All These Things I've Done (Birthright #1)(6)

The lakes had dried up or been drained, and most of the surrounding vegetation had died. There were still a few graffiti-covered statues, broken park benches and abandoned buildings, but I couldn’t imagine anyone willingly spending time there. For Natty and me, the park was a half-mile to be gotten across as quickly as possible, preferably before nightfall, when it became a gathering place for just about every undesirable in the city. Incidentally, I’m not entirely sure how it got so bad, but I imagine it was like everything else in the city – lack of money, lack of water, lack of leadership.

Natty was annoyed with me for making the crack about babysitting in front of Win, so she refused to walk with me. We were just across the Great Lawn (which, I suppose, must have had grass at some point) when she ran ahead about twenty-five feet.

Then fifty.

Then one hundred.

‘Come on, Natty,’ I yelled. ‘It’s not safe! You’ve got to stay with me!’

‘Stop calling me Natty. My name is Nataliya, and for your information, Anya Pavlova Balanchine, I can take care of myself!’

I ran to catch up with her but by then she’d put even more distance between us. I could barely see her any more; she was a tiny dot in a schoolgirl uniform. I ran even faster.

Natty was behind the glass section of the enormous building that used to be an art museum (now a nightclub) and she wasn’t alone.

An incredibly skinny child, dressed in rags and, coincidentally, a decades-old Balanchine Chocolate Factory T-shirt, was holding a gun to my sister’s head. ‘Now your shoes,’ he said in a squeak of a voice.

Natty sniffled as she bent down to unlace her shoes.

I looked at the child. The boy, despite being emaciated, seemed sturdy, but I was pretty sure I could take him. I scanned the area to see if he had any accomplices. No. We were alone. The real problem was the gun and so I considered the gun.

Now, what I did next might sound reckless to you.

I stepped between my sister and the boy.

‘Anya! No!’ my baby sister screamed.

My dad, you see, had taught me a thing or two about guns, and this kid’s handgun didn’t have a clip. In other words, no bullets unless there was one in the chamber, and I was betting that there wasn’t.

‘Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?’ I asked the boy. In point of fact, the boy was three inches shorter than Natty. Up close, I could see he was younger than I had thought – maybe eight or nine years old.

‘I’ll shoot you,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Yeah?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to see you try.’

I grabbed his gun by the barrel. I thought about tossing it into the bushes, but I decided I didn’t want him terrorizing any more people. I put it in my bag. It was a nice weapon. Would have done a heck of a job killing my sister and me. Had it been functional, that is.

‘Come on, Natty. Get your stuff back from the kid.’

‘He hadn’t taken anything yet,’ Natty said. She was still a bit teary.

I nodded. I handed Natty my pocket handkerchief and told her to blow her nose.

At this point, the would-be mugger had started to cry, too. ‘Gimme back my gun!’ He lunged at me, but the kid was weak with hunger, I’d guess, and I barely felt him.

‘Look, I’m sorry, but you’re gonna get yourself killed waving that broken gun around.’ This was true. I wouldn’t be the only person who would notice he didn’t have a clip and, likely as not, the type of person who noticed such a thing would shoot the kid between the eyes without a second thought. I felt a bit bad about taking his gun, so I gave him what money I had on me. Not much, but it’d keep the kid in pizza for a night.

Without even a moment’s reflection, he took my offerings. Then he yelled an obscene name at me and disappeared into the park.

Natty gave me her hand, and we walked in silence until we were in the relative safety of Fifth Avenue.

‘Why’d you do that, Annie?’ she whispered as we were waiting for a walk signal. I could barely hear her above the city noise. ‘Why’d you give him all that stuff after he tried to rob me?’

‘Because he was less fortunate than us, Natty. And Daddy always said that we have to be mindful of those who are less fortunate.’

‘But Daddy killed people, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘Daddy was complex.’

‘Sometimes, I can’t even remember what he looked like,’ Natty said.

‘He looked like Leo,’ I said. ‘Same height. Same black hair. Same blue eyes. But Daddy’s eyes were hard and Leo’s are soft.’

Back at the apartment, Natty went into her bedroom, and I scrounged around for something for dinner. I was an uninspired chef, but if I didn’t cook we’d all starve. Except for Nana. Her meals were delivered to her via tube by a home-health-care worker named Imogen.

I boiled exactly six cups of water per the package’s instructions and then threw in the macaroni. At least Leo would be happy. Macaroni and cheese was his favourite.

I went to knock on his door to tell him the good news. There was no answer, so I opened it. He should have been home from his part-time job at the veterinary clinic for at least two hours, but his room was empty aside from his collection of stuffed lions. The lions looked at me questioningly with their dull plastic eyes.