The Lost Village(23)

I start untying her tightly laced bootlaces, trying to ignore the short, choked sounds she makes when, despite my best efforts to be gentle, my movements cause her pain.

After loosening the bottom laces, I take the boot with both hands and look up at her.

“Ready?” I ask.

Tone nods.

I start slowly pulling the boot, and though she doesn’t make a sound, her teeth are clenched so tightly that her jaws have gone completely white. But then, just as I’m coaxing the foot itself out of the boot, she can’t hold out anymore. She lets out a long, drawn-out moan that’s almost worse than the scream she made when her foot went through the step. I can still taste the adrenaline in my mouth from that moment; the fear still has my body in an iron grip. It hangs in my joints, like an ache.

I put the boot down and look up at Tone. Her eyes are wet, and when I wipe my face I realize my cheeks aren’t dry, either.

“That’s the worst of it over,” I lie, and she tries to respond with a faint smile that, in its own way, is worse than the tears.

I peel the sock off her foot. She isn’t bleeding, which is a relief, at least, but I can see that her ankle has already started to swell. The skin around it is crimson.

“I heard something,” says Tone.

“It’s probably just Max looking for the first aid kit,” I reply.

“No,” she says quietly, “in the school. I heard something below us. That’s why I was on the stairs.”

I look up.

“What did you hear?” I ask.

Her gaze is steady, but her lips are pale.

“Footsteps,” she says. “There was someone walking around down there.”

“But there was no one else there,” I say, and Tone purses her lips.

“There shouldn’t have been, no,” she says.

Something inside me lurches. I think of Emmy’s pale face last night, and can’t help but ask: “Are you sure that … I mean, are you sure what you heard was … real?”

Before either of us can say anything more, Max comes running back from the van with a white box.

“Here,” he says, putting it down beside me. “It had fallen behind one of the tripods, so I had to move things around a bit.”

“Thanks,” I say as I open the box, and then pull out a roll of gauze. I am just winding it around my hand when, out of the corner of my eyes, I see Emmy and Robert running across the square. Robert is carrying their things, so Emmy reaches us first. She stops breathless in front of us, small spots of perspiration visible under her arms. Like Tone, her mask is dangling from her neck like a macabre necklace.

“What is it?” she asks, before her eyes land on Tone’s rolled-up pants and swollen ankle. “What happened?”

“They’re saying she went through a step,” says Max.

“Were you the one on the walkie?” Emmy asks Tone.

Tone’s eyes are shiny and confused.

“I haven’t touched mine,” she says.

“Someone was calling into their walkie-talkie. Moaning in pain.” She looks at Robert.

Tone puts her hand into her back pocket, as though searching for something.

“No—I don’t even have mine,” she says. “It must have come out when I fell.”

Emmy looks at Robert again.

“Could that have been it? Maybe she landed on the talk button when she fell.”

Robert shrugs, his squirrelly brown eyes downcast.

“I guess,” he says. “That or it broke. It could have sent out interference, or something.”

Emmy steps forward and sits down at Tone’s feet, so close that I have to shuffle back, thrown.

“All right if I take a look?” she asks.

Tone’s voice is thin and exhausted:

“Alice was just—”

“I’ve had training.”

My skin is rippling in irritation, but I can hear the pain in Tone’s voice. Her ankle is now so swollen that it hardly looks like a leg anymore.

I swallow my pride.

“Go on, take a look.”

Emmy carefully sinks her fingertips into Tone’s swollen, red skin, then glances up at her, muttering a “sorry” when Tone whimpers.

“Have you taken anything for the pain?” she asks.

Tone shakes her head, and I add: “She’s allergic to painkillers. It’s her stomach.”

“Is that true?” Emmy asks.

Tone nods without hesitation.

“I have a little whisky,” says Emmy. “You can take a few swigs, if you want. It’s an old-school kinda painkiller, but it works.”

Miraculously enough, this draws a wry smile from Tone. Emmy looks around at Robert, who sets off toward their van without a word. Then she picks up another roll of gauze and starts winding it tightly around Tone’s ankle.

“I can’t tell whether it’s broken or sprained,” she says. “But this should keep everything in place for now. It’d be better if we had something cold to put on it, but…”

She looks at me. “Did you bring any frozen foods we don’t know of?”

I shake my head.

“Then we’ll just have to make do with good old pressure and elevation,” she says, securing the gauze with a small safety pin from the roll.