. I should have done it in a different perspective, gotten a feel for the expanse of the desert, plus the angles on the porch aren’t right... “Hmm,” he says. I don’t know if this is approval or a critique.

“The tricky part is that we need to make it look like we aren’t hiding anything,” I say. “It has to be casually inaccessible. What would keep someone from entering a house?”

“Rabid dinosaurs,” Peter says immediately.

“Seriously.”

“I am serious. If I saw a rabid dinosaur, I’d skip that house.” He winks at Claire, and she giggles. He then mimes roaring like a dinosaur, and she laughs out loud.

I tap the notebook with the pencil. “Anything that exists? Like, say the windows were all surrounded by boards with nails sticking up?”

“Yeah, I’d skip that house, too.”

“Good. What else?”

He shrugs. “If it looked empty.”

I could paint the shades on the windows to look like empty rooms. It wouldn’t fool anyone close up but might dissuade someone passing by from taking a closer look. But I don’t have the paint, and it would take too much time. I need the house to be safe but not at the expense of my other goal. Don’t die, and find a way home. My new mantra. “Something fast and easy to do.”

“Plague!” Claire pipes up cheerfully.

Peter nods in agreement.

I hold up my pencil to halt discussion for a moment. “Just to be clear, there aren’t really rabid dinosaurs here, are there?”

Claire giggles again.