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"Jacob! Oh, God Thank God"

Both of us were shaking I putmy hands over her body to ht?" I said

"Yes Are you?"

My ears hurt andwhere I’d been pelted by debris, but the pain in one The moment the blast went off, it was as if someone had flipped a switch insidehad vanished

The hollows had been vaporized

"I’m okay," I said "I’m okay"

Aside froether in a cluster and compared injuries All wereher head in disbelief

It seemed even more so e realized that everywhere around us were nails and bits of concrete and knifelike splinters of wood, round by the blast

Enoch wobbled to a car parked nearby, its s smashed, its frame so pocked with shrapnel that it looked like it had been sprayed by a er into one of the holes "Why aren’t we full of holes?"

Hugh said, "Your shirt, mate," then went to Enoch and plucked a crurit-encrusted sweater

"And yours," said Enoch, pulling a jagged spike of h’s

Then we all checked our sweaters Elass and pieces of h our bodies--but hadn’t Our itchy, ill-fitting, peculiar sweaters weren’t fireproof or waterproof, as the euessed They were bulletproof And they had saved our lives

"I never drea," said Horace, testing the sweater’s wool between his fingers "I wonder if I could make a tuxedo jacket out of it instead"

Then Melina appeared, pigeon on her shoulder, blind brothers at her side With their sonarlike senses, the brothers had discovered a loall of reinforced concrete--it had sounded hard--and pulled Melina behind it just as the boirls unaccounted for But as the dust settled and their house ca them alive see down onto the lower What re rubble

Bronwyn took off running toward it anyway, shouting the sisters’ nao

"We could’ve helped them and we didn’t," Emma said miserably "We left them to die"

"It wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference," Millard said "Their deaths had been written into history Even if we’d saved their lives today, so else would’ve taken them tomorrow Another bomb A bus crash They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no o back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war fro," said Enoch "History heals itself Isn’t that interesting?"