Beautiful Blue World by Suzanne LaFleur

Author:Suzanne LaFleur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

“HANS, WHAT’S IN BLOCK THREE-E?”

“Three-B?”

“E! Three-elephant!”

“Oh! Nothing!”

“Nothing?”

“It’s empty. E for empty.”

“There should be something there, should be something…” Tommy paced between four boards, where a dozen kids sat, considering possibilities, moving pieces.

He slammed into me.

For the fifth time.

The first four times, he had stepped to the side and ignored me. I kept opening my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. The last time, he stared into my face as if only then seeing me.

“Who are you?”

“Mathilde.”

“Can I help you?”

“I—I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

“Aren’t we all? Here.” He shoved a clipboard at me. The papers on it were incredibly crumpled from being flipped through so many times. “If anyone at these tables moves anything, mark the change on the paper, okay?”

“Okay.”

A page represented each table with a chart numbered to match the squares on the board. I stood at each table and confirmed that the Xs matched the pieces’ placements. But as soon as the kids started moving the pieces, I couldn’t keep up. I turned from one table to another, then back, and those first kids would have moved something again.

The clipboard was wrenched out of my hands.

I jumped.

Tommy studied my notes. “There is such order in it, and yet, it’s not without mystery.”

“What isn’t?”

“This. These plots. Math. Maybe I should make an equation showing the typical movements.”

But he was speaking to himself; he scribbled down some notes and thrust the clipboard back. “Keep up.”

I tried my best.

“Lykkelig.”

Someone had said the name of my city. I looked around.

I was supposed to be the only one chosen from there, so why would anyone be talking about it? Was someone talking about me?

I missed several more changes as I looked to see who had spoken.

And then they said it again—three boys on couches at a low table across the room.

As I got closer, I could hear that they were arguing about a lot of cities.

“No, that town got hit three nights in a row! They’re going to go somewhere else now! It’s too likely we have aerials ready for them! We’ve got to look for a new target.”

“But they just hit somewhere new last night; they’ve never introduced new sites so close together! If not there again, then somewhere else they’ve already hit.”

A third boy shouted, “I’ve been telling you, they’ve been accelerating the introduction of new towns!”

“All with—”

“Factories!”

“We don’t have factories,” I said.

“What?”

The boys looked up at me, surprised.

“We don’t have factories.”

“Of course we don’t have factories. Faetre’s just a manor house in the middle of nowhere.”

“I mean we, back home. In Lykkelig.”

One of the boys looked at me critically. He pulled out a book and flipped through it until he found a certain page and showed me the heading and the data below it.

“Fourteen,” he said. “Fourteen factories.”

Tommy yanked the clipboard out of my hands again, and ran back over to his tables.

I sat down. “I didn’t know that. Is that why they’ve been bombing?”

“Factories. Train stations. Morale,” one of the boys said, like he was reciting a school lesson.

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